Chuck Wilson

The co-directing brothers Goetz prove adept at building escape-the-bad-guy action sequences, but they continually run up against the story's Marquis-de-Sade underpinnings.

Hellions is unsettling, but in all the wrong ways.

The new thriller from Spanish writer-director Nacho Vigalondo (Timecrimes) is visually dazzling, but the story starts off silly and ends up a confusing, maddening mess.

Screenwriters Andre Fabrizio and Jeremy Passmore fail to conjure a single witty line. Nor is there any finesse to be found in director Brian A. Miller’s inept staging of car chases and shoot-outs.

Writer-director Matthew Weiner, creator of the magnificent Mad Men, has made a feature film — theoretically a comedy — that's just shy of terrible.

Watching the hopelessly vapid get taken out, one by one, has never been more depressing.

Very Good Girls is a film one wants to like but can't. It just doesn't work.

If the onscreen serial killer isn't having fun, how can we?

Devlin's script tips its hand so early on that Devil's Due lumbers toward a woefully flat, predictable ending, and the unwelcome promise of something truly demonic — sequels.

Although Thornton and co-writer Tom Epperson are clearly trying to get to some essential truth about the ways in which machismo hinders love, their insights are scattered and pedestrian.

The smash-and-crash chase scenes are numbingly dull.

It's all very predictable, very Hollywood. Storytelling cliché, it would seem, knows no borders.

There are many things absent from this found-footage horror movie, including suspense, logic, and originality.

The game of wills that ensues between the two women isn't terribly interesting, much less suspenseful, and in fact, it's not clear that director Egidio Coccimiglio and screenwriter Floyd Byars ever settled on whether they were making a thriller or a satire about food and celebrity.

Aftershock is incompetently made and morally muddled, but since talent, morality, and Mr. Roth have never been on speaking terms, we're not exactly surprised.

The movie is eerily photographed (by Brandon Trost), but never suspenseful or scary, and eventually, events descend into goat-sacrificing silliness.

Built-to-shock anthology film.

A surprise hit in Thailand, the film is nonetheless a reductive mess.

There's not a believable moment in all of it, but for a while the film chugs along on Ryan's innate charisma. Even so, no amount of movie-star twinkle could lighten screenwriter Cheryl Edwards' bizarre character arc, which finds Jackie turning, overnight, into a callous, possibly racist, ninny.

Shawn is clearly meant to have deep feelings, yet the filmmakers have saddled her -- and Blair -- with a shallow angst that bums out the whole movie.

Bass isn't a gifted actor, but he retains his dignity, mostly by keeping his head down and avoiding the eyes of the idiots around him.

One almost pities the unnervingly twitchy Murphy, whose shiny makeup is dreadful, and who doesn't stand a chance alongside the focused intensity of Fanning, who commands the screen with the precision of a 30-year veteran.

Drab and muddled romance.

Queen Latifah gets co-producer and scenarist credits for this anemic comedy, and also a supporting role that amounts to the worst performance of her career.

This time, Zombie doesn’t appear to have many deep thoughts, so Michael doesn’t just stab his victims, he slices and chomps them into gooey pulp — an overkill motif that actually feels false to the character and quickly becomes a depressing bore.

Inane uplift tale for teens.

Sometimes the predictability of a romantic comedy is reassuring, and sometimes it makes you want to scream, as with this witless wonder.

A horror movie that's not horrific enough, Soul Survivors plays like a "Twilight Zone" by way of "Touched by an Angel."

There is nothing sadder, either in real life or on the movie screen, than an unlikable idiot, and what we have with this dreadful comedy -- the longest 90 minutes of the film year -- is the sight of not one but two charm-free fools.

Even the easily weepy may grow impatient with the snail’s pace of this melancholy romance.

Moves slowly and deflates completely when the over-hyped family secret turns out to be a dramatic dud. Still, it's an awfully pretty movie. Let's all summer in Maine.

Mostly, Lafferty is all about expletives and sexual innuendo of the frankest kind, some of it so raunchy (and unfunny) as to make one wonder if the parents of the film's many child actors bothered to read the script.

Judging by the stilted nature of both the dialogue and acting, that's what this film is -- a thesis project better suited to a grad-night exhibition.

Director Uwe Boll (House of the Dead) pulls off a nicely staged fistfight in an open-air market at the start, but soon loses his way amid mind-glazing exposition and endless gunfire aimed at bulletproof giant lizards.

Insipid embarrassment.

After a zippy first hour, the wackos wear out their welcome and the director, perversely, fails to show the big concert.

As a calling card for the stylistic talents of a new filmmaker, writer-director Anna Chi's first feature is a success. As drama, it's a dud.

To help Prinze sail past the eventually unbearable clichés of Kevin Falls and John Gatins' script, director Mike Tollin has assembled an impressive supporting cast.

Feels like a movie made by men whose world views were shaped, primarily, by "Porky's" and "American Pie."

This is a decidedly bizarre movie, nicely photographed and designed -- someone spent some money -- but built entirely around dialogue so stilted and unrevealing that it’s little wonder poor LaVorgna screams it.

A big-screen reality show that flashes plenty of t-- and d--- but little integrity.

To be fair, it's not solely Cage's fault that his new film, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, is lousy -- director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) deserves most of the heat for this listless dud.

Remarkably unfunny.

There are moments that suggest the comedy that could have been.

A truly dreadful sequel.

No, this isn't an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s great 1985 novel, but a muddled talking-ghosts movie.

Bad movies can be a hoot, but rather than campy, Ameer appears to be dead serious; and it's hard to feel anything but fury toward a filmmaker whose opening title sequence intersperses black-and-white flashbacks of his sexy young lovers with actual concentration-camp photos of stacked, emaciated corpses.

Strictly Urban Comedy 101, as if the filmmakers had neither the inclination nor the chops to move the genre past timeworn stereotypes.

The director and her capable cast appear to be caught in a heady whirl of New Age–inspired good intentions, but the spell they cast isn't the least bit mesmerizing.

What they don't do often enough is battle anacondas. It's all tease and no payoff.

The only time the actors appear to have accelerated their own heartbeats is in two paintball scenes, as well as -- professionals all -- the fart-lighting contest. It's pretty pathetic.

Screenwriters Melissa Carter and Erica Bell (Sleepover) have given Murphy -- perhaps the twitchiest actor of her generation --cutesy quirks to play in lieu of a character.

Has there ever been a more inept trio of big-city caseworkers? Go ahead, Lilith. Unleash the hounds.

It’s hard to know what’s more depressing -- a senseless remake or the idea of a once-great director doing such shockingly slack work.

After a first hour that plays like a bad TV show, Sommers hits his groove with an over-the-top Paris chase sequence that, in turn, leads to an underwater finale that’s absurdly overproduced, momentarily diverting, and then instantly forgettable.

Like the film's characters, the city of Paris has been made faceless, as if it too were merely the pawn in a representational hell where light and color and shading are forbidden.

The glitch, beyond the rote story, is that while she's an infectiously upbeat screen presence, Latifah is not, inherently, a major laugh generator, and neither, it would appear, is Fallon.

With her long, black coat and midair karate-chop skills, Selene is more Matrix-y Neo than Count Dracula, which may explain why this movie is so brutally un-fun.

A mindless muddle.

A sappy love story wherein nary a gun or action sequence is seen after the first 10 minutes.

Most of the animated sequences, capably mixed with live action, leave a bad aftertaste, particularly when the ultimate fate of one beaten and battered human bystander after another is left callously unresolved. In other words, parents beware.

The movie is a funereally paced downer.

Director Chuck Russell ("The Mask") and screenwriter Thomas Rickman don't need new agents -- they need backup careers.

For trashing a classic, Tunnicliffe and his writing cohorts deserve a Grimm-style fate -- perhaps a long, slow boil in the witch’s vat?

Full of shuttery jump cuts set to music cues so loud your heart can't help but convulse, Darkness should have been left to molder in Miramax's vast vault of horror-movie stiffs.

Baffling too is The Rock's choice to follow up his acclaimed performance in "Be Cool" with a role that requires him to do little more than widen his eyes and grunt lines.

The one saving grace is a sweet, affecting performance by Werner de Smedt.

Why the devotion to such dull material?

So dull, a road-trip movie that's surprisingly short of both adventure and song.

This movie could have easily been shot as porn, a transition that would have given it a modicum of respectability and, better still, true social purpose.

McCormick and screenwriter J.S. Cardone don’t have one original thought between them, but they do appear to share an obsession with characters opening hotel-room closets in which the steel hangers gleam ominously.

Rich with comic potential that goes unfulfilled, time after stupefying time.

If your cell phone vibrates while you’re watching One Missed Call, go ahead and answer, because even a wrong number will be more exciting than what’s happening onscreen.

First-time director João Pedro Rodrigues' unwillingness to define his hero’s background or motivations becomes more and more frustrating as the film goes on.

Deadening comedy.

Just lies there, poorly lit and tone-deaf.