David Fear

All that's left is to enjoy the ravishing visuals, which range from gorgeously dusky scenes of semidarkness to the sort of smeary neon palettes that Wong Kar-wai has virtually patented.

So why does this animated kids' film fail to come together? Bursts of manic pacing steamroll over most of the wit, a little of Sandler's thick-accent shtick goes a looong way, and by the time the requisite life lessons about letting your offspring leave the nest get rolled out, the undead-on-arrival jokes are outnumbered by anemic sitcom gags.

Such passé testosterone worship might have been passable if the filmmaking weren’t so amateurish--every emotional exchange is accompanied by insipid, high-volume pop songs--and the film’s self-satisfied chest-thumping didn’t extend to its creator as well.

It takes more than a few good actors playing bad apples to sustain such familiar romps through regurgitated material. There’s no bounty to be plucked from Perrier’s Bounty. The treasure chest has long since been emptied.

It can't decide whether it wants to be magnificently toxic or merely mediocre. Mileage may vary on where the movie eventually lands, but either way, this is a "romp" that's keen on going nowhere ... and sloooowly.

Caan can’t seem to play up his strengths. He’s a raw talent who needs an editor for his scripts and a strong hand behind the camera guiding him. Mercy gives our guy neither.

Zhang's mixture of unsparing violence, mawkish sentimentality and garish flourishes creates one uncomfortable aesthetic.

Ballad of a Small Player truly puts all of it chips on its lead, and while that faith doesn’t make up for a lot of the ridiculous twists and overplayed hands leading up to a climactic streak, it’s still a smart bet.

Other than the Pottersploitation and presence of current It nerd Baruchel, this fantasy-action-comedy might have been spat out into multiplexes any summer over the previous two decades, yet it would seem like forgettable abracadabra filler regardless of the date.

Enter at your peril…of major eyeroll strain.

The way that Qualley brings her star presence and her chops to Honey O’Donoghue, however, feels unique. You’re used to seeing people in neo-noirs do their variations on Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall’s line readings; no one has managed to fuse those icons’ respective personae into one role and make it feel completely their own. It’s truly a great sync-up of performer and part.

When continuity and plot logic are AWOL in your movie, who ya gonna call? Not these folks.

Although Reminiscence doesn’t try to hide any inherent metaphors — what are most movies these days, really, but nostalgia machines, designed for those stuck in the past? — it doesn’t do much with the material besides fashion something like a dull-edged Blade Runner.

It’s a movie that works a lot better when it sticks to its star running, jumping, dodging, ducking and, eventually, fighting back. That’s more of a comfort zone for Spanish filmmaker Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, who specializes in horror films that involve pursuit and tight spots (28 Weeks Later, Intruders).

It’s too chintzy to be a proper high-octane action flick and not nearly over-the-top campy enough to be the conduit for a great B-movie endorphin rush.

What do you get when you cross a discordant riff on a fan favorite with a failed prestige project? Twice as much deux-deux.

You could get whiplash watching this bipolar drama jerk between extremes: For every extraordinary scene - such as an authentically awkward exchange between Bosworth and estranged dad Thomas Haden Church - there's a sequence or three that might be extended collegiate acting exercises.

It’s a mediocrity no matter when you release it.

Unlike his previous action films and pulpy crime flicks, there’s neither enough grade-A live-wire dynamism nor giddy, guilty-pleasure cheesiness (seriously, have you seen Non-Stop?!) to make this movie actually move. It’s a safecracker-versus-corrupt-feds thriller that’s just north of somnambulistic.

If you know the book, you know the answers regarding the who, what, where and why behind its secrets. If not, know that all will be revealed and, past an investment in Fanning’s character (and an admiration for how she does more with less in terms of a low-key acting style within high-voltage scenes), little will hold your interest.

Though Reeder's attempts to unnerve sometimes veer close to enfant terrible posturing, The Oregonian knows how to work its unpleasantness to primo psychotronic effect.

There’s a true-crime aura that hangs over every scene like a shroud — an unshakable sense that you’re not watching a Western so much as a ghost story.

Part intellectual-property barrel-scraping, part pumped-up star vehicle and part fumbling bid for Sony to cross media-revenue streams, Uncharted isn’t the worst attempt to bring a beloved video game to the screen — just the latest bit of evidence that these things are really a zero-sum game.

Only the mighty Fonda cuts through the claptrap; the rest is just a long, predictable trip.

Given that Sarandon played this same role so sublimely before in "Moonlight Mile," her devolution into theatrical rending of garments and gnashing of teeth is particularly disappointing, but no one--not Brosnan’s shell-shocked–by-numbers patriarch nor Mulligan’s wide-eyed waif--comes out of this steroidal pity party unscathed.

Regardless of whether you’ve ever played Minecraft or not, you’ll recognize the kind of endless ribbing, nudging, winking knowingness on display here; this is steeped in the self-aware absurdism of, say, those Old Spice commercials that aim to confuse and confound in the name of moving products off store shelves. A Minecraft Movie is essentially a 101-minute version of that.

All you’re left with is Wilson’s exquisitely left-of-center take on the master of friendly trees, which keeps creeping toward the sublime before Paint knocks it back into the middle of an undefined road.

You can look past it muting the spiky chemistry of Rudd and Coon, who deserve more scenes and their own rom-com together, or the way the narrative’s father issues feel so incredibly forced, or how so many of the sequences appear to simply be killing time until the final act. What’s less forgivable is the way that it gets so caught up in the mythology of its hollow nostalgia that is misses why the original meant so much to so many of us way back when.

So much of The Mother feels like a movie star doing an imitation of what they think a tough, serious, jaded hero is like rather than actually playing one. Lopez is an actor with a particularly deep set of skills. You wish she’d brought some more of her expressive ones to this revenge flick.

Feste's ode to showbiz clichés is closer to contemporary Nashville pop: twangy enough to qualify as Southern-fried, but too slick and disposable to be truly deep.

While it never hits the gritty heights of you-are-there junky journalism à la Larry Clark's "Tulsa," you still feel as if you've personally toured the abyss.

No matter; this aggressively humorless farce would play like a dead rabbit pulled out of a hat, regardless of the casting choices.

The question is, could someone turn these full-frontal-dudity snapshots into a satisfying, cohesive movie? Answer: no, but not for lack of trying.

This is Transformers-level inanity. This is a blow to your head from a mallet. It will not make you feel like a 10-year-old, but it will make you feel 10 years older than when you first entered the theater. It is certainly not personal in any way, shape or form, just strictly chilly, corporate to a fault and somehow both chintzy and wildly overblown.

The movie itself ends up just hustling a stock redemption story window-dressed with issues as opposed to exploring them.

Even the show's disciples may feel like they've been cheated.

Foe knows the tale it wants to tell. But because of the often mannered, occasionally stagy way that it ends up telling it, this is a movie that has a tendency to be its own worst enemy

Watching [Hanks] in this career footnote now is a little like seeing an unformed lump of sculptor’s clay and knowing that there’s a famous statue just a few well-placed moves away.

No one’s denying that American Samoa’s brief moment of victory — it didn’t make it to Cup playoffs, yet it’s never been in last place again — is a major coup. So why does this feel like such a lost opportunity for all involved?

This is a pulpy B movie that is dying to be a prestige project, and there’s a big part of you that wishes everyone had just leaned into the teensploitation aspects more.

As a distraction, it’s inoffensive. But you can tell it wants to be the juggernaut on wheels, the unstoppable giant mowing down or devouring everything in its path. It’s really the smaller thing trying desperately to outrun oblivion. It’s all scraps and nothing but.

Bibliophiles, librarians and graduate students may swoon at the sight of the author's signature grotesquerie.

There’s something admirable about the anything-goes energy that Van Peebles brings to this tall tale, but the amateurishness and Video Toaster–era technical tricks start to grate after a bit. It’s a funky, free-form fairy tale, but one that only a mutha could truly love.

The rest of us will just be left to puzzle over Aniston’s exhibitionism obsession and pray that Sudeikis’s smirking-douche leading-man shtick won’t constitute his entire post-SNL career.

It’s a new chapter in a saga, yet like its characters who’ve been practicing the art of war since Sun Tzu coined the term, the sequel somehow feels ancient and a little creaky.

The film thankfully doesn’t offer some pop-psychology Rosebud to explain Jobs’s drive or near-sociopathic perfectionism, yet we walk away knowing nothing about what made this revolutionary tick.

A sense of the man himself seems absent in Fábio Barreto's portrait, however, and other than a rally scene with prescient Occupy Wall Street overtones, you're mostly left with facts, dates and iconic poses.

A few awesome firefights does not an action film make, and even De Niro's Ronin-esque interlude can't shake the feeling that the thrill, like the '80s, is gone.

Director Reinaldo Marcus Green (King Richard) does his duty by delivering eureka moments, a few greatest-hits sequences, some personal drama. The result is a perfectly functional look at a legend, one that will definitely make you want to put Exodus back into heavy playlist rotation. It’s still not enough.

There’s a need for redemption here, to be certain, and it has nothing to do with the narrative.

Even if Women in Trouble didn’t keep bringing to mind a superior artist, the film would still be badly written (DOA tangents about cunnilingus and kink don’t make dialogue edgy, only vulgar), not to mention unevenly paced and an embarrassment to all involved.

while director Olivia Newman (First Match) and screenwriter Lucy Alibar (Beasts of the Southern Wild) retain the book’s breathless, beach-read momentum — sudden violence! love triangles! plot surprises! incredibly photorealistic sketches of shells! — there doesn’t seem to be much of a spark in the engine powering these narrative turns. Can a movie be both hyperventilating and lackluster at the same time?

There are many reasons that 1999 is considered a banner year for American cinema. This attempt to revisit the type of fanciful, footloose and fancy-twee storytelling that helped characterize that cultural moment is a big swing, and an even bigger miss.

Childers's varied, charitable life story warrants a movie, but whether that means it's okay to simply mash up sappy Christian piety and action-movie chaos is highly debatable.

Retribution is not the worst of his thrillers/action movies — that honor belongs to either last year’s god-awful Blacklight or this freezer-burned turkey — but it does suggest that Neeson may want to consider retiring from the everyman action-hero beat for good. What once felt like a niche being expertly filled now resembles a formula beaten into submission, like so many nameless thugs threatening the safety of a tough guy’s offspring.

The movie may be so scared of being an Auto-Tuned biopic that it settles for simply being out of tune altogether.

Not even the presence of Money Heist‘s Úrsula Corberó as a slinky villain known as the Baroness could stave off a sense of disappointment.

What you won’t be bowled over by, however, is the storytelling, which makes Missing Link the weakest link in Laika’s chain of movies to date.

Glass is not the flaming flop some folks have already suggested it is, nor is it the movie you want in terms of tying ambitious, highfalutin notions together about how we process our pulp mythos.

It's one thing to call a film about homophobia and human rights Any Day Now; it's another to actually have your character sing "I Shall Be Released" in full at the end. The intent is righteous. The dramatic overkill is deadly.

The original cartoon’s credit sequence, redone with modern computerized shininess, is indeed a gas to witness. The rest is basically corporate synergy, canine shenanigans, and hot air. Zoinks, indeed.

Set mostly in modern-day Shanghai and involving two other girlfriends (also Li and Jun), this parallel plot feels less like an attempt to broaden the book's horizons than to cash in on "Joy's" cross-generational appeal while doubling down on cheap-shot melodrama.

The idea of doing The Right Stuff of food stuff and treating the rise and fall of empires over a breakfast treat as U.S. History 101 is, on paper, a well-balanced meal. Onscreen, it comes off as a lot of half-baked self-satisfaction that leaves you woozy from the sugar crash.

It’s the sensation that you’re watching something that’s sloppy, overthought, undercooked and can’t decide whether it wants to honor the original (it fails), add to both the in-house lore and the longstanding genre tropes of the slasher canon (it does not), or some combo of both (two missed opportunities for the price of one).

It works far better as a partial document of life under lockdown than as a genre mash-up.

This bloody, messy action film devolves into a plain ol' bloody mess.

We get something that’s too long for their usual stoner-digestible absurdism, too unfocused to really take on post-Trumpian political targets, and too insular to translate to folks not already invested in their long, drawn-out in-joke.

Even if you view this as just another superhero movie, it still feels like a litter’s runt. We’d have been fine if this kingdom stayed lost.

Neeson has made better pulpy B movies, and he’ll probably make worse ones than this. The good news is that, like buses, a new film from the star tends to come around every few hours, so you can skip this one without regrets.

Rather than presenting the original Czech version, American distributors have opted to release an English-dubbed edition, headed up by writer, director and actor Vivian Schilling (who voices the kidnapped doll Buttercup) - and the result is a tonal disaster.

It’s as if someone had gently ladled a teaspoon of artificial political-thriller flavor over a substandard Marvel movie, being oh-so-careful as to not upset corporate overlords or the status quo. A better title might have been Captain America: Business as Usual.

What is confusing is why director Catherine Corsini thinks anyone should invest in a po-faced bourgie drama with so little to offer.

Whether anyone over the age of 16 will find the film's proud amateurism and choir-preaching personally enlightening, much less profound, is anyone's guess.

And though Capper captures a few truly intimate moments, like the star humbly participating in a Rasta ritual, the whole thing ends up feeling like a superficial cross between a starstruck version of Vice’s gonzo travelogues and a highly (ahem) stage-managed portrait of an artist in transition.

This slapdash parody will simply inspire shrugs.

Innocence is lost - as well as 90 minutes of your precious, precious time.

Unfortunately, Malkovich thrusting in a metallic space suit may indeed be the sole takeaway of this attempt at a social thriller.

Jones may be a charismatic comedian, but no amount of her skilled mugging, Britpop tunes or help from supporting stars (Brooke Shields, Bill Nighy) can transform this derivative ugly duckling into a comic Anglophile swan.

Jack proves he’s (von Trier) also capable of making a failed act of provocation. The fact that he ends the movie in hell seems superfluous. We’ve already been there for two and a half hours.

The movie misses the Hughes sensitive-raunch sweet spot, though a game supporting cast hits bull's-eyes on lesser targets.

As with so many middle parts of proposed trilogies, Halloween Kills feels designed to get you from Point A to a future Point C. It forgets, however, that a middle chapter still has to work on its own, and that stranding fans, completists, casual moviegoers, etc. in a weak-link entry runs the risk of permanently turning people off of the whole endeavor.

OK, so, listen: There’s really no point describing what happens, or how, or when, or why. This is not a narrative film. This is not “cinema,” or maybe it is, who the f**k knows anymore? This is a Michael Bay movie.

Even "Bwana Devil" showed less crassness in its attempts to wow, however, and the more this cardboard blockbuster piles on the cut-rate F/X, the less anyone - the cast, the filmmaker, you - can muster up the energy to care.

Viewed as a light star vehicle with a lot of VFX — a soft Rock movie — it’s simply ho-hum. The issue is with everything else happening onscreen around him. Even by the DCEU’s dodgy standards, it’s a mess in a cape.

Why does this Last Dance feel so impersonal, so rote, so step-by-step predictable?

Then observe as all but the hard-core Colferphiles slink out embarrassed, feeling as confused and discombobulated as if they too just took an electric bolt to the brain.

Recommending that someone actually subject themselves to Roland Emmerich’s sci-fi neo-disaster flick, however, is a little like shoving three-month old milk under an unsuspecting person’s nose and inquiring, Does this smell ok? You already know the answer; you just need to share the pain.

You go in with high expectations about what this collection of talent can do with this bats**t pulp fiction. You leave feeling like you owe Brian De Palma a thousand apologies.

The problem here isn't excessive pandering; the sheer existence of this second movie is already 100-percent fan service. It's that it doesn't give you much beyond a very subjective view of what these guys find hilarious.

To start as a genre resuscitation and end up as simply generic — that’s a far more fatal ending than any curse befalling the characters onscreen.

This kind of Cold War-a-go-go, deadly-honeypot intrigue is harder to do well than you might think — just ask the folks behind "Red Sparrow." So you appreciate it when someone like Besson can make it move like a pro.

What makes this documentary more than just a feature-length DVD supplement is how these peeks behind the curtain are offset by a connect-the-dots case study of obsession and devotion taken to extremes.

A tonally uneven mishmash of Wes Anderson quirk, John Cassavetes guts-spilling and The Breakfast Club, all of which somehow manages to dampen the talents of its crack ensemble cast.

It’s not schlocky enough to be so-bad-it’s-good and nowhere near good enough to be taken even a tiny bit seriously.

If Gregorini and Von Furstenberg's goal was to construct a cinematic Sunday Styles spread of the plaid-skirt-and-tie crowd, then kudos. As filmmakers, however, these two have some serious growing up of their own to do.

You never doubt the good intentions of Zemeckis and Steve Carell, who plays Hogancamp with genuine grace. Sadly, something essential went missing in the trip from Marwencol to Marwen.

Though there’s no shortage of biographies on the notoriously private writer, no one has had the stones to try making a comprehensive visual documentary on someone as camera-aversive as the Catcher in the Rye author. The effort itself should be applauded.

Once AIDS rears its head, this nostalgic look back goes into melodrama mode - and quickly descends from bad to much, much worse.

Just when you want to outright dismiss it, a pinprick of sound and vision peeks through the straight-to-DVD dross. And just when you start to think someone’s starting to gin up that old black magic, the whole thing simply topples over with a loud thud.

There’s so much wasted potential here, so little sense of how to get across a notion of solidarity in the face of catastrophic danger, and sexism, not in that order.

This is the final game: Do you recommend this to your friends out of brand loyalty, knowing that they’re Saw completists and hey, you endured this, so why shouldn’t they? Or should you take mercy on them and let them know that Spiral should be avoided at all costs, regardless of its slasher-flick pedigree.

If its juxtaposition of bad behavior and dairy products leaves you stone-faced or wearily sighing, you should exit the theater posthaste.

The fact that the film’s title is an Arabic word for “olive,” as in holding out said branch to your foes, gives you a sense of what Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis (Lemon Tree) is going for: a melodrama with a do-we-all-not-bleed? moral.

On the page, the limitations somehow feel groundbreaking and expansive. Onscreen, the film somehow reduces the same notion of one angle/one thousand different moments to little more than a blinkered gimmick.

Bouchareb gives his actors room to roam, but you still get only skin-deep sketches instead of flesh-and-blood women.

There are moments in this borderline incoherent mess of a movie in which fans may be convinced that its sole purpose is to try making the original follow-up, 1977’s legendarily godawful Exorcist II: The Heretic, look positively genius by comparison.

The only thing that remains a mystery is why anyone thinks they can pass off a poorly made, predictable-to-a-fault movie as inspiring entertainment.

You see Evan Hansen, all of his flaws and desires and self-loathing laid bare. And there are enough of these goosebump-inducing, epiphanic moments courtesy of the actor that you see why people might love this film as well as cringe at it. Platt does not ruin the movie. He singlehandedly gives it a voice.

This isn’t really a biopic. This is the Passion of St. Michael, rendered with great fidelity to and emphasis on both Jackson’s undeniable suffering and equally undeniable talent.

Woodshock is both gorgeous and pretentious in equal measures, and it's hard to reconcile the fact that you don't get one without the other – or that, coming in the shadow of another free-form swing for the fences, any rush to ding the movie for being an exercise in style over substance isn't even slightly tinged by gender.

Question: What's the only thing worse than doing an unfaithful film adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel? Answer: Doing a completely faithful one.

That this retelling has no time for the facts, given the book’s dodgy relationship to the truth, isn’t shocking. That it feels this surprisingly fun-free and generic to a fault, frankly, kind of is. Fans deserve better. If any of them want to collectively sue for defamation of character, let me know where to sign.

At one point, a character is forced to stand in front of an automatic football launcher and take a series of pigskins to the cranium, each of which is shot at him with increasing speed. And by the end of this mess, you’re left thinking: I now know exactly how that guy felt.

It can give you something approximating action. What it can’t give you is a watchable action movie. That’s where it truly fails to go the distance.

Was this eventual big-screen take on Shakur going to be an epic look at a complicated legend's life and times – a Gandhi of gangsta rap iconography – or merely a slightly larger Lifetime TV movie filled with hysterics and greatest-hits moments. We now have an answer. It was not the one we wanted.

Chaos Walking doesn’t even get to the level of high camp, where pleasure is found in the sheer badness of it all.

They've taken an intriguing story about female neuroses with gothic overtones and turned it into a graceless, butt-ugly attempt at Twilight-lite.

This is a movie that keeps going out of its way to be any kind of blockbuster except an actual Jurassic World movie.

You never lose the nagging sense that you're simply watching a high-school drama club's production of '40s fatalism chic.

It isn't long, however, before the film's caricatured bad-guy shtick starts to wear gossamer thin, and an overabundance of "clever" twists-no one is [Yawn] who they seem to be! - begins to sap whatever little goodwill has been built up.

The books' ingenious wunderkind is MIA here, replaced instead by a generic eye-rolling, motormouthed preteen bopping around rote set pieces.

Fess up: You want to see Los Angeles get blowed up real good, and it's a measure of this movie's incompetence that it can't even deliver that vicarious thrill properly.

There’s something incredibly deflating about all of this, from the waste of precious screen-talent resources to the sense that you’re watching the last gasp of an age-old formula. It is like staring at a bright, shiny epitaph for two hours.

What, exactly, is the payoff for suffering through such painfully bad filmmaking for 93 minutes? Forget about getting "A Few Good Men"–style military melodramatics; this movie quickly proves that even a few good performances, lines of dialogue or music cues are a pipe dream. Your loyalty will not be rewarded.

No stranger to controversy, Fifth Generation Chinese filmmaker Chen Kaige (Farewell, My Concubine) has always taken his country to task over bureaucratic and social issues; here, the director goes after both old-media exploitation and new-media omnipresence, and the result is less than cutting.

Ugh! For a movie devoted to an alleged geek-rebel underdog, this coming-of-age flick couldn't be more conformist, from its familiar faux quirk to the interchangeable emo-pop songs peppering each sugary montage.

There's a secret weapon embedded within The Watch, however, and his name is Richard Ayoade.

Has neither enough bite nor enough heart to sustain it as a female-revenge-fantasy-cum-romantic-comedy; even its “shocking” switcheroo and faux-edgy moments seem remarkably frivolous and flavorless.

Nothing - script, performances, comedy, drama - works in the slightest. To answer the title: Where do we start?

The film does offer some revealing anecdotes about his infamous Monroe sessions, but mostly, it simply slouches from one sensationalistic, salacious bit to the next, sans any historical context. Worse, filmmaker Shannah Laumeister continually rhapsodizes on-camera about her own “soul mate” relationship with the subject—leaving viewers feeling mad as hell.

There’s a deadening feeling you get watching all of this, as if Argylle’s real revelation is: We’ve cracked the code on how to take a handful of your favorite actors and a surefire ha-ha-bang-bang storyline and leech every single thing out that you usually like about these kinds of things.

How can you recreate the first Ziggy concert in 1972 at Borough Assembly Hall, Aylesbury, and fail to evoke even an ounce of the moment’s dynamism even when you have the moves down? Does Stardust exist solely to make Bohemian Rhapsody seem better by comparison? Why are we still watching this?

Their brotherly bickering may be a useful time killer until the new Arrested Development episodes drop, but it's ultimately foamy filler added to a frustratingly frothy film that says nothing about its subject.

No matter how may times Identity Thief switches tracks, nothing works — it fails as a star vehicle, a recession-era satire, a WTF white-collar-grunt revenge tale, a "Midnight Run"–style buddy flick, a gross-out laughfest and a bathetic tale of broken souls. No amount of stolen guises can fix it.

If it’s not the worst of these films, it’s certainly the most anemic — and even die-hard fans are apt to feel completely drained by all of it.

Something vital definitely seems to have been lost in the translation, however, and what you’re left with is a retelling that feels deader than anything skulking around the shadows.

Director Michael Corrente has delivered decent petty-criminal movies before - see 1994's "Federal Hill" - but every aspect here smacks of faux-street toughness at its worst.

What you’re left with is something that wants the brand-name recognition of being a Spider-Man project by proxy, but also wants to give you an overly violent, extremely gory vigilante movie that, despite featuring Kraven fighting a weak-tea CGI version of another well-known Marvel villain, has nothing to do with those films. Congratulations on failing twice, we guess?

This seventh chapter just seems to be exploiting our affection for the Scream team’s history and thinking die-hards will simply go see anything with the name slapped on it.

This film will make you cry tears. They won’t be happy ones.

Simply casting doubts isn't the same as making a compelling counterargument-or crafting a coherent film.

Turn away from your screens. Go for a walk. Start your own wheat-threshing collective. Anything but suffer through this.

Everything from the script to the film’s score seems stock, and echoes of past victories--Eyre’s dissection of infidelity in "Notes on a Scandal," Neeson and Linney’s chemistry in "Kinsey"--only remind you of what these talents are capable of when the stars actually align.

It’s 94 minutes that you won’t remember seconds after its over. You could always just throw down the white flag before shots are fired and save yourself the trouble.

A completely incoherent mess.

For some reason — maybe it’s because the seminal, ’74 original holds such a special place in so many die-hards’ hearts (this one included), and still feels like such a potent example of channeling primal fear — this latest ransacking of a landmark title feels less like just another killer-versus-final-girl rerun and more like the final straw.

Thanks to his pitch-perfect portrayal of Parks and Recreation's Type A–personality-run-amuck boss, we're willing to forgive Rob Lowe for virtually anything. This pitiful excuse for a political satire, however, seriously tests that theory.

Such pitiable incompetence isn't charming, it's embarrassing - and simply inexcusable.

Love may hurt, sure. But it’s not nearly as painful as being forced to watch a great actor stuck in a bad movie.

This haphazard "exposé" only proves that hackery plus hot air [time] does not equal skillful muckraking.

Those of us who dig the comedian's hyperactive persona may feel that the meter is now officially running on his amiable rocker-doofus act; everyone else will simply marvel that a Christmas season could produce such an unfunny, unentertaining lump of coal.

This tale of a rich brat (Jonet) is a banal, tone-deaf dud.

If this is what passes for contemporary art terrorism, we’ll opt instead for something truly subversive--like genuine art

Given that porn star and academic Lorelei Lee cowrote the script, we can assume that the film's portrayal of the cine-erotica industry is accurate. Which simply means that, while totally botching little things like how people speak, act and live in the real world, the film gets at least one thing right.

As for viewers, well … whoever won in the endless round-robin of interspecies chicanery, we all lost.

There’s an art to making action films, and that artistry is as AWOL here as it is in the first movie.

It’s essentially the Snyder Cut of every science fiction and fantasy touchstone of the past 100 years — a jam-packed, ransacked greatest-hits reel posing as a saga.

The one light at the end of this long, slogged-through tunnel is, surprisingly, Willis.

Hellboy wants to remind you that this Dark Horse Comics brute with a soul still deserves a place in the superhero-movie ecosphere. It ends up simply being a franchise reboot damned to be restaged as its own bloody hell. Some things are better left dead.

The one thing this Corporate Animals has going for it — the reason you may wanna plunk down cash to see it regardless — is Demi Moore.

It doesn’t take long to realize that what was meant to be a franchise-starter is, unlike its hero, permanently DOA.

It’s a bad movie, full stop. Which is a pity, because the pedigree looks great on paper.

Performances barely meet a junior-collegiate theater-troupe level, the narration hits maxi-fromage heights, and just when you think it can't get any more derivative, out comes a glowing suitcase à la "Pulp Fiction." Rock bottom has now been firmly established.

Not one single character strikes you as being anything but a mouthpiece for writer-director Matthew Leutwyler's simplistic views on socio-emotional problems (racial self-hatred! post-rehab guilt!) or an excuse for self-satisfied, back-patting acting exercises. The title is an understatement.

[Viewers] won’t find much here besides Langella’s typically austere performance, some lazy character sketches...and the sensation one gets after having watched paint dry, painfully slowly, on a canvas.

The problem with setting a familiar story in a foreign universe is that you have to establish the parameters of said universe or risk losing your audience. That's world-building 101, folks. Bright does not care about that. Bright's attitude is closer to "fuck you for not somehow keeping up with our cool shit" before doing a lot of push-ups.

It’s unfair to blame Hess solely for condescension comedy’s bad aftertaste--he’s not the only perpetrator--but his particular brand is the most graceless.

A veteran of the Saw franchise, Darren Lynn Bousman trades torture-porn antics for an old-fashioned Euro-horror vibe, complete with old dark houses and creepy maids; he then wastes what little suspense he generates with endless dorm-room philosophical debates about faith versus atheism and religio-conspiracy theories so far-fetched they'd embarrass Dan Brown.

A genuine Chernobyl-level disaster that seems to get exponentially more radioactive as it goes along, this detour to one of the dustier corners of Marvel’s content farm is a dead-end from start to finish.

The taste of toxicity will overwhelm whatever pulpy grindhouse pleasures you might have experienced. A franchise that started off with a sense of betrayal and righteous anti-authoritarian anger ends by parroting authoritarian talking points that betray what this country is about. Let this please be the last of its kind.

Even if you ignore the bad acting, dogmatic dirty-talk dialogue so wooden it'd put a Redwood forest to shame and director Phillippe Diaz's total lack of visual sense, you'd still have to digest a junior-collegiate lecture with less savvy than a horny 14-year-old.

You can only swindle audiences by thinking you simply throw A-list stars in anything and people will still show up, drooling like Pavlov’s pups, for so long before the echo in empty theaters is deafening.

As for parents: Are you cool with feeling like you're having artificial sweetener sandblasted into your eyeballs for 87 minutes?

Well, it's a little confusing. And slightly incoherent in terms of how it lays out the book's narrative about a serial killer who is targeting mothers and whose calling card is a snowman. And sort of not very good overall. It's bad.

Kutcher is surprisingly anticharismatic as a star. A smarmy grin and looking good while shirtless does not equal screen presence, dude.

This London Fields is nothing but fallow ground. Or, to apply the metaphor that Thornton’s scribe gives to Heard’s sexed-up temptress when he first meets her, it’s a black hole — something that sucks talent, taste, light, energy and matter into maw and leaves everything stranded in a void.

The idea of putting these images out there at this very moment, and pimping it out as “entertainment” is, frankly, nauseating. It goes from being a crime against an art form to something a little more toxic. No. Nope. Nuh-uh. Netflix, what the hell were you thinking?

This War of the Worlds isn’t bad or even so-bad-it’s-good. It’s a secret third thing, a hodgepodge of shoddy CGI and dead-eyed reaction shots from Ice Cube that make you feel like you can identify individual brain cells mid-death cycle.

If you can roll with Almereyda’s free-form vibe, you’ll find the docu-essay’s cumulative effect goes a long way toward proving his thesis

Though it’s divided into three chapters--“Voices,” “Recollections” and “Innocence”--the film takes a largely free-form look at a dying community that’s more reminiscent of Frederick Wiseman’s nonfiction case studies than the usual sociopolitical hand-wringing.

An overall lack of drive drops the pacing from languorous to a slow, stalled crawl, but the journey itself isn’t the point here. For once, it’s the destination--forgiveness--that really counts.

But while you can’t fault this labor of love’s conception, you can take issue with its leaden execution.

Focus, instead, on the perks that Nightfall does offer: You still get the criminally underrated Aldo Ray trading hardboiled barbs with Anne Bancroft (“I’m a painter.” “Soup cans or sunsets?”); Brian Keith and Rudy Bond’s giggly good-thug-bad-thug double act; and the joy of watching beefy guys in boxy suits dangle cigarettes off sweaty lips and talk tough.

It’s a trial run that puts many of his peers’ masterpieces to shame.

The film ham-fistedly hammers home its message more than the usual collateral-damage drama.

Suddenly, everything clicks; this snooty art merchant may love the sound of his own voice, but you're reminded how much Rohmer valued the sound of others' voices above all, and why going out on a whimper occasionally works wonders.

Turning the on-location Tokyo streets into the perfect backdrop for a cartoonishly colorful version of hardboiled drama - call it Pulp Art - House of Bamboo keeps its story line about an undercover Army cop (Stack) battling a gangster (Ryan) on the lean and mean side.

Blessed with a weeklong run at the end of Film Forum's bliss-inducing Robert Bresson retrospective, the French filmmaker's 1956 tale of steel bars and iron wills boils a true-story prison break down to its bare necessities.

Only Dissolution's divine climax feels truly poetic. Having the stamina to not break down on the journey to that moment is half the battle.

Ron Honsa's PBS-appropriate doc pays lip service to the utopian space's history, and features (too-)brief snippets of performances and modern-dance legends - Merce Cunningham, Mark Morris, Suzanne Farrell - praising the landmark.

By boiling a dysfunctional couple down to a worst-hits clip reel, the director created one painful autopsy of an affair, the polar opposite of those frolicking montages so prevalent in American rom-coms. (He's also gave his actors a hell of a valentine; neither Yanne nor Jobert has ever been better.)

Thirty-six years later, this Molotov cocktail of fizzy champagne and feminist theory has not lost any of its combustible carbonation.

As a tone poem, Tocha's documentary can be mesmerizing. As a memento mori, It's the Earth feels a little lost in space.

It may be a stretch to call the filmmaker a forgotten genius, but if nothing else, Le Grand Amour makes a case that Étaix was a fertile clown, overdue for a bow in the spotlight.

The result is less an ode to late-'60s California dreamin' than an NYC-hip riff on SoCal somnambulism, one that occasionally Pops with Warhol's mondo minimalism yet never snaps nor crackles. "Lonesome Cowboys" this is not, despite the fact that Surf uses virtually the same cast.

The War Is Never Over is as much about trauma and processing and empowerment — the real kind, not the bumper-sticker-slogan kind — as it about music, or a musician, or a cultural moment. What it leaves out of Lydia’s history is substituted by what it adds to understanding her story.

Even with its simple set-up and at a scant 71 minutes, there’s an entire buffet for thought laid out here. Alexandrowicz may have given us the single best documentary of the year; he has undoubtedly given us one of the most vital.