Jeannette Catsoulis

With little furtherance of the plot beyond confusing flashbacks to a creepy childhood triad, “Chapter 2” is hackneyed and silly, relying heavily on Petsch’s sneakily resilient scream queen.

Last Breath is disappointingly shallow and fatally lethargic.

Given that the finale of Michael Polish’s spies-on-the-lam thriller, Alarum, teases the unwelcome possibility of a sequel, please consider this review a mercy killing.

While Wolfe is an engaging screen presence, the movie is too clumsy and clichéd to conjure tension.

Mixing war movie, coming-of-age drama and gangster thriller, Akin and Hajabi’s screenplay is a dispiriting brew of repellent behavior and odious rap lyrics.

A work of glaring artifice, Miller’s Girl, written and directed by Jade Halley Bartlett, is being touted as a psychological thriller, but it’s too vapid and silly to do much besides titillate.

Boutella is a pleasingly game and lithesome heroine, but the movie around her feels curiously indifferent, a crammed, compressed delivery system for its maker’s dorm-room dreams.

Bland photography and perfunctory writing are the very least of my issues with Next Goal Wins, a movie-shaped stain on the class of entertainment known as the sports-underdog comedy.

A misbegotten blend of the futuristic and the antiquated, “Divinity” is an unintentionally comical sci-fi diatribe obsessed with beautiful bodies, bickering brothers and biblical symbolism.

As for LaBute, a once incisive chronicler of male cruelty and ineptitude, his continued dabblings in genre are lamentable. Perhaps the kindest thing to do is pretend this dud never happened.

The misogyny of the movie’s risibly sadistic villains is only one distasteful thread in this sleazy saga of rescue and revenge.

Top-heavy with big names (Tina Fey, Jon Hamm) and set in a nondescript small town populated primarily by sad sacks and losers, the movie struggles to get out of second gear.

Trite, charmless and entirely without grace, Mafia Mamma weaves a wearying string of Mob chestnuts into a shallow empowerment narrative.

Washed in an unappetizing sludge of grayish green, the movie aims for serious and settles on bilious. The real McLaughlin was a fascinating, pioneering newshound; you’re unlikely to find her here.

Hobbled by a lack of visual oomph or verbal sparkle, A Little White Lie pokes feebly at impostor syndrome and writerly insecurity.

A play-like trudge through seesawing power dynamics, bursts of violence, perpetual gloom and a ludicrously attenuated finale, The Apology could have doubled its tension by halving its running time.

Lively, noisy, dark and daft, this gloopy creature feature from the British director Neil Marshall plays like a loose, if vastly inferior callback to his two best films, “Dog Soldiers” (2002) and “The Descent” (2006).

Spectacularly uninteresting...this dreary Antipodean curiosity is a yob-filled slog of hard-man posturing, all of it bathed in an oppressive testosterone funk. And I haven’t even mentioned the hairy buttocks.

Familiarity might be the point, but a screenplay this coarse leaves the actors little wiggle room, reducing them to mouthpieces for recycled jokes.

Perhaps the most depressing thing about Sophia Banks’s Black Site — a dreary, underwritten thriller — is an ending that suggests a sequel might already be in the works. For the sake of its beleaguered star, Michelle Monaghan, I can only hope not.

A sequel so dumb that no effort by Willis could reasonably be expected to save it.

The title is bad enough, but it’s all downhill from there in the revolting Belgian farce Mother Schmuckers. I would say words fail me, but they don’t. It’s just that most of them are unprintable.

Subtle as a sledgehammer and shallow as a saucer, Asking for It is painted in such broad strokes that — with just a smidgen of humor — it would pass for satire.

Throttled by a corrosive self-awareness, the latest Scream is a slasher movie with resting smug face, so enamored of its own mythology that its characters speak of little else.

There were moments during The Scary of Sixty-First when I was convinced I was watching a botched horror-comedy. But while this witless slurry of onanism and conspiracy theories is certainly laughable, it is never, for one second, even remotely funny.

An indolent, narratively impoverished mess that substitutes corpses for characters and slogans for dialogue.

Treacly and manipulative, Dear Evan Hansen turns villain into victim and grief into an exploitable vulnerability. It made me cringe.

Queenpins might have been a snappy little comedy had it lost 20 minutes and found a point beyond glorifying grand larceny. Erasing the lead character’s smug-perky narration wouldn’t have hurt, either.

This convoluted clash of competing interests, though, is so poorly explained it’s as arduous to untangle as it is to enjoy.

The Tomorrow War is betting its flash will blind us to its vacuity.

As any Neeson watcher will tell you, you don’t mess with his action characters once their dander is up. Sadly, Neeson’s dander is no match for a hackneyed plot, poorly visualized stunts and characters whose behavior can defy common sense.

For the first 20 minutes or so — a blitz of eye candy and ear worms — its breezy action and the performers’ good cheer are enough to entertain. Too soon, though, the movie drifts into narrative doldrums that derail its momentum and drain the cast’s energy.

Edge of the World plugs its narrative gaps with corn and cliché.

An insufferable movie.

Gratingly sentimental and simplistic, Julio Quintana’s Blue Miracle, set in Cabo San Lucas in 2014, turns a potentially compelling underdog tale into a sermon. But if you’re in the mood to see Dennis Quaid learning and growing — and engaging in sappy conversations about fatherhood — then step right up.

Wise viewers will not be expecting an action movie, but The Marijuana Conspiracy is worse than inert: It’s shallow and tone-deaf. Attempts to highlight the sexism and discrimination of the time are either embarrassingly awkward or troublingly facile.

Thunder Force, the latest in a string of dismal comic collaborations between Melissa McCarthy and her husband, Ben Falcone, does nothing to improve upon its predecessors.

This dull dig into human nature owes more to the aesthetics of Calvin Klein than the terrors of outer space.

Playing the evil entity with convulsive movements and a killer manicure, the contortionist Marina Mazepa turns in the movie’s most entertaining performance. That’s if you don’t count Morgan looking genuinely baffled as to what he’s doing here at all.

However effortful, the movie’s tricks are more likely to activate your gorge than your funny bone.

The look is grimy and the atmosphere is grim; but what could have been a moody character study or a taut conspiracy thriller is instead a dreary procedural, a misbegotten mush of flashbacks, voice-overs and dead ends.

Muted almost to the point of effacement, this limp adaptation of Joanna Rakoff’s 2014 memoir, written and directed by Philippe Falardeau, only affirms that what might work on the page doesn’t always pop on the screen.

Surplus buffoonery and a new ending add nothing to the original, leaving us with a movie that obsesses over death while showing all too few signs of life.

This drippy drama presents precisely the kind of prettified portrait of death that Teague’s candid writing sought to rebut.

Dopey dialogue and less-than-scrupulous continuity augment the ramshackle vibe of a movie that’s too inept to qualify as camp or cult.

The most polished superpower on display in the defiantly unexciting Secret Society of Second-Born Royals is the ability to say its title without spitting.

The characters are so flimsy, and so wearyingly familiar . . . that Michell is incapable of giving their conflicts life.

This stultifyingly earnest movie makes its points with such a heavy hand that its horrors struggle to resonate.

Coarsely merging social-media critique and slasher comedy, this shallow take on the evils of internet addiction is as unoriginal as it is unfunny.

LaBeouf, like his castmates — in particular, the talented Chelsea Rendon from the STARZ drama, “Vida” — is constrained throughout by the weight of the stereotyping and dialogue that doesn’t stand a chance against the violence.

Featuring one of the most dissatisfying, anticlimactic endings in genre memory, this paranoid thriller (the directing debut of Dave Franco) turns an isolated seaside villa into a slaughterhouse.

There is so much recycled material in “Fatal Affair” that its carbon footprint must have been zero.

Despite the ripeness and flammability of its material, the movie feels oddly distant, the screenplay marred by weak scares, graceless plotting and dashed-off characters.

As derivative as its title and as implacable as its declining hero, Blood and Money suffers from near-calamitous narrative lapses.

Tape, in short, is a terrible movie about appalling behavior.

This first feature from Will Forbes is a big slice of ham.

Even when the ghost of a point materializes — that recording ephemera can be a self-soothing behavior — VHYes is too unsophisticated to develop it.

Bedazzled or otherwise, clichés are still clichés, and this debut feature from Andrew Desmond is strewn with them.

Struggling to connect the filaments of past and present, youth and maturity, Dolan seems lost, his signature vivaciousness and sense of fun almost entirely muted. Instead, what lingers is a feeling of being lectured to — which isn’t much fun at all.

An unfortunately clunky, relentlessly corny salute to Rani Laxmibai.

At fault is a threadbare, irritatingly vague script (by the director and artist Ben McPherson) that simply strings together a series of generic setups and forgettable characters.

A deadpan take on suburban hell — I hesitate to call it a comedy, black or otherwise — the movie takes competitiveness to such excruciatingly surreal lengths that every would-be joke feels agonizingly strained.

Narrative ellipses and a slew of visual clichés — like vague shapes, ghostly footprints and disorienting flashes of light — make Mary (the name shared by the ship and the couple’s younger daughter) a particularly unsatisfying possession yarn.

A raft of marquee names — including Seth Rogen, James Franco and Will Ferrell — can’t save Zeroville, a maddeningly surreal head trip through Hollywood history and movie-fan insanity.

Hancock is wasted here, as are the meaty dramatic threads that Elizabeth O’Halloran’s formulaic screenplay never bothers to pull.

Caught between a hero with no personality and a villain with way too much (Fletcher’s slobbering performance has to be seen to be believed), Raymond comforts himself with shots of people gazing pensively at clues and pulling grisly things from drains.

Vita & Virginia takes a passionate, real-life affair between two enormously gifted writers and proceeds to throttle the life out of it.

Not even John Newman’s distressingly awful dialogue can slow Cage’s roll to a histrionic finish.

I wouldn’t dare to predict who might cough up admission for this; but if watching prostitutes guzzle Twinkies and swallow handguns is your thing, then by all means come on down.

If Petitjean’s dialogue is problematic, its delivery is no less so: at times, the discord between a character’s words and lip movements suggests that some line readings had to be dubbed.

While you might leave with several unanswered questions, the most concerning one is how this fiasco was ever financed in the first place.

Notwithstanding a lively turn from Charles Dance as a chatty brain-tumor sufferer and a perfect Charlotte Rampling as a tranquil guide to oblivion, Euphoria gives up the ghost well before either of its unhappy heroines.

Burdened neither by fresh ideas nor common sense, Gary Dauberman’s lethargic screenplay (he also directed, an inauspicious debut) takes so long to get moving that Annabelle herself should demand a do-over.

An uncomfortable blend of sickness and silliness, this dancing-past-the-graveyard comedy suggests that the many travails of aging can be endured if you only gather enough friends and surrender enough dignity.

Inspired by a 2014 ISIS raid on Kurdish territory, Girls of the Sun, unlike the women who populate it, is weak and often corny.

Marshall, a world away from the dank dread and crawling terror of his 2006 spelunking stunner, “The Descent,” directs like a dog at a squirrel convention, charging gleefully from one witlessly violent encounter to the next. Ian McShane, as Hellboy’s adoptive father, does what he can to calm the chaos, but the movie left me alternately baffled and battered.

Despite a thoroughly modern central character, this impeccably costumed, wishy-washy period piece feels like it emerged from a PBS storage trunk, wrapped in tissue paper and reeking of mothballs.

This lovingly made homage to avarice feels strangely limp. Instead of gushing, it trickles.

Ear-shredding to listen to (the soundtrack, between chunks of a comically portentous score, is mostly thrash metal) and soul-destroying to watch, the movie trembles with tragedy. Yet because almost everyone and everything — dialogue, image, setting — is presented in such broad, symbolic strokes, we feel absolutely nothing.

There’s scarcely a behavior or line reading in this exasperating relationship drama that doesn’t feel like affectation. Fraudulence might be a plot point, but only the writer and director, Emma Forrest, knows why it has to permeate the entire movie.

Oppressively mirthless, Outlaws can nevertheless be enjoyed, after a fashion, as a surreal tapestry of macho garbling.

While fragments of past, present and who-knows-what events flash past, Cage, bless him, fully commits to the nuttiness.

Neither remotely credible nor more than minimally entertaining, Stacy Cochran’s New York City romance, Write When You Get Work, presents rich folk as gullible idiots and blue-collar crooks as heroes.

Lousy with stereotypes and filthy language, the sordid Pimp wraps 21st-century blaxploitation in a lesbian love story as unconvincing as every other relationship on screen.

London Fields, directed by Matthew Cullen and adapted from Martin Amis’s 1989 novel, is, quite simply, horrendous — a trashy, tortured misfire from beginning to end.

A bit of low-budget Nordic nonsense that only makes you appreciate the visual finesse and rowdy discipline of the History channel’s “Vikings.”

All right, then, let’s rip off the Band-Aid: Destination Wedding is torture. And not just because this would-be romantic comedy is grating, cheap-looking and a mighty drag: it also turns two seasoned, likable actors into characters you’ll want to throttle long before the credits roll.

A Whale of a Tale is a rambling blend of complaint, tourism and straw-men arguments. What it’s not is persuasive.

Unlike “Sharknado,” The Meg doesn’t seem to know how dumb it is.

Featuring more twists than a 1960s dance marathon, Terminal is a flashy, hyperstylized bore.

Mr. Shoaf wastes an excellent cast (and one cute aardvark — you knew there’d be one) in a movie of astonishing vacancy.

Truth or Dare is a wearying slog through crushed feelings and mangled bodies.

An imbecilic misfire.

Handsome cinematography and a highly competent supporting cast — including Michelle Monaghan, Nathan Lane and Alex Karpovsky — can’t save The Vanishing of Sidney Hall, a tortured mystery dripping with pretentiousness.

As popular as this window-fogging franchise has become, its flaccid finale is likely critic proof. But if I can persuade just one of you to bypass its milquetoast masochism and watch the stratospherically superior “9 1/2 Weeks” instead, then I will have done my job.

Despite the typically elevating presence of Helen Mirren, this super-silly feature (the fifth from the Australian brothers Peter and Michael Spierig) stubbornly resists being classed up.

This blah trudge from cradle to stage will be catnip to his fans and Ambien to everyone else.

Mashing limp romance and artless satire into a ludicrously contrived plot, The Clapper lurches from one mirthlessly eccentric scene to another.