Calum Marsh

The director, Ulloa, tries to mask the derivative story by embellishing the violence, cutting to closeups of flesh wounds and bullet holes as a distraction from the routine plot and hardboiled dialogue — he seems to be aiming for stark and gritty, but his tough-talking assassins, crime lords and arms dealers bring the whole thing closer to unintentional camp.

Its story of high school freshmen navigating a libertine house party follows exactly the trajectory you would expect, with few laughs and even fewer surprises.

While the details are meticulous, the attitude is all wrong, trading the simple, unaffected charm that has served the character so well since his introduction in 1981 for a snarky and fatuous air that leans hard on winking humor and bland, hackneyed irony.

Poetry refracts life; this film can only reflect it, and tritely at that.

The solemn excavation of Smith’s life and death — she died at 39 of a drug overdose, in 2007 — ultimately brings the movie, despite Macfarlane’s well-meaning efforts, squarely into the territory of what it’s attempting to condemn: lurid voyeurism.

Mancini, who served as an executive producer, is glorified and exonerated, yet it's his inability to render either process interesting that ultimately sinks the picture.

If this is the standard we’re dealing with, I’d rather have amnesia.

the film's occasional fits of comic inanity — locals ranting about aliens, conversations about two-headed dogs — are certainly embarrassing. But its attempts at melodrama are outright repugnant.

Has an elegance roughly on par with a Goosebumps novel, refusing to follow its own contradictory rules and barely sustaining a pretense of internal logic.

The director, Jennifer DeLia, doesn't seem aware of the humor inherent in this scenario, which may be why, despite proving thoroughly ridiculous, Billy Bates remains an unabashedly self-serious film.

While it’s true that a certain tepid aspect is common to most B westerns, those of the ’30s and ’40s were made with a baseline competence that The Old Way is woefully lacking.

Koyaanisqatsi was a marvel of smeared and kaleidoscopic light; Visitors is a dull etch of digital blacks and grays.

An amorphous melange of ill-fitting reference points and misappropriated aesthetics, a lumbering family blockbuster both tiresome and wholly indistinct.

This tedious, unfunny, screamingly unoriginal romantic adventure film is so flimsy and so insubstantial that it’s practically vaporous.

Little more than an exercise in sustained contempt, a petty little missive directed at anyone who dares to wield a pen.

Between its old-hat story, flagrantly distasteful humor and lousy visual effects, Virtually Heroes feels as if it’s been sitting on a shelf for a lot longer than 10 years. It probably should have remained there.

It's a particularly risible nothing whose premise alone betrays the paucity of Franco's imagination and wit.

This is a guy who seeks to mock idiocy? Physician, heal thyself.

Resoundingly terrible.

Beautiful Creatures basically spits in the face of a legacy of literature founded on feelings of exclusion and social alienation.