Gabe Toro

It's the sort of film where music montages are used like wallpaper to take narrative shortcuts and minimize messy conflict.

It's mythmaking for dummies, a Hercules with no poetry, only incompetent brute strength.

You wish Evelyn Purcell's action thriller just had a bit more character, and not a budget-cutting location that looked great in front of a camera.

This one veers further from actual horror into an action picture. “The Purge” tries to unsettle. The Purge: Anarchy wants you to cheer.

It's all fist-pumping anti-thought, consisting of baseless revisionist history and idle contrarianism.

This is a laughably bad movie, but an amazing drinking game waiting to happen.

An end-film tease for a laughably unnecessary part two feels emblematic of the entire film: McKee and Sivertson aren't interested in laying any groundwork regarding cogent themes or diverse characterization, because there are skulls to be split and blood to be drank.

The film’s dismal action staging and over-complex story can’t seem to overcome Mr. Fairbrass’s lo-fi presence.

For being a kids-centric film, the picture is relatively slow and joyless.

Wanting to create a leading character worth rooting for, and experiencing the schadenfreude that comes from her failure, is a complex balancing act, one that Adult World simply cannot pull off.

It's all very cheap, wholly unconvincing, and loaded with dull narration.

The Starving Games is the sixth directorial effort from Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, and they are nothing if not consistent.

Escape Plan deserves some credit for gradually rising from abysmal to almost-mediocre, though it’s needlessly complicated in every step of the way.

It’s an ugly, unpleasant viewing experience, one that sees geek culture as a hateful cesspool of exclusion and juvenility, miserable to experience first-hand.

This is the sort of movie that should be playing in the background on an episode of “Tim And Eric,” and yet instead it’s being released by IFC Films. Bring alcohol.

About Time, inadvertently, reveals itself to be About Men, and how they devise lies in order to create the illusion that all women supposedly want to see.

About an hour in, if you haven’t walked over to the nearest stove and shoved your head inside, the sinking feeling sets in that you’re stuck with this unpleasant asshole.

The film is so po-faced that you wonder what the point of all this is, let alone what we should be hoping is the outcome. Struggling to bring gravity to the proceedings are Wakefield and Hinshaw, who give off the heat of two slabs of baloney slapped together.

The Family is ultimately a headache, nearly two hours of baseball bat beatings and dull witticisms, with zero inventiveness or energy.

As a movie, it’s quite an effects reel: Cockneys Vs. Zombies is a greatest hits package of your least demanding expectations given such a title.

This expensive misfire runs a little less than ninety minutes, which means that there’s likely a 105-110 minute long version that the producers hacked up in order to get the maximum amount of 3D showtimes to not embarrass the studio on opening weekend. Judging by the released product, that version is likely even worse, if such a thing were possible.

Basically, it’s a film made for brainless grunts who like to hang out all day making sub-literate jokes about boobs and gays while watching the game. No wonder the first movie was such a success.

It’s all very first draft, with a layer of supernatural permeating the events that suggests added attempts to connect three wildly disparate storylines.

What’s obnoxious is that it’s never in doubt where Assault On Wall Street is headed, and it seems to believe there’s a certain poetry to taking its time turning Baxford into a non-verbal Travis Bickle.

Oconomowoc seems like a cartoon pilot that IFC doesn’t pick up, only to be turned into a film.

Tedious effort.

It’s as if Weitz knows he’s got a corpse of a film on his hands -- never trust a movie when it feels as though you can see the director clasping the defibrillator.

Up until the very very end (which uncorks a CLASSIC cop cliché that seemed long dead by now), The Sweeney is straight dumb procedural, no chaser.

At its worst, the film is a panoply of ersatz camera placement and terrible scene blocking, actors having no clue how to interact with their surroundings as they rifle through dialogue that stands as a series of historical checkpoints rather than a cohesive story.

It's like stocking a team with proven performers and hoping that everything else will work itself out at the end, including a rickety script, indifferent direction, and a plot that pretends its final act is anything other than a cliché-hugging inevitability.

For those of you who felt "Ides Of March" was entirely too cerebral and challenging, here comes the dunderheaded Knife Fight. A political satire that treads no new ground, this name-heavy comedy wastes an engaging central performance by Rob Lowe.

You wonder if Hollywood is trying to make a point: sex is joyless, and best experienced by recognizable, and recognizably obnoxious people.

Unfortunately, there are few screens small enough to properly convey how inessential another deadpan suburbs satire is in 2012.

It's not a surprise that he most resembles an older Charles Bronson in Taken 2, as both found the enthusiasm to soldier on in the action genre well into their old age. Bronson had a bit more patience with these films: after this, it's doubtful Neeson will.

In other words, here's the same slop you've seen before, only with brand new accents. Also, more pooping.

Comes to you courtesy of WWE Films, though it's a considerable departure from their recent family-friendly approach. But it does make sense that the audience for post-apocalyptic films will start out with the Speak & Spell version of this premise, a knuckle-dragging time waster you could predict with your eyes closed. But hey. It's a movie.