Glenn Kenny

There’s nothing like a good Irish movie with some edge to it. So it’s too bad that “Four Letters of Love” is nothing like a good Irish movie with some edge to it.

Turkiewicz apes Tarantino’s great film by giving chapter titles to its sections and setting multiple scenes in a diner. These sequences don’t resemble “Pulp Fiction” so much as they do television ads for Chili’s — a locale where you’ll have a better time than watching this utterly misbegotten movie.

Topping it all off is a deliberately shaky and agitated shooting and cutting style that heightens nothing. Just watch “The Exorcist” again.

Harris and Murray are such reliably engaging screen presences that they provide a few glimmers of entertainment, provided you’re able to set aside the movie’s practically all-encompassing repulsiveness.

Even at its relatively trim 89-minute runtime, "Armor" feels padded.

In the end, the wafer-thin story amounts to the same nihilistic slop that Phillips served up in the first “Joker,” albeit remixed, genre-wise.

One could argue that Forster and company calibrate their anodyne effects to make a Holocaust narrative that’s palatable for younger viewers. But what mostly resonates is a particularly lachrymose brand of show-business hedging.

A spectacularly inane comedy.

The movie plods around awkwardly, trying to leech whatever charm it can from the remaining elements of the original.

Since Maïwenn created Jeanne for herself, it may seem paradoxical to state that she’s all wrong for it. Nevertheless, her broad performance is a consistently unfortunate case study in “whatever she thinks she’s doing, this isn’t it.”

In the end, even genre fans with relaxed standards might try to similarly rebel against this insipid offering.

Few things in this laboriously quirky picture mesh at all.

The holiday themes feel arbitrary and tacked on; one guesses the script was rescued from Curtis’s bottom drawer and spruced up with some Christmas fairy dust. The story, finally, is only about a man who learns the true meaning of punctuality.

The magic of movies does depend on a certain suspension of disbelief, but “Journey” tests the viewer beyond rational credulity, even as it persists in asserting the reality of its existence.

Over the next 90-plus minutes, the canines drop as many F-bombs as Pacino did in “Scarface.” Then there are the scatological jokes, each one more outlandish than the last, none bearing the slightest tinge of wit or joy.

I’m really not trying to make a cute play on words by calling Sympathy for the Devil godawful.

It’s hard to tell if this movie avoids any conventionally exciting set pieces out of scrupulousness or just lack of inspiration. Oddly, the picture’s muted tone ultimately undercuts its solemn sense of mission.

The Lesson, directed by Alice Troughton from a script by Alex MacKeith, aspires to be high-toned but only gets to the peak of a cliché slag heap.

LaBeouf essays a rather, let’s say, contemporary Pio. And completely sinks the picture.

Even when the relentlessly salty humor gets fully crass (a dog is thrown out a high window), the product is bland.

This version has little quirk and less spark.

While Hedlund’s character eventually melts into the kind of dissolute puddle that Hedlund has made performance meals of before, no real dividends are paid off on the viewer’s investment of time.

The movie can’t help but function as an apologia for the ruling class.

A romantic comedy starring Diane Keaton, Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon and William H. Macy would kill as a Nancy Meyers movie. Unfortunately, the rom-com Maybe I Do was written and directed by the television veteran Michael Jacobs.

This endeavor might have tried the alternative title “Die Hard on a Budget,” except even that would have been hopelessly optimistic.

Overall this remarkably glum, logy, convoluted and unengaging movie has only a vestigial relation to McCay’s work. McCay fans should beware. So should everyone else.

After Hal and Josie’s meet-cute, they see sights blandly, philosophize blandly, blandly tiptoe around the notion of romance, and criticize each other — yes, blandly, but with an occasional touch of “salty” language.

One watches this movie with a persistent “this is just … wrong” feeling. It’s not just the superficial depiction of Louis’s condition, or the facile depiction of racial dynamics, although those factors don’t help. Maybe it’s the pervasive self-seriousness in pursuit of what turns out to be nothing much at all.

The gear-grinding tedium of the movie’s taking-responsibility scenario is occasionally broken up by not-quite-lyrical sequences of Los Angeles sunsets seen from car windows.

This movie brushes aside a lot of things — the most shocking thing about it is how soggily noncommittal it is.

Looking as if it was often shot in complete darkness or something like it, Agent Game is murky nonsense that aspires to get by on what it considers to be a trenchant cynicism about geopolitical chess.

The documentary posits him as a pioneer but struggles to pin down how he was unique.

Feature-length failures as abject as this one are almost frightening, in part because one worries about what kind of a snit the director will be working out if/when he gets a second shot.

Another season, another “Liam Neeson Has Skills” movie.

The movie’s prefab on-screen graphics are just one reason “Worst to First” has such a limp tone overall.

Kirkby does keep up a jaunty pace. But he also seems preoccupied with impressing his inner hipster, as with an attitude toward race that dares you to call it cavalier. And his again edgy music choices.

One thing is certain: for all the strain the movie exerts, it never comes close to touching the hem of the writers it purports to depict. And it leaves the mystical and erotic dimensions of their lives and works far outside of its belabored vision.

The movie’s flabbiness, its unfocused flopping from scene to scene, its disinclination to provide any individual scene with any dimension beyond its immediate impact, practically vitiates the entire theme of Dickie’s ostensible mentorship of Tony Soprano.

The cynical pro forma luridness Yakuza Princess grinds out suggests that sensationalist cinema, or at least its most ostensibly mainstream iteration, is currently depleted of resources.

What ensues when Edward and the town’s reactionaries clash cannot be properly called hilarity, and the end product of this dismal film is mostly befuddlement.

For an ostensible action hero, Henry Golding in the title role does an awful lot of standing around and looking tense. The mayhem is frantic yet forgettable.

What chafes is not so much the vulgarity (although it is as relentless as it is unfunny) but the movie’s intractable infatuation with it.

No equine beasts adorn this queasy comedy. Too bad.

In spite of its tidy running time, Chasing Wonders is diffuse and often limp.

This is a plodding and ultimately infuriatingly noncommittal movie.

What Moby leaves out of his account is as revealing as the tales of homelessness and addiction he puts in.

In Profile, the images mix real documentary footage with fictional social media and news organization posts. And meaning is elemental—a simplistic rush meant to induce viewer panic. While also being incredibly on-the-nose.

It’s not just the title character who fails to thrive. The filmmaking is on occasion, to put it kindly, fractured.

As is customary for many hack films, the writer or producer or whoever it was that nailed down the title Trigger Point for this cinematic bag of pain didn’t/doesn’t care what the phrase actually means, or whether it applies to anything that actually happens in the movie; they just thought it sounded cool.

And while I understand the anger that animates Awbrey’s script, anger doesn’t excuse its overall weak argumentation, not to mention its rampant plot holes.

The film initially pretends to have some sensitivity about mental illness, but blatantly trivializes it and uses it as a crutch upon which to hang the villain’s increasingly maniacal actions.

Food — its preparation, consumption and just what the hell its ingredients are — figures in a minimal plot that the filmmakers inflate in a variety of slick but ultimately unimpressive ways (particularly in the editing).

In many respects, Silk Road is an excellent examination of why you should probably never date, or maybe even socialize with, a libertarian. It comes up short in almost every other way, though.

One may wonder how Tate Taylor, who has overseen high-profile, conventional, ostensibly respectable Hollywood product like “The Girl on the Train” and “The Help,” came to direct this amoral, repellent bag of sick, a movie whose biggest ambition in life is to start a bidding war at a late 1990s Sundance Film Festival and then bomb at the box office. Call it water finding its own level, maybe.

A plot twist saves (that might not be the word for it) Don’t Tell a Soul from being absolutely oppressive, merely by injecting a scintilla of “what happens next” appeal — and letting the always-interesting Wilson stretch a bit.

I like cheap exploitation as much as the next guy, but not when it tries to disguise itself with transparently insincere humanist indie trappings.

The director, Gabriel Range, who wrote the movie with Christopher Bell, opted to press on, even after he was denied permission to use Bowie’s songs. They might not have helped much, however.

It certainly doesn’t help that Tobias and Elin are entirely banal characters with nothing to define them but their loss.

A derivative, irritating thriller.

The sweaty clichés enacted along the way are uniformly tired and ultimately offensive. A love scene near the movie’s finale, Winkler’s vision of sex among the underclass, is a caricature that could comfortably fit in the new “Borat” movie.

This is a whiffed effort at an all too familiar subgenre: the ostensibly dark, searing human drama undercut by the fact that all the humans in it are boorish idiots.

While I rather doubt that co-writer/director Yuval Adler pitched his new picture as “'Death and the Maiden' meets ‘Leave it to Beaver,’” that sure is what he ended up with, conceptually at least.

This biographical documentary of the writer Flannery O’Connor, directed by Mark Bosco and Elizabeth Coffman, is sporadically informative. But it mostly underscores the shortcomings of the varied methods it uses.

The Mexican-born Naranjo, best known for the showy 2011 thriller “Miss Bala,” here depicts the toxic gender relations of young louts — culminating in assault, forced drugging, and general grossness and incoherence — with a stoic grimness that wants to look like resigned wisdom. It’s not.

Irritating film.

This movie aspires to generate the kind of rich-people-you-love-to-hate juice of cable TV series such as “Billions” and “Succession.” Ultimately, Inheritance doesn’t even get to the level of “Dynasty.”

Explicit but in no sense pornographic — it’s rather like antimatter with respect to pornography — Liberté plays an arguably specious moral and intellectual game, poking around the porous areas between squalor and perdition, and ultimately producing a pictorial and aural container of tedium.

While Glanz is the only cast member who gets within swinging distance of charisma, Roberti’s chops as a romantic lead are lacking.

The proceedings, which also include Susan falling hard for a smarmy “Jumpoline” proprietor played by Jim Rash, are professionally executed. Yet the movie’s pace seems glacial. It’s as if the filmmakers tossed a bunch of fish into a barrel and didn’t bother to shoot them.

This is all interesting from a pro-am cinema semiotics perspective, but none of it is in the least bit scary. This, really, is what happens when you take all the wrong lessons out of film school.

A dull-as-dishwater, paint-by-numbers cinematic hiccup with no discernible reason for being.

It’s a challenge to keep action coherent and build suspense in the submerged environment simulated in “Underwater,” but Eubank doesn’t meet it, instead falling back on stale shocks that are not credibly buttressed by swelling bass effects on the soundtrack.

This is another cinematic slab of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Aside from a rock-solid performance by Thomas Jane as the grizzled cop, Crown Vic, which is named after the Ford model car that is the default of the LAPD black-and-white, has very little to offer the discriminating moviegoer.

One could watch Honey Boy musing that it must be nice to have someone finance a movie of your 12-step qualification. That assessment is actually too generous.

All these “what incredible irony!” moments are designed to…well, I’m not quite sure. The movie’s final line, an appropriation of the dying words of a black man killed by police, is an exploitative and cheap reversal that legitimately addresses precisely nothing.

The movie’s finale offers a twist that ostensibly ameliorates the internal-logic complaints. But it most vividly registers as a rancid misogynist cherry atop a sloppy concoction of tired jump scares.

If you’re one of those people who believes the Tarantino of today still needs to “grow up,” this movie will provide an oblique but vivid insight into how much worse things might have been.

If you want to make a movie that argues for stricter gun laws, or more conscientious nationwide mental health care, by all means go ahead. But this kind of morbid, witless scab-picking, capped by an oh-so-ironic choice of closing credits song, is worse than useless.

As nostalgic twaddle goes, “Me and Phil and the New Wave Girl” (I mean Pretenders) initially feels like an innocuous treatment of the joys and sorrows of cinephilia and young love. The sort of thing concocted by men whose collegiate experience taught them little beyond how to turn self-serving reminiscences into middling indie movies. Soon, though, it descends into several discrete modes of misogyny.

The title of this movie proves unusually apt: You will figure out its climactic plot twist within the first 10 minutes.

If what you’re looking for are vulgar cartoons based on facile social stereotypes being awful to each other, Corporate Animals will fill the bill.

Not even a month after the John Travolta travesty “The Fanatic” seemed to have secured the title of Worst Film of 2019, up comes this movie to overtake it. By several lengths.

As it lumbers to its climax, the movie delineates the border that separates the merely stale from the genuinely rancid. For all the heavy lifting The Fanatic does, it winds up on the weaker side of the divide.

The details of the story, as they unfold, do not correspond with any dimension of reality. Character development is nonexistent. The sluggish rhythms, the awkward cuts, the unlovely cinematography cohere into what seems like the enactment of a pointless dream.

I suppose it’s a genuine achievement that a movie packed with as much delightful canine (and agreeable human) talent as this one should be so insufferable.

Every aspect of this computer-animated movie directed by Kelly Asbury seems equally overdetermined and tossed-off, as if it were a caffeinated weekend project for everyone involved.

When the characters are singing, you can’t wait for them to get back to talking. And when they’re talking, you can’t wait for them to get back to singing. After a while, you start wishing you were watching that TV ad with a bunch of people on a bus, singing about how they have a structured settlement but they need cash now.

Unfortunately, it’s a confused and frequently enervating effort.

It took me a while to realize she actually IS Shania Twain, because I initially thought “What does Shania Twain need this kind of low-rent enterprise for?” Maybe she really wanted to meet Travolta.

Out of Blue botches the source material’s story, misses its mordant humor and inverts its despairing core. Much of this is the filmmaker’s prerogative. But “Out of Blue” doesn’t strike out only as an adaptation. What it offers on its own is tepid and predictable.

As revisionist as it might aspire to be, Never Grow Old is rife with clichés, Cusack’s philosophical villain one of the most conspicuous.

Mapplethorpe, directed by Ondi Timoner, is a fictionalized biography of the photographer that is most alive when it’s putting its subject’s pictures on the screen, which it does often. And should have done more, because the movie is otherwise as timid as its subject was bold.

As competently put together as this movie is, it imparted to me no sense of a higher calling, and thus left me unmoved.

The single achievement of I Hate Kids, a new comedy directed by John Asher, is that it is simultaneously tepid and offensive.

Although he’s playing a man of letters, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers swans around the film’s settings with a pout that suggests that he’s waiting for his cue to sing “Please allow me to introduce myself.”

The depictions of degradation and sadism are arguably accurate, yes. But they’re executed in a context that’s almost entirely free of meaningfully specific historical detail, to the extent that one comes to suspect this movie of commodifying human suffering.

As for those special effects, they are vivid, colorful, convincing. They aren’t quite so good that you don’t notice the WWII fantasy scenarios enacted therein are clichéd constructions reenacted in high heels.