Jeannette Catsoulis

Were it not for the charming Patrick Bruel as a no-nonsense security expert and Alice’s unlikely suitor, this spun-sugar concoction would be well nigh unwatchable.

Neither suspenseful nor even comprehensible, John Swetnam’s dashed-off script (carelessly directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi) throws up plenty of red herrings — and a stupendously idiotic ending — but not a single character worth caring about.

The barnacle-encrusted plot...is dumbed down to the studs.

Gives you the creeps, the giggles and the groans in almost equal measure.

The film has a bare-bones look that only intensifies its nearly painful sincerity.

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.

This soulless, sterile romantic comedy has slipped under the wire to give audiences a headache and Matt LeBlanc’s reputation a relapse.

The film version is now being granted a limited release. Exactly how limited will depend on your tolerance for tasteless behavior, extravagant overacting and a decibel level to rival the unveiling of Oprah’s Favorite Things.

Smooth and folksy, it traffics in broad, unchallenged claims that serve a single purpose: to persuade us that the only thing wrong with today’s farming methods is our misinformed perception of them.

A caldron of unspeakable acts and unpalatable language, The Human Centipede 3 takes the bottom-feeding standards of its previous chapters (released in 2010 and 2011) to new lows of debasement.

As the uniformly annoying characters stumble around, screaming and cursing, we don't give a hoot for their survival. Quite the reverse: we're counting the minutes until the asylum's ghostly inhabitants silence them for good.

Rambling, frustrating and wholly uninvolving, The Face of an Angel (based on Barbie Latza Nadeau’s nonfiction account of the murder) swarms with ideas that have no place to land.

Spouting stiltedly clichéd dialogue...the actors struggle to sell their characters. Only Mr. Harris eventually succeeds, conveying, in a single speech, what it must be like to be the parent of an addict.

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

The battle scenes are as lacking in heat and coherence as the central love story.

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.

The Captive seems tailor-made to explore the psychological damage that a child can suffer over a lengthy confinement, but instead leans too heavily on the chilly desolation of Paul Sarossy’s cinematography. What’s going on in the victim’s mind, or anyone else’s, is as invisible as what lies beneath the snow.

Features annoying characters navigating unbelievable situations.

Whichever side of the aisle you inhabit, you will leave The Iron Lady feeling disgusted; you will also feel cheated - of information, insight or even an identifiable point of view.

A mess from start to finish — though, judging by the ending, this story won’t be over any time soon — Insidious: Chapter 2 is the kind of lazy, halfhearted product that gives scary movies a bad name.

A cringingly awkward tale of sexual predation and female lunacy.

A futuristic vomitorium of bosoms and bullets.

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

By the midway point, viewers will be questioning whether they would rather remain in their seats or put their eyes out with a fork.

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.

There used to be entertainment in the dodging and wit in the scripts; now there’s 3-D.

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.

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

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

Last Breath is disappointingly shallow and fatally lethargic.

Aiming for a moody portrait of psychological distress, Mark Jackson directs with a sluggish pace, an abstract style and a dismal aesthetic that rebuff involvement.

A limp sci-fi comedy with fewer laughs than a meeting of Abductees Anonymous.

"How are we going to get out of here?" Sarah squawks at one point, a question that Mr. Dourif ought to have asked his agent long before the cameras began to roll.

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

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.

According to the press notes, pandorum means “Orbital Dysfunctional Syndrome”; whatever that is, by the end of the movie I was convinced I had caught it.

Anyone looking for the lowdown on haute cuisine will be sorely disappointed: devoid of emotion, context or narrative, the baffling avant-garde techniques and extreme politesse of the lab become oppressively dull.

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

A lackadaisical dive into backwoods barminess and masculine neuroses, this low-budget paean to indoor plumbing and rampant facial hair doesn't unfold so much as unravel.

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.

Silver Bullets neither pleases the eye nor stimulates the mind.

Cocaine Cowboys is a tabloid headline, a movie as oppressive and inarticulate as the lives it represents.

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.

James Cameron upstages the ocean in Deepsea Challenge 3D, a shallow vanity project that invites us to join him in marveling at his own daring.

The soullessness of the enterprise is staggering. Making clichéd, cynical gestures toward romance, Mr. Harris (whose last feature was almost a decade ago) tortured me for a full 96 minutes.

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.

This lifeless adaptation only proves that making entertaining movies out of hard-to-swallow ideas is as challenging as you might think.

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

You may not believe it's possible to bore people to death with a film about risking your life, but The Wildest Dream comes shockingly close.

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

Unfolding in awkward diner conversations and uncomfortable bedroom scenes, Gut has a cold, flat look that gives even a child's stuffed toy a sinister sheen.

Erratically paced and with a pitch-black heart, the movie manipulates at every turn.

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

This one-note documentary from Ramona S. Diaz is as hostile to conflict as the group’s songs themselves.

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.

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.

This shockingly flabby effort from Mr. Anderson — who, in features like “The Machinist” (2004) and “Session 9” (2001), showed a much surer hand with oppressive atmospheres and troubled psyches — feels as nutty as its characters.

A limp urban comedy not nearly as whimsical as its title.

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

[An] insipid and uninformative portrait of singularity and obsession.

Offering no hint of the backbreaking drudgery and mental strain of their predicament, this gauzy picture (produced by the couple’s son, Jonathan Cavendish, and directed by his friend, the actor Andy Serkis) is a closed loop of rose-tinted memories.

If you drink every time you’re reminded of Monty Python’s 1979 Judean jaunt, “Life of Brian,” you might just make it through to the end.

With its fusty air and glumly earnest performances, this unnecessary reminder of Steven Spielberg’s soppy 2011 staging of another of Mr. Morpurgo’s novels, “War Horse,” is about as entertaining as trench mouth.

This painfully awkward product fails on almost every level.

Jay Alaimo’s sour tale of suburban greed and marital disappointment, can’t even deliver a temporary high; mired in the blahs, the blues and the midlife crazies, this poor man’s “American Beauty” slowly sucks your will to live.

The movie’s setup has underdog appeal in spades. But it’s all for naught in a screenplay, by Elissa Matsueda (working from Joshua Davis’s 2005 article in Wired magazine), that plays down intellect in favor of corn and cliché.

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

It takes an especially robust sense of self to so openly invite ridicule, rendering the film’s title somewhat less than credible.

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.

A dreary, interminable drama written and directed by Eva Aridjis, is exactly one-third of a good movie. That third is Frank Wood's beautifully modulated and modest central performance.

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 emotionally manipulative, heavily partial look at the purported link between autism and childhood immunization would much rather wallow in the distress of specific families than engage with the needs of the population at large.

By the time the final meal is devoured, you’ll be wanting nothing so much as an antacid.

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.

More focused on philosophy then feeding, “Kiss” marries a mash-up of undead clichés (I know, let’s have another lingering shot of the moon!) to hilariously stilted conversations.

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.

Caught between the harsh demands of a survival story and the emotional beats of a romantic drama, the director, Hany Abu-Assad, grabs hold of neither.

A hodgepodge of pseudoscientific twaddle and variously shifty murder suspects, Rememory satisfies neither as science fiction nor as psychological drama.

Oconomowoc has one thing going for it: a running time of just 79 minutes, even if every one of them feels like an eternity.

Maddeningly muddled and frustratingly counterintuitive... the story shuttles between Hong Kong and mainland China without a noticeable gain in logic or reduction in decibels.

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

Smothered by a storm of visual tics — and the tiniest of nods to “Rear Window” (1954) — any social commentary takes second place to multitasking gimmickry.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

There’s barely a whiz-bang punch line or smoothly executed setup to be found in a movie that longs to be a sparkling bedroom comedy and winds up a tortured, fizz-free farce.

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.

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.

Rehashing characters and plots from the "Law & Order" playbook, the director, Rafal Zielinski, supplements his material with religious iconography and more gauzy close-ups than a Barbra Streisand marathon.

As artificial as the inseminations it celebrates, Delivery Man is a soggy comedy more focused on stimulating your tear ducts than your funny bone.

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.

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

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.

Dark, airless and packed with psychological hurt that seems to spring from nowhere, this angry morality play, tucked inside a police procedural, suffers from a crippling lack of back story and characters whose relationships are fraught with unexplained complexity.

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.

Against the Sun is a groaningly tedious survival story that will at least leave you with a renewed commitment to wearing sunscreen.