Chris Nashawaty

A lazy hash of cheap geezer gags and spoon-fed sentiment.

Look, no one is expecting much from a movie called Happy Death Day 2U. Certainly not air-tight logic. But this chapter feels phoned in. And unless you’re really, really desperate for a new horror movie to check out, you might want to think twice about accepting the charges.

Now a miscast Claire Foy adopts the hacker vigilante’s black leather and badass avenging-angel attitude for The Girl in the Spider’s Web — a disappointingly safe, by-the-numbers action-thriller.

Moretz, who is 16 now, can't manufacture the same that's-so-wrong jolt she managed the first time around. Back then, it was hilariously taboo to see a little girl spout arias of profanity. Now, she's just another teenager swearing. Like the rest of the film, what was once shocking now just elicits a shrug.

Schwarzenegger, for one, seems to be having a hoot.

The Green Inferno is less a riff on spaghetti splatter flicks like Cannibal Holocaust than a desperate-to-shock pastiche of guts and gore served with a wink to audiences with strong stomachs. You know who you are.

On paper, writer-director Oren Moverman’s The Dinner has all the ingredients for what should be a four-star feast. But from the opening course, it’s clear that something has gone wrong in the kitchen. Moverman, the chef, has tried to make his creation too clever and complicated.

The only one having any fun in this dead-on-arrival noir is Robert De Niro.

It's no coincidence that Winter's Tale is being released on Valentine's Day, when our resistance to schmaltz is at its weakest. But do that special someone in your life a favor and splurge on some flowers and a nice heart-shaped Russell Stover box instead.

The Vatican Tapes is basically “Exorcism’s Greatest Hits” played by a schlocky cover band.

The one thing Mute has going for it is Jones’ vividly imaginative sense of world-building. Like Ridley Scott with "Blade Runner," he fills every corner of the screen with something cool to look at.

With Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce now in the roles once occupied by Johnny Depp and the late Jean Rochefort, Don Quixote turns out to be a pretty typical Gilliam film: whimsically daffy, frantically overstuffed, and art-directed to within in an inch of its life. It’s often transporting, but even more often exhausting.

It’s little more than a handsome snooze that even the Masterpiece Theatre crowd may find a bit too snoozy.

Knock Knock is a pretty flimsy erotic thriller, but thanks to Reeves’ oaken obliviousness it’s also got a few moments of deliciously trashy fun.

The whole thing feels like the pilot episode of a third-rate comic-book vigilante TV show.

The Space Between Us attempts to take young love to literally new heights before crash-landing into an earthbound hash of schmaltzy clichés and romantic absurdities.

Apocalypse feels like a confused, kitchen-sink mess with a half dozen too many characters, a villain who amounts to a big blue nothing, and a narrative that’s so choppy and poorly cut together that it feels like you’re watching a flipbook instead of a movie.

Watching it all unfold and slowly go off the rails, you can't help but wonder what Pfister's mentor, Nolan, might have done with the same material. My guess is he would have sent the script back for a Page One rewrite for starters.

For a movie about the importance of objectivity, Truth feels like a biased and sanctimonious op-ed column.

Anderson's film is something to be experienced, like a psychedelic drug trip where the journey trumps the destination. Unfortunately, his journey just didn't do it for me.

Corbet doesn’t seem as interested in the answers to the provocatively glib questions he raises as he is in creating a cynical riddle cloaked in style. No doubt some will find all of this to be a deep meditation on the pop-industrial complex, but from where I was sitting, it just felt like empty camp.

While Hudson's and costar Mary J. Blige's soulful, stirring musical numbers are absolute dynamite, the rest of the film's story is larded with enough soap opera twists and heavy-handed schmaltz that you'll feel like you're being bludgeoned with a hymnal.

The goal of any manifesto is making its aims as clear as possible. But it’s never clear what this Manifesto is aiming for besides a cheeky roll call of intellectual camps. Ph.D.s in art theory will chuckle knowingly as everyone else eyes the exit.

Like its predecessor it’s an unremarkable placeholder until the next "Mission: Impossible" flick comes along.

Some, no doubt, will find Lowery’s playfully surreal experiment (a ghost story told from the POV of the ghost) haunting, lyrical, and moving. Others (ahem, guilty as charged) will just find it maddening, inscrutable, and alienating. Check it out, then take your side in the debate.

Ari Folman's meta-commentary on Hollywood in the soulless digital age starts off promisingly, like a Charlie Kaufman mind scrambler. But then it spirals into logy animated nonsense.

Whatever the case, you’re better off rewatching the fake Linda Blair movie.

Pretty light on scares and only hangs together with the thinnest (and hokiest) of narrative threads.

Isn’t aggressively terrible or outrageously offensive. It’s just harmless, pointless, and meh. You’d think with 17 years at their disposal these guys would be able to come up with some jokes that weren’t so half-baked and dumb. Alas, this is low-hanging fruit all the way.

While the fish-out-of-water caper is stuffed with whiplash turns and colorfully eccentric lowlife characters, it never adds up to much. It’s so busy you might think there’s more to it than they’re really is.

It seems to have been made by people who couldn't decide if their film was a horror flick, a whodunit, or a "Hellboy" knockoff.

Apart from the film’s occasional spasms of rousing, lightning-choreographed ultraviolence (a confrontation with an apartment full of date-raping finance bros is particularly great), the film is too enamored with its own morose righteousness to be very engaging.

In the end, what should be a three-hankie, ugly-cry tearjerker feels unnuanced, overplotted, and mechanical. Frank and Mary deserved better.

All of which leaves you wondering: Why cast such talented, interesting, and edgy performers if you're only going to ask them play it safe?

Annabelle: Creation isn’t a terrible film. Not exactly. The set-up is promising, and it offers some decent early jump scares. But eventually the thinness of the material becomes overwhelmingly obvious.

With his latest film, the mawkish and melodramatic Labor Day, Reitman has done an unexpected about-face: He's ditched Wilder for Douglas Sirk. And the swap doesn't do him — or his fans — any favors.

The heist in Heist is pretty pedestrian, and the film turns into Die Hard-on-a-bus with a couple of so-so twists and serviceable spasms of action. If that’s what you’re looking for, rent Speed instead.

If Marwencol made your heart go out to Mark, Welcome to Marwen does something quite different. It makes you want to back away from him slowly.

As for the new Papillon, it wisely doubles down on high adventure, but it’s still as lifeless as its predecessor. Just in different ways.

The problem isn't so much what the film is saying but its shrill, alarmist tone. You don't have to be a sociological genius to look at all of us walking down the street like zombies, obliviously staring at our smartphones, and know that something's wrong.

The twists in Close aren’t very twisty and its thrills aren’t particularly thrilling. But if watching women getting smacked around by cartoon bad guys before finally getting payback is your thing, by all means, have at it.

Mandy Lane does eventually build to a whiplash twist ending, but it's too little, too late — much like the film itself. Here's a case where the backstory is more interesting than the movie.

The comedy here isn’t very funny and the drama isn’t very sharp.

It wants to be trashy, pulpy fun that toys with your mind and your expectations. Sadly, it just ends up insulting both.

Slight even by the wafer-thin standards of the wedding rom-com genre, writer-director Jeffrey Blitz’s Table 19 offers a couple of mild chuckles, six actors who’ve all been far better elsewhere, and a mercifully brief running time.

Stanley Tucci, Hope Davis, Anne Heche, and Sofia Vergara all pop up in glorified cameos and give the movie more fizz than their roles require. Which begs the question: Why would they sign on for such thankless, bite-size roles?

True Memoirs is harmless, disposable junk food that has just enough laughs to make you feel like you didn’t get scammed.

By the time the climactic act of violence finally arrives, there’s barely enough patience left in the viewer to feel any real sense of catharsis or liberation. Just exhaustion.

Eli Roth’s Death Wish isn’t a bad movie as far as super-violent exploitation flicks go. But it is a deeply problematic one. And that problem boils down to this: It’s the absolute wrong movie at the absolute wrong time.

The one bit of good news is that the first Gambler is currently streaming on Netflix. Do yourself a favor and watch that one instead.

The film doesn’t seem particularly interested in grappling with any of those issues beyond the most superficial level.

Get Hard is not only a bad movie but a profoundly wasted opportunity.

As horror comedies go, this one sadly winds up somewhere between Scary Movie 4 and 5.

A major disappointment. Bleak, brutal, and ultimately pointless.

If I Stay never bothers to go after authenticity when there's a cliché hovering nearby. That may not be enough of a drawback to prevent teenage audiences from lapping up the movie with a spoon, but they certainly deserve better.

If you enjoyed 2013’s Pacific Rim but secretly wished it was more like a vapid Transformers sequel, then you’ll love Pacific Rim Uprising. Everyone else can give this heavy-metal howler a hard pass.

Before anyone reading this starts complaining that I just don’t get what movies like Godzilla: King of the Monsters are all about, that I’m the sort of killjoy who should just relax, let me say that it would be a lot easier to take it less seriously if the people who made the movie cared enough to take it more seriously.

The three main narratives cut back and forth between New York, Paris, and Rome, which is the best thing the movie has going for it: picturesque locations. Unfortunately, by the time we're done taking in the sights and Haggis finally coughs up his third-act puzzle-box twist, it comes off as a big metaphysical So What.

Rourke, whose face has become an inexpressive waxwork in recent years, doesn’t do much with what’s already a pretty undercooked role.

The two leads have chemistry and a rebellious sort of charisma. Too bad they’re given such wheezy clichés to work with.

Is it possible to be an enfant terrible when you’re 55? Unrepentant French provocateur Gaspar Noé pushes that question (and your buttons) to the breaking point with his latest transgressive import, Climax.

No one churns out big-budget action mediocrity these days as regularly as Dwayne Johnson. So now, just three months after his giant gorilla-a-go-go Rampage, we have Skyscraper — a film that suggests what would happen if you took The Towering Inferno and Die Hard and stripped them of the qualities that made both work.

No one involved in Resurrection seems like they can be bothered to break a sweat. It’s a movie made by folks who know they can do better but couldn’t be bothered.

It’s a movie that desperately wants to be timely and relevant, warning us about the Brave New World threats we all face when it comes to privacy, surveillance, and freedom. But it’s so cartoony and ham-fisted it sabotages its own argument.

Occasionally, Mann shows flashes of the sort of springloaded action set pieces he was once hailed for, like a shoot-out during a religious parade. But mostly they just come off as warmed-over parodies from a onetime master aping his own style.

In Mad Men mastermind Matthew Weiner's big-screen directorial debut, the aggressively unfunny Are You Here, all of the dark humor and delicate character shadings we're used to seeing on his TV series are conspicuously absent. He's swapped nuance for blunt-edged numskullery.

Aside from one gag in particular, the scares lack any real mechanical knack. The one thing the otherwise forgettable film has going for it is Shaye, who over the course of the Insidious quadrilogy has miraculously created a real flesh-and-blood character with Elise.

Zoolander No. 2 is embarrassing, lazy, and aggressively unfunny. The only good news is that at the pace the franchise is moving, we won’t get Zoolander 3 until 2030.

The film has a stunningly hypnotic look thanks to Zach Kuperstein’s crisp black-and-white ­cinematography. It feels like a waking nightmare. It’s just enough to make you wonder how a film that’s so ugly managed to look so damn good.

Its lack of both originality and any real memorable moments feels shameless and lazy. Adding insult, the movie ends on a cliffhanger, guaranteeing that Insidious: Chapter 3 will soon be coming to a theater near you.

It happens. Really talented directors sometimes step into the batter’s box, take a gigantic swing, and whiff.

The new comedy, The Spy Who Dumped Me, is a mirthless, dead-on-arrival dud.

It’s undercooked even by the filmmaker’s own late-career standards. Yes, Coney Island has never looked more gorgeously golden-hued (thanks to cinematographer Vittorio Storaro), but Allen has seldom been less sharp.

If the first Kingsman, at its best, felt like a dry martini of a joke, then this one is more Jack and Mountain Dew — unsubtle, unrefreshing, and unnecessary.

The Predator isn’t a dumb movie exactly. But it’s not a smart one either. What it is, is something uncomfortably in between: a satire of a franchise that was already in on its own macho joke.

The early-’60s styles are chic, the Euro locales are swank, and the music cues (including a nod to Ennio Morricone’s Once Upon a Time in the West score) are fantastic. Too bad the plot and the lead performances are so lifeless.

The most impressive thing about Triple 9 is that it somehow manages to be both predictable and incoherent at the same time. Well, that and the fact that it manages to make half a dozen good actors look really lost.

It never makes up its mind whether it wants to be a what-hath-science-wrought disaster movie like those old John Sayles cheapie classics Piranha and Alligator, or just a big, dumb, and loud tongue-in-cheek action comedy. It’s a movie that’s afraid to pick a lane.

Wan, a director who’s proven himself to be a can’t-miss ace regardless of genre (from the horror formulas of The Conjuring and Insidious to the big-budget tentpole mayhem of Furious 7) seems to finally be out of his depth. He’s conjured an intriguing world, but populated that world with dramatic cotton candy and silly characters, including a hero who’s unsure if he wants to make us laugh or feel — and winds up doing neither. Pass the Dramamine.

This stylish-but-grating pastiche of far better crime flicks is as soft-boiled as they come.

It takes a promising premise loaded with white-knuckle, things-go-bump-in-the-night possibilities and proceeds to do surprisingly little with them over the course of its slim 87-minute running time.

Narratively preposterous and probably an hour too long, it’s the year’s first big howler. It could have been DeHaan’s "Shutter Island," but instead it’s just Gore Verbinski’s latest self-indulgent mess following "The Lone Ranger."

Gere, an actor capable of great nuance, hams it up so mightily you’d think the film was sponsored by Boar’s Head.

During the film’s intoxicating first 30 minutes, for example, I couldn’t decide whether what I was watching was brilliantly bonkers or total folly. Then, as the story went on, it came into sharper and sharper focus: Valerian is an epic mess.

There are the makings of a poignant Harold and Maude-style drama here, but the movie is so amateurish and eager to be shocking, it just winds up feeling creepy.

The story isn’t just confusing, it’s a betrayal to anyone who’s invested brain cells in the Terminatorverse over the past 31 years.

It happens more often than it should: A cast of sterling actors is assembled for a movie that doesn’t come close to equaling the sum of its parts.

Neither scary enough to be a horror film nor funny enough to be a comedy.

Passengers is not very good. In fact, it’s pretty bad.

If you're looking for cheap scares and have 90 minutes to kill, you could do worse than The Pyramid. But not a lot worse.

Ultimately, Age of Extinction is an endless barrage of nonsense and noise.

Hard on the heels of January’s god-awful "Serenity," we’re now treated to The Beach Bum — a shambling, self-indulgent inside joke about a perpetually stoned holy fool from the Florida Keys named Moondog. I’ll give you one guess who plays him.

Everything about Vice feels like recycled goods. It's basically "Westworld" meets "Blade Runner" programmed by glitchy filmmaking replicators.

Strip the pleasure away from a guilty pleasure and what are you left with exactly? Fifty Shades Freed, the third and final cinematic installment in E.L. James’ trashy S&M trilogy, answers that question with every ludicrous plot twist, stilted line delivery, and too-laughable-to-be-hot sex scene.

Neither Sandler nor his listless writers (too many punchlines just sit there and collect flies) seem invested. Whether he’s saving the planet or putting the moves on Michelle Monaghan, Sandler can’t be bothered to raise his pulse above comatose. If he doesn’t care, why should anyone else?

Even the stunts – the whole raison d’etre of a movie like this – seem tame and staged. It cheaps out on the good stuff. And for a movie with so little going for it besides the threat of danger, there’s no excuse for Action Point to play it this safe.

A shoddy special-effects howler that makes a hash out of both Egyptian mythology and human logic.

It’s soulless, incoherent, Renaissance Faire hooey. And since the latest iteration of game series that inspired it, World of Warcraft, already peaked years ago, even the timing is off.

It's both exhausting and laughable in its eagerness to shock. That's the bad news. The worse news is that Volume II comes out next month.

In Wiener-Dog, Solondz just keeps telling the same dark joke over and over again—and it just keeps getting less and less funny. It’s a dog.

It’s a comedy that’s so witless and unfunny and shoddily made it makes "The Hangover 2" look like "The Godfather 2."

Disposable and shockingly inept.

Kin is a movie about a child with an all-powerful firearm that makes him feel important and special and powerful. On a one-to-ten scale of moral fecklessness, this ranks about a thousand.

Even by the series’ already low standards, The Human Centipede Part 3 is crap.