David Fear

You can’t say it’s unambitious, any more than you could call it coherent, and the result is less Dances With Wolves Redux and more Palms on Faces.

This is a movie too enamored of its own tawdriness, turning every violent act and violation into gratuitously salacious grindhouse set pieces.

Yes, you would watch these two in virtually anything. You just wish it wasn’t this. They deserve something sturdier and far less head-slappingly preposterous, and that’s the truth.

Even with Gallic neomusical royalty like Catherine Deneuve joining in the fray, the whole endeavor reeks of the filmmaker throwing everything against the wall yet barely making anything stick.

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.

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.

There’s a sense of sniggering that lurks behind all of the provocation, which thankfully never crosses the line into full 4chan territory. But the fact that so much hinges on the poking of a wound doesn’t automatically make it audacious in a way that’s taboo-breaking. It’s the sort of too-edgy-for-the-mainstream movie that’s not nearly as edgy as it thinks it is.

The best thing you can say about Escape Room is that for most of it, you’re not desperately searching for the exit sign.

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

A former stand-up comic, Miller lends a sense of puckish mischief to his tenderhearted, troubled Cupid, yet everything else about this drama - even the cultural and spirit-of-'68 historical touches - feels like Nesher is simply mashing several stock elements together and gracelessly parading them around.

Huppert fans have long been tolerant of her hit-and-miss filmography, and while her double act with the rubber-faced Poelvoorde provides a few well-played scenes-two words: horsey rides-it's not enough to liven up a trite story of loosening up.

The pity is that the people in People Like Us ultimately don't feel any more dimensional than the archetypes dutifully dotting his lowest-denominator multiplex fodder. He's just picked a different set of clichés to ransack.

It’s not a bad film, just a generically bland one.

Mea Maxima Culpa only gets messier the more it tries to iris out to a larger indictment. The central tragedy ends up diluted to a fault.

Though the director includes a few brief humdingers — a fight that involves a Rube Goldberg–ish tangle of wires; some munitions-fueled mayhem in a farmhouse — it’s not enough to keep viewers from wishing they were thumbing through a John le Carré novel instead.

This sequel tries to expand into tonier genre horizons and gin up a sort of Den-iverse mythology, yet simply ends up playing tourist in smaller, more previously colonized territory.

This isn't a film, it's a recording of canned ham-tasty, certainly, but creaky nonetheless.

The only time sparks fly are when that restorative tanning bed crackles and sputters.

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.

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.

While the filmmaker may favor a classic Amerindie art-house style - shaky cameras, peekaboo framing, fill-in-the-gaps storytelling - he doesn't offer much in the way of corresponding insight regarding this social-issue case study, preferring to just construct a bare-bones stage on which his gifted performers can rage.

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

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.

At the very least, this mush pot reminds us that countries other than ours also produce melodramatic mediocrities.

This Age-of-Aquarius relic's dedication to utopian ideals is great; this superficial portrait, however, is merely grating.

You’re left enduring a bumpy ride on a road to nowhere, in other words, and neither the film’s wane familiarity nor its welcome, pro-smut good intentions can make the journey worthwhile.

You applaud Seyfried for doing so much of the heavy lifting, and for once again proving that a close-up of someone looking unnerved is worth a thousand wonky exchanges. Still, not even she can keep the wheels from falling off when the second half tries to trade in gaslighting for ghosts and never finds the tone it needs to make the transition.

Awkward banter, a lack of narrative thrust and concentrated character deep-digging, and a performance by Sally Hawkins as a Russian maid that seems beamed in from another movie all contribute to the cinematic equivalent of a half-baked fruitcake.

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.

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.

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.

It may be petty to dismiss such a rags-to-much-better-rags story, but given how manipulatively constructed this music doc is, even in its rawest moments, you still leave feeling like you've been played.

This full-clip misfire reminds us of a valuable lesson: Not even talent, tastefully dressed tough guys and a metropolitan backdrop dripping with after-hours menace can compensate for a complete lack of momentum or drama.

Other than an impromptu spectacle in a downtown record store, little of the chops and charisma Buckley fils had in spades is channeled; this is still the usual Let Us Now Praise Famous Men karaoke session, wrapped up in some extra-discordantly warbled notes.

Should you care to dig into a contemporary interpretation of a centuries-old canon work, you can skip this Carmen. If you feel the need to watch a sweaty sex symbol pound a punching bag while shirtless, we have a movie just for you.

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

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.

Whistle-blowing works best without gratuitous pop-doc debris, but there are only so many dry, fact-heavy testimonies from engineers you can take before a certain dullness uneasily settles in.

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

A huge hit in its native country, Hun Jang's epic doesn't lack for spectacle or incident: In addition to its war-what-is-it-good-for? moralizing, it also piles on bloody battle scenes, subplots involving a sniper and a supply chest, and a nihilistic last-minute twist. What you don't get is the sense that this pumped-up combat-fatigue chronicle is pandering-or, for that matter, particularly original.

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.

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

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.

Subversive elements or not, this is essentially little more than a TV soap opera spiced with hot-button topics (gender issues, clandestine gay trysts), and the combo of TV melodramatics and mumblecore-ish aesthetics eventually wears out its welcome.

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.

Say what you will about this collection of less-than-feature-length films: There’s truth in its advertising. The sketchlike movies here are indeed shorts, and stars do lend their presence.

But at its best, Shock and Awe still feels like it strains to be Spotlight-lite and comes up lacking. The title feels like a misnomer.

A business-as-usual slog.

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

Barkin may be the equal of Gena Rowlands or Liv Ullmann. Her director's clumsiness, however, suggests he isn't fit to hold Cassavetes's or Bergman's old camera cases.

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.

That’s the Lee you get in this near-hagiography: a peek at the man, a whole lotta the myth, and almost none of the messiness. Definitive isn’t the goal here, clearly. Printing the legend on a splash page is. It’s less a doc than a Stan Lee infomercial.

A favorite at this year's SXSW, Kyle Smith's real-time look at curdled relationships is a modest take on indie psychodramatics - and little else.

They quickly smother whatever greatness was inherent in the material. Faulkner’s vivid, tragic and tender world is nowhere to be found here, and it's a deal breaker by any other name.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

For a movie that continually asks its main character to recognize where dreams end and delusions begin, you wish it knew when to heed its own lessons.

It’s a waste, for sure — of talent and your time.

In all aspects, The Girl can’t help it — this is headline-torn cinema du tearjerking at its most generic.

The fact that director Darragh Byrne has laden things with a Celtic Whimsy 101 score and a sketched outline of a script makes it even tougher for Meaney to lift this film out of its social-drama rut.

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

They're not doing themselves any favors by letting this oldie out of the vault.

This could have been a true urban mosaic. Instead, we simply get a vision of Paris as the city of lite.

Vallée and his lead get high marks for kittenish revisionism. In all other respects, however, this movie is indistinguishable from every other throne-and-scepter biopic to hit the screen.

What this feels like is a second-generation copy of a copy, and one that suffers from the typical franchise law of diminishing returns. No one expects the reinvention of the MonsterVerse wheel, but it’d be nice to have something that isn’t more of the same and less than the sum of its I.P. parts.

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.

There are tiny glimpses of someone who has genuine chops behind the camera, almost but not quite enough to make you think that, given more time and focus, he could have made something out of these spare parts. Or maybe, just maybe, this whole botched Operation is designed to make his older, possibly lesser work look better.

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.

We sing O’Connell’s praises so loudly because he’s really the only reason to check out Max Winkler’s tale of blood bonds, brotherly love and bloody bareknuckle bouts, and to remind you that sometimes, even the best and brightest can’t save something so banal and by-the-book.

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

As it is, this attempt at an Altmanesque ensemble piece feels a little dramatically flat even as it's dazzling your retinas.

Once this cultural exploration devolves into just a forum for grating geek griping and Jar-Jar Binks hatred, however, you'll wish you could escape to a galaxy far, far away.

After the novelty of these backgrounds and comin'-at-ya bits wears off, Mars Needs Moms has to rely on Fogler's obnoxious Jack Black Jr. shtick, a weak subplot involving a '60s-obsessed Martian graffiti artist (Harnois) and rote video-game-y action sequences to carry it along-and that simply won't cut it.

Despite toggling among the three characters' story lines, the film is barely concerned with the who, what or where of the incidents, much less a deeper why. It simply wants to milk this real-life example of courage (and chaos) under fire for multiplex thrills, reducing everything to a cheap adrenaline rush set to a pulsing soundtrack.

Just because you tart up a typical romantic comedy with trash talk doesn't make it edgy or real.

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.

Filmmaker Gérald Hustache-Mathieu has fun recasting Monroevian moments and setting up parallels between the fromage-hawking hottie and the late silver-screen sex symbol - bring on the Miller, DiMaggio and JFK avatars.

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.

Parthenope wants to be a feminine epic. It’s really just an update of those Bardot arthouse skin flicks, Italian style. But it can take solace in easily being an early contender for the horniest movie of the year.

Given the talent involved, Fly Me to the Moon should be the stratospheric answer to our summer-movie prayers. Instead, it can barely get off the ground.

Thor accomplishes its essential goal and little else, which is to introduce the mighty warrior to the Marvel screen universe.

As you try to piece the various bits of information together, the whole thing starts to seem less like a movie and more like an exercise — a one-shot wonder doubling as a one-note narrative. There’s lots of hair there in Hardiman’s debut, but no there there. You leave feeling more teased than the models’ wigs.

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.

Only Leo, always a dependable supporting actor, turns her character into something resembling a three-dimensional person. Watching her tentatively reconnect with her maternal instincts is a welcome surprise. Everything else here just feels like another descent into mediocre Amerindie miserablism.

So it's the story of a down-and-out bigwig vindicating himself by revising his crowning cultural moment. Feel free to draw your own conclusions.

Only jackanapes and jackasses would deny that the experience of war can cause psychic damage, but does that mean we have to sit through such a schematic, dogmatic melodrama about the subject?

Porterfield has proved he can do grit and atmosphere. Should the young director ever decide to channel this talent into storytelling with purpose and a point, he might be someone to watch out for.

Given how prominent the postcard sultriness of her backdrop is compared with the story's emotional ping-pong, all she ends up with is a kinder, chicer Adrian Lyne movie.

It may hint that the bad guy at the center of if all wasn’t the primary villain. But the movie does prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it is its own worst enemy.

The Deadpool movies were once a much-needed counterpoint to all those dead-serious MCU sagas. They still act like the foul-mouthed class clown in the back row, but now it’s just more white noise dressed in red, yellow and black.

Strange Powers works best when inadvertently capturing the toll of living in the shadow of a genius. When it comes to examining the genius himself, it's woefully out of tune.

A corporate I.P. Easter-egg hunt posing as a movie, this horror-comedy raids the House of Mouse’s resident spoooooky ride’s signature bits while nudging your ribs as aggressively as (in)humanly possible. Even for die-hard Disney fanatics, it’s still about as fun as waiting endlessly in line for something permanently closed for repairs.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

It’s a disaster movie in more ways than one. Should you indeed look up, you may be surprised to find one A-list bomb of a movie, all inchoate rage and flailing limbs, falling right on top of you.

While we do not condone the excessive consumption of alcohol, or sneaking spirits and other such beverages into a theater, or any display of public intoxication, we also do not think you should endure Ambulance while being sober.

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

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

Thanksgiving is less a movie than a messy attempt to coast off an oldie-but-goodie one-off without adding anything to the party. It can 100 percent go stuff itself.

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.

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?

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

Not even J-Law off the nice-young-lady leash can save something this lazy and desperate to offend, however. The movie simply isn’t on her level. Or really much of any level at all.

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

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.

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

This Snow White may not be the worst live-action adaptation of an animated touchstone, though it’s a strong contender for its blandest. The movie does earn points as a bedtime story, however, because it will definitely put you to sleep.

Even before the murderer is revealed, you’ll recognize the method in which the movie dispatches its victims: They, like us, were probably bored to death.

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.

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

Plane is, in essence, the Frontier Airlines of action films: It’s cut-rate to a fault, makes you endure a lot of unpleasantness on the way to its final destination, and still leaves you with the distinct feeling that you didn’t even get what you paid for.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s just blinkered middle-class pandering at its most shameless.

This tale of self-involved millennials, a mystery machine, and a whole mess of purposefully mistaken identities is the kind of mashup of high-concept horror and ham-fisted satire that mistakes complicated for complex and a pile-up of confusing plot twists for storytelling.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What really hurts is seeing Jamie Travis's name attached; for those of us who love his extraordinary "Patterns" trilogy, watching the talented Toronto filmmaker add his characterically kitschy touch to such a witless, faux-edgy movie can only be described as a Travis-ty.

A completely incoherent mess.

Fixed should have been, by any measure, the fix we needed in terms of balls-out hilarity about neurotic, sex-crazed creatures, or even just a parable from an animation godhead about humans being just as beholden to animal instincts as our four-legged friends. Instead, we get a wildly uneven, totally obvious, and often painfully unfunny 80 minutes.

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.

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

Kari Skogland’s flashy yet dead-on-arrival drama turns Belfast’s backstreet battlefields into music-video backgrounds.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The overbaked, underwhelming, narratively restless movie itself is 0.0 percent watchable.

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.

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).

Such manic fumblings and desperate crassness might be more forgivable were any of it actually, y’know, funny, but other than Olivia Colman’s occasional cameos as a raging therapist, the laughs have been granted a leave of absence.

The movie adaptation's version of religion may be more nuanced than the usual Left Behind fire-and-brimstone sermonizing you find in much contemporary pro-Christian cinema, but it still leaves behind a sulfuric stink.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The "bumpkins are people too" message will certainly please the Appalachian Anti-Defamation League; midnight-movie fans, however, will recognize that this mess misses the mark by a country mile.

We've come to expect diminishing returns from the once-promising Mexican director who then gave the world "Babel," but the combination of wallowing humanistic-cinema overkill and outright ridiculousness he lays out here represents a new low. Biutiful is not a tragedy. It's a straight-up travesty.

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

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.

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.

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

It makes sense that Last Christmas isn’t coming out at the end of December but right on the cusp of Thanksgiving. It’s a bona fide holiday-movie turkey.

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.

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 is the sort of lazy, slapdash, self-impressed excuse for “edgy” entertainment that makes you enraged. It’s not even so-bad-it’s-good; this is so bad you’re tempted to kick those responsible for it right in the jingle bells.

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

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.

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.

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.

It takes a lot of hard work and the perfect alignment of movie stars to make something this god-awful.