Bill Goodykoontz

Comparisons are unfair and inevitable. But even when taken on its own terms, the new Carrie rings hollow, a horror movie that is unsure of itself, with little to offer the uninitiated and less to offer fans of the first film.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle is a movie in search of a reason to exist. Despite a needlessly excessive running time, it never finds one.

Scoob! is a poorly written, nonsensical animated update of the Scooby gang.

Yes, there are sex scenes in the film, quite a few. But for a movie where people are naked for a large chunk of time and play at bondage and dominance (without ever really seeming all that committed to it), it sure is boring.

Bad Samaritan is a horrible little movie with two things going for it: one wigged-out performance and one genuinely terrific line that's so great, you want to be able to say that it saves the film.

Add romantic chemistry to the list of things that fall flat in the film, alongside dialogue and acting.

Laughably bad dialogue and wooden acting.

Jolie Pitt is going for a European cinema vibe here, but all the smoking, drinking and speaking in French can’t disguise the fact that there isn’t a lot going on here. Filmmakers reserve every right to demand patience from their audiences, but they have to provide a worthwhile payoff in the end. By the Sea simply doesn’t.

Costner works hard, and it shows. That's even more true of Leary. Garner's stuck in a thankless role. Only Langella seems to be having unencumbered fun.

What we’re left with are a few PG-13 murders, uninspired performances, some not-so-scary urban legends and a couple of actresses who must be wondering how they got here.

The Gunman is a predictable slog through action-movie tropes, and Penn's intensity isn't a good fit.

Live by Night is a mess. It’s got some interesting elements that Affleck, who wrote the script based on a Dennis Lehane novel, surprisingly can’t pull together. And, it must be said, his performance in the lead role isn’t up to snuff.

Too bad. You sense that someone could have made a good movie with this material. Unfortunately, Leth didn't.

Blackhat is a mess of a movie from Michael Mann, a would-be cyberthriller slowed by stupidity and sabotaged by a stunningly silly subplot.

The utter lack of surprises and waste of a first-rate cast — Anthony Hopkins as Alfred "Freddy" Heineken; Jim Sturgess and Sam Worthington as kidnappers — make for a tremendous letdown.

The problem is that almost everything in the film feels either forced or false, so the tears aren't earned.

Bitter Harvest, bless its low-budget heart, means well. But George Mendeluk’s film, about the Holodomor, the forced famine and starvation that killed between 7 and 10 million Ukrainians, falls well short of its ambitions.

The movie is content to simply mimic the old Stooges, bringing nothing new to the table.

In Chernobyl Diaries, directed by Bradley Parker, stupidity is taken to extremes.

The Internship has some funny moments. The cast is too talented for it to come up completely dry. But for a movie about a place so filled with ambitious climbers, it is far too lazy.

Angels Sing is a shameless holiday movie, one that will stop at nothing — even killing off characters — to try to wring one last bit of emotion out of the audience.

Newton's character is the only one we really become invested in. At least that's something. But Good Deeds leaves you wanting much more.

Several good performances are left adrift, as the characters roam from scene to scene, singing (quite well) as they go. Even as a sort of long-form music video, it's disjointed.

There are a few scares in Come Back to Me. They would be a lot scarier if we either hadn't seen them coming, or hadn't seen them before.

What it has instead is really bad acting set against often-stunning cave-wall backdrops and underwater action sequences.

Sex and the City 2 isn't a feature film as much as it is consumer porn. The audience is not asked to relate to the characters, or at least what we remember of them, as much as to their shoes, their bags, their apartments, their couture, their stuff.

By the time the main vampire shows up, Salem’s Lot has already been rendered toothless.

The charm of these movies — such as it is — comes from the notion of aging action stars slugging it out between wheezes. So when Stallone brings in a new cast of mostly generic warriors, the premise, like the movie, deflates.

Call it what you want, but the best word to describe it is: unnecessary.

There should be a sense of, yes, wonder at play at all times here. Too often “Alice Through the Looking Glass” feels like a slog through time.

This isn't a terrible movie. It just falls flat, in almost every way. It exists and not much else. It's all too predictable, and way too heavy-handed.

Enchantment is an essential ingredient of an animated film, particularly one that skirts dark edges. The Boxtrolls doesn't have nearly enough of it.

Charm, alas, is the one thing lost in all the banging and clanging of the remake.

There are some laughs here, but not many. Johnson and Wayans have a pleasant enough chemistry, but the best parts of the movie are when Johnson gives Ryan an unhinged quality.

It's an unnecessary movie, with some funny parts and a few callbacks to the original, as if visiting Las Vegas for a bit might bring back some of the original magic. It doesn't, but at least this time it seems like they're trying. A little, at least.

Hector and the Search for Happiness is more like "audiences and the search for a good movie," and despite the effort of Pegg and the other actors, you won't find that here.

Vincent Grashaw's film, although well-meaning (as a postscript reminds us), tries too hard, both in content and form.

By far the scariest thing about director Stuart Beattie’s I, Frankenstein, a terrible would-be horror story that somehow roped in a couple of really good actors, is that the ending seems to suggest the possibility of a sequel. Now that’s horror.

Jenkins is a fantastically adaptable talent. It helps that his character here is supposed to be innately likable (by everyone, evidently, but his girlfriend's family), since Jenkins is so likable as an actor. Good thing, because there is little else to like about Darling Companion.

It strains both credulity and patience in its attempt to be different, and it leaves you feeling creeped out as well.

Paul Schrader, the once-brilliant screenwriter of such films as “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull,” has fashioned a movie that seems to exist to be repugnant. Maybe that’s the point; it was written by Bret Easton Ellis. Nearly every character in this movie is unlikable.

A relentlessly unfunny comedy, it wastes the talents of Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara as egregiously as one could possibly imagine, resorting to lame jokes, cliches and incompetent storytelling to pass the time.

It’s not clear that the movie has anything to say, new or otherwise. . . . Other than that it’s just blood and guts, and lots of it.

The purpose of San Andreas is not to make us think, but to make us gape, to pummel us with effect and effect until we finally give in. Fair enough. Uncle. I need a Tylenol anyway.

Mean-spirited.

CHIPS is a miserable movie, an exercise in stupidity that takes whatever nostalgia one had for the late-1970s television series – this assumes anyone actually had nostalgia for it — and beats it to death on a bed of idiocy. The action scenes, though, are pretty well-directed.

Without Lohan, Falling for Christmas would be another of the near-anonymous morass of holiday movies so prevalent during the season. Even with her it’s not much more.

It’s hard to get excited about any of the on-screen happenings, because director Justin Lin can’t seem to hit the right notes.

There is nothing about the movie that isn’t utterly predictable. You meet a character, and it’s immediately obvious what’s going to happen to him (or her). And then it happens. Maybe it’s meant to make you feel good about your deductive reasoning skills or something. But mostly it just makes you want to see something else.

Aside from the waste of talent, the frustrating thing about The Lazarus Effect is how it cheats. Good horror movies work on internal logic.

Gomez plays ... well, that’s one of the problems. Her character is so underdeveloped in director Courtney Solomon’s movie that she doesn’t actually have a name.

Josh C. Waller’s movie is just prurient nonsense, a film only a couple of notches up from the women-in-prison films that were popular years and years ago.

What a mess. Its meandering plot draws attention to the alarming lack of laughs — not what you look for in a supposed comedy.

The acting is so poor and the story so badly told that the viewer's feelings about Rand's novel - an epic ode to free-market fundamentalism - are almost immaterial.

Could be fun, you might think. No. Bad acting and worse dialogue quickly put an end to that notion.

A mean-spirited little movie, investing its limited charms in all the wrong characters.

There is something admirable about Fun Size. Not in how it succeeds, because it doesn't. Whoo, boy, it doesn't. Rather, in how bad it is on so many levels, in how it will offend and disappoint different segments of its audience for different reasons. It's an equal-opportunity bad movie. Something to hate for everyone! [25 Oct 2012]

Jonah Hex somehow manages to waste the talents of Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Michael Fassbender, Will Arnett, Aidan Quinn and Jeffrey Dean Morgan in a story that combines vengeance, the occult and an Old West war on terror (really).

It’s all predictable and, despite the best efforts of Turteltaub and screenwriter Dan Fogelman at something a little risky, it’s pretty lame.

A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III is a curious mess, a movie that doesn’t really seem to have any reason to exist, other than maybe to give writer and director Roman Coppola and star Charlie Sheen something to do for a few weeks.

Too often the jokes don’t land. Neither does the physical comedy. The story doesn’t really hold. It’s clear that Schneider and his daughter love each other, and this film is a way to express that. But it’s a lot to ask of the rest of us to watch it.

You know it's not working when you don't care about any of them. Sadly, that's the case with Answers to Nothing, Matthew Leutwyler's dud about a revolving cast of characters in Los Angeles.

You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll be swept away — about as much as you would be by artificial roses. Movies like this may look like the real thing, but they're not.

Hot Tub Time Machine 2 is a movie that didn't need to be made, and certainly doesn't need to be seen — not when you can rent the original and still feel good about yourself afterward.

There's just not a lot to like here, with the exception of what may be one of the all-time best bad movie lines, one Conan utters to Tamara as a kind of personal credo: "I live. I love. I slay. I am content."

Johnson and Dornan retain the chemistry of two mannequins knocked into each other in a department-store storage closet; the actual sex scenes play more like aerobics videos than anything actually steamy.

This is one of those movies you feel stupider just for having sat through. I think I'm already worse at math.

This is a horrible movie. Which makes it not a lot different from the first film.

Simply put, it's a mess.

Overall the film is goofy, slight, without a truly deep thought in its pretty little head. And for a movie with vampires and werewolves, the only scary thing is in the title - "Part 1," which means "Part 2" is on its way. Shudder.

Dinesh D'Souza's America: Imagine a World Without Her paints a genuinely troublesome portrait of the country — just not at all in the way he intends.

The Dark Tower is a near-total whiff, a mess of a movie that took forever to get made and by the look of things should have taken about twice that long. Or maybe just never have been made at all.

Dumb, lazy, obvious and largely pointless.

It's big, it's loud and it's all over the place, never really making a lick of sense. To his credit, sort of, director Michael Bay tries to insert a little story into the film early on, even a little humor, but that's overrun at some point by explosions and plot digressions.

There is very little on the screen to capture your attention.

While the special effects are impressive enough, M. Night Shyamalan's film doesn't make a lick of sense.

These supremely talented women are put through embarrassing paces by director and co-writer Bill Holderman. It’s meant to be a film about a reawakening of desire, and thus life. It turns out to be a wince-inducing mess.

Maybe there’s a place in the film world for El Coyote as a cult artifact, something that years from now enthusiasts will defend as a kind of dada experiment. In the moment, though, as you suffer through it, it’s just an ill-conceived mess.

Maybe your kids will insist that you see Furry Vengeance. Then again, wouldn't this be the perfect time to let them test their independence and sit through it alone? Otherwise, good luck. You have my condolences.

It's bigger and louder and, if not longer (checking in at a mere two hours and 28 minutes), certainly stupider than ever before.

In the past, I’ve given D’Souza the benefit of the doubt, going out of my way to be extra objective. I actually gave “2016: Obama’s America” a somewhat positive review in 2012 (3 out of 5 stars). But this thing is madness.

An amateurish-looking disaster that makes you wonder if it isn’t some kind of in-joke, a stunt to see how bad a movie can be and still find its way into theaters.

In fairness, you can say that Mortal Kombat is pretty much exactly what you expect it to be. It’s clearly meant as the first film in a renewed franchise. But for me, it’s game over.

On the plus side, Jones is a really good makeup artist, and he is adept at creating gross-out dead people and wounds, and violent acts intense enough that they make you want to look away. On the minus side, the acting and story are so bad you want to look away anyway. Follow that instinct.

All I can say is, no matter who made it, no matter who paid for it, no matter who it's about, "Melania" is a singularly bad movie.

It means to be an interconnected story, in which one coupling leads to another in increasingly ridiculous fashion, until you're not only no longer interested, you're grinding your teeth, hoping it will end.

If nothing else, it's consistent — consistently stupid, with things like character development and story advancement never getting in the way of another parkour stunt.

D'Souza fans and Trump apologists will flock to this, misguided moths to a misleading flame. In that way, it's a perfect representation of the current climate. In every other way, it's a mess.

Director Jessie Nelson shoots it all like a Hallmark card that comes to life, which sounds like a cliche, which it is, which is the point.

We get it, we get it: Capitalism is good, government is bad. But Atlas Shrugged: Who Is John Galt? is worse.