Drew Taylor

At its best, Pacific Rim Uprising is tedious and mildly diverting, but at its worst it feels like an out-and-out betrayal.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 utterly unconvincing and not scary in the slightest.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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