Chris Packham

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Such is the case of The Osiris Child, a series of scenes that cut away from interesting developments to flashbacks with a vengeance, as though “interesting developments” killed director Shane Abbess’s dog.

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

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

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