Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

The result puts a handful of good actors on autopilot, maneuvering around Intro To Screenwriting character beats, occasionally accompanied by sappy piano music.

Romeo & Juliet looks chintzy. The Capulets’ masked balls is designed in Pier 1 Imports colors and texture, the lovers’ secret marriage is performed in front of a green screen, and when Romeo goes up to Juliet’s balcony, he climbs a plastic vine with cloth leaves.

There’s nothing wrong with social-cause filmmaking, and the movie’s chief problem is less its political talking points than the corny way it tries to impart them.

Erased is a snoozy, sputtering Euro chase flick—a sort of poor man’s Liam Neeson revenge movie.

Awkward and unfunny in exceptionally long stretches, Reboot probably won’t turn his diehard fans against him. But it’s unlikely to win him any new converts either. For that, there’s "Clerks," "Mallrats," or "Chasing Amy."

Partway through the film, a viewer may begin to yearn for Perry’s usual schizoid shtick, the cacophony of screeches and sobs.

Too rote to be trash, it has to make do with being mere junk, impatiently exposing more incoherent machinations and more condo-board-like council meetings involving the dullest vampires in moviedom.

The new Point Break drops the original’s Zen-like balance of macho mysticism and camp in favor of dour humorlessness.

Does The Tax Collector sound intriguingly bizarre? In actuality, it’s a tediously paced procedural about work-life balance in which suspense-free displays of hackneyed gangbanger signage are filled in with a few flashbacks that look like they were a cut from a much more exciting movie.

Its blasé attitude to the basics of movie action turn the video-game-esque quest plot into an exercise in tedium.

The low-wattage, high-concept psychological drama Man Down is too misbegotten to be rescued by Shia LaBeouf’s Method lead performance; in fact, the most interesting thing about it is his masochistic commitment to the film.

It’s less a movie than a bad sitcom episode stretched to feature length and raunched up to an R rating.

The films are inane, sloppy, tone-deaf, moralizing, and have no sense of quality control, but there’s nothing quite like them. Madea, we hardly knew ye…

Domino is, for large stretches, just ludicrous—and atypically boring. It’s a sad sight to see from a filmmaker who, once upon a time, excelled at drawing a viewer into the thrill of seeing a sequence come together, with all the pieces falling into place. In Domino, one finds only the pieces.

Think Like A Man was a memorably bad movie; the most eccentric thing about this sequel is its title.

Raze is a brain-dead exploitation flick in which barefoot, white-tank-top-clad women beat each other to death.

A bargain-bin biblical epic that delivers the requisite mass-murder-by-ass-jaw as a cheapjack approximation of Zack Snyder-esque pomp, but is for the most part clinically dull.

Since making an ill-fated attempt at Hollywood with 2002’s "Killing Me Softly," Chen Kaige has slipped further and further out of relevance. Now even his elegant sense of style — the one thing keeping later efforts like "Forever Enthralled" afloat — seems to be slipping away. Case in point: Chen’s new film, Caught In The Web.

It is a heartfelt, earnest piece of flatly lit Americana, made in a hypnotically dull style usually associated with mid-century industrial filmmaking.

The aura of cheap-o emptiness is overwhelming: Scenes tend to be visually featureless, composed against strangely empty walls or Vancouver street corners. Even the occasionally decent fight choreography looks unappealing.

The Crash fumbles between bad diatribe and bad domestic drama, complete with subplots about absent parents and childhood cancer.

Old Fashioned — a deathly dull small-town drama with the marketing smarts to bill itself as the conservative Evangelical answer to "Fifty Shades Of Grey" — is all about the importance of sexual chastity, which is another way of saying that it’s all about sex.

An exercise in tasteful pointlessness, shot in flat black and white and scored (by Gruff Rhys, of all people) with tinkling piano and sawing strings that evoke nothing so much as an aura of cut-rate class.

Of course, Cats has always been ridiculous, just as it has always been ridiculed. (“Cats is a dog,” declared a notorious review of the musical’s Broadway debut.) But Hooper can’t even get camp right.

The premise should provide plenty of opportunities to skewer the way women are perceived based on appearance, with Shame as the operative word, but writer/director Steven Brill (Little Nicky) uses it mostly as a magnet for broad ethnic humor.

Tyler Spindel, a Happy Madison veteran, directs The Wrong Missy with all of the worst tendencies of the Sandler shingle style. It’s a series of claustrophobically unfunny scenes that drag on and on, interspersed with establishing shots and music cues that look and sound like they were licensed from a stock library.

Get On Up is the Hollywood biopic at its near-worst — a formless, extravagant assortment of historical incidents and lip-synched musical numbers, which ultimately amount to little more than a 138-minute showcase reel for Chadwick Boseman’s technically impressive and utterly opaque James Brown impression.

Gunslingers drags on for a little over 100 minutes, and the best it can show for it is Cage yelling about Jesus in a funny voice.

However rubbery and manic, though, A Haunted House 2 still can’t overcome star attraction Marlon Wayans’ severely limited comic skill set.

Kidnap is an asinine child-abduction thriller spliced with a touch of the early Steven Spielberg TV movie "Duel," and the most likable thing about it is that it is utter, unabashed garbage.

The problems with Anita start with director Freida Lee Mock’s attempt to fit this story into the template of a generic empowerment narrative.

Viewers will readily accept monsters, but the idea that someone would keep filming while evading said monsters — well, that’s taking it too far.

It delivers the tedious, heavy-breathing buildup associated with the genre, but skimps on the scares and the gory, gooey good stuff.

Boasting no less than five credited screenwriters, the film is like an exquisite-corpse exercise in kiddie-movie plotting.

This one even comes with a freebie: It’s got “dubious” right there in the title. But instead of being sloppily miscalculated (the “Franco touch”), this attempt at a Depression-era labor drama in the vein of John Sayles just bores its way through almost two hours of screen time, never rising above anonymity.

Directed to resemble rather than act, Eastwood comes across as stiff and unemotive, though Diablo doesn’t even have the sense to let its star get upstaged by the overqualified supporting cast.

While The Legend Of Hercules offers plenty for viewers who’ve acquired a taste for the fake and incompetent (not the least of which is the dialogue, which finds characters saying each other’s names at the end of every other sentence), it’s unlikely to please anyone who wants entertainment in the conventional sense.

The film ignores all the potential commentary and conflict in its pulpy, hyperbolic premise (tradition technology, urban contradictions, etc.), offering only trivialities, superficialities, and contempt. It has as little to say as its protagonist. Possibly less, even

A vapid exercise in narrative kitsch that spans two languages and multiple decades and love stories.

Collateral Beauty is one of those cloying movies about learning to take the good with the bad that feels like it was made by aliens with little grasp of human life.

Murro doesn’t so much direct as frame and stage, placing the characters against digital desktop-wallpaper skies and constructing each battle scene as a showcase for the characters’ prowess and toughness.

There’s nothing about this unconscionably long movie (it runs a whopping 132 minutes) that suggests anyone involved ever watched it from start to finish. But it looks nice enough, like a Nicholas Sparks adaptation, with lots of flowers and flannel.

The sort of uninspired international pre-sales item that usually goes straight from a basement booth at the Cannes film market to a Netflix parent’s peripheral vision. The sole interesting thing about NWave’s animation is its use of the camera, which plays to 3-D’s pop-out factor.

Its one saving grace is that Chu’s direction is so wildly inconsistent that it manages to produce a handful of genuinely gorgeous images alongside all of the cruddy ones.

Stranded is unmistakably bad, but somewhat enjoyable, especially for viewers who have a soft spot for the "Mystery Science Theater 3000" favorite "Space Mutiny."

The second interesting thing about Every Thing Will Be Fine is that it’s very bad, and that its bizarre throwaway lines and shrugged-off subplots brings to mind Tommy Wiseau instead of Douglas Sirk — an impression underscored by extensive, largely mismatched dubbing.

If nothing else, Jean-Christophe Jeauffre’s insipid Passage To Mars instills a greater appreciation for the classic movies that clearly inspired it.

Black Nativity is a cut-rate musical melodrama that grafts overreaching references to black culture onto a facile family-values narrative.

The pace is hectic, but the jokes just aren't there.

Billingsley (Couples Retreat) has a remarkable disregard for anything that might hold viewer interest, though he and Vaughn (who also produced) have managed to put together a heck of an ensemble for something that’s basically a low-tier Nicolas Cage cheapie, minus Nicolas Cage.

As played by actor-musician Johnny Flynn, the Halloween-costume Bowie we meet in Stardust is a miserable, charmless wannabe. Which is to say that the film fails where a single photo of this most chameleonic of music legends would succeed: It makes Bowie boring.

The move from practical stuns to a discount VFX simulacrum (no real cars appear to have been wrecked in any of these chase scenes) has not flattered Tong’s amateurish direction.

This is supposed to be a world of fighters with bizarre outfits and combat abilities, but a lot of the time, the viewer will just find themselves staring at a screen that’s mostly rocks.

As it turns out, there is something worse than Nicholas Sparks, the king of morbid romantic kitsch, and that’s a Nicholas Sparks pretender with highfalutin pretensions.

Stylistically, Once Upon A Time In Venice is mostly indistinguishable from a middling TV pilot that never made it to series.

This is a bad movie, with maybe two good jokes and some of Allen’s clunkiest direction.

A deranged melodrama where any sense of soapy, campy fun is undercut by the preachy, self-serious tone.

It becomes clear early on that, despite its cheap thriller trappings, the film is headed only in the blandest direction, basically a love story of the kind traditionally told in commercials for tech companies and phones.

A complete dud.

Even as a star text, it’s shoddy.

The sets are either claustrophobically limited or anonymously empty; the period detail is nonexistent; and the special effects are on par with a Syfy original.

The result is an uncritical, drama-free documentary that comes uncomfortably close to resembling a business-magazine puff piece.

Without a coherent lead performance, all Baggage Claim has left are its generic rom-com plot — which has flight-attendant Patton jetting around the country to meet the perfect man in time for her younger sister’s wedding — and profoundly shoddy production values.

If it’s any consolation to the parties involved, Exposed could have ended up being worse; however, it’s unlikely that it could have been much better. Trainwreck-bad movie enthusiasts will be disappointed to find a film largely defined by its lack of energy, in which every scene seems to be stalling for time.

Jeff Garlin’s second directorial feature, Dealin’ With Idiots, is a largely improvised ensemble piece about a comedian who decides that his son’s Little League team would make an interesting subject for a movie. It doesn’t.

Here, a few words should be said about Carrey’s performance: It may be the worst dramatic acting of his career, a charmless cartoon of self-repression.

It’s a lazy, crappy film, and perhaps even a cynical one, but its ineptitude is charming.

The high point of Last Vegas is also arguably the low point of Robert De Niro’s career.

Largely free of Sandler’s usual schmaltz and lame romance, it’s pure plotless, grotesque high jinks, bizarre and inept in a way that’s fascinating without ever being all that funny.

The rare Steven Seagal movie to open in American theaters, Contract To Kill is so crude and anti-cinematic — so f***ing bad — that it becomes its own parody.

Too incompetent to work as an underdog dance flick, but not nearly weird enough to qualify as howling camp, Battle Of The Year is destined to please only bad movie buffs desperate for a fix of awful dialogue, blatant product placement, and clunky exposition.

Likely to be appreciated only by homeless viewers who need a quiet place to nap during the cold months of winter, the movie has more awkward dead space than jokes.

It’s a movie where everything, from the sets to the cast and crew, is an unconvincing, low-cost substitute for something else.

If there are any new jokes left to tell about Holmes, they’re nowhere to be found in the abysmal Holmes & Watson, which might be the worst feature-length film ever made about the “consulting detective” from Baker Street.