Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Taylor’s direction is cosmetic, focused on well-groomed and well-dressed actors, spotless interiors, and the arty, textured camerawork supplied by cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen, whose gifts are both self-evident and sort of wasted here. It’s artificial without a hint of intentional façade: No home looks lived in and no conversation feels like it could have occurred outside of a laboratory environment.

The eerily laugh-free pre-head-trauma opening stretch requires Schumer to play mousy (not her strong suit), while the inevitable climactic speech tests the limits of her acting ability. Somewhere in there are a handful of good jokes about Renee’s delusional self-image...and a few tedious ones.

Remove the nonsensical characterizations and The Mountain Between Us becomes a cornball paean to rock formations and (mostly male) beauty.

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

With a product this generic, one at least expects it to do what it says on the tin.

Just as the movie seems to have exhausted its supply of generic guilty pleasures, it ascends to some more operatic and mordant plane of slasher-dom in a wacko sequence that involves the aforementioned “Total Eclipse Of The Heart,” a swimming pool, and a perfectly timed smash zoom.

Like its predecessor, it’s a one-joke movie; the difference is that this time around, the joke is better.

The Chinese film industry’s insistence on proving that it can make blockbusters that are as dull and crummy as anything to come out of Hollywood (but at only half the cost) continues unabated with Railroad Tigers.

Secret Of The Tomb plays it as a source of corny jokes, pop-culture references, and father-son bonding moments. In other words, it’s exactly the kind of film that shouldn’t be expected to engage with its assorted bizarre subtexts — but what a movie it could be if it did.

Even though In The Heart Of The Sea’s framing device often feels like it was written by someone who’d never read a word of Melville, its visual style makes for a bold approximation of his allusive prose.

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

Berry’s performance effectively turns a routine drama to a minor oddity, and Frankie & Alice’s complicated release history further adds to the curio factor.

Even as a star text, it’s shoddy.

There’s a couple badass heroes with humongous swords, a few big scaly monstrosities, and frequently not much else. The minimalism is consistent with Anderson’s career-long devotion to delivering caloric content with an unlikely combo of classical unities and pounding, insta-dated electronic beats. The movie’s called Monster Hunter—what more could it reasonably need?

A stolid film that largely rests on its director’s competence at helming extravagant aerial views of pyrotechnic destruction.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard, which bears the tagline “Get triggered” and is essentially a dumber, tackier "Midnight Run," was destined to be one of those Neanderthalic, faux-merican EuropaCorp action movies, like "The Transporter" or "From Paris With Love" ­­— except fate fumbled, and the film ended up as a coasting-on-star-power Hollywood programmer directed by The Expendables 3’s Patrick Hughes.

Unsurprisingly, Johnson makes for a perfect movie-star Hercules, and the film gets a lot of mileage by playing his charismatic-but-modest take on the character off of the strong, predominantly British cast.

It is dull and weird — weird in that way that it is pronounced we-ee-eird, the stretched vowel signaling a weirdness that is probably unconscious on the part of the filmmakers.

Unfortunately, Heaven Is For Real isn’t really a movie about religion so much as an attempt to appeal to the broadest possible audience of conservative evangelicals.

By continually deferring dramatic tension, the filmmaker puts more weight on the movie’s closing scenes — which are abrupt but true to life — than they can handle.

Now You See Me 2 gets giddy on its own unreality. That sense of freewheeling excess extends from the chip heist — set in a metal-free clean room — to the nonstop contrivances and coincidences to the cast.

It’s a film of ephemeral pleasures, adorned in a rich variety of voices, non-verbal gestures, and speech patterns: unfussy, unrushed, at times very funny.

Jellyfish takes the kitchen-sink approach, piling on external inequities and indignities on its protagonist.

Manderley is in part a state of mind. In this Rebecca, that state is exasperating boredom.

A potentially interesting-if-imperfect mash-up of contrasting sensibilities (Stark vs. Black) turns out to be just another one of the curiously fake-looking blockbusters that emerge every now and then from streaming’s abyssal money pit and immediately disappear from the public consciousness.

The Meg is lackadaisically paced, dull to look at, and has trouble keeping track of space and plot.

The rest is feel-good painted unenthusiastically by numbers: a repetitive series of artificially inflated character conflicts and tossed-off resolutions, interspersed with slapstick and jokes about prissy rich snobs, ultimately adding up to far less than the sum of its well-worn parts.

Detour is just film-school-ish synthesis, right down to the cinematography-midterm shot lit through venetian blinds and the anachronistic analog static on the motel room TV—the story of a young man who hates his stepdad so much that he stumbles right into an over-complicated thriller set-up that can only be watched once.

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."

Most of the cast does a fine job of turning this hooey into something serviceable.

The stuff is about as convincing as a chain letter and requires considerable padding, despite a slim running time.

Odd Thomas is at its best when it’s presenting — rather than commenting upon or explaining — juxtapositions of the wholesome and the supernatural.

In brief spurts, the film is funny, but taken as a whole, it feels like a waste of talent. Cheesiness should not be the most memorable thing about a Tony Jaa movie.

The “new and improved” model looks claustrophobically like an overpriced TV pilot, and not in a good way. Say what you want about the tenets of brooding, art-school-fascist superhero worship, but at least it’s an ethos.

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

More playful than genuinely creepy, Adam Green’s hybrid mockumentary Digging Up The Marrow deserves credit for trying to re-think the done-to-death found-footage horror formula, even if its self-reflexive angle amounts to little more than a whole lot of unrealized potential.

In an era of predictably tweaked horror premises and haunted-house flicks with 10-dollar titles, a doggedly straightforward monster movie like Blood Glacier can feel refreshing, if not exactly fresh.

It’s the rare movie that knows its limitations, but also understands how to use form to best convey its strengths, pulling together countless complicated dance scenes in which the relationships between teams and characters come through more clearly than they could through dialogue.

A failed experiment in stunt casting.

An always welcome presence, Law is the only cast member in The Rhythm Section to give the impression that he had any fun making the movie, playing B as a survivalist sourpuss with impossible reflexes. Nonetheless, he is consistently dressed and lit as though he were posing for a watch ad.

It stands apart from the majority of R-rated, coprolalic studio comedies simply by being fast-paced and, on occasion, pretty funny.

Pitched somewhere between indie domestic drama and direct-to-video exploitation, Lila & Eve is the kind of film in which a sturdy, unsensational piece of acting can take the spotlight.

It’s a stale, phony, grunt-level sort of view of American intervention, cast in large part with Brits and shot in the familiar desert backlots of Jordan, which has stood in for the site of one Middle Eastern conflict after another since "Lawrence Of Arabia."

Given the awfulness of its predecessor, which was this publication’s pick for the worst film of 2016, a sequel that’s merely pedestrian represents a dramatic improvement.

Plotted as a round robin of dalliances and coincidences, it’s relationship comedy as weightless movement, meaning that something is always happening, but that none of it matters a damn bit.

Hypocrisy aside, Off Label’s biggest problem is that, for a movie that features a lot of people talking about a lot of things, it doesn’t have a lot to say; its scatterbrained, switching-between-browser-tabs structure guarantees that no idea gets developed very far.

What a shambles. Robert Duvall, eminent character actor of the Hackman-Caan generation of difficult big-screen guys, returns to the director’s chair with Wild Horses, a dawdling and sometimes damn near unintelligible ensemble piece set in a Texas border town.

When it comes time to morph and break out the Zords to the sound of “Go, Go, Power Rangers,” the film groans and shuffles, like a sulky teen who’s been told that they have to finish the dishes before they can borrow the minivan.

Whenever MacFarlane — who has enough trouble maintaining basic continuity — has to stage a fight or choreograph a musical number, the whole thing falls apart.

If one were to diagnose a central problem with The Marksman, it’s that it isn’t actually a Clint Eastwood movie; it lacks the breathing room, the first-take nonchalance that always makes an attractive opposite to the Eastwoodian sense of purpose.

Dumber and less stylish than its predecessor, Kingsman: The Secret Service, the cartoonish secret-agent pastiche Kingsman: The Golden Circle is also even more of an incoherent right-wing text, an exaggeration of the James Bond movies’ violence, fashion sense, and sex that keeps trying to pass off its ham-fisted conservative attitudes as smirking nihilism.

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.

Simply put, it lacks its predecessor’s curiosity about its world—its fascination with colorful backdrops and machines.

The result is monotonous, its only memorable image being the salacious wink of Cox’s open fly, mid-frame during a shot of Churchill getting out a car. (Presumably this was the best take.)

The concept of a supervillain hellbent on Scottish independence is, admittedly, kind of funny (not to mention in keeping with the overall politics of the Kingsman films). But The King’s Man can’t figure out what to do with the idea, apart from having the largely unseen bad guy yell a lot in a Scottish accent. Like so much of the film, it’s trying to have it both ways—to be stupid and clever at the same time, and coming across mostly as the former.

Into The Storm is an uncanny valley disaster movie — not as consciously cheesy and cheap as something like "Sharknado 2," but built around a similar equation of unreality and gratification.

For all of this ersatz panache, the plot of Hot Summer Nights is both groan-inducingly contrived and vapid, its talented young cast wasted on an incoherent script—less a web of betrayal, greed, and adolescent desire than a few dangling threads.

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.

In fact, Aftermath only becomes interesting if considered as a dour subversion of the daughter-and-wife revenge scenarios of Schwarzenegger’s action movies — as star text, in other words.

This move is both redundant and counterproductive because it weakens one of the screenplay’s central conceits — the way Bettany’s guilt is shared and experienced by other characters.

The problem with this sort of Hungry-Man dinner theater is that it needs a true believer or at least a testosterone junkie behind the camera to rise above the lowest-common-denominator appeal of watching men yell at and rescue each other. Donovan Marsh is neither; his direction is perfunctory, unable to evoke even something as basic as the claustrophobia of a submarine’s interior. Perhaps he’s just following orders.

Handsomely shot by Steve Yedlin, Rian Johnson’s regular cinematographer, and boasting a typically likable Dwayne Johnson as its star, San Andreas nonetheless struggles to drum up tension or interest, even as skyscrapers topple like Jenga towers and massive tidal waves sweep through San Francisco Bay.

When Redemption works, it’s as a series of writerly miniatures fleshed out by Statham’s street-tough charisma and Chris Menges’ neon-soaked nighttime camerawork.

In the end, it comes up with just over half a dozen decent jokes — about one per writer.

Geoffrey Fletcher’s directorial debut, Violet & Daisy, has a lot of arch dialogue and very little depth. Talky and artificial, it moves like a sort of lobotomized Hal Hartley movie; it has plenty of Hartley-esque rhetorical devices — theatrical speech patterns, naïve characters, jokey plotting — but lacks Hartley’s sense of curiosity or engagement with the real world.

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

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 result is perversely watchable, which puts it a cut above the average inane wannabe franchise-starter. With no likable characters or internal suspense to keep it in check, Wingard’s direction sputters out into a cloud of slickness and pastiche.

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.

Downrange is trash, but in an almost elemental vein.

Like countless Swanberg films (the prolific director has completed 17 features in less than a decade), 24 Exposures is populated by characters who are defined not by their actions, but by their unwillingness to act. The difference here is the presence of an exterior force—the murders—that makes Swanberg’s naturalistic style seem affected.

The truth is that a movie about deeply personal obsessions can’t work if it doesn’t have some of its own, and the prevailing mood of The Current War is indifference.

Running only a little shorter than the average season of On Cinema At The Cinema, it’s never as cringe-inducingly funny or inventive as the webseries that spawned it.

This latest film, which was made on about half the budget of either of its predecessors, is as close as the Langdon-Howard cycle has gotten to actually being fun.

Cooper’s charm, imposing post-American Sniper physique, and proficient French carry the movie, propped up by a very strong supporting cast... whose roles mostly consist of fascinated or exasperated reaction shots. It just doesn’t carry the movie anywhere interesting.

If The Great Wall is too spotty to really satisfy as the old-fashioned medieval adventure it sometimes aspires to be, it is consistently engaging as an almost abstract exercise in visual sumptuousness.

Adapted from a 2008 memoir by former New York Times writer and editor Dana Canedy, it trades in cloying sentimentality and romance, the gooey melodrama done no favors by Washington’s stiff, anonymous direction.

It’s at its best in the brief moments when Besson plunges into complete, comic-book-panel unreality, as in an early shot where a hitman in a black trenchcoat, black trilby hat, and black gloves emerges silencer-first from behind a wall of smoke. It's the rare occasion when you might wish a director were more over-indulgent.

The film’s sense of time lacks precision and urgency, and just having characters periodically point out that the clock is ticking doesn’t cut it.

A complete dud.

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.

The director, Tim Reckart, is better known for his puppet-based stop-motion (he worked on Anomalisa and was Oscar-nominated for a short film) and seems to be out of his element here.

The franchise-hungry tentpole-itis of the present studio model has produced oh-so-many dumb rehashes of classic myths and fairy tales, but this is the first that is always funny on purpose.

Throughout, one is continually reminded of other, better movies—not least of all, the kind of eminently watchable genre films Anderson was producing at his peak.

The result is inchoate: not involving enough to work as a thriller, and too self-defeating to mean anything.

Gloomy, dishwater gray, and often framed through dusty glass, Child 44 wastes no time announcing itself as a capital-S Serious movie that doesn’t have a clue what it’s supposed to be about. Stalinist paranoia, marital anxiety, and a serial killer figure in the murky plot, done no favors by Daniel Espinosa’s inert direction.

Many Jerry Lewis staples, including bratty children and imposing tough guys, are present and accounted for; at one point, Hart even childishly leaps into Ice Cube’s arms, Lewis-style.

Whether it’s introducing random flashes of white screen or slowing down shots to a stuttered chop, Dragon Blade seems to be going out of its way to make sure the action never rises above the level of “watchable enough.”

Unable to create emotional tension, it instead opts for obliqueness — which can be tantalizing, but only if there’s something worthwhile hidden underneath. In this case, there isn’t. Instead, the movie comes across as evasive, repetitive, and, eventually, more than a little dull.

Village Of The Damned is probably the worst movie John Carpenter ever directed: hokey, miscast, devoid of tension and atmosphere.

Fortunately, Pompeii’s second half is tailor-made for Anderson’s established skill set, unfolding over a matter of hours, with many scenes set in and under a gladiatorial amphitheatre that recalls the arenas, subterranean tunnels, and cavernous vessels of Anderson’s best movies.

Watching the overqualified likes of Adams, Moore, Leigh, Henry, Oldman, et al. get tangled up in this gaslighting mystery is, admittedly, one of the pleasures of The Woman In The Window.

For all the pains the movie takes to explain why someone shouldn’t play football—to win, to be a star, to defeat others — it never bothers to explain why someone should play the game. It’s a collection of well-intentioned absences with no defining presence to speak of.

David Ayer’s latest, Sabotage, is a sloppy DEA whodunit, distinguished by its scatological humor and gore.

Rowan Joffé’s drizzly, workmanlike thriller Before I Go To Sleep turns a ludicrous premise into a fitfully suspenseful, consistently interesting exercise in audience manipulation.

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

By turns inert and logorrheic, William Monahan’s pseudo-intellectual nut-scratcher Mojave is a movie of barely furnished mansions and lens flare-speckled landscapes.

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.

Think of it as a downmarket Atomic Blonde (a film that does Besson’s established shtick with a lot more panache and less ick) or Red Sparrow without the surface-level professionalism; what’s clear is that Besson doesn’t want anyone to think about Anna very hard.

Matthew Modine — who wrote about Vitali repeatedly in his published diaries of the hellish production of "Full Metal Jacket" and is also interviewed in Filmworker — echoes what seems to be a common sentiment about Vitali: that the guy is a friendly mystery, either a glutton for punishment or a saint.

And yes, it’s as tired as “The Breakfast Club remade with adults” implies.

Among all the cardinal sins of moviemaking it commits (up to and including reusing an iconic needle drop from a Martin Scorsese movie), the worst is this: It makes Shaft look uncool.

In The Blood plays like demented cruise-commercial fan fiction.

Like so many of Ayer’s directorial efforts, Suicide Squad feels like it was re-drafted in the editing room. It’s clumsy, disrupted by at least eight different plodding flashbacks, filled with lines of dialogue that cut well into trailers but make zero sense in context, and patched up with an embarrassment of rock-along musical cues.

Pellington, a music video veteran who was once known for inconsistent-but-diverting thrillers like The Mothman Prophecies and Arlington Road, doesn’t show much interest in making either of movie’s central relationships work, leaning on the brittle, snappy MacLaine to carry almost every scene.

An inoffensive children’s film with an above-average voice cast, competent animation, and no product placement. This is enough to make it the finest film ever made about the Smurfs.

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.

It is, in other words, just a few musical numbers and a whiff of marijuana smoke short of being the Thomas Pynchon book of big-budget, effects-driven movie sci-fi.

The basic ingredients of a throwback action movie are all there; what’s missing is action and style.

It’s a beat-for-beat remake of a movie whose plot was never meant to do anything except get characters to jump from rooftops, made by a less confident director (Camille Delamarre, one of the studio’s go-to editors) and set in a culture Besson has never been able to grasp. It’s also a silly pile-up of exaggerated action clichés—and much of the time, it’s pretty fun.

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…

Unchecked impulse can be a boon, but Landis writes his way through every scene as though it were overdue homework, and directs with nary a hint of style.

Need For Speed’s dialogue-centric scenes are often clunky, and its comic relief is at times embarrassingly unfunny, but whenever Waugh shifts his focus to figuring out how to best convey an ingenious practical stunt with the camera, the movie comes alive.

Wrestling with the intrinsic creepiness of the premise would involve some social commentary, self-awareness, and honest-to-God storytelling, and that’s not Doremus’ bag.

The truth is that crummy, un-scary horror movies are nothing new, and are more the norm than the exception. And while The Home doesn’t distinguish itself in terms of style or subtext (one can argue that it doesn’t have any of the latter), it at least throws out just enough gross-out imagery to keep a viewer awake.

For all of its ambitions, Here is ultimately too simplistic to work as either a domestic drama or a deconstruction of the same—an experiment in storytelling that turns out to be an object lesson in undercooked ambition.

By the umpteenth scene where the “joke” is that one of the characters is on drugs, the movie’s strained wackiness becomes wearisome.

Without a poignant note or undercurrent of suggestion, it amounts to a world of effects, rather than a world of magic.

The Gunman is too disorganized and sloppy to make sense as political commentary or to work on the most basic level as a globe-trotting chase thriller.

Somewhere around the 60-minute mark, director Nick Cassavetes — whose career makes one wish that John Cassavetes had been a better father — pushes the movie into Tyler Perry territory, with the final third playing as a tone-deaf mixture of wish fulfillment, punishment, and bawdy innuendo.

Generic but enjoyable with some nifty low-budget effects work.

Waste enough of the audience’s time with the adventures of a couple of uncharismatic dinguses, and Depp’s stage-drunk, innuendo-laced, cabaret-emcee shtick starts to creep back into being funny.

Stage Fright has a weakness for predictability; it practically revels in it.

These fight scenes—and the chases that often precede them—are neither ingenious nor novel, but they’re fun and cleanly shot; the fact that this can be considered a major virtue probably says more about the state of the big-budget action movie than about Skin Trade itself.

An objectively bad movie, paradoxically ponderous and pointless.

One can smirk at the movie’s fuzzy philosophies and primordial clichés and still appreciate the delivery of Lee’s action scenes.

Despite its illegible chase scenes, awkward slow-motion shots, and fumbling attempts at political commentary, No Escape manages to be intermittently interesting, thanks to an off-beat supporting turn from Pierce Brosnan.

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

The movie is about as generic as modern romantic comedies get.

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

In old age, Lewis’ vanity has become touching. But Max Rose — shelved for more than three years before finally making its way to theaters — is as trite as a film can be while piggybacking off the reality of age.

A mediocre movie, starring two great actors who’ve certainly done worse, that benefits from baseline competence and lowered expectations.

The Wyler film’s rousing chariot sequence—filmed separately and at lavish expense by Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt, one of the greatest stuntmen who ever lived — is hard to beat. But Bekmambetov acquits himself nicely, offering up a loud and vicious circular chase, with point-of-view shots of people getting hit by chariots as armored Romans scamper around like rodeo clowns.

The authentic Sparks movies at least tend to be howlers, with shamelessly overcomplicated narratives and risible twists. Midnight Sun, on the other hand, is straightforward and trite.

The mystery itself is rote and, despite its jokey foreshadowing and its constant winks to the audience, never smart enough to really work as a genre parody. Instead, the movie just breezes along on the strength of Aniston and Sandler’s easygoing rapport.

Even the downer ending plays like an unconscious nod to the over-familiarity of the material, with one character declaring that it’s “the same thing we do every time.”

What’s missing, among other things, is the dark humor that is the Addams family’s whole raison d’être.

Almost as schlocky as the original, but not nearly as fun.

This one feels one-size-fits-all—which is to say, it isn’t especially tailored to either of its stars. It just sort of hangs on them, getting more and more tattered as it goes along.

Love, a movie with very little to say about relationships and even less to say about sex, is somehow one of the most interesting attempts any filmmaker has made in recent years at conveying the experience of memory.

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.

In spite of its modest running time, Burying The Ex feels stretched thin; it takes a good 35 minutes to get going, only kicking into gear once Evelyn returns from the dead.

Hammer’s performance — always game, never mugging — certainly helps; his likable but buffoonish Lone Ranger is an essential part of the movie’s irreverent tone.

As a film, though, it amounts to less than the sum of its parts.

The fact is that moviegoers deserve a better class of comedy, or at least movies that aren’t composed of one part recycled three-act filler and one part vamping.

This is the stuff that reminds us that Hollywood movies are made with charts and committees; we don’t enjoy it, but we put up with it in exchange for a good time. Red Notice only has the time part down. The good, like the bejeweled egg, is frequently missing.

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.

Cleverer than the average Kevin James comedy, though its better gags are unlikely to inspire more than a snicker.

In the case of The Cloverfield Paradox, it’s just a fancy word for “junk drawer.”

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

Pulp without style: Shanghai has many of the staples of noir—back alleys, shadowy figures, hard-boiled narration, and more femmes fatales than a viewer could keep track of—but none of the atmosphere or cool.

In The Canyons, there’s no pleasure — only power struggles disguised as sex.

A high-concept thriller that teeters like a seesaw between deranged and dull.

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

At once thinly conceived and maddeningly over-designed, irreverent and over-serious, and chock-full of strained references (to World War II, environmentalism, and drugs, among other things) and creepy violence, Pan is an elaborate flight of fancy with no vision — which makes it strangely compelling in spots.

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.

The more Special Correspondents skirts bad taste — by having the heroes record an ISIS-inspired ransom tape, for instance — the closer it gets to having something to say about mass media and geopolitics.

The truth is that what sinks the film is Shainberg’s insipid direction.

A pleasant, albeit very minor, surprise: a movie that never quite rises above its clichés, but which nonetheless tries to invest them with emotional credibility.

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

The Guillotines expends most of its energy in its first 30 minutes, leaving the audience with roughly 90 minutes of soapy Qing Dynasty fan fiction.

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.

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 mediocre ones, like the new Australian drama Drift, squeeze surfing scenes into conventional narratives, presuming that, because surfing looks exciting, any story related to surfing is inherently interesting.

It’s somehow both mannered and style-less, fantastical and under-imagined—perversely watchable, in other words.

A workmanlike cross between a disaster movie and a caper-chase flick...the film never rises to the promise of its awesomely literal title.

With its third entry, the Sylvester Stallone-led Expendables franchise finally becomes the live-action Saturday morning cartoon it was always destined to be.

This all contributes to the impression that the director’s interest in the project came down to just about everything except the plot. Which is understandable given the source material, but doesn’t excuse the fact that The Last Thing He Wanted sputters on most of the basic terms it sets for itself. Still, there is at least some nobility to its failure.

Unfortunately, Java Heat is also an action movie for people who don’t mind clichéd plotting, lame dialogue, and the low-wattage charisma of third-string Twilight heartthrob Kellan Lutz.

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.

There’s a germ of a smart biopic in Diana; the problem is that it’s tucked away behind a clunky structure and even clunkier dialogue.

It probably shouldn’t star Ryan Reynolds, who is generally likable, but frequently miscast. Only Kingsley’s bizarre, severely mannered performance seems to be following the undercurrents of the material.

It has no clue what it’s going for.

One hundred minutes of snooze-inducing troubled romance eventually gives way to a strange, interesting backstory. It doesn’t manage to recast the preceding feature’s worth of movie in a different light, but instead makes the viewer wish the film had gotten to the end sooner.

Even if it weren’t about an atrocity, this training-wheels Doctor Zhivago would still be lame.

It would be a waste of everyone’s time to go on about how this 95-minute movie deviates from the source. Let’s just say it turns The Dark Tower into something generic, and leave it at that.

It’s a shame that The Last Witch Hunter ends up crumbling into another generic showdown of murky fantasy effects and snatched artifacts, with a final shot that is literally framed around a door to possible sequels.

It might not be Donald Westlake, but it does its thing: meaningless, nonstop violence and movement, enacted by a large cast of characters who are only looking out to survive into the next scene.

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.

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.

In its highly combustable, confusing, angry environment, where everyone from parents to rioters to cops is just making it up as they go along, the only thing that seems to matter are the underlying drives, whether it’s goodheartedness or resentment.

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

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

Although it isn’t actually a comedy, Iron Mask qualifies, in substantial stretches, as one of the funniest films of the year.

Like its lead character, The Lifeguard is stuck in a rut. After establishing Bell’s frustration within the first five minutes, the movie continually reiterates it.

The movie cheats whenever it can. At least it’s interesting to look at, if only at first.

Like a distracted driver constantly missing his highway exit, Collide keeps passing on opportunities for action in favor of patience-straining exposition.

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.

Aside from a taste for Visual Storytelling 101 basics (a close-up of a dropped teddy bear, held for what seems like half a minute), British director J Blakeson (The Disappearance Of Alice Creed) doesn’t do much to distinguish himself from any number of hired guns.

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 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.

The fourth, longest, and flimsiest entry in the director’s signature franchise finds Bay mostly in cruise control, snapping to only when the movie veers away from the “robots fighting in tax-friendly locations” formula—which, unfortunately, isn’t very often.

Resurgence ends up falling victim to its attempts to differentiate itself while remaining completely derivative.

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.

Refueled isn’t a good movie by most metrics, but it is consistently committed to mainlining the basest action-movie pleasures at the expense of damn near everything else.

Not to say that the movie is a mess. Instead, it plays out as a more or less conventional direct-to-video-style thriller, distinguished by a handful of subtexts and images that might have been developed in a different version, but here register as mere quirks.

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

That the comedy is second-rate is a given. But at least it’s brisk, inoffensive, and devoid of human mugging, with Arnett breezing through like a pro.

Objectively speaking, it’s garbage, a suffocating mix of dad redemption, not-ready-for-Mr.-Right romance, and a bogus lit-world success story, with mental illness, slobs-vs.-snobs legal drama, and an Electra complex thrown in for flavor. On that level, it’s as shameless as porn.

The movie feels like a throwback; it brings to mind the blandly crappy movies Sandler made 10 years ago, rather than the brazenly crappy movies he makes today. In that sense, it’s a double disappointment, neither consistently funny nor endurance-testing.

Director Colin Trevorrow (Jurassic World, Safety Not Guaranteed) lacks any of the eccentricities that might make this quirky and contrived material work, even at face value.

Though viewers may have trouble watching any of this with a straight face, the movie’s goofy corniness becomes marginally endearing, in a hobbling-puppy sort of way.

Seventh Son is brisk and unpretentious, though the fact that these two qualities can be considered remarkable probably says more about the state of modern genre filmmaking than it does about the movie itself.

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.

Plenty of credit is due to Barbara Curry’s deranged script, set in a suburban fantasyland of doofus bullies, junior proms, and middle-class sex fears; it probably isn’t meant to be a Verhoeven satire, but it sure moves like one.

Though it delivers disaster-movie specialist Roland Emmerich’s usual mix of pop iconography, cornball Americana, and conspiracy theory, and benefits from some better-than-average performances in hokey roles, Stonewall is a farrago.

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

If the film is made with the understanding that campiness needs to be straight-faced to be funny, then are its “unintentional” laughs really that unintentional?

The film also contains fleeting moments of authenticity. Most of these come courtesy of Robert Patrick, who plays David’s father, and Greenwood. Together, these two veteran actors turn could-be-thankless “good dad/bad dad” roles into credible depictions of wounded masculinity. Unfortunately, the movie isn’t about them.

Like the passable original, this formulaic comedy can’t stop teasing the possibility of a funnier, smarter movie being made with the exact premise, central conflicts, and stars.

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.

The difference here — aside from the fact that the jokes aren’t as funny and that John Cusack is nowhere to be found — is the lack of a motivating factor.

Like a lot of entertainment pitched at the family matinee audience, it sits at the zero point of watchability.

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.

The Best Of Me is neither the best Sparks adaptation, nor the worst; it’s merely the most recent.

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

A multi-colored downer fantasy which combines bursts of imagination with a bleak worldview, resulting in something that rarely feels mainstream.

Perhaps the movie’s politics—which range from tone deaf to irredeemable—would be more of an issue if it weren’t so inept.

The movie is bland hackwork; its crime isn't incompetence, but indifference.

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

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.

Unfortunately, eccentricities are few and far between in the movie, with sleepy action that bungles its best ideas (like its potentially interesting twist ending) and finds Cage delivering one of his more moribund performances.

By the standards of Tyler Perry’s Madea series, A Madea Christmas is better than average.

The more striking moments of The Last Knight—this is an ostentatious Michael Bay movie, after all—speak just as loudly to its director’s indifference to both source material and visual scale.

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.

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

So what, exactly, is wrong with Taken 3? A lot of things, most of which can be attributed to the fact that director Olivier Megaton—who also helmed Taken 2—couldn’t mount an action scene if his life depended on it.

The sequence is Last Blood’s pièce de résistance, and perhaps the only compelling reason the movie has to exist. But it’s also pure, relentless, grimacing punishment at the end of a joyless film, choreographed like a ritual sacrifice. Rambo has always been a monster, but in his old age, he has become something even worse: no fun.

It’s the kind of curio that’s arguably more interesting to think about than to watch — a plodding melodrama that mixes royalty-free Elvis worship with preachy proselytizing.

Van Damme’s performance is about the only element left unscathed by the movie’s compulsion to point out its own absurdity.

Wrong Cops does what underground movies used to do: It gives the viewer the sense that what they’re watching is thoroughly wrong in terms of both behavior and style. What’s missing is the transgressive kick, the sense that a real boundary has been crossed.

Unabashedly pulpy, Rushlights brings to mind the noir cheapies churned out by the studios of Hollywood’s Poverty Row in the early 1950s. It has a few of the better qualities of sub-B noir—above-average camerawork, a rogues gallery of bit players — and all of the flaws.

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.

A treasure trove of gilded fantasy bric-a-brac and clashing accents, Proyas’ sword-and-sandals space opera is a head above the likes of Wrath Of The Titans, but it rapidly devolves into a tedious and repetitive succession of monster chases, booby traps, and temples that start to crumble at the last minute.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For the most part, Getaway lacks tension and violence. Strobe cuts rob the stunts of any sense of motion; twisting metal, seen in half-second snippets, becomes abstracted texture. While it’s possible to appreciate this stuff on an individual level, it doesn’t quite add up to an action-movie whole.

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

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.

Dramatically and comically impotent.

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

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.

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.

A courtroom thriller that becomes sillier and more generic as it zips along. It moves fast (a rare quality for a contemporary thriller), but doesn’t end up going anywhere interesting.

Bad doesn’t have to mean boring. Case in point: Vice, a bargain-bin high-concept sci-fi thriller full of Joel Schumacher-esque canted Steadicam moves, leaden expository dialogue, and cheap fluorescents-glued-to-the-wall sets.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Puerile, demented, and often funny.

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

Simply put, Don’t Go Breaking My Heart 2 doesn’t pop like a Johnnie To flick. Shooting in a digital format for the first time, and without his signature Technovision anamorphic lenses, To seems to have been thrown for a loop; his sense of space and rhythm are off, and his compositions are uncharacteristically flat and conservative.

It undoes itself over and over, as though struggling for the right choice of plot points. And yet, League Of Gods is also a dazzling example of the Hong Kong high artifice, in which the least important thing about a special effect is whether it looks convincing.

Daguerrotype is frustratingly easy to rationalize. It’s also about an hour too long; by the time it reaches the end credits, even the spell cast by his eerie direction and handsome widescreen compositions has worn off.

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