Drew Taylor

Overlong and joyless, it’s the cinematic equivalent of a giant, opulent express train trapped in the snow, heaving and off balance. Buy another ticket. Skip this train.

Completely forgettable, Hellions is far less cool, smart, and scary than it thinks it is.

The marketing engine of Minions is undeniably powerful. This is something craftily designed to sell toys and theme park tickets and special cans of Tic-tacs. But it’s not a movie. It’s an eyesore.

Ted 2 gives lip service to civil liberties and spends the rest of the running time picking the easiest joke to tell, again and again and again.

It's ultimately a convoluted, muddy (both literally and figuratively) and overlong bore that takes an intriguing premise and does absolutely nothing with it.

If DreamWorks Animation is hoping to get back on track with this movie, a lavish sci-fi comedy based on a recent children's book, they're pretty much doomed.

A dumb, loud action movie that aspires to forcibly entertain and provoke thought but fails miserably.

It's an absolutely horrible, amateurishly assembled comedy that is more offensive than just about anything we've seen lately, a non-stop parade of racist, homophobic bile that would be bad enough from any comedian, but coming out of Ferrell and Hart has the effect of watching a childhood hero committing some horrible act.

Unfinished Business is the type of movie that is so awful that as it rolls along (its 91-minute runtime feels agonizing) you get more and more restless.

Bringing someone back from the dead is one of the horror genre's oldest and most effective tropes, but with The Lazarus Effect, it just seems tired.

Nothing in Seventh Son is compelling, interesting or noteworthy, though you can feel the strain of the filmmakers attempting to set up a potential franchise.

A limp psychosexual thriller that takes a promisingly trashy conceit... and does absolutely nothing with it, and saddles it with wooden performances, poor staging, and a complete lack of conviction. It reaches a nearly operatic level of ineptitude.

There are so many interesting ideas and concepts that could have been spun from this framework. Instead, it's the work of a bunch of filmmakers who seemingly wanted to offer up a WTF-worthy twist ending and tried to reverse engineer a movie from it.

Night at the Museum was always the best when it was closest to complete anarchy, tapping into the zippy, good-natured malevolence of filmmakers like Joe Dante, but here that energy is gone, replaced by a kind of sleepy noncommittal attitude. The magic has dried up; the museum is closed forever.

It's a found footage movie that feels instantly dated, even with its supposed political undertones. It's creaky, laborious, and not, in the least bit, scary.

The fact that the sequel is a messy, dull, instantly forgettable trifle somehow makes it the perfect follow-up to the original -- it's just as horrible.

The original film was unpredictable and loose and every so often gave up the aura of dangerousness. If anything, the sequel is a tepid, watered down, and at 100-minutes oftentimes boring attempt to recapture the magic but without any of the whimsy.

The story is so poorly-plotted, nonsensical, and misogynist that it's hard to imagine one person liking this material, much less millions of literate book lovers.

It's just a bore, barely registering as a movie (visually, it looks more like an USA cable series), which is a shame, because with the oddball cast and somewhat notable director, it could have been fun and trashy. Instead, it's just forgettable.

If "subtle" horror movies are going to be this devastatingly boring, maybe it's time to bring back the buckets of blood.

Fans of the novel might get some minor thrills from the big screen adaptation, but it's hard to understand what made the material so popular in the first place.

Somehow, No Good Deed finds a way to be exploitative and creepy wherever it can.

Tammy is a boring, unfunny road movie that limps along idly, consisting of a string of nonsensical set pieces and halfhearted stabs at character development that come across as off-putting and odd.

It’s a lifeless, meandering, overlong (116 minutes!) trudge through the oversized ego of its creator, full of wrong-headed humor and inept filmmaking.

A movie that is, in its subtle way, as offensive and mean-spirited as anything Sandler has done, but in a way that is so cuddly, there's the possibility it could, somehow, go unnoticed.

What's interesting about Proxy is that it plays with all of the ephemera associated with pregnancy – the way that a person's psychology can warp around it – but too often gets bogged down in B-movie clichés and an unnecessarily convoluted narrative that strives for profundity but comes across as crass and dull.

While the more down-to-earth Chef does offer some fascinating autobiographical dimensions, the film is also an overlong, unfunny, largely insufferable bore.

The entire movie feels belabored, lumbering from one awful, over-dressed set piece to another. It's wrongheaded, it's horrendous, it's filled with lines of dialogue that are utter howlers, and yet, it's the type of movie that feels so confident that it really is something. It is, in fact, not.

This movie is a corpse in desperate need of reanimation.

A movie so ugly and woeful that you'll wish you had superhuman strength to pluck your own eyeballs out of your head.

The characters are so two-dimensional that a meaningful connection with the material isn't elusive; it's downright impossible.

It's understandable that larger scale movies will want to spawn sequels, but this is about two degrees away from being a movie that premieres on Cinemax on a Friday night, sandwiched between two soft core porn movies with funny titles. Getaway is stuck in neutral. And that's where it'll stay.

No matter how good The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones looks, it's hard to really care about anything that's going on, and not just because we could barely understand it.

It's utterly unconvincing and not scary in the slightest.

The Smurfs 2 doesn't even pretend to be anything more but the most base, sugar-coated family entertainment, the kind of things that parents won't even be able to comprehend, much less enjoy.

One of the more disappointing big studio animated features this year, a movie can't even muster the energy to be visually engaging, let alone give you anything to care about story-wise.

I Give It a Year groans on, with unmemorable scene after unmemorable scene, each one more contingent on coincidence and happenstance than by the actual, gear-filled mechanics of drama or comedy.

It's a comedy so out of touch that jokes disappear before they're even delivered, as if by magic.

For a movie that tries to create and sustain a sensation of wild unpredictability, it's a huge failure. It's not shocking if we've all seen it a thousand times before. With 21 and Over, it's all been there, drank that.

It’s the kind of garbage that does a disservice to the fearless possibilities of the horror genre and its knack for sly social commentary.

Snitch is just a big, dumb, ugly-looking waste of time, one that turns one of cinema's most charismatic heroes into a restless drone. As they say in the joint: snitches get stitches. But Snitch deserves to be put down for good.

With long stretches (we're talking 20-30 minutes) without a single guffaw, Identity Thief is aggressively dull, and will joylessly steal two hours of your life that you will never get back.

This newest film is an undercooked potboiler, one so tastelessly bland and visually indistinguishable that you wonder if anyone associated with the project realized what makes cheapo crime fiction so fun to consume.

Watching Deadfall really is like being trapped in a blizzard – the cinematography is so muddy you can barely make out what's going on on screen (besides the bright splashes of blood) – you're antsy to be anywhere else but where you are.

It's hard to tell who is to blame for the movie's abrasive anonymousness – Curtis or Apted – but it hardly matters. In either directors' hands, Chasing Mavericks would have been a wipe-out. It's totally bogus.

One step worse than most of these video game movies. It feels less like a game and more like what happens when you leave your PlayStation on and it becomes a kind of dim screensaver. If we had a controller in our hand, we would probably throw it at the screen.

Paranormal Activity 4 is listless, dreadful and boring, an almost painfully inert and superficial ghost story that lacks specificity or scares. Time to turn the camera off, guys.

Alex Cross is more boring than your average weeknight procedural, except much longer, dumber and more violent.

We assure you, it's not worth taking a trip to down to the House at the End of the Street. Something horrible might have happened there, but it can't be worse than this movie.

It's a testament to the movie's lack of creativity that Anderson can't even rip off "Aliens" and have it come across as anything less than totally boring.

Whatever Branded is selling, we aren't buying.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and in a few months it will also be paved with unwatched DVD copies of The Tall Man.

A plodding, undercooked, and old-fashioned (not in a good way, either) chiller that will bore you to tears instead of scare you to death.