Jeannette Catsoulis

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.

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.

Dry as new bank notes and doggedly uncinematic, Simon Yin's $upercapitalist approaches the seamy side of international finance with a story as stale as the subprime meltdown.

Characters are simply triggers for the overwrought action sequences, though between the Edward Scissorhands editing and occasional wobbling background, even those are less than distinct.

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

It’s all just so much empty eye candy.

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.

Gone is the original’s joyful sense of mischief; what’s left is an inoffensive piece of twaddle that never fully appreciates the ineluctable bond between community spirit and a drop of the hard stuff.

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.

Jolene's skin may smell like warm milk to Brad, but to the rest of us it has curdled long before she leaves his bed.

Plagued by clunky action sequences and a porous plot the cast visibly wilts.

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.

Though the film's final, disturbing image forces race to the forefront and belatedly raises wider issues of persecution, its most controversial suggestion is not that Jesus might have been black but that he might have been a really terrible actor.

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

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

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.

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.

A movie so hopelessly late to the coming-out party that you want to haul everyone connected with it into the 21st century.

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.

Despite Mr. Stormare’s valiant efforts, “Dark Summer” (directed by Paul Solet) feels listlessly plotted and insipidly performed.

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.

An unruly mash-up of terrific anecdotes and terrible teeth, grainy film and garish memories, Who Killed Nancy? cares less about investigating a death than about vindicating an accused killer.

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

A Rubik’s Cube of shifting sexual orientation and elaborate sex fantasies, “Sloppy Seconds” gathers all the accouterments of soft pornography -- cheesy music, low-rent acting and attractively framed genitals -- into a plot of stunning imbecility.

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

A depressing slog that could have been so much more.

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.

Robert Nathan’s Lucky Bastard is a sorry-looking found-footage thriller as unconvincing as its characters’ thrashing orgasms.

Luridly earnest and laughably immoral, Illegal Tender is an old genre movie with a new look. Call it Hispanixploitation.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dan Kay’s filament-thin story, accessorized with flapping vultures and disturbing graffiti, relies entirely on Mr. Cage’s desperate-dad energy.

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.

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

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.

Table 19 is so awkwardly structured and tonally off-kilter that its moments of catharsis feel wholly unearned.

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.

An unappealing jumble of sex, regret and hero worship, “Bert Stern” is an odd tribute to brilliance muffled by lust.

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

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

This witless installment features the usual ultra-slow-motion mayhem and helpful freeze-frames to allow us to admire the extra dimension. Fans will not be happy, however, to learn that Ms. Jovovich is more decently clothed this time around.

As she learns the value of public schools and pickup trucks, her erstwhile friends in Philadelphia seem happy to be rid of her. By movie's end, you'll feel exactly the same.

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.

A movie that has neither a coherent point nor an authentic character.

Ornamenting its flimsy back story with assaultive sound effects and asinine behavior, Out of the Dark strains to shock.

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

Arriving as inevitably as puberty, Bratz introduces the swollen-headed, fashion-addicted dolls of the title to a live-action movie.

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.

Hilary Brougher’s Innocence (based on Jane Mendelsohn’s 2000 novel) moves to the formulaic beats of the second-rate TV movie, albeit one cloaked in an ultra-glossy sheen.

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

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.

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

Soured by its enervated star and uninspired writing, the movie offers only tiny moments of joy, like a hailstorm of gumballs that's unexpectedly magical.

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

Unlike their spring 2018 fashion collection, Kate and Laura Mulleavy’s first foray into moviemaking, “Woodshock,” is depressingly dull and terminally inarticulate.

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.

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.

Borderline incoherent and unrepentantly lewd, this buddy-cop comedy (based on the 1977-83 television series of the same name) substitutes cars, ’copters and motorcycles for actual characters

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

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

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.

Add the magnificent Christine Baranski to the mix and A Bad Moms Christmas, while still a slog of base sight gags and lazy profanity, becomes marginally more bearable. Only marginally, given that this pitiful follow-up to last year’s “Bad Moms” is even less able to distinguish between crass and comedic.

Filled with joyless people in drab rooms (Josh Silfen's grubby cinematography doesn't make things any cheerier), Silver Tongues takes a novel idea and uses it to jerk us around. Swirling with unease, its scenes set us up for a payoff that never materializes and strand its actors in a bitter present.

A tired mash-up of every men-behaving-badly sitcom ever to grace a third-tier television network, Speed-Dating tries to coax laughs from characters so dated even Eddie Murphy would balk.

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.

National Lampoon’s Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj harnesses smut and silliness to an oddly innocent tale of true love.

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.

All in all, this is a movie best enjoyed with a snoot full and a morbid disposition.

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.

Allan Loeb’s script is glib and grating.

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

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

This painfully awkward product fails on almost every level.

Advancing without a single original idea or surprising moment, Austenland seems torn between poking fun at the British and lampooning Austen’s many American fanatics — a riskier enterprise, considering that they’ll be needed to fill theater seats.

Alternately rancid and ridiculous, strident and sickly sweet, Our Family Wedding”offers plenty that’s old, borrowed and blue; it’s the something new that’s missing.

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.

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

A poker-faced puzzle whose biggest shock is the absence of Sarah Michelle Gellar.

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.

Viewed solely as a string of action sequences, Erased delivers the kind of dryly efficient, wearyingly familiar entertainment that already clogs too many of our movie screens.

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.

A cheapie hostage drama with a lot more swagger than substance, The Killing Jar strains to wring tension from a tired premise and an airless script.

Staggeringly silly and visually disordered.

Teeming with smart American humorists - and a passel of Arquettes - all unconditionally admiring. What's astonishing, then, is that not one of them stepped in to dissuade their friend from participating in such an embarrassingly awful project.

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

Suffers from abusive close-ups, repetitive fight sequences and uninspired demon design.

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

A tiresome blend of overacting and underwriting, The Salon moves from one predictable conversation to another -- the lack of available black men, the wondrousness of Bill Clinton -- without originality or comic rhythm.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Rather than present an evenhanded assessment of the issues at stake, the director, Todd Darling, is so busy fist-pumping for urban farming — and so dazzled by his granola heroes — that naysayers must be demeaned and denigrated.

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

Proceeding with a strained quirkiness that infects much more than the names of its main characters, this first feature by Justin Reardon is a paean to the kind of narcissism that sucks the air out of every scene.

An imbecilic misfire.

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.

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.

After a particularly brutal, attention-grabbing start, Breaking Point quickly devolves into a flavorless stew of murder, corruption, blackmail and baby tossing.

Substituting sex for suspense and pop music for ideas, the director Christian E. Christiansen drags The Roommate from limp beginning to lame conclusion.

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.

Other People’s Children desperately wants to take a deep dive into a young woman’s pain and the solace of artistic expression. For that to happen, though, would require much better actors and a much smarter script.

Yawningly directed by Jim Isaac, Skinwalkers is a slavering mess that buries its clunky addiction metaphor beneath a welter of genre clichés, all delivered in extra-slow motion.

Silver Bullets neither pleases the eye nor stimulates the mind.

He might as well be describing the act of watching this grating round robin of connubial dysfunction and romantic disappointment.

Told with multiple flashbacks and minimal taste, this exuberantly scuzzy thriller - shot in less than two weeks with a budget as micro as the women's skirts - pits sleazy cops against fun-loving disrobers in the middle of scraggly foliage.

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.

Airless, senseless — and seemingly endless — this clumsy heist movie, directed by the prolific schlockmaster Brian Trenchard-Smith, manages to make even the magnificent coastline of Queensland, Australia, feel dreary.

Ms. Riesgraf, who at times recalls the young Teri Garr, is gutsy and committed, but not even Meryl Streep could make this hokum credible.

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.

Prostitutes are not the only things butchered in The Lodger, a spooky story ruined by lumpen dialogue, cloddish performances and a director and writer (David Ondaatje) oblivious to both.

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.

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

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.

A toothless examination of marketing and morality, Álex de la Iglesia’s As Luck Would Have It combines lecture, farce and soapy sentiment in a single misshapen package.

Filled with sappy dialogue and screeching strings, Truth is a puerile excavation of secrets and sickness.

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.

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] regrettably hokey first feature from Bryan Anthony Ramirez.

Offers agony in a vacuum, a villain without a motive and a hero with more personal problems than lines of dialogue.

Tailor-made for those who like their violence multifaceted and their women monosyllabic.

Too slight to persuade, The Unbelievers is also too poorly made to entertain. The rational roots of atheism deserve a much better movie than this.

Overkill is what Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer do best: as the uncontested titans of the parody genre (with fingers in everything from the “Scary Movie” franchise to the more recent “Epic Movie”) they continue to prove that ridiculing other movies is much easier than making your own.

A Pan-Asian romantic melodrama that virtually pokes you in the eye with its fakery.

With a peephole-riddled set and a flashback-heavy screenplay, Black Christmas smothers terror beneath a blanket of unnecessary information, revealing too much and teasing too little.

A stunningly witless revival of the infamous British film series about a girls’ boarding school.

Dim in wits and lighting, The Possession of Michael King strains our eyes, spits on our intelligence and saps our generosity of spirit. Relatively untaxed, however, is the part of the brain that processes new experiences: There’s scarcely a shot or an idea in this first feature from David Jung that we haven’t seen many times before.

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.

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.

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

Really, how slovenly is it to use invisible aliens? If you're going to tease us with nothing but pinwheels of light for three-quarters of the film, you'd better have one heck of a reveal up your sleeve.

A mawkish drama hobbled by a thoroughly unpleasant and uncharismatic lead performance.

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

As one bloody encounter treads on the heels of the next, all that remains is a tiny indie undone by its own vicious ambitions.

An exhaustingly pretentious heave of artistic self-involvement, The Time Being takes an exceptionally handsome journey to nowhere at all.

This dreary spy drama is as flat and airless as the concrete bunker in which it unfolds.

In this achingly inept thriller, you will see Naomi Watts do what she can to sell a plot of such preposterousness that the derisory laughter around me began barely 20 minutes in.

Fusty research, aging interviewees and decades-old advertising campaigns offer background to the uninitiated, but Mr. Warrick's muddled, undisciplined approach destroys even the possibility of a cogent overview.

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.

Missing no stops on the road from cloying to annoying, Harlem Aria has waited more than 10 years for domestic release. Maybe its destiny has been written.

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

One of those projects whose very existence should baffle anyone hardy enough to endure all 94 minutes.

Boorish, bigoted and borderline pornographic.

The plot, unlike its execution, is not terrible.

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.

For all the shooting, knifing and nattering about sleeper cells, the film feels weirdly static and terminally tired.

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

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.

This sickly sweet concoction sets your teeth on edge.

"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.

Cuter than a basket of puppies licking a litter of kittens, An Invisible Sign is an excruciatingly whimsical collision of adult themes and kid-friendly aesthetic.

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

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

Best appreciated drunk or otherwise impaired, Satan Hates You is the kind of horror movie that appears to have been shot in someone's basement using a box of old Halloween costumes.

The comedy is forced, the drama nonexistent and the actors melt into a yapping clan that seems to go everywhere en masse — a gesticulating blob of upraised shoulders and upturned palms.

The movie offers less gore than the average Band-Aid commercial and fewer scares than the elimination episodes of "Dancing With the Stars."

Dumb as dirt and just as generic, Hitman: Agent 47 trades brains for bullets and characters for windup toys.

Silly beyond words, Wolves is indifferently acted and unconvincingly realized.

Trafficking in irresponsible inferences and unsupported conclusions, the filmmaker Brent Leung offers himself as suave docent through a globe-trotting pseudo-investigation that should raise the hackles of anyone with even a glancing knowledge of the basic rules of reasoning.

The director, Vic Armstrong — whose lengthy résumé hews primarily toward stunt work — displays no facility with actors and even less with pacing.

The undisciplined shooting style and underdeveloped script confound the actors at every turn. Despite their best efforts, they never overcome the limitations of a movie more intent on cutting corners than fleshing out a story.

Failing to expand on the intriguing notion that evil can find physical form online, Smiley, like its sutured monster, is sadly more to be pitied than feared.

Directed by Ross Katz and filmed like an ad for erectile-dysfunction medication, The Choice is almost repellently synthetic.

Men are pigs, and women are sick of it, says Girls Against Boys, a dumb, dreary, let's-get-back-at-them slasher in which pulverized genitals pass for feminist critique.

A movie that feels like punishment for a crime you can't remember committing.

This spinoff from the story of a magical kingdom besieged by an evil empire is too ludicrous for words.

This laughably clichéd dive into sexual masochism and hardscrabble survival replaces story with outline and characters with place holders.

Why Him? is trite, crass and insultingly moronic.

Veering from ridiculous to revolting, The Tortured would like to be about more than singed nipples and seared skin. And it is: It's also about cracked toes and lanced eardrums.

Silly, slack and unforgivably tedious, Thomas Harris's screenplay is padded with interminable flashbacks and a bombastic score that telegraphs every emotion Hannibal represses. And there are a lot of them.

Not even the august presence of Maximilian Schell can dispel the odor of fusty smut that clings to House of the Sleeping Beauties, a clammy meditation on sex, death and the endless fascination of unclothed innocence.

Unlike Michael Knowles's similarly plotted and vastly superior "Room 314," The Trouble With Romance is visually stagnant and tonally bewildered.

Pretentious and inane.

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

A horror movie of such ineptitude that it invites sympathy for even its least gifted participants.

Sadly, the only thing audiences are likely to find horrific is the acting. Or the possibility that any of these people might make another movie.

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

An insufferable movie.

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

Unless you’re trapped on an airplane or enjoying movie night at the penitentiary, you have no excuse for watching Killers. A brain-deadening collision of high concept and low standards.

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

Even if we can get past unlikely details (like a mental institution that allows patients to play with scissors), the drab locations and dull performances suck the air out of a story (by Mr. Irving and Rick Santos) that’s every bit as troubled as its unappealing heroine.

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.

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.

Memory is an inane, sluggish mess.

If you are going to be this mean-spirited, you had better deliver the jokes, but the film's attacks on pretentious parents - not to mention put-downs of hardworking immigrants - consistently come off as more hateful than humorous.

This fiasco from the writer and director Mark Edwin Robinson will persuade you that the title refers not to a place without light (though there’s precious little) but to a story without reason.

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.

Shatteringly stupid and repulsively misogynistic, Martyrs mashes revenge, torture and the supernatural into one solid, quasi-religious lump.

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.

It’s a poorly acted grab bag of shopworn ideas and hyperbolic behaviors that not even Ryan Murphy could translate into entertainment.

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

Custom designed for its smirking star (who is also an executive producer), this tasteless train wreck asks only that she preen and prance on cue.

A film with nothing to please the eye and even less to excite the mind.

A scorching affront to Italians, Iraqis and the intelligence of movie audiences everywhere.

Pathetically inept.

Evidencing more bullets than brains, Vice — a bit of ephemeral science-fiction twaddle directed by Brian A. Miller — has absolutely nothing to recommend it.

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 cringingly awkward tale of sexual predation and female lunacy.

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

Insulting several nationalities and most of the filmgoing public, Tied to a Chair lurches through acting atrocities, continuity glitches and narrative gaps with grating insouciance.

A futuristic vomitorium of bosoms and bullets.

Clueless, directionless and altogether pointless.

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

Soulless, joyless and depressingly graceless, Alien Girl plays like an early Guy Ritchie knockoff without the jokes or Cockney accents.

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.