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.