Brian Tallerico

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.

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

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.

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.

This is a story that still resonates in the way we deal with war, torture, and detainment camps. It demands depth.

One of those increasingly depressing affairs, like watching air come out of a balloon. You start to feel bad for everyone involved, even the man responsible for it all, Ricky Gervais.

Sporadically, one can see the movie that Slender Man could have been, but it disappears like the title character’s victims.

Much like “Self/Less,” Amnesiac feels like a director-for-hire gig for an artist too talented for the job.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

An incredibly frustrating movie, almost purposefully so.

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.

The movie has an undeniable black hole at its center in the fact that it barely mentions Axl Rose, and includes no original Guns N' Roses recordings.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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