David Ehrlich

If only its irony were the most painful thing about Flatliners, an artless and agonizingly boring remake of a semi-forgotten movie about the dangers of bringing things back from the dead.

The most distressing aspect about The Emoji Movie is that a spectacle this self-evidently soulless no longer feels like a new low. It doesn’t even leave a dent.

The Current War forces viewers to spend so much time wading through its aesthetic that it becomes easy to lose track of its ideas, or grow too bored of them to bother following along.

Hulu’s dull and exasperatingly basic “The Princess” wastes a slew of talent on a straight-to-streaming cheapo so undercooked that it feels like an AMC psy-op designed to make you run to the nearest multiplex and beg for a ticket to whatever’s showing next.

It’s worth remembering that the “Cloverfield” movies were only able to successfully disrupt conventional distribution methods because they’re good. The best thing you can say about this one is that it’s free with your Netflix subscription.

The same video game aesthetic that facilitated his earlier B-movies has otherwise entombed this new one in a generic mess of C++.

Saldana delivers her distractingly affected performance with greater conviction than most could muster under these circumstances, but no amount of ferocity can disguise the discrepancy between the 37-year-old actress (33 at the time of filming) and the 62-year-old woman she's playing.

A limp and lifeless historical melodrama that aspires to be the “Pearl Harbor” of the preamble to World War I and still falls well short of that ignoble goal, Joseph Ruben’s The Ottoman Lieutenant tries to snatch a love triangle from out beneath the Armenian Genocide but fails to get any of the angles right.

A lukewarm soup of second-hand tropes that’s served in a portion too small to satisfy even the least discriminating thirst for slop, Infinite borrows so much from such obvious sources that it never bothers to establish an identity of its own.

Vaughn Stein’s Terminal takes a mess of dead tropes and Frankensteins them together into an crime saga that’s in desperate need of brains. And a soul. And a story.

If Sleepless feels like the microwaved leftovers of a dish that was designed to be swallowed whole, Foxx is the frozen part in the middle, the bite that makes you regret that someone tried to heat this up in the first place.

The film blinks too fast to maintain a coherent vision.

There are any number of reasons why the vast majority of comedy sequels are borderline unwatchable, but there’s ultimately only one thing that the worst of them all share in common: They give the audience what they think they want, not what they don’t yet know they want.

Can a single guitar riff tell you everything you need to know about a movie? The dreadful Kill Me Three Times, which has nothing to offer beyond some aerial looks at the white-and-turquoise beaches of Western Australia, opens with a power chord so cheesy and generic that it immediately identifies this story of amateur criminals as the charmless ’90s throwback that it is.

Cross-cutting the story of a cancer victim who’s struggling to maintain her agency with the story of the woman who’s trying to cure her should compellingly enhance both threads, but Bernstein refuses to take advantage of his film’s structure and draw meaningful connections between the two.

Forget that The Lovers doesn’t have the courtesy to be fun; no cosmic romance should be so deeply afraid to shoot for the stars. As one of the film’s many forgettable characters so eloquently puts it, “This stinks worse than an oyster’s fart.”

Although the live-action Kite has been graphically desexualized, the anime’s exploitative attitude nevertheless prevails, made all the more prominent by the film’s refusal to engage with it directly.

Entourage can’t muster enough conflict for a podcast, let alone a feature.

Here is a movie that encourages you to give it the benefit of the doubt at every possible turn but has no interest in offering anything in return. If you liked the original, you’ll like this one less. If you loathed the original, may God be with you. Opa!

As fresh as a stiff tissue and even less appealing, the film takes its cues from so many disparate sources, it almost feels like an accidental spoof.

These charmless characters are meant to learn that spending time with each other isn’t so bad, yet surviving 100 minutes with them is one of the great cinematic endurance tests of our time.

Faster than you can say, “Alexa, show me a piece of streaming content that crystallizes the grim future of feature-length comedies that have to satisfy an algorithm but not a theatrical audience,” you’re watching a lifeless, laugh-free slab of nothing like Superintelligence, which starts with “what if Skynet, but with jokes?” and then just gasps for air for the next 105 minutes.

If The Happytime Murders isn’t the worst movie of the summer, I tremble at the thought of whatever’s coming out next week.

Geostorm is terrible entertainment, but it’s a remarkably effective window into Donald Trump’s soul.

An immaculate case-study in how far blockbusters have fallen.

A braindead slog that shambles forward like the zombified husk of the heist movie it wants to be, The Last Days of American Crime is a death march of clichés that offers nothing to look at and even less to consider.

Sing is the Platonic ideal of an Illumination movie. It’s a profoundly soulless piece of work that shines a light on the mediocrity they foist upon the children of the world.

The Do-Over is atrocious, but it's atrocious in different ways than any of Adam Sandler's previous comedies.

We used to watch movies and wonder “How did they do that?” The problem with Now You See Me 2 isn’t that we already know the answer, it’s that we’re not even inspired to ask the question.

Bad movies happen to good actors all the time, but Pottersville is something worse — not malevolent so much as utterly mystifying. It’s a movie that’s mere existence is infinitely more amusing than any of its jokes.

Truth be told, there isn’t a single laugh — or even a knowing smile — to be found in this relentlessly stale ordeal, which does for sci-fi adventure comedies what “The Gray Man” did for action thrillers: absolutely nothing.

The Emoji Movie might have been a boring and brazenly cynical piece of corporate propaganda, but at least it had the courtesy to be offensive. Kidnap, on the other hand, doesn’t have the the courtesy to be much of anything.

Oliver Thompson's spellbindingly awful Welcome to Happiness isn't much worse than most first features — and, in some respects, it's far more ambitious — but this star-studded mess is the rare film that confronts you with the helplessness of watching someone self-sabotage their own work.

The Lost Village may be awful, but it’s not malicious. It doesn’t flaunt its mediocrity or celebrate its ugliness — it isn’t “Sing.”

Unwatchable even by the subterranean standards of a direct-to-video Nicolas Cage thriller, director York Shackleton’s 211 is the kind of low-grade schlock that leaves you with a newfound respect for the basic competence that most bad movies bring to the table.

It’s not that it’s bad, it’s that it never could have been good. It’s an irredeemable disaster from start to finish, an adventure that entertains only via glimpses of the adventure it should have been.

Series fans will feel cheated by such a chintzy and incurious take on something they love, while the rest of us will be left wondering how the source material earned itself any fans in the first place.

The Haunting of Sharon Tate resolves as a cheap revenge fantasy that suggests its subjects only died because they couldn’t see the writing on the wall.

As Alice runs from one hollow set piece to another, hitting every standard mark that a colossal movie like this must in order to pay for itself, her adventure grows less and less interesting with every turn. By the end, all that lessness is too much for the muchness to match it. Less is usually more, but when it comes to this franchise, none would be ideal.

It’s rarely a good sign when a movie leaves you thinking: “The Renny Harlin who made ‘The Adventures of Ford Fairlane’ would never have stood for this lazy, mean-spirited crap.”

Like all of the very worst dark comedies, Jon S. Baird’s insipid and self-satisfied Filth isn’t content to merely tap into viewers’ most odious desires. It also insist that it’s revealing them.

Without a bloody foundation of truth to ground their swagger in reality or give it some kind of moral purpose, these two certified alpha males are completely lost; it’s like they were given all the various bits you need to assemble a watchable action movie, but went into production without any idea of how those pieces might fit together.

Pacino has made a lot of movies that feel like glorified tax shelters, but this is the first that appears to have actually been shot in one.

For most of its interminable runtime, Action Point feels like a porno that deliberately ruins the sex scenes in order to stop you from fast-forwarding through the plot.

It’s hard to be even morbidly curious, let alone excited, about any future iterations or installments of a franchise so determined to remix a million things you’ve seen before into one thing you’ll wish you’d never seen at all.

A stagnant portrait of the degradation that envelops those fortunate enough to live so long, the film desperately tries to mine sweetness from the banality of life’s endgame, but the falseness of its bittersweet storytelling only accentuates the misery.

Young and Bamberger’s insultingly trite bro comedy is too content with the stink of its own reprocessed garbage to serve as anything more than a reminder that some actors should be in better films, and some producers shouldn’t be involved in any of them.

After is essentially The Room of 9/11 movies, a position that was really best left unfilled. Its heart might be in the right place, but that gulf between pain and understanding has never been clearer, and might now be even wider than it was before.

Insufferably boring, culturally hegemonic, and profoundly ugly.

Exists isn’t a found-footage horror movie about Bigfoot experts; it’s one about a group of stranded cinematographers. Just kidding, it’s obviously about a group of stupid young people who couldn’t shoot a competent Vine, let alone a visually coherent feature.

This is truly a depressing experience. It’s rare to feel such pity for a major studio movie, but watching Warcraft bend over backwards to set up a sequel is like watching a desperate paramedic apply CPR to someone who’s clearly been dead for hours.

From the director of “Suicide Squad” and the writer of “Victor Frankenstein” comes a fresh slice of hell that somehow represents new lows for them both — a dull and painfully derivative ordeal that that often feels like it was made just to put those earlier misfires into perspective.

As a documentary determined to damn the Democratic Party, “Hillary’s America” is a profound failure of unprecedented proportions, an embarrassment for Republicans, Americans and pretty much the rest of humankind. As a parody of right-wing conspiracy theorists, this knotted spiderweb of ideological garbage is practically “Citizen Kane.”

So profoundly bad that it represents the worst of two entirely different mediums, Ratchet & Clank doesn't blur the line between movies and videogames so much as it flushes them both in a toilet and forces us to watch as they swirl together down the drain.

The meandering and insufferable Death of a Nation is little more than a greatest-hits collection of its creator’s favorite neocon conspiracy theories, which frame the Democratic Party for the fascistic tendencies embodied by Donald Trump.

Run Hide Fight is a glib, artless, and reprehensibly stupid thriller that doesn’t even have enough on its mind to be provocative. It’s a movie made by someone who’s seen too many movies, and now made at least one too many as well.

Graced with a hilariously definitive title, America is astonishingly facile, a film comprised entirely of straw man arguments.

The Moment is a stilted, asinine Hitchcockian exercise that ultimately serves as little more—and often considerably less—than a needless reminder of how difficult it is to execute this kind of material.