Chris Packham

Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia is the unscary film’s only source of spookiness.

It’s completely unfair to compare these characters to (say) Abbi and Ilana on Broad City, funny women who derive dignity from their friendship. But that’s a show written, created, and performed by women, while this film’s creative trust is a clueless, retrograde sausage festivus.

Lambert aims for gentle, Lake Wobegon–ish nostalgia, but the jokes never land, the undifferentiated small town confers no sense of location, and its eccentrics aren’t particularly weird.

Kill Switch is an ungainly hybrid of two totally disparate mediums that have been Human Centipede-d together: film and first-person-shooter video games. Film is not the front end of this configuration.

Though it’s not very scary, the film mines suspense from Jack’s attempts at luring his victims and hiding his tracks.

Atomica's slapdash script is a hasty aggregation of screenwriting and science fiction clichés, barely feature-length and possibly written over a single weekend.

Because we see so much of ourselves in them, it’s nearly impossible not to anthropomorphize dogs. Which the filmmakers know, and exploit in the same way that a dog exploits an unattended burrito on the counter — enthusiastically, with no compunctions and not a thought in its head.

The film combines agonizing scenes of didactic earnestness about gun violence with the absolutely soul-crushing ennui of flaccid marriage jokes.

Ted Balaker's Can We Take a Joke? is a surprisingly self-righteous and unfunny documentary in which shelf-dated comedians spend 74 minutes misinterpreting the First Amendment to mean that behaving like an asshole should have no social consequences.

Allen attempts to build a sense of mounting anxiety via the increasing suspicions of a tenacious insurance investigator, unexpected testimony from eyewitnesses, and Lena's squirrelly behavior, but pop star Jonas is incapable of making simple facial expressions, let alone evincing existential dread.

The film never reconciles the incongruities of its constituent parts, which hang together like toothpaste and orange juice

So gosh-darn terrible in so many ways, the film defies a unified thesis.

Writer-director Hank Bedford delivers some tactile, human details.... But the film is slow and often agonizingly predictable.

Eden wants you to know what people are really like outside your smothering bourgeois cocoon.

The script doesn't know the difference between being something scary and pointing at something scary. It's less a film than a series of imitative gestures, a bunch of horror signifiers pointing to nothing.

In its execution, the film becomes a cascading-failure scenario that proceeds from Soumah's intention to bait-and-switch the audience, coupled with a lot of suboptimal acting and amateurish editing choices.

Unlike guilty-pleasure Guy Ritchie crime films, in which vivid characters and unlikely subplots converge in lush visual mayhem, 7 Minutes is humorless and perfunctory, its heavies and protagonists never so much as aspiring to transcend or challenge the stereotypes they represent.

Using a slavery narrative to advance an unrelated agenda is pretty tasteless, bordering on offensive.

Like many, many films starring Christopher McDonald, the best thing about The Squeeze is Christopher McDonald.

If Napier hadn't shown up with a camera, Uygur would likely have continued filming himself, because his "firebrand" commentary is only ostensibly about politics; it's mostly about projecting the world onto his own ego and making it Cenk Uygur–shaped.

The film unspools with a momentum that mitigates its artless brutality, kinda, but it's a high-pressure firehose of stupid.

The film is as vacuous and undeserving of regard as any of its characters.

A Little Game is an OK children's movie that can only be appreciated by kids, who have not yet been callused by the awfulness of both chess metaphors and the old ladies in films who are always spouting gauzy generalities about the magic of life.

It's a comedy that's so broad and cartoony that the occasional dramatic pivots seem diminished and ridiculous, like performing a soliloquy on a Chuck E. Cheese stage.

It's a black-comedy plot without any blackness or actual comedy, unless mugging and bro-heiming by Mad TV's Will Sasso counts as hilarious.

The jokes are slow and obvious, and the editor lingers over every one like a sleepy drunk over a basket of tater tots, stoically holding the shot long after any reasonable person would have concluded that a punchline had occurred.

It sacrifices its voice to the premeditated non-style of a first-person pseudo-documentary, a form that often has the paradoxical effect of making everything it shows us seem more fake than usual.

Among Ravens wants to be the The Big Chill with Gen-X assholes, a weird ambition.

Premature, you will be exhausted to hear, is a teen sex comedy with the plot of Groundhog Day, its supernatural comedy hearkening more to Scott Baio's Zapped! than to Porky's.

Emoticon ;), a vanity project written, directed, starring, and sung by Livia De Paolis, is a grown-up's weird idea of how kids behave.

Rio 2 wants to be a musical, but instead of timing songs to, say, the emotional peaks of the characters, director Carlos Saldanha opts for high-intensity intervals of singing every four minutes.

The white saviors are flat, 2D manifestations of virtue... And the film's Indians? They aren't characters at all.

Too bad that Urban's stab at black-comedy satire is hobbled by the obviousness of his characters.

The dull Adventures of the Penguin King is definitely the laziest of the waddle-coms to win theatrical release.

A study in the frustrating insufferableness of people you probably agree with.

There's a lot of onscreen music-making, some of it amazing, the rest Santa-related.

The exhausting and unrelatable Our Day Will Come escalates to a violent rampage as essentially unpleasant and nonsensical as its characters.

Like the Saw franchise, Cassadaga, directed by Anthony DiBlasi, attempts to leverage the horror genre in the service of inducing epiphanies, but keeps tripping over its confused tangle of genres.

The Secret Lives of Dorks, starring Jim Belushi, is, well, the Jim Belushi of high-school romantic comedies: indifferent, kind of exhausted.

The tense prologue of writer-director Bryan Ramirez's Mission Park...evokes a tactile, scary reality utterly betrayed by the following 90-minute string of hackneyed, basic-cable plotting and dialogue.

Unfortunately, the interesting drabness of the afterlife’s police department is paired with the colorless paucity of the film’s heavies...The deados, unmemorable CG brutes, spout generic bad-guy dialogue undistinguished by humor or characterization.

An extraordinarily undistinguished comedy from director Brian Herzlinger.