Glenn Kenny

Relentless, spell-it-all-out dialogue is wedded to a clunky visual approach that’s pretty much the cinema equivalent of a wikiHow entry.

This dopey action thriller harks back to grindhouse pictures of the ’70s and ’80s, although it’s too tasteful, if that’s the word, to consistently exploit the more lurid implications of its sensationalist scenario.

This is one of those movies that never quite sinks to the risible depths you kind of wish it would.

Alas, in less than an hour and a half of running time (the director Laura Terruso does orchestrate the proceedings with a palpable sense of dispatch), the movie demonstrates how quickly “amiable and inconsequential” can shift to “hackneyed and labored.”

These songs have the power to move, inspire, make you dance. For the first time in my experience of Springsteen, they made me want to hide under my seat.

In Zoe, the characters, all in their 30s at least (except for the robots, I know, but bear with me), still believe that 100-percent glitch-free everlasting love is a reasonable life goal. It’s this component, even more than the poorly realized sci-fi trappings, that finally make the movie a little insufferable.

This movie gets better the more it strays from its real-life models and into hazy hallucinatory American weirdness. But the snotty dismissiveness with which it treats country music ultimately overwhelms its intriguing qualities.

As the parents, Mr. Wilson and Ms. Arquette seem just about as tired as the characters they’re playing. As Auralie, Ms. McLean is appealing and fresh-faced and could do well in a better coming-of-age movie in a few years.

Tong is not a stickler for verisimilitude. Hence, this movie’s ridiculous computer generated lions; hence also, its solid-gold sports cars.

The movie makes no attempt to engage any current situation, basking instead in a one-dimensional nostalgia.

The movie will be most profitably consumed by fans — people who believe Hoon earned the tribute. While one does not want to be cruel, one is obliged to be frank.

The movie is pedantic, humorless, dry — all of the things that, as it happens, “The Searchers” is not.

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

Too slack to do much harrowing and falls back on some very raggedy commonplaces at the points when it should be delivering knockout scares.

There's a lot of "stuff" here, and Kelly's biggest problem -- he's got more than a few -- is that he can't tell his good material from his bad.

The plot’s central mystery suffers from “Body Double” syndrome in that the movie has so few characters that the villain’s reveal can only elicit a shrug.

This is a perhaps even more misbegotten remake than the Farrelly Brothers' update of "The Heartbreak Kid."

As conventional and stiff as Max Rose itself is, Lewis’ performance in it is full of virtues: he’s committed, disciplined, and entirely credible.

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.

Strange Magic is essentially a jukebox musical so song-laden as to practically be an operetta, and the songs are so eclectic that they never quite fit into the movie’s flying-insect world, which is divided into dark and light forests.

Aside from race jokes, Ted 2 offers a nearly staggering number of weed jokes, a couple of which are mildly funny, or at least funnier than the rape jokes.

I’m not even going to discuss, in detail at least, the elephant in the ideological room that Passengers inhabits, which is its spectacular sexism.

If you saw the trailer, you got the best the movie has to offer.

For adults -- even adults with fond memories of the TV series -- this is one bizarre mess.

The directorial pyrotechnics keep Solace from “dragging” in a narrative sense; the very real boredom it nonetheless elicits is more existential.

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.

A staggering misfire on two discrete levels. As an adaptation of the 1997 novel by Philip Roth, it is lead-footed and inept. The screenplay, by John Romano, treats the narrative in a way that strongly suggests what I hope was a willful misreading of the book. But even considered entirely separately from its source material, American Pastoral is hopelessly weak.

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.

The reason for all this dull-to-offensive story stuff is, of course, the dancing, which has its moments but overall seems so calculated to impress that it loses all other reason for being.

But it looks great, right? Not really. Directed by Christian Rivers, a longtime art director for Jackson, the overall look asks the question, “are you sick of Steampunk yet,” and for me, yeah.

The movie USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage is not exactly unwatchable, but it’s also completely not worthy of watching.

It’s not involving; it’s not scary; it’s just kind of miserable.

To top off all of the ineffective weirdness, the movie ends on a tone-deaf “got a sequel if you want it” note.

Wan wants to have something both ways, and in the end, he gets almost nothing. As Clint Eastwood said in yet another genre picture: A man’s gotta know his limitations.

Django is for the most part everything Reinhardt’s music was not: listless, glum and meandering.

Victor Frankenstein is, despite bravura performances from committed young leads Daniel Radcliffe and James McAvoy, all kinds of obnoxious and pointless.

Paltrow, whose previous directorial feature was the somewhat more apt 2007 showbiz romcom “The Good Night,” is an attentive student of cinema, as his mini-homages to the likes of Antonioni and Lucas in this story testify. But his story is a veritable nothingburger, here and there recalling notes from the likes of “Giant” and “There Will Be Blood,” but never really connecting on levels emotional or intellectual.

This really is a paint-by-numbers action movie with two good things going for it. Those are brevity — it’s only 93 minutes long — and immediate forgetability.

The all-live action section of this movie is lit and shot almost exactly like an episode of “The Adventures of Pete and Pete.”

The tonal weirdness and the philosophical fallacies and the general level of treacle did not sit very well with me. Then again, I have to admit I’m really more of a cat person.

This is one of those “based on true events” movies that give you the distinct feeling that the true events deserved better.

This ostensibly edgy comedy didn't wring a single laugh out of me until maybe fifteen minutes before the finale.

In a comedic bildungsroman like this one, it’s apt to have doubts about the hero early on, but you’re not supposed to want to throw him out of a high window. I did, and I never quite recovered from that feeling.

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.

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.

The movie goes for grin-and-cringe-inducing, and instead achieves “excruciating.”

The problem is the material itself, with its trite observations and shockingly flat writing.

Once the mercenaries start tooling around wearing actual Ku Klux Klan outfits, the pretenses to allegory have gone out the window. And yes, it is salutary to see guys with pointy hoods getting blown away by righteous African-American avengers. But the cinematic cost of getting there was not, for this viewer, worth it.

Willis really might as well have phoned in his performance. Part of me doesn’t blame him, but another part of me would like him to cut it out.

By the time you’re meant to learn just what the tie is between John and Louis, you’ve stopped caring. But, thanks to the excellent if a little on the obviously-pictorial-side cinematography by Robert Barocci, you’ve seen some lovely vistas on the way to indifference.

Had this been the work of a young novice filmmaker, I would say it showed some promise. But as it happens, Mr. Martin is approaching his mid-fifties. He should look for better writers, to begin with.

This is not a terribly plot-driven movie; indeed, at two hours and twenty minutes it’s rather a ramble.

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.

It’s an unfortunately apt demonstration of what can befall a clever filmmaker who gets too clever.

As a full movie experience this did not drop my jaw in a consistently enjoyable way. And the movie’s Trump joke is pretty ineffectual. Sad!

It’s amazingly relentless in its naked borrowing from other, better horror and sci-fi movies that I was able to keep occupied making a checklist of the movies referenced.

While I might actually go out and buy the soundtrack album, the last thing I’m gonna say about the movie is friends shouldn’t let friends pay money to see We Are Your Friends.

This is part of the movie’s problem. Aside from it being another how-I-made-out-in-an-“exotic”-locale narrative. The film means for us to delight in Jay’s flouting of conventions.

All of the personages in this slight movie are relatively one-note. It’s a shame that actors as searching and scrupulous as Strathairn and Keener are so ill-used.

For the most part, Murphy is pitching somewhere between "American Beauty" and "The Royal Tenenbaums"; indeed, the characters Bening and Gwyneth Paltrow play in Scissors are, in a sense, inversions of their roles in Beauty and Tenenbaums, respectively.

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.

If this mess is what they ended up with after erring with the best intentions, I feel bad for them. If this is actually the end result they were going for, I’d be inclined to use the legal system myself, to file an injunction against them ever getting near a soundstage again.

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.

It’s a lazy, vulgar celebration of White Male American Dumbness—one that only put an African American in the cast to camouflage just how much of a celebration of White Male American Dumbness it is.

A tediously noisesome English-language remake of an Asian horror picture that wasn't any great shakes to begin with.

While "House of Sand and Fog" remained (somewhat precariously) balanced on the knife-edge that can turn tragedy into bathos, this picture doesn't fare nearly as well, and begins weighing down the viewer with its putative significance only minutes after its opening credits.

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.”

Where The Wall excels is in the creation of an extra-untantalizing desert atmosphere. The dust is practically inhalable, the sunlight glaring, and the characters grow ever more sand-gritted with each mishap.

As the movie did its slow fizzle, I couldn’t help but wonder when the #MeToo movement was going to make its way into actual movie content. Because the misogyny inherent in Josie isn’t just objectionable, it’s boring.

Little Accidents is quietly earnest, handsomely produced, and too dramatically inert and dogged by the commonplace to make much of an impact beyond conveying the dreariness (as opposed to the dread) of life in a coal-mining town.

Noisome, fragmented mess of a movie, the fourth film based on Jack Finney's novel "The Body Snatchers" and the worst of them all.

Mechanic: Resurrection suffers from a storyline and script that strains credulity and insults intelligence even by the low bar set by the majority of contemporary action movies.

Lichtenstein's putative switcheroo on the Vagina Dentata trope is to play it as some kind of token of female empowerment, but it's pretty clear that the writer/director didn't think things through on any counts, contenting himself that the putative outrageousness of the concept could see him through.

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

Making good absurdist cinema is a lot tougher than good absurdist cinema makes it look. This movie, a stab at absurdism that results in a swampy wallow in affectation, testifies to this fact with sad eloquence.

To get at the heart of what’s wrong with The Face of an Angel all you need to do is consider the professional stones it takes to adapt the Amanda Knox case into yet another movie about the existential/amorous crises of a white male filmmaker. (And then have the nerve to dedicate the results to the memory of the murder-victim in the real-life case!)

Yes, Burying The Ex, I thought as I watched, I AM on your side conceptually already. Now could you start being genuinely funny? Or scary? Or something?

Turgid even in its brightness, overwritten in a way that does nothing to camoflauge its first-draft quality, jaw-droppingly overacted by all but one of its central cast members; it’s a Woody Allen disaster that elicits both a cocked head and a dropped jaw.

On the plus side, director Ewing displays a better-than-competent command of cinematic space, so some of the suspense beats produced aren’t entirely ineffective. Here’s hoping she develops better taste in scripts.

The movie’s incredibly irritating characters made me remember why I only ever needed to watch “The Blair Witch Project” once, and its hobbling, dopey, drawn-out plotlines and xenophobic thematic threads made me think very, very kind thoughts about Eli Roth’s “Hostel” movies, which at least have ruthless efficiency going for them.

Such a muddle right off the bat.

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.

The movie’s relentless one-note tone makes its final twist, such as it is, entirely predictable and pat.

As a fan of the genre, and someone who genuinely loves such recent horror efforts as "The Descent" and "The Host," I respectfully suggest that the atmosphere for horror movies might be better if moviemakers stopped making ones like this.

Irritating film.

These site-shifting extravaganzas sometimes reach an exhilarating level of near-abstraction. So it's too bad that just about everything surrounding the action scenes of the picture is such unmitigated cr--.

The heretofore nothing-but-delightful Simon Pegg stumbles in the long-anticipated feature film directorial debut of -- ta-da! -- David Schwimmer, who takes the sow's ear of a script given him by Pegg and Michael Ian Black and deep-fries it into a burnt pork rind of a movie.

The bad news is that, as movies go, Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising barely qualifies as one.

This version has little quirk and less spark.

The stridently theatricalized violence is horrific only because it’s so abjectly manipulative. By the end of the movie, my jaw felt unhinged from dropping so often.

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.

The kids of today deserve better. So do I, come to think of it.

A derivative, irritating thriller.

The clichéd story line pursues turgidity with a relentless determination.

For an ostensible action movie, the cast spends an awful lot of time standing around and looking lost. I can only guess that they were following their director’s lead.

Mr. Taylor offers up nothing but glitchy editing and bad vibes.

The movie is ultimately a tepid and frustrating experience.

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.

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.

Blame is earnest but underdeveloped. At the same time, it’s overdetermined and often overplayed.

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.

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.

Dowling’s direction, while competent, also trots out every cliché that a 90-minute movie can contain.

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.

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.

The Neon Demon is hot garbage that dares you to call it offensive. In addition, it’s offensive.

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.”

The Bad Samaritan director, Dean Devlin, handles the proceedings like Adrian Lyne (who directed “Fatal Attraction”) on HGH supplements (and divested of over a third of Mr. Lyne’s visual elegance, such as it is).

This movie, which stars Stéphanie Sokolinski, the French musician known as Soko, in the role of Fuller, only comes alive during the dance sequences.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Overdrive has all the features of a potentially entertaining action B-movie for overgrown boys: gorgeous near-mint vintage cars, rugged male performers, seductive female performers, ravishing European locations. What it doesn’t have is a lot of cinematic adrenaline.

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

The Belko Experiment is a grisly, sick-making exercise in sadism that tries to camouflage its base venality in a thought-experiment plot.

While the lead actors are clearly committed, the movie gives them little to do besides exchange verbal invective.

A spectacularly inane comedy.

Some of Mr. Smith’s prior work made me laugh so hard that I cried; Yoga Hosers made me want to cry for different reasons.

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

Until its climax, which clearly seeks to be congratulated on its restraint, Dark Night is not much more than an arty bore.

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.

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.

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.”

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

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.

The plot is twisty in a perfunctory way, the action predictably explosive, the sought-after exhilaration nonexistent.

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.

In certain mutilated pictures, you can detect the lineaments of greatness: Consider Orson Welles’s “The Magnificent Ambersons.” Here, that’s not the case.

Genre homage or not, trashy, assault-coddling sexism is a turn off — and worse. Perhaps the “roman porno” reboot project should have rebooted its sexual politics before calling “action!”

As the movie wears on, one suspects that the writer Luke Del Tredici and the director Jonathan Watson aren’t crafting an indictment of toxic masculinity, but an invitation to take some sadistic enjoyment in it, without consequences.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The movie feints in the direction of confronting horrific geopolitical realities, but there’s a specter of sentimentality hovering above the proceedings, waiting to smother everything in sight.

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

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.

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.

The expectation that a female-written, female-directed effort would yield something refreshingly different is scotched within the first few minutes.

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.

Few things in this laboriously quirky picture mesh at all.

The director, Bethany Ashton Wolf, who adapted the screenplay from, yes, a romance novel by Heidi McLaughlin, can concoct some Hallmark-greeting-card-quality shots, but has little flair for piecing them together. The lead actors are very pretty.

Mr. Chan is in his early 60s, and he doesn’t deliver the action pizazz here that he used to. Nor, frankly, does he summon enough gravitas to be persuasive in the role of a grief-maddened father. For what it’s worth, Mr. Brosnan, as Quon’s nemesis, sells the angry-all-the-time requirement for his character.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

The writer-director Zack Whedon toggles his plot between “Out of the Past” and “Three Days of the Condor” with highly mixed results before letting loose with a hilariously unconvincing climactic reveal.

Britpop is a musical genre I had neutral feelings toward before sitting through Modern Life Is Rubbish, a uselessly nostalgic movie named after Blur’s 1993 album. After it, I wondered whether I had been too generous.

The actual movie is strangely plain, eyesore-overlit and uselessly frantic.

Perhaps this picture’s higher function is to be a calling card. But I don’t know what a calling-card project that demonstrates that its maker can semi-successfully mimic artistically vital but uncommercial directors is supposed to prove. For me, it mostly proved a waste of time.

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

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

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.

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).

Upon taking in the gorgeousness — and it is really something; the production design of this movie, by Luca Tranchino, is exceptional (as is Daniel Aranyó’s cinematography, which shines when he’s shooting in the natural world) —Lillie observes, “It’s like being inside God’s thoughts.”

Director Young shoots his unimaginative opus with an eye of getting all the value of the gore makeup department’s work on screen. In this respect, he does a bang-up job. As for everything else, well, this movie does answer the question “What if Eli Roth’s ‘Cabin Fever’ had zero sense of humor?” very satisfactorily.

Smushes together “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (the novel, that is), “True Believer,” and “Eyes Wide Shut,” only it does so without being nearly as good as any of the aforementioned.

From my perspective, the film's anti-Semitism is implicit rather than programmatic, and, in the film's current form, a little sneaky.

One of the problems with this My Cousin Rachel is that it’s hard to come up with any issue or reason relative to its creation, I’m afraid.

So hackneyed, tired, labored and overstuffed with contempt not only for all of its targets but also its own self that one gets the feeling that the talented Mr. McDonagh has gone mad with rage. Possibly during dealings with the American film industry.

Willfully over determined and perversely stylized.

Vacation is, minute to minute, one of the most repellent, mean-spirited gross-out comedies it’s ever been my squirmy displeasure to sit through.

The Hollow Point is such a shameless and indifferent recycling of Nihilistic Crime In The New American West clichés that it feels like it was crafted by committee. A really lazy committee.

The scenic cinematography by Ben Nott is often beautiful, which distracts, at times, from the fact that the storyline is both convoluted in the most gratuitous way possible and that it’s enacted in the most unengaging way imaginable.

And so it goes, leaving an awful taste and the inevitable question: Jane Fonda made a comeback to do dreck like this and "Monster-in-Law?"

Thoroughly irritating little film.

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.

The movie ventures into the realm of pure grindhouse sadism. It’s borderline reprehensible, in spite of Kumar’s intentions.

Weinstein Co. honchos Bob and Harvey are chasing some of the old "Pulp Fiction" magic--and failing not only miserably, but kind of disgustingly.

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

Band of Robbers just plain doesn’t work, to the extent that I’m almost regretful that the attempted schoolroom bans on Twain’s work weren’t more effective over the years, as they might have spared me watching it.

Carrey’s commitment is in the service of a movie that is not just muddled in the conventional ways but down to its core; it really never figures out what it’s about, even as it grimly manipulates its volatile content.

The movie, directed by Robin Pront from a script by Pront and Jeroen Perceval (who’s also one of the film’s lead actors), is well-crafted up to a point. But the end to which it is crafted is utterly useless.

Once you’ve sunk into the entirely warped groove of Reach Me you’re almost eager to experience the next offense against aesthetics and/or common sense it is poised to commit. And make no mistake: this is a movie that keeps on delivering, and for 95 solid minutes.

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

Eventually, the fact that the characters are all aware of the multiple clichés they’re uttering — an exchange between Brian and a young editor (Olivia Thirlby) is particularly excruciating in this respect — doesn’t redeem or excuse the clichés.

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.

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

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

The earnestness brings the movie from mildly irritating pastiche status to actively awful, and that is all she wrote.

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.

The bad behavior on display, instead of emerging organically from the characters, seems frequently chosen from a menu of sorts.

Director Julie Taymor's gargantuan all-Beatles-songs musical is that rarest of animals, the perfect disaster that fulfills expectations by defying them.

There’s actually a not-too bad caper plot underneath the incoherent over-direction from Mann.

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.

This movie, which is what you’d call a god-awful mess.

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.

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.

Of course, all films, good or bad, are good or bad in their own way. I don’t know, though. All I See Is You seems extra-uniquely bad somehow.

It is all very terribly tiresome.

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.

It is earnest and tortured and pointless, in a very self-serious suffer-for/with-art fashion.

Its climactic highway shootout, and much else in the picture, is rendered in the best Paul Greengrass manner that Hollywood money can buy. But where Greengrass pictures aim to keep one on the edge of one's seat throughout, the tension here, such as it is, is designed to stoke audience bloodlust. If that's your kind of thing, The Kingdom certainly satisfies.

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.

One of several reasons River Runs Red is such a resentment-generating movie is that it takes a vitally serious subject and makes such a relentlessly dumb hash of it.

Both the French and U.S. iterations of Martyrs are transparently voyeuristic cheaply ginned-up Guignol peep shows with intellectual pretensions.

I guess the “Black Hawk Down” comparison derives from the many gaping wounds the characters and the extras suffer. I don’t know where the rest comes from; because all told this effort is a cavalcade of crap. Loud crap.

The movie’s main feature is a group of long-take, moving-camera action scenes that I guess might have been more engaging had the characters on the run and in battle been figures you wanted to spend any time with. They’re not.

The potential for real offense is palpable, but Bruce Almighty never gets there; the script is too lazy and incoherent--truly effective blasphemy takes brains and rigor.

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

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion once said. And yet, watching Misconduct, a twisty but exceptionally bone-headed—one might even say cretinous—legal thriller, sitting through its story hardly felt like “living.”

Aside from providing an object lesson in how Chinese film financing forces some rather remarkable storyline convolutions into generic international action pictures, Outcast provides nothing of interest.

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.

Remarkably pointless movie.

Well, if there’s one positive thing to say about Brimstone, it’s that it doesn’t lack for lunatic ambition.

One is apt to mourn the time wasted not just by the movie’s living participants, but also by the VW bug. All participants could have gotten up to something far more enjoyable.

As bad movies go, The Jacket belongs to a relatively rare but extremely intriguing/irritating genus.

The most perfunctory horror picture I’ve seen in some time.

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.

No equine beasts adorn this queasy comedy. Too bad.

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

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.

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.

Whatever investigation it’s attempting, the movie is leaden in its pacing — the first 15 minutes feel like an hour — and its constricted shooting style, practically all hand-held almost close-ups, is transparent in its contrivance of realism.

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.

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

All Eyez on Me, a fictionalized film biography of Shakur, directed by Benny Boom and starring Demetrius Shipp Jr., is not only a clumsy and often bland account of his life and work, but it also gives little genuine insight into his thought, talent or personality.

You know what might make an intriguing, revealing movie? The story of how, over 30 years after its debut, a relatively innocent arcade game starring a giant ape and other oversize beasts underwent a corporate transmogrification and became a turgid, logy sci-fi/action blockbuster.

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.

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.

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

Mr. Montiel may have had honorable intentions in creating this movie. But what he made is neither a viable work of art nor an effective call to action. It’s a sadistic and ghoulish spectacle.

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

This is a plodding and ultimately infuriatingly noncommittal movie.

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

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.

In a movie year in which I’ve had to see both “Clown” and “Trash Fire,” the bar for worst of year is pretty low. I suppose that Pet, for me at least, completes a trifecta of sorts.

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

As for me, watching this overripe, ignorant parading of Hollywood privilege an hubris put me in mind of a different song--Neil Young's "Revolution Blues." Specifically the bit about Laurel Canyon being filled with famous stars . . .

Kidnap isn’t schlock, it’s garbage.

The excruciating experience of Marguerite & Julien need only be endured by viewers with an obsessive interest in the least constructive aesthetic currents in contemporary French cinema.

This almost laugh-free comedy, a Netflix Original directed by Kyle Newacheck, is distinguished by a relentless level of outrageous yet strangely listless vulgarity.

Who benefits from the existence of this film? Certainly not the largely bland ensemble of post-adolescent actors cast as the leads, who here can scarcely be called characters. Possibly the day players essaying those stock grotesques, who retain the air of being hungry for work.

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.

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.

Kin is insufferable, self-seriously combining shut-in nerdiness with wannabe macho pyrotechnics. It’s Bro Cinema in all the worst imaginable senses of the term.

This movie finds Mr. Perry, never the most deft at the technical aspect of filmmaking, drastically off whatever his best game is.

As well meaning as this movie is, it is also a turgid, muddled one.

The movie, a goopy, glossy mess with 10 times more respect for contrived sentimentality than for film grammar, is bereft of genuinely amusing jokes — Mr. Marshall really had some nerve naming his autobiography “Wake Me When It’s Funny.”

Its plotline, involving Norm’s trek to New York to foil a condos-in-the-Arctic scheme, is inane even by the standards of animated funny animal comedy. Its gag set pieces run the gamut from uninspired to incoherent.

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.

[A] glib and repellent exercise in “can you top this” genre opportunism.

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.

That such a woebegone project attracted such a largely first-rate cast is peculiar but not inexplicable; sometimes the urge to bite the hand that feeds you overwhelms your quality control filter.

I didn’t think I had see a worse fiction film this year than that other failed American Guignol, “Clown.” I may have been wrong.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

It’s painful to watch. Not because no one cares about Adam’s heartache. But because the movie is boring, trite, sexist tripe that wants to make the viewer empathize with a guy who’s actually pretty aggressive in his pursuit of loserdom.

Visually ugly, morally non-existent and a complete black hole in the departments of insight and wit, Chapter 27 is quite possibly the most godawful, irredeemable film to yet emerge in the 21st century.

It’s violence for cowardly voyeurs who want to make the people who annoy them just shut up in a way that’s silent, sterile, and thoroughly humiliating to the victim.

That the long-gestating crime drama Gotti is a dismal mess comes as no surprise. What does shock is just how multifaceted a dismal mess it is.

I can’t say I was too surprised by how risible, grotesque, and incoherent I Know Who Killed Me is. But I can’t say I was prepared for its pretentiousness. If the picture has any use at all, it’s as a case study in what happens when the talentless attempt to emulate the inspired.

The movie is so incredibly consistent in failing to land an honest laugh that about an hour into it, its not being funny becomes laughable.

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.

Future World is a miserable, idiotic sci-fi trifle, threadbare in both the imaginative and production value categories.

If raunch-comedy maestro Judd Apatow had not just an evil, but an evil-and-untalented twin, this grotesque excrescence would be his signature work.

On the plus side, the movie’s production values are very nice and its cast is notable. And as it happens, neither of those are pluses, because what they mean ultimately is that good money is put into this kind of worthless woman-hating garbage even now.

According to a certain interpretation of the auteur theory, a film’s value derives from the extent to which it communicates the personality and character of its director. Judged by that standard alone, I suppose “Hillary’s America” is some kind of masterpiece.