Brian Tallerico

There are times when what should be escapism approaches “Hostel” levels of viciousness, just one of the many issues with a film that seems incapable of settling on a tone.

Genuinely inept in every way, “Scream 7” is far and away the worst of the franchise, a shallow rendering of things that worked better in other films.

Sadly, “Dreams” never figures out what it wants to say, and what it does convey is done with so little affect or pulse that it almost feels like an intentional choice to tell a “hot” story in as “cool” a way as possible.

The third chapter is better than the middle one by virtue of having at least a few new ideas and one less CGI wild boar, but it’s still a shapeless mess, a movie that might have worked as the final act of one film.

It’s such a non-movie that it actually becomes difficult to review because there’s so little to hold onto that it dissipates from memory while you’re watching it. There are no laughs. The plot is inane. The action choreography is insulting. It is such a lifeless piece of product creation (not filmmaking) that even writing about it feels like a waste of time, much less watching it.

Luke Greenfield’s atrocious Playdate is a remarkably stupid movie that thinks you’re remarkably stupid too.

It’s a messy movie that produces frustration instead of fear, and its nods to commentary on gender roles and the need to become and stay beautiful feel shallow and insincere.

It turns out the creators of this cash grab are aggressively unwilling to go much of anywhere at all.

Edward Berger’s “Ballad of a Small Player” is one of the most over-directed films I’ve ever seen. And I’ve been playing this specific game for a long time.

Yeon Sang-ho’s The Ugly is a dour, depressing drama, a movie that gets so lost in its lethargic structure that it feels like a chore.

Ultimately, “Eenie Meanie” is a collection of clichés in search of an actual movie. Too often, Shawn Simmons mistakes profanity for toughness and violent outbursts for plot, trapping us with what is mostly a bunch of loathsome idiots for 94 minutes without the craft of a Tarantino or the visual acumen of a Wright to make it worth the captivity.

Ultimately, it feels like Cognetti has lost sight of what people loved about the first movie.

Desperation destroys comic timing, and this thing is drenched in the flop sweat of a stand-up comedian who knows he’s losing his audience.

Give me a silly movie that knows it’s dumb on a hot summer day every year. This isn’t that. It’s so much dumber than it thinks it is.

There’s just so much missing, including logic.

Daniela Forever, Nacho Vigalondo’s first film since his excellent “Colossal,” eight years ago, is a baffling disappointment, a sci-fi mindbender with echoes of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Inception,” but no idea what to do with its many ideas or what it’s ultimately trying to say.

It feels like all the good ideas during the pre-production of “Until Dawn” were sanded down until the film lost almost all of its edge, wit, and actual horror. All that’s left is a depressingly repetitive exercise in hyperactive editing, overheated sound design, and forgettable characters.

The Amateur skims the surface of what has worked in spy thrillers of the past, never finding its own rhythm, identity, or personality.

Cognetti’s skill with found footage does him no favors here, as this flick is laden with awful dialogue, worse performances, dumb plotting, and a truly inane ending. Set your horror GPS to a different location.

Locked starts promisingly, and then almost refuses to really go anywhere, trapped by its own concept and unwillingness to do anything thematically richer than “wealthy people be crazy.”

It’s a story about how people hide their true selves behind costumes like the perfect wife or even the forced whimsy of Tulip Season. Its tragic misstep is how much it refuses to actually look under those surfaces.

Yes, great musicals have been built on “the power of love” before. But pulling that off requires something this movie never has: a heartbeat.

Ostensibly a commentary on celebrity culture and the fawning journalists around it, “Opus” is one of those movies that throws talking points at the wall without having an actual point of view on any of them.

By and large, "Dear Santa" feels as if someone took a Diary of a Wimpy Kid book and added some truly weird Satanic mythology.

Some of the voice work elevates what could have been a total disaster, and the legendary Alan Menken drops a couple of entertaining compositions, but it's a largely forgettable venture that families will watch during Thanksgiving break before the Netflix algorithm buries it forever.

There’s so little “fun” here, feeling as if everyone is merely fulfilling an obligation. I was excited for another time jump movie with a twist. After this one, I just wanted my time back.

Jason Blum is a powerful, underrated force in the industry, but I wish he would empower his chefs to cook more interesting horror movie meals.

Consistently boring in a manner that almost feels defiant, “Slingshot” plays as a shallow COVID lockdown allegory for most of its runtime, before insultingly spiraling off the rails. It feels like a movie that hates its characters. And hates you too.

Merely being violent and unpredictable does not make a film like Jackpot funny. Therein lies the biggest problem here: the laughs don’t come nearly to the degree required to make the complete lack of morality or interesting characters palatable.

It doesn’t help that the plotting and tone of “Duchess” are so exaggeratedly stupid that the whole thing plays almost like a parody of Ritchie instead of an homage, one that goes on for what feels like forever – it’s overlong at nearly two hours, and I swear to you it feels twice as long.

Nothing that works about the games has been adapted intact in this ugly, boring, truly inept piece of filmmaking, a movie that was mostly shot years ago and should have been shelved even longer. Like, maybe forever.

There are bad movies, there are really bad movies, and then there’s “Lumina,” a film so breathtaking in its overall incompetence that one starts to wonder if it’s not intentionally so in the hope of being the next “The Room” or “Birdemic.”

Duchovny the director never bothers to ground his melodrama in something that feels real, missing the target on the period in which it’s set and an honest understanding of the people who live and die on the success and failure of their favorite teams.

There is absolutely zero tension in “You Can’t Run Forever.” It all feels like a lark, a project that would completely dissolve if not for the Oscar winner at its center.

Kim’s Video reaches so hard for quirky profundity that it falls on its face. It’s a real shame because there’s an interesting story buried in this frustrating film.

Everyone in almost every scene either looks lost or annoyed, never genuine. Except for Crowe, who grumbles his way through another film with deceptive ease, finding occasions to ground even a miserable film like this one.

Immaculate feels like both a throwback to another era of Italian horror and a timely commentary on woman’s bodily autonomy, but it can’t match the flair of the former and lacks the thematic thrust to convey anything resonant about the latter.

Ponderous and dull, “History of Evil” is the kind of script that plays with hot-button ideas instead of having a single thing to say about them.

Generic dialogue and lack of character depth kills the sometimes promising “Sunrise,” which works best when it has a grit that reminds one of the best vampire flicks of all time, “Near Dark,” but that doesn't happen nearly enough.

No one on-screen is to blame for the failure of The Family Plan. They’re all fine, but they’re swimming upstream against a script that doesn’t give them enough to do and a director who fails at blending an average family and uncommon action into one vision.

The cast gives their all, but the film ultimately has nothing to offer.

The most impressive thing about Pierre Morel’s film is how it takes two actors as generally likable as John Cena and Alison Brie and makes them such bland avatars for actual people that they fade into the dull background of action-comedy noise this “movie” tries to achieve.

Much as in his atrocious remake of “Rebecca” in 2020, Wheatley mostly phones it in here, and he does so with a rotary landline. At least until the final half-hour, when he’s finally free to unleash some monstrous chaos, this is one of the dullest films of the year, a plodding, poorly made giant shark movie that inexplicably lets the giant shark take a backseat to an evil underwater drilling operation. This thing just has no teeth.

A frustratingly inert film in every way, The Beanie Bubble has no POV and nothing to say.

Padre Pio is a therapy session for star Shia LaBeouf, intercut with a story of labor strife in a traumatized Italian village. If that sounds weird, it is, but never in a way that's consistently interesting.

The latest animated blockbuster from Illumination is their most soulless to date, a film that feels like ChatGPT produced it after data and imagery from the games were fed into a computer.

Ben Young’s atrocious Devil’s Peak is a case study of excellent performers being given so little to work with from a script.

A modern attempt at something like “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” from the creator of “Black-ish” and co-written by star Jonah Hill, Netflix’s “You People” is a stunning misfire, an assemblage of talent in search of an actual movie.

If this is truly the end, it’s a whimper, not a bang.

It’s not just a bad movie—those are common enough to be dismissible—but a movie that I found grossly condescending and manipulative, a dramedy that’s so deeply unconcerned with its actual true story other than how it can be crafted to emotionally impact an audience.

It’s not surprising that Janney is easily the best thing about Lou, but watching this talented actress give so much to a movie that gives absolutely nothing back starts to get depressing.

One of the many problems is that Logan can’t find the tone, making something campy in one beat and deadly serious in another. The whole film falls in the valley in between, unable to find any identity at all.

Instead of ratcheting up tension, Squire seems content to sustain a minor-stakes atmosphere that, well, abandons his leading lady in a film that doesn’t do anything interesting with her predicament.

A film that goes through the motions with such apathetic predictability and pure cinematic laziness that you may want to set whatever device you’re watching it on ablaze.

The Twin just treads water with B-movie style until it gets to the deep ending. And that’s where the whole thing drowns in its lack of ambition and execution.

At least until its bonkers final act, Choose or Die consistently fails to fulfill on the truly hallucinatory promise of its premise. Without that, it’s a choice that’s ultimately forgettable.

It’s a startling misfire, a movie that fundamentally fails at almost everything it’s trying to do. Leatherface deserves better.

Pretend it’s not a “true story” and it’s still a shallow representation of sports, parenthood, and comedy, with almost no laughs.

So much money, so much charm, so much movie, and yet it adds up to so very little. Red Notice is as disposable a movie as you’ll see this year, something that most Netflix subscribers will have trouble remembering exists weeks later.

Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin feels less like a chance to creatively reboot a hit franchise and more like a way to cheaply profit off any residual interest left in it.

A chaotic mishmash of ideas searching for a movie, Black as Night suffers significantly from truly awkwardly amateurish dialogue and performances.

While this kind of manipulative melodrama is often easy to dismiss, what makes The Starling even more frustrating is the amount of talented people who got sucked into its spin cycle of sadness.

Last Man Standing is a startlingly scattershot piece of filmmaking from a director who normally has a sure, personal hand on his projects.

Whatever is keeping Neill Blomkamp so reserved that he delivered a film as dispiritingly rote as Demonic—that’s what needs an exorcism.

From the “how do you mess that up” school of filmmaking, Blood Red Sky takes a phenomenal concept that mixes genre hits like From Dusk Till Dawn, Snakes on a Plane, and Train to Busan and just blows it on poorly choreographed action, momentum-draining flashbacks, and an interminable runtime.

The characters are bland, the dialogue is atrocious, the action is mediocre, and even the heist is a boring bust.

It’s a film filled with half-hearted ideas and thin characters, all in the service of a story that wallows in its trauma in a manner that gives it little purpose.

Spiral: From the Book of Saw is more frustrating than the average mediocre horror sequel because you can easily decipher the wasted opportunity up there on the screen.

There’s more than enough meat on the bones of this true story for a film like Above Suspicion, but director Phillip Noyce can’t figure out how to tell it in a way that's more interesting than a Wikipedia entry.

William Brent Bell’s Separation is an atrocious piece of work, a movie that fails as both a domestic drama and as a horror flick, and really feels like the kind of thing that everyone involved is going to have to discuss in therapy someday to get to the bottom of why it was even made in the first place.

It’s a dull, overly familiar affair that really only reminds one that Depp should have segued nicely into old man roles if his personal life and on-set behavior hadn’t derailed his trajectory.

A few sequences of classic T&J comedy aren’t nearly enough to make up for the dull plotting and flat characters in this soulless product, one that will fail equally for adults who grew up on Tom and Jerry, and their kids who have never heard of these characters.

Willy’s Wonderland feels like a movie conceived during a drinking game. A few people had a few too many after a few rough days and dared each other to come up with the most ridiculous concept they could get produced.

You can’t make a movie called Monster Hunter that’s boring to look at it, and this is one of Anderson's flattest films in every way.

The truth is that even if one sets aside all potential moral arguments about the very existence of "Songbird," it's still just really bad. If you're going to make a movie this exploitative and gross, you really have to make it better to disguise the smell of it all.

It has a reasonably strong lead performance for micro-budget horror, but writer/director Jeffrey Reddick can’t come through with the thrills, resorting to cheap jump scares to hide shoddy editing, low-grade cinematography, and the kind of clunky storytelling that’s more reminiscent of a Creepypasta tale than a feature film.

That’s all you’ll get in Death of Me, a movie that takes a fresh idea and decides that the best way to present it is through tropes and clichés from better films.

Nothing about this inert, dull project feels like a movie. It’s a half-idea, half-heartedly filmed. Yes, it’s a kids’ movie, but kids are smarter in 2020 about their action entertainment and putting this alongside all the Marvel movies on Disney Plus feels almost mean.

No one expects The Babysitter: Killer Queen to be anything other than your basic escapist entertainment, but it fails even at this modest goal. It's a defiantly stupid movie, with references so bizarrely dated that it verges on fascinating.

Worst of all, the pacing here is just off, leading to a film that drags even at 90 minutes. If the cold doesn’t kill you, the boredom will.

A depressing, cynical slice of nihilism, a movie that thinks it’s saying something about gratuitous violence and exploitation of real tragedy but is even more hypocritically hollow than the films it purports to criticize.

Once you get past the horrifically casual racist stereotypes, non-existent character depth, incoherent plotting, clichéd dialogue, and baffling editing, what’s perhaps most insulting is how numbingly boring the whole affair ended up. If you’re going to make a movie this lazily, at least try to make it fun!

Everything here feels timid and toothless, lacking in true atmosphere or genuine scares.

The only crime here is cinematic. It’s not often one sees a film as vile, ugly, and deeply incompetent as Olivier Megaton’s The Last Days of American Crime.

The ultra-violent take on “Home Alone” with a precocious teen girl who dispatches bad guys like a killer in a slasher movie? That’s where Becky falls apart.

A B-movie that turns its violent rage on corrupt Los Angeles cops should be better than Body Cam. Unlike so many cheap horror films that show their flaws most explicitly during the scare scenes that are overly reliant on loud music, quick cuts, and attempts to make you jump, it’s really everything but the big moments in Body Cam that falls apart.

It’s not hard to think that there could be an interesting remake of “Going Places” or an interesting spin-off “The Big Lebowski” to be made — it’s just that this film doesn't work as either.

Inert to such a degree that one wonders if the film has been slowed down, The Night Clerk doesn’t really go anywhere, truly disappointing for how much it wastes the talents of its young stars on a movie that doesn’t deserve them.

It’s a film with alternating shots of Katie Holmes looking scared and the doll looking creepy. Rinse and repeat. And it becomes so tediously boring that your mind will wander.

At least, director Gille Klabin tries to amp up The Wave with aggressive visual style, but it’s still a movie that’s rotten at its core because it suffers from the same problem of all those “American Beauty” clones in that it never satisfactorily answers the question “Who cares?”

Like the songs sung by its young cast, Knives and Skin feels like cinematic karaoke, lacking in authorship or deeper meaning. The cast, two actresses in particular, give it their all, but it is an aggressively hollow experience.

It takes great effort to find what interested director Wash Westmoreland and company in the source material in the first place, but it feels like a project that reaffirms something I’ve long argued: just because something works in one medium doesn’t mean it will in another.

It’s easy to see why even Blum wanted to forget The Gallows: Act II. It may be his company’s worst film.

Sure, I was never bored, but this movie makes zero sense, and contains some shockingly bad filmmaking, acting, writing ... pretty much everything. It is remarkably grisly and violent, containing a body count that tops the double digits, and almost all of the victims of its quality kills see their insides before they die.

This movie is atrocious, never making a lick of sense, wearing its “message” on its sleeve like a bad term paper, and then ending in a way that should make you angry more than eager to see if it makes any sense.

An incoherent blob.

If Tartt’s book is about grief and the sudden trauma that can derail a life’s trajectory, Crowley’s film feels like it doesn’t understand either of those things at all, merely using them as exploitative decoration on a beautiful but shockingly hollow experience.

Fred Durst’s The Fanatic hates fans. It hates actors. It hates tourists, shop owners, and servants. It really, really hates autistic people. And it hates you. It’s a movie that thinks you’re an idiot, someone who won’t see through its shallow provocations, illogical behavior, and vile misanthropy.