Inkoo Kang

I'm not sure who this remarkably tone-deaf, cynical-for-the-wrong-reasons film is supposed to be for, other than maybe college-hating gajillionaire Peter Thiel. As the kids used to say, thanks, I hate it.

I felt resentful of my own feelings of gratitude while watching The Kitchen, a joyless and exhausting movie that squanders the talents of a dream trio: McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, and Elisabeth Moss.

The key, according to the film, is dialogue and altruism — namely, black overtures to white hate. The onus is as misplaced as the movie’s sympathies.

A movie so lifeless you’d have more fun guessing the Netflix niche group that the production is supposed to satisfy.

The commitment of its all-star cast — which includes Oscar Isaac, Annette Bening, Mandy Patinkin, Antonio Banderas, Olivia Wilde, Olivia Cooke, and Samuel L. Jackson — can’t divert from the fact that its quills droop and sag, where they haven’t fallen off altogether. Behold the other North American flightless turkey.

A joyless, soulless slog, wasting the efforts of co-stars Melissa McCarthy and Elizabeth Banks.

First-time feature writer Sofia Alvarez’s attempt to shrink Han’s lengthy, largely internal, and culturally specific story into a 97-minute movie is, simply put, a botch job. Stilted and scattered and strangely cold in its cinematography, it’s a handsomely shot whole lotta nothin’.

The self-serious meditations on fate and responsibility — as well as the uneven but ever-charged flare-ups between Izzy and whoever she’s talking to — recall exercises in an acting class. By the end, we understand her motivations and recent biography, but precious little about who she is as a person.

In the end, the only transgression The Misandrists really commits is self-satisfied solipsism.

Like a teen’s journal, writer-director Vaughn Stein’s debut feature is a scrapbook stuffed with allusions. The fondness is clear. But the resulting compilation is self-indulgent twaddle.

I Feel Pretty is an honest-to-God fiasco. Virtually every single aspect of this rigidly unfunny comedy is botched, from the characters to the plot, the themes to the core message.

The film is just plain bad, with an amateur cast (led by Taylor James), cut-rate special effects, who-cares storylines, and confusing details shoehorned in from the Bible.

Proud Mary did not screen for critics, nor should it have. It’s a copy of a copy of a mediocre original, with the drab aesthetics of a TV movie and the emotional hollowness of an infomercial.

Director Gurinder Chadha (“It’s a Wonderful Afterlife,” “Bend It Like Beckham”) attempts to explore the cataclysmic human costs of the Partition without humanizing any of the Indian characters. And so we’re offered, on the 70th anniversary of the Partition (give or take a couple of weeks), another film about how brown suffering makes nice white people sad.

The new horror-thriller is cheesy, asinine, convoluted and ludicrous. On the plus side, if your eyeballs need a vigorous workout, this will have them rolling nonstop.

A day can be mind-numbingly dull or fate-alteringly momentous. Person to Person expresses this duh statement with scarcely more wisdom, nuance, or emotional pull.

The death scenes range from goofy and completely preventable to modestly suspenseful.

If nothing else, Dirty Grandpa is consistent: it maintains a tone of aggressive charmlessness from start to finish.

The Masked Saint didn’t screen for critics, but it’s no worse than any other faith-based film, which as a canon tends to sacrifice story for the sermon. A movie that can finally combine the two — now that’d be a miracle worth beholding.

American exceptionalism certainly deserves to be deconstructed, but that can most assuredly be accomplished with a lot more nuance than it is here. As an exercise in liberal self-flagellation, hey, whatever floats your boat. But as a political call-to-arms, I believe in America: We can do better.

Failing almost entirely at amusement, “The Road Chip” may be most useful as a lesson for children to be more discerning about their movie choices.

It’s as punishingly dull as Sunday-school homework — and just as unnecessary.

Silicon Valley is built on various inequalities, and, frustratingly, CodeGirl isn’t interested enough in delving into those issues — or the girls determined to overcome them.

At best, The Green Inferno is a reliable shock and disgust-delivery system. At worst — and it certainly veers toward the worst — it’s a racially reprehensible work that exploits one of the world’s most powerless peoples. And no number of movie-geek references to “Cannibal Holocaust” is going to change that.

For all its cheap talk about the importance of innovation, Agent 47 just feels like a copy of a copy of a copy.

Pixels is ultimately a thoroughly numbing experience, not least because all the characters are doomed by a psychological flatness more two-dimensional than any arcade-game screen.

Phoenix’s transformation from a scotch-soaked pile of tweed into a homicidally self-righteous ubermensch is fun to watch, but Allen too frequently loses sight of the story he’s telling.

Aloft is simply adrift.

The joyless and perfunctory Hot Pursuit would be a black mark on anyone’s résumé, but it’s an especially disheartening one for Witherspoon at this point in her career.

The fatal flaw of "John Doe" is its focus on ideas, rather than people.

Lost River is little more than Detroit-based ruin porn, an aesthetic exploitation of poverty and hardship punctuated by splashes of neon and blood.

The mystery is solidly structured, but the answers it gradually yields are silly at best and lazy and offensive at worst.

Bring a notebook and some tissues — the mission to protect the queen becomes a tangle of shifting alliances between local and British forces that might require visual aids, while the snail-slow realization of gloomy prophecies may well tear you up in boredom.

A rancid comedy fueled by male entitlement and uxoricidal rage.

Without that emotional groundwork to establish the contours of Cathy and Jamie’s relationship, “The Last Five Years” is largely a numbing experience.

A misguided attempt to spin a nightmare scenario into a cutesy rom-com premise, this British production takes place in a harrowingly claustrophobic world where personal growth ends at age 18, and you meet everyone you’ll ever become friends with in your whole life during high school.

Neither good nor bad, nor campy nor scary enough to be in any way memorable, The Boy Next Door is a lot like our own neighbors, just there. You could make the effort to sneak a peek, but it probably wouldn’t be worth your while.

The writer-director never finds a coherent point of view (or a way out of Strindberg’s three-wall play structure), and Miss Julie ends up merely a whirlwind of moods without a center, as changeable and as random as a TV flipping channels.

A timid and slapdash musical.

Franco is a fine reader, but ultimately the film adds little more than his handsome face and trite confessional origins to Williams's experiential vernacular. When the words are so direct, powerful, and inviting, who needs Franco's books on video?

By the film's end, Black or White raises only one question: Is its racial-baiting disingenuous or oblivious?

The unfunny, unmoving, and uninspired Penguins never persuades us of its need to exist. Sure, there's a muddled lesson at the end, as tacked on as a Post-It on a piece of week-old cake.

Unfortunately, it's just when Jessabelle looks like it might transcend its haunted-house trappings that the Southern Gothic clichés rear their tortured, screaming heads.

Too earnest to be satisfyingly arch and too scattered to succeed as parody, Thorpe's goofy musical comedy only manages a sporadic charm through the occasional bon mot or a madcap flight of fancy.

Meet the Mormons isn't substantial enough to screen on the first day of LDS 101; the church's most basic tenets — and controversial aspects — are elided completely.

In its conflation of happiness and self-knowledge, “Hector” often feels like the visual approximation of a therapy session. And just as therapy is work, enduring this mess is exertion, too.

I was tempted to remark that Benson doesn't know how to write women, until I noticed that he doesn't know how to write men, either.

"When the Game” is like a bad seven-layer salad: it's tempting in theory, but it's really just a jumble of random ingredients that wind up supremely unappetizing in the aggregate.

It's a supernatural epic that never feels quite colossal or consequential enough, as well as an utter waste of Dwayne Johnson‘s unique dopey-flirty charm.

A rapidly wearying comedy that mistakes crudeness with humor.

Emma Stone couldn't be more charming, but her on-screen romance with Colin Firth couldn't be more contrived or ickiliy age-inappropriate.

Sex Tape is a hustler of a film — it works very hard for its laughs — but it's so haphazardly directed (by Jake Kasdan) and written (by Kate Angelo and Segel and Nicholas Stoller) that it can easily be divided into three distinct sections.

The apocalypse is no fun for anyone, but the dreariest possible scenario probably entails being stuck in a house without a functioning toilet and with nine of the dullest people left alive.

Billed as a comedy but nothing more than a shallow and exasperating portrait of female self-loathing, Dean Pollack's Audrey puts its protagonist through hell -- and its audience along with her.

First-time Spanish director Jorge Dorado aims for Hitchcock and misses by a mile with Anna.

The gratingly underdeveloped plot has all the dramatic effect of a toddler with her hands behind her back chirping, "Guess what I've got?" for more than an hour.

Directed by brothers Andrew and Jon Erwin, this ostensible femme-powerment film is strangely unsympathetic, even demeaning, to its target audience. Rather than pandering to moms, this unfunny, unabashedly anti-feminist comedy consistently points out how wrong or unnecessary or ungrateful they are.

The invitingly loud Melendez posits herself as both a victimized failure and a triumphantly persevering pioneer, and though one can certainly be both, the film doesn't say anything new or meaningful about the industry she's been dying to join for the last two decades.

Despite its outstanding performances, The Quiet Ones remains the very thing its protagonist scoffs at: a pointless story about “evil begetting evil for the sake of evil.” Evil can be defeated, but emptiness always prevails.

It's time to return this old painting to the attic.

The exhausted mockumentary genre provides yet another reason for its demise in Authors Anonymous, a tenaciously unfunny comedy.

The careless diminishment of every other character that isn't Chávez — including wife Helen, played by an utterly wasted America Ferrera in a grape-sized role — might be worth overlooking if the film provided any insights into its subject.

There isn't the faintest glimmer of lived experience to be found here, not the briefest flash of truth.

The social construction of illness is certainly a worthy topic, but Carter situates his characters far from any semblance of a plot and even further from his heart.

Director Trevor White frames the former teen gang member's life as an uplifting coming-of-age prison drama that feels entirely disconnected from the realities of incarceration.

It's good for a couple of fart jokes and otherwise utterly forgettable.

Desiccated by its pretensions, it's freeze-dried melodrama.

Beyond this general outline, plot and character development are afterthoughts, or maybe never-thoughts.

The film's lack of momentum makes the pace stultifyingly slow, but it's the script's reliance on the musty Wise Indian trope that makes "Dancing" dead on arrival.

The inherent cinematic potential of one of nature's cutest animals rescues the film from being a total waste of time.

Chen's grand opus about the perils of the Internet already feels obsolete.

This character study in rom-com's clothes is ambitiously formula-averse, but too shaggy and unfocused to be satisfying.

LaBeouf and Wood don't clang, but they don't quite click, either. That's not enough for the film to persuade us of its message, that love is worth any sacrifice.

A Case of You is a disappointing romantic comedy that aspires to social relevance until the third act, when it settles for pat Freudian revelations.

It's frustrating that the filmmakers could only think to enrich the characters of one race by demeaning those of another.

Though the filmmakers undoubtedly had good intentions, their ultimate point—that a long life is the result of moral rectitude—is offensive and imbecilic.

The film strands its archetypal characters in a featureless danger zone and gives them overly familiar dialogue borrowed from a dozen other B-movies.

Any one-man crusade is likely to fail, but a rom-com character's war against sincerity is doomed from the start.

The bloodletting is blandly demure and the identity of the malefactor telegraphed too early.

While the narrative spins in place, Kyle Killen's script throws out one uninspired gambit after another to extend the film to feature length, eventually climaxing with dual endings, both contrived.

This film's eagerness to please functions as a slow poison, draining The Millers of its vitality by rendering its characterization uneven, its potential undeveloped, and its plot predictable and stupid.

The script's programmatic feel-goodery smooths out everything strange and noteworthy about Dean and Mei Mei's relationship into an unmemorable and unconvincing blandness.

Aspires to be a consciousness-raising documentary but is only as deep as a tube of lipstick.