Geoff Berkshire

Matt Smith (sporting a jarring Midwest American accent) and Natalie Dormer (sounding like she stepped directly off the set of “Game of Thrones”) inject what little life there is in Patient Zero, a post-apocalyptic pandemic movie that's more grade-Z than “World War Z.”

By the time the film reaches a third act low on logic and heavy on exploding heads, it's clear that "Hover" never had the right parts to take flight.

Sidney Hall strings its audience along on a tedious journey that runs out of steam long before reaching an embarrassingly overwrought finale.

Even a prickly pro like Sutherland can’t do anything to elevate a hokey self-help lecture disguised as family entertainment.

Visual spectacle still takes precedence over coherent plotting, and the human characters retain all the gravitas of generic placeholders who accidentally made it into the shooting script.

So good at making the most outlandish elements of his first two films seem completely credible, Jones can’t find a way to get this cartoony spectacle to soar. His heartfelt approach to the material only underlines the silliness.

Lack of originality feels like a fairly meaningless complaint when Roth’s film was derivative enough to begin with.

The type of sporadically silly and patently predictable horror pic that would look like filler on Syfy’s weekend lineup, The Other Side of the Door brings virtually nothing new to the supernatural genre.

With plot elements cobbled together from recent animated hits, the blandly executed pic might as well be titled “Happy Minions of Madagascar’s Ice Age.”

Daddy’s Home isn’t so much a lump of coal as an empty box.

Writer-director Eli Morgan Gesner (a clothing designer and skateboarder who previously helmed the skateboarding and hip-hop doc “Concrete Jungle”) could have milked the premise for gleeful counterculture exploitation (like a 21st-century “Basket Case”) or campy John Waters-style gross-out comedy, but settles for mean-spirited banality.

Empty cynicism isn’t a substitute for well-reasoned critique, and Roth winds up looking more clueless than the so-called “social justice warriors” he’s trying to satirize.

The Gallows isn’t without a certain amount of atmosphere, it simply feels borrowed wholesale. That would matter less with a better script, but the four main characters are paper-thin even by genre norms.

“Lazarus” shamelessly steals from superior genre efforts and lacks any distinguishing traits beyond a wildly overqualified cast.

Even a brisk running time, barely topping 80 minutes, is too long to ask audiences to stay in the company of these characters and their terrible self-inflicted predicaments.

The film’s haphazard structure and freewheeling arguments only serve to reinforce tired pothead cliches — it’s paranoid, prone to starry-eyed dorm-room philosophizing, and it doesn’t know when to quit.

Neither warm and fuzzy in the best holiday movie traditions, nor edgy and irreverent a la “Bad Santa” (coincidentally also co-starring Graham, to better effect), it’s something of a mystery what audience A Merry Friggin’ Christmas intends to serve.

Sanchez’s thoroughly conventional approach here does little to elevate a dismally generic script from frequent collaborator Jamie Nash.

Cheerfully exhorting imagination, creativity and bravery in children while demonstrating none of those virtues itself, The Hero of Color City proves to be a dispiritingly colorless feature-length babysitter.

Jack’s predicament is both revolting and claustrophobic, but he never emerges as any kind of hero or villain, just a passive victim, which makes the pic’s most off-putting quality its endless tedium.

The second feature from writer-director Tenney Fairchild (“The Good Humor Man”) actually attempts to be an emotionally resonant relationship tale, but lives down to its title by delivering nothing but inane comedy and insufferable drama.

There isn’t a pharmaceutical cocktail powerful enough to improve the dreadful comedy of Better Living Through Chemistry.

The lukewarm family dynamics sit awkwardly alongside equally underwhelming action sequences.

An utterly unevolved romantic comedy, “Cavemen” tries to split the difference between raunchy and sweet and fails miserably on all counts.

Eric Chaney’s debut feature, Indigo Children, doesn’t so much copy Terrence Malick as swallow the filmmaker’s stylistic tics whole and vomit them out onscreen in an ungainly if mercifully brief mess.

The timidly plotted proceedings never veer from romantic-comedy formula. There’s a whole lot of talk and very little action here, and not just because the squeaky-clean pic wears its PG rating like a badge of honor.

While every moment is captured with the reverence of a fawning fan, Holwerda’s star-struck approach neglects to shed new light on his subjects or even showcase their greatest hits.

Overlong film quickly becomes tedious whenever the camera strays from the lions, who don’t have much personality but prove more compelling than the humans.