Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

A complete dud.

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.

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."

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.

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…

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.