Brian Tallerico

If it sounds like a fun idea for a ‘90s-style slasher pic, it is, but the execution is something else altogether. For a good HOUR, Thriller is the kind of flat, dull teen drama that even The CW would pass on.

A well-intentioned disaster, only slightly redeemed by a committed performance by Sean Bean, whose talent proves nowhere near enough to make this manipulative tripe more digestible.

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.

When you reach the critical point that you consider that Trejo, the star of such gems as “Zombie Hunter” and “Dead in Tombstone”, to be above this material, you know you’re in a rare category of awful.

American Violence seems defiantly unconcerned with addressing the actual issues at play, delivering a generic crime thriller instead. And a bad one at that.

To be fair, the slow burn does eventually catch fire and there’s lots of screaming and heavy breathing and dark tunnels and running and what-not. The relatively tense final half-hour is clearly the reason that very smart producer Jason Blum thought this would be a solid follow-up to “Paranormal Activity.” It’s that first hour that is the reason it took six years to (barely) get released.

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

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.

Everything in Dark River feels like it’s designed not with real people in mind but with Serious Independent Cinema in mind. It’s a movie so filled with pregnant pauses and pretentious looks that it never develops an emotional undercurrent at all.

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.”

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.

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.

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

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.

Without Piven and Dillon to keep it entertaining, it would be absolutely dreadful.

Vita & Virginia wastes the talents of four people — its two subjects and the two women that play them. It is a deeply frustrating movie, a film that not only can’t find the right tone from scene to scene but feels disjointed in individual moments too.

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 words that keep ringing in my head regarding Adam McKay’s Vice are courtesy of the bard: “Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

There was little reason to expect such a horrendous drop in quality as there is to “Viral,” a film that contains some of the sloppiest, most ineffective filmmaking I’ve seen all year.

An incredibly frustrating movie, almost purposefully so.

The result is a disappointing, shambling piece of melancholy with a few interesting scenes here and there that never cohere in such a way that allows the legendary actor to disappear into the character.

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

It's a movie lost somewhere in the middle: too weird to be believable, not weird enough to be memorable.

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.

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.

Benjamin never quite replicates that creepy feeling of being alone in a dangerous place, resulting in a film that needs some dirt under its nails and to get under our skin to be effective. It simply never is.

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

The narrative outline of Self/less is a philosophical theme park, readymade for daring, complex filmmaking. And Singh and his writers never go on any of the rides.

There are movies about ugly, vile people, and there are ugly, vile movies. Triple 9 is the latter.

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.

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.

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.

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?”

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.

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.

It comes down to filmmaking. And this is a bad film, filled with awkward reenactments, poorly designed graphics, scripted interview segments, ominous music and enough jumping to conclusions that I’m surprised someone didn’t throw out their back.

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.

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.

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

A movie that lacks the energy, wit and heart of its predecessor and is the kind of project that probably never should have happened.

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

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

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.

There are a few decent performances, a nice riff on the technology fears that drove the original movie, and a centerpiece of horror that works, but never once do you get the feeling that the people behind this remake are here because of artistic passion or creative drive.

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.

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.

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.

Colorful elements of “Fargo” and “Seven” blend into a bland beige in the mostly straight-to-video The Calling, a piece that almost miraculously finds a way to waste the prodigious talents of Susan Sarandon, Ellen Burstyn, and Donald Sutherland.

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

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.

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.

What went wrong? How did so many talented people devote their time and energy to a film that came out this generic, dull, and flat?

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.

Odd Thomas becomes a film that's going through the motions with too little character, style, or atmosphere to keep it engaging.

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.”

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.

There’s clearly a biopic in Morrissey’s true story. You can hear it in the timbre of his voice and the wit of his lyrics. However, it is not in England is Mine, a flat, disappointing drama that casts Morrissey as a mopey teenager. The man who wrote “How Soon is Now?” deserves better.

Fernando Coimbra’s Sand Castle offers too little to the War is Hell genre to be noteworthy.

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.

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.

Almost approaches so-bad-you-need-to-see-it categorization.

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.

From the beginning, Cut Bank isn’t just tonally inconsistent, it doesn’t really have one. It’s flat. There’s no sense of rhythm, tension, or atmosphere.

There are few surprises here after the narrative’s turn to survival horror as the film plods to its inevitable conclusion, and even that final shot feels unearned.

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.

Merely being violent and unpredictable does not make a film like Jackpot funny. Therein lies the biggest problem here.

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.

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.

Flat is the kindest way to describe A Good Marriage, a King novella turned feature that could have worked as a short or an episode of “Masters of Horror” but truly tests viewer patience at 102 minutes. It’s arguably the dullest King film yet, despite solid work by LaPaglia to save it and a decent set-up that goes absolutely nowhere.

It is a joyless, lifeless, boring affair that repeats ideas from better X-films and feels more like an obligatory reunion cash grab than a deeply considered goodbye to iconic characters.

Several of the changes to Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata’s brilliant manga have already been widely reported, including the whitewashing of the entire project by relocating it from Japan to Seattle, but those are just the symptoms of a greater disease known as complete creative bankruptcy.

For an hour, Lucky McKee’s Blood Money is aggressively annoying, the kind of film with no likable or believable characters, and one of those cheap VOD flicks in which it feels like everyone was there purely for the paycheck.

There’s just so much missing, including logic.

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.

Even for how negatively I responded to the bafflingly inept Marauders, I choose to believe that Miller and his overly talented cast didn’t just do it for a paycheck. Even with that in mind, it’s hard to forgive.

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.

The dull Suburbicon lacks in witty dialogue, interesting characters, or even visual flourishes. It is as flat as the well-manicured lawns in the idyllic neighborhood that gives it a name.

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.

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.

Before I Go to Sleep is a movie with nothing to hold on to but a paper-thin mystery with really only one of two possible suspects in the end.

They don’t make movies that seem to purposefully waste the talents of current “SNL” stars much any more. Well, except for this one.

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

Through it all, a few performances actually increase the disappointment, for one wishes they were in a better film. Leo is perfect casting as a woman whose acerbic personality helped define her.

This is still a perfect example of the market that Netflix seems intent to corner: Movies You Can Watch While You Play Games on Your Phone.

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.

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.

The dialogue isn’t just awkward and unbelievable — it’s as if it was written by a teenager raised on only bad horror movies.

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.

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.

It makes sense that another of Flynn’s novels, the sinister Dark Places, would get the cinematic treatment as well, although this failed exercise could be used comparatively with “Gone Girl” as a What Not to Do cinematic lesson.

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 non-stop, navel-gazing, faux philosophical dialogue about love starts to feel like some strange experiment itself. It reaches points of near-parody, not unlike overhearing drunk college kids talk about dating apps and the meaning of love at 3 AM at a party you really want to leave.

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.