Joe Neumaier

Unpleasantly icy film based on a true story.

Points for niche audaciousness, but that’s all.

Will Smith may have run through every trick in his bag. In Focus, the one-time fresh prince and former box-office champ looks tired, bored and, even worse, uninspired.

It is likely to become an unintended camp classic, something we haven't had since "Showgirls."

Director Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s film underserves its cast of up-and-comers (Thomas Mann, Ezra Miller, Tye Sheridan), allows the usually solid actor Michael Angarano to go astray with a scenery-chewing role and buries Crudup in fretting and sanctity. Worse, the experiment’s inherent drama is exacted with a tin ear and a cheesy style.

Terminally silly, even more so for being "inspired by actual events."

The amazingly awful dramatic thriller Red Riding Hood could, with tweaks, be enjoyably bad in a "Plan 9 From Outer Space" kind of way. Instead, it's M. Night Shyamalan-style bad, which means despite all the unintentional snickers, you feel trapped.

So that's three snickers, not counting the Bush quote, 'cause including that one ain't fair, man.

This is perhaps for Shakespeare completists only.

Alas, this learned woman of letters - her expertise became the work of Dostoyevsky, whose major novels Geier nicknames "the five elephants" - is ill served by a trudging approach and dry-as-dust, procedural style.

Has warmed-over chills and a muddled, zombie-like execution.

The problem with this hyper-verbal comedy is in the title.

Well-intentioned but as earnest as a college freshman discovering campus politics.

PA 4's best idea, besides reintroducing the slow-walking, statuesque Katie, is a strange video trick involving lots of little lights filling a darkened room. It's tough to describe, but the cameras, of course, capture a figure the characters can't.

Rote, dull and point-blank obvious.

Where on the evolutionary scale of wacky-dudes-learn-to-grow-up movies does Role Models fall? Certainly less evolved than "Meatballs," but head and hairy knuckles above "Daddy Day Care" or "The Benchwarmers."

This smart-looking but empty adventure — with a hero that looks more Tom Ford than John Ford — suffers from a shambling script, shifting tones and a surplus of villains. Clunky and drawn out, “Ranger” shoots blanks, even with the star power of Johnny Depp behind it.

This odd Dickens-meets-Sunday-school movie is as artless as the setup is muddled.

The overlapping stories, the emotional disconnect, the heavy-handed symbolism -- no, it's not a movie from the makers of "Babel," its a mumbling, stammering copycat drama from Swedish director Lukas Moodysson.

If this is your particular poison, it won’t kill you. But anyone averse to Sparks’ sappy touch may get sick from all the bull.

Stein's schlumpy presence is disarming, though his know-it-all nature is at odds with his free-speech posing.

This Australian movie reminds you what can happen when directors pretend to be Quentin Tarantino, complete with snark masquerading as style, slippery timelines, blood and guts and guns everywhere.

The film is an exasperating bore.

To call MacGruber"a total bomb is a bit much, but this comedy-action flick sure feels like it was put together with gum, shoelaces and a couple of sticky Twizzlers.

Trust - a drama about the dangers of teen sexting and online predators - plays as prurient, ham-handed and amateurish.

This comic drama tries too hard to serve up a slice of manic life, but Eisenberg, along with Tracy Morgan and Isiah Whitlock Jr. as the affable druggies, provides some spark.

It's finally here: The most boring alien-invasion movie ever.

Luckily, folks like Snoop and good sports like Sheen and, yes, Lohan, break up the monotony. Until, like an undead beastie, the boredom and dumb jokes come roaring back.

The former “Friends” star clearly wanted something special, but sadly the result is ... this.

Add two more stars here if zoning out to weirdo-dreamy, '80s public-access TV with a synthesizer soundtrack is your idea of midnight fun. Because this ambitious, but not uninteresting, failure has that in its DNA.

This dour, hyperactive family film is joyless, overly busy and starchy.

What you don't expect is how bad almost all of it is.

It takes a really bad stupid comedy to make you appreciate well-done stupid comedies. And boy is Miss March a stupid comedy.

Though Julia Leigh's surprisingly dull debut is meant to present the mysteries of a troubled young woman, you're more likely to wonder why its star, Emily Browning, is drawn to such demeaning roles.

Hemsworth has presence, but he also represents this film’s biggest problem: It feels like a bunch of good-looking kids putting on a show.

Get Hard isn’t edgy enough to be offensive or witty enough to be challenging. It’s just dumb.

This sock-it-to-'em souffle falls very quickly, unless watching Travolta trying on another faux-hip look is considered fun.

Irrational Man plays, like so much of Woody Allen’s work over the past 20 years, like a bad Woody Allen parody.

One we wish we hadn't seen

Travolta’s face looks immobile, while Plummer and Jennifer Ehle, as Cutter’s estranged, strung-out wife, look out of place. Sheridan (“The Tree of Life”), though, does seems comfortable in a movie where the colors blur sloppily.

This mashup of a teenage assassin lark and high school misfit comedy misses the chance to add a supercool heroine to pop culture.

There's something sadly poetic about a movie dealing with disappearing memories that vanishes from your mind while you watch it.

A disappointing mess of a genre flick.

See, everyone complains about humans in movies but no one does anything about it, so it fell to Eagle Eye to make everything laughably, ridiculously fake.

The bad news about Admission is that this thin envelope of a comedy checks all the boxes for being a phoned-in, phony, padded rom-com.

At 67, maestro Argento's taste still runs toward bloody entrails and eye-gougings, but Asia's sexy sour-lemon smile is underused in his movies.

It’s Fatal Attraction 101.

Director Khalil Sullins’ movie has its heart and brain in the right place, but its guts are a mess.

Irritating and clichéd.

Paranoia’s twitchiness is like an actual twitch: it’s contrived and clunky, and you forget it in an instant.

Faith-based audiences may find comfort here, but the film's heavy-handedness is a burden it can't overcome.

This nothing-new-here documentary presents basketball’s onetime celebrity point guard in unguarded moments. But the result is banal and fawning, with Lin coming off as a pious, charmless subject.

Thuddingly awful.

Unfortunately, the whole movie seems constructed just to get the singer/actress into a knock-down catfight, shoehorning one of show business's sexiest entertainers into a scorned-woman role. And even then, the pay-off feels cheap.

The film is put together too choppily to appreciate the bounce-off-walls athleticism of parkour. That’s a shame, since “District 13” star Belle is known as a founder of the sport.

It’s slow, lethargic, utterly lacking in charm and undeserving of the Cold War setting that is its best trait.

The result is a dull, high-minded soap opera.

Peter Jackson siphoned out all the soulfulness that made the author's combination thriller/afterlife fantasy a best-seller. In its place is a gumball-colored potboiler that's more squalid than truly mournful.

Its creepy atmosphere aside, Maggie is a slog of the living dead.

Neighbors stakes its claim in suburban-property cliches. Given the dull, stale results, maybe the end of the world was a better fit.

Willing as Campbell is to Shatner-ize himself, his movie will appeal only to true believers.

This slovenly, self-indulgent riff on Charles Bukowski-like fringe-livers has all of the naked harshness of Bukowski with none of the poetry. At least Haas gives it a good shot.

Jamie Bell gives a watchable performance in this self-conscious, coming-of-age drama, though the film's overall effect is best described as David Lynch lite.

The result: a dangerously cracked creep flick.

The movie’s gimmick is having the actors visually superimposed over sets created from actual Civil War photographs. But this collage effect, while striving for truthfulness, comes off like a View-Master version of a tale already told.

Another preachy, overacted message film that owes its out-of-time structure to "21 Grams" and "Babel," except writer-director Charles Oliver uses the idea of restorative justice.

This kind of thing requires a velvet touch, though director Stanley M. Brooks hits only hammer-heavy notes.

Sadly, for 99% of its running time, this muddled sci-fi drama is filled with enough overplotting, bad acting and riddle-speak dialogue to stop a clock.

The Losers is simply a lot of low blows, telegraphed each and every time.

Frozen is good for five minutes of "What would you do if?" games. Then it's just stiff as a board.

The movie even makes night-vision-goggle scares more irksome, a rare feat.

Director John Polson's elliptical storytelling style quickly becomes an irritant.

Someone forgot to put anything fantastic into Fantastic Four.

This would-be satire earns an E for Effort for wanting to be to the advertising world what “Being There” was to television.

The concept is the same, and just as tired as it was when the second, third and fourth sequels to “Paranormal Activity’s” 2009 first installment.

If you're not an 11-year-old boy, or a grown-up in the mood to feel like one, the endless "wow!-that-car-is-now-a-deep-voiced-robot" scenes lack thrill. In fact, the action scenes, as in the previous films, are downright headache-inducing.

Only natural spitfire Spacek, as the pickup-driving mom of the land, feels fresh. There's even a mouthy kid Garity is "taking care of" - guess whose son he is?

A lot of Aftershock predictably involves screaming or shock cuts, and the movie features a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo from Selena Gomez.

Filled with enough clichés to be broken up and sold in pieces as junk material.

Yes, the film’s CG dinos look great tromping in the Alaskan wilderness, but children deserve better than such unchallenging fare.

The title of The Misfortunates ­really applies to any audiences unlucky enough to sit through it.

Appearances from Jeff Goldblum, Zach Galifianakis and John C. Reilly help some, but all the mincing from Heidecker and Wareheim, the wanna-be, gross-out humor and THE CONSTANT SCREAMING get tiring.

Finding a fresh setting for a comedy is difficult, but a Renaissance fair is too broad a target.

Fine actors are let down by a comatose script and wayward direction in this retro crime drama.

Madagascar 3 can't upgrade its own shtick, becoming a craven example of a fast-buck, no-fun family film.

Even in shabbily put together dramedies, such as this one, there can be a glimmer of light. Here it’s Christine Lahti’s anguished, nuanced turn as a wife and mother excited to begin a new phase with her husband.

The Tracey Fragments is a grating stunt that plays like a film-school project, cutting a bland story into a million tiny irritating pieces.

Preposterous things are everywhere in this lethargic thriller.

Well-meaning but dreadfully executed movie.

Texas Chainsaw 3D sees itself as over-the-top and knowing, but what we ultimately get is simply eyes without a face.

Black Rock is as dingy and dirty as the genre thrillers it appears to want to one-up. All it does, though, is bring everyone down.

What starts as a creepy, original conceit — mysterious Caesarean-section abductions during hospital stays — devolves quickly into standard talk-to-the-camera, jump-at-the-sounds, found-footage banality.

The connection they share is clear; the reason we're invited to sit in is foggy at best.

It's also suffocatingly stagy, especially when the husband's new love (Kristen Bell) and a violent thief (Justin Long) show up.

“Holiday” is more palatable than similar, American-bred films like “The Family Stone” or This is Where I Leave You. Still, once Connolly’s sad-eyed, hippie-ish cancer sufferer is gone, there’s little reason to keep going.

The charmless but harmless A Cat in Paris hits theaters yet doesn't enchant.

The brooding and emotional prickliness gets overwhelming. Kidman tries her best to flesh out her character, but writer-director Kim Farrant gives this still-undervalued actress little to do.

Director Benni Diez tries for schlock shocks in this giant-bug flick. Sadly, what’s left out here is the fun.

Unfortunately, the rest of writer-director Eran Creevy’s film just shows that the Brits, too, make good-looking but empty thrillers, just like in Hollywood.

Directors James Mather and Stephen St. Leger stage a few good action set pieces, but unlike the 1981 midnight movie classic it imitates, the blandly titled Lockout never busts out of its cheesy concept.

Laughable/Bad

This is a perfect example of the kind of indie movie J.K. Simmons will hopefully never have to do again if he wins an Oscar for “Whiplash.”

This Arthur is missing a soul.

Von Trier ("Breaking the Waves," "Dogville") has no barriers, which absolutely can be a good thing. Here, though, his uninhibited nature is an omen of the pretentious butchery to come.

Early scenes set up the tragedy, but the majority of Oliver Hirschbiegel's movie is set in a TV studio where the two eventually face each other, and the tension, unfortunately, quickly becomes stagey.

This dark lark is like walking around Times Square looking at the flashy logos and lights and thinking you see the message behind the medium.

What’s more depressing: that John Cusack chose the junky, un-exciting serial killer drama The Frozen Ground as his latest step away from John Cusack-y roles, or that Nicolas Cage chose to, at long last, be as un-Cage-like as possible?

As clichés trot through their sessions - it's like "In Treatment" as bedroom farce - we check out. Huppert, though, is as fearless as ever.

The movie is played fast but lacks wit. The script, written by Kristin Gore — daughter of Al, and author of the book on which it’s based — mistakes frantic for funny.

The end result is like Quentin Tarantino reworking a Charles Bukowski story.

Problem is, this movie is all surface - to quote one character, it has hidden shallows.

This is one of those films in which almost every element is done in such an embarrassingly amateurish way, you want to put it out of its misery.

It's an unfunny Spanish movie that worked best as a two-minute trailer.

The folksy shenanigans are well-intentioned but frankly interminable, with Kline's wry efficiency the best relief from all the yowling and whining.

Act of Valor is like watching the wrestlers in dramas produced by the WWE: They're great at what they do, but being in front of the camera isn't part of that.

The Last Exorcism trods on previously stomped ground and has almost no good jump-outta-your-seat moments.

Ultimately, even more than 2007’s “Live Free or Die Hard,” “Good Day” never lets McClane be McClane. Gone is his taunting snark and quick-witted preparedness; instead he seems like a jerk with a thing for guns.

It would be easy to say that the final minutes of this mixed-up thriller make everything before it meaningless, but that would indicate the odd conclusion has meaning, too.

The father is the only one who can leave the house to go to his factory job, and that seems like a paradise for viewers trapped watching this clinically shot claptrap.

The drug that Ma-Ma trafficks in, Slo-Mo, slows its user's brain to 1% of its normal speed. Dredd unfortunately makes you feel as if you, too, have partaken.

Unfinished Business squanders almost every opportunity provided by its potentially funny premise. Instead, it becomes yet another blotch on star Vince Vaughn’s résumé.

This insipid mashup of history lesson and monster flick takes itself semi-seriously, which is truly deadly.

Tis embalmed drama is a ghost from the '80s, a decade that regularly produced surprise-free, caramelized biopics. The airless Amelia is missing practically everything.

It only comes alive when the star briefly shows the casual looseness that once was his calling card.

Viva needed to be shaved down to about 70 minutes, the better to really let loose and jettison some over-the-top jokiness.

Motherhood's litany of complaints and trite comedy-drama comes off as thin, and targeted, as a flyer for The Children's Place.

This eye-rollingly bad movie is silly, sluggish and miscast.

Fatigue is all we get from Run All Night.

Laudable as its world-building is, the film drags not just in its interminable middle hour, but also during the redundant monster-on-mechawarrior smackdowns.

San Andreas is a disaster — literally. That’s not to take a piece out of Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson. His charm and family-man-style fearlessness as the movie’s star is the only saving grace in this thuddingly repetitive, badly written crash-a-thon.

A ghost-busting drama set in a world of mystics, mind-benders and various and sundry fake-psychic gobbledygook. But the weirdest thing is how all the fun gets lost in a bottom-drawer "X Files" story.

Any way you slice it, writer-director Spencer Susser's movie is bad company, full of wanna-be-outrageous anecdotes from the fringe.

Polanski views things so mischievously that the naughtiness is neutered long before sniveling Thomas is tied to a pole. He’s a captive not only to Vanda, but also to all the dull, reductive mind games.

A children's comedy about talking animals that feels as if it were written by children or, perhaps, by talking animals.

John Peaslee's Screenwriting 101-style script has merely left everyone floating on their own.

The movie doesn't try for "Airplane!" or even "Scary Movie"-type ribbing, but its adherence to the genre isn't quite pure, either. Despite McCormack's good-natured efforts, this is "MADtv"-quality satire.

The latest indignity.

With no heat at all and a woefully disjointed cast, De Palma’s danse macabre never catches fire.

The Expendables 3 lets down its cast with a film that’s about as thrilling as the arrival of a monthly Social Security check.

Carpenter's economical but mundane chiller is possessed more by previous ghoul-friend flicks than it is by his better work.

At least "Witch" offers Perlman's easy, early-hominid charm, and a semi-suspenseful rickety-bridge scene.

This is what happens when the Norwegians try to make their own "Blair Witch Project": We get three-headed trolls that hate Vitamin D and references to "Deliverance."

Ultimately, Paradise is a tiny version of a saint’s journey among sinners, an immature conception. Peramb-you-later, Lamb.

Still, in movie terms, Warrior's Heart makes curling look like gladiatorial combat.

As awful as most of That's My Boy is, it's sort of mesmerizing to see how Sandler - in a script credited to David Caspe - keeps his touchstones in place.

The story feels like quicksand. Riddick, which couldn’t even qualify for proper summer movie placement, moves like Martian molasses and can’t present an action scene to save its life. You’ll wish you had Uncle Martin’s ability to speed people — not to mention awful movies — up.

These actors know how to liven up a room, yet here they're forced to perform in Miller's Theater for the Overwritten.

Robert Luketic's bland action comedy focuses on the uninteresting relationship between its two bland main characters, and that's the deadliest thing in sight.

The only saving grace is Green, the reigning witch-queen of cinema. The smoky-eyed French actress, best known for “Casino Royale,” “The Golden Compass” and “Dark Shadows,” throws her all into the performance, going bare-chested at times, bared-teeth at others. She’s like Elizabeth Taylor’s "Cleopatra" possessed by a succubus — which is a good thing. Without her, 300: Rise of an Empire would be bloodless and brainless.

When people complain about movies glutting the market, this moronic “Black Swan”-meets-“Phone Booth” thriller is what they mean.

A kids' adventure movie can be a lot of things -- wild and woolly, loosey-goosey, full of foolishness -- but they should never be shabby. And that's the best word for Inkheart.

This movie is so dumb for most of its running time, you walk away wishing there was less plot and pointless posing and more of the fuel-injected coolness that brought you to the multiplex in the first place.

The missed opportunities in Austenland are more numerous than dowry-less sourpusses at a ball in a Jane Austen novel.

The always beguiling Radha Mitchell can’t save this stunted procedural-horror combo.

A chatty little bore.

Director James Keach's movie is so annoyingly dipsy-doodle that TV veteran Bilson, trying hard to look haunted and angsty, is boxed in.

Likely to draw a range of responses. Many will be transported by its gorgeous construction and breathless emotion. Others will find it patently ridiculous.

Who let an unfunny, irritatingly acted two-hour commercial for Google onto multiplex screens?

Bening and Dillon are equally misused, and the rest of the cast is frankly just annoying. Like Imogene’s early promise, Girl Most Likely is likely to be forgotten quickly. The sooner the better.

"Wolverine" is silly and typical, not in spite of but because it bonds an undeveloped family feud onto the main character's renegade story.

Machete Kills? “Machete Bores” is more like it.

This tonal mishmash cripples The Dilemma almost immediately, though there are many other speed bumps, including Vaughn's irritating, fast-talking prattle.

What the movie needs more than anything else is a fast-forward button.

A cringe-inducing, self-consciously kooky indie comedy that's best enjoyed for its taste of Rip Torn.

Alba certainly tries her best at portraying not just a beauty but also a beautiful mind, yet very few things add up despite director Marilyn Agrelo's efforts.

And then there is the most annoying animated sidekick in a long time: a bulb-headed, trying-to-be-cute glow creature called Kilowatt (Kristen Chenoweth), who sings an ear-piercing, high-pitched note when it's scared, which is often.

The James Bond parodies and genre riffs feel at least 20 years past their prime, and most will fly right over the heads of audience members 7 and under

A romantic comedy that's neither romantic nor funny.

The movie’s ennui feels like so much posing, and the Bret Easton Ellis-lite characters are monotone. It’s rich in effort, but it all comes to diminishing returns.

This fawning appreciation wears thin, despite the good-natured clowning of Alabama dentist/would-be actor George Hardy, who's like a poor man's Bruce Campbell (our apologies to Bruce Campbell).

A ridiculously cheesy confection filled with unthrilling thrills, bored-looking adults and a comically overstuffed backstory.

Murder on the Orient Express, this ain’t.

Kick-Ass - based on a graphic novel - thinks it's so brave and bold. But it's more like the title character, a dweeb who just thinks he's tough.

Swan is so eager to be a trippy comic lark that it ends up resembling a clown trying to fit through a pea-shooter.

Director Mary Harron ("American Psycho") can do little with this bloodless drama.

Like a worst-case-scenario, indie-movie cliché, Wendy and Lucy throws every bone it can at the screen.

Far from burning bright, this earnest indie starts out dull and gets duller.

By the middle of the second hour, you'll be wishing a zombie would just chomp off your head to end the pain.

What this heavy-handed film mainly has to endure is a clunky story structure and an ending that wasn't original when it was seen four decades ago on "The Twilight Zone."

Would like to think of itself as an extension of its lead character -- gangly, a bit uncouth, but ultimately sweet. Unfortunately, it's more like the best friend in a movie like this -- irritating, unfunny and something that hangs around longer than it should.

Director Michel Leclerc's comedy plays like one of those foreign-movie spoofs Jerry and the gang would go to see on a "Seinfeld" episode. Only here, there's no "young girl's journey from Milan to Minsk" - just from madcap to moronic.

Ball knows one trick, and it's sure over.

Sort of “An American Psycho’s European Vacation,” this indie dramatic thriller mixes sex and violence and still winds up dull.

As ineffectual police work and broken feet stack up, the silliness gets out of hand.

The remake of the 1987 cult actioner Robocop is a misguided failure — not only because its retooled half-man/half-machine hero now has emotions, but also because its “fear the machines” message winds up feeling creaky.

These World Wrestling Entertainment-produced movies are a world unto themselves: Cliché-ridden B-flicks anchored by monstrously huge grapplers giving acting their all.

The movie soon turns into only a production-designed run-and-chase game, and our curiosity about what happened to Earth and the crew is teased and teased again until the movie’s big letdown of a reveal.

The Sitter is not only an atrocious shout-out to bad '80s comedies, it's also the kind of movie Jonah Hill should look at as a crass blast from his past.

This wannabe Sherlockian thriller is like a night spent at Madame Tussauds, watching mannequins strangle other mannequins.

This Canadian Hamlet, completed years ago, is as airless as a tomb.

Tries waaay too hard, just like its motormouth jock-snark heroes.

Cranston, in a fake beard and dark glasses, seems to be enjoying his goofy act. Trouble is, this isn’t the kind of movie in which goofy earns goodwill.

The cozy sentimentality in The Time Traveler's Wife is the only thing that grounds it. Mostly it's just featherheaded.

An epic example of muddled storytelling, chintzy excitement and scatter-brained execution.

Broomfield's point that Palin followers threaten her enemies, though, is worthy of a different documentary - perhaps one about American fanaticism.

An atrocious, idiotic 88 minutes of anti-entertainment. To borrow word-shtick from the guru Pitka, it's AWFUL as in, "Anyone Watching Feels, Um, Loser-ish."

It should surprise no one that visually quirky, graphic-novelish, pulp-noir action flicks rarely come through the sausage machine intact.

"Dopey" is too good a word for it.

It winds up just being annoying.

Even young would-be botanists will find this charmless animated adventure as exciting as watching grass grow.

There are some nice moments of camaraderie, as Feldman and Imperioli do their laid-back thing and Fisher is feisty and warmhearted. Still, the let’s-all-talk-at-once actorliness wears thin. It’s just not worth the mood swings.

This one has a screenplay by Stephen King, adapting his own short story. Unfortunately, that can’t save this low-budget thriller.

There's a reason potboiler paperbacks don't make good movies - there's too much outlandish plot, even for Hollywood.

It doesn't help that Eastwood's laconic style is as torpid as it was in such misfires as "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" and "Changeling."

Though Fontaine makes sure the beaches are sun-dappled and the women’s shared house comes off like a sandy paradise, the movie is like the early-’80s groaner “Summer Lovers” with wrinkle lines. Hooray for the freedom and beauty of older women — a demographic that deserves better than the deplorable Adore.

Has raw action and urgent performances, but loses power due to an amateur approach.

Flashbacks show samurai shenanigans, but it's all cluttered and rambling. Watch "True Blood," "Let the Right One In" or "Twilight" instead. Or wait for "Thirst" or "New Moon" or "Daybreakers" or ...

Throughout, Davidson's intentions are honest but become lost in a haze of overly familiar story beats.

Rois has moments of desperate urgency and depth, but Twyker's love of parallels is finally done in by artsy shots of the threesome au naturel against stark white backdrops.

Evil babies aren’t exactly fresh meat for parody. Then again, there’s hardly a laugh in this whole hellish thing.

One achievement of James Cameron’s “Terminator” is that it overcame its low-rent, B-movie trappings. The great sin of “Genisys” is that it costs millions and yet isn’t worth a dime.

Travolta, who was more believable as a middle-aged housewife in “Hairspray” than he is as a former Serbian commando, has the accent down pat. But his Boris-and-Natasha-style syntax seems to represent Killing Season best. Just imagine that voice saying: Dees ees very seelly movie. Catch on cable TV, please.

Most of the acting is amateurish at best, and the tone is vintage "Afterschool Special." But it does aim to be family-friendly, and at least it succeeds there.

Okay, y'all, the never-ending appeal of the Southern-fried crime caper for filmmakers hungry for flavor is back with The Baytown Outlaws. Only here, the drawling accents, screeching tires and sawed-off blasts that rise again don't amount to much.

Safe arrives filled with bombast and sneers but barely any thrills.

It's the same-old flesh-chewing. Like vampires, this genre is getting deadly.

This film, though, lacks any spine. Director Jean-Baptiste Leonetti isn’t sure if he’s making a Hemingway-lite faceoff or a hemmed-in horror flick.

Hitman: Agent 47 is a by-the-numbers schlock action sequel that writes its own epitaph when a character mutters the dusty insult, “You’re dead, too. You just don’t know it yet.”

After much fumbling, the snicks and giggles of adolescence grow wearying yet again.

The loping pace, inconsistent tone and lack of imagination are all deadly.

There's a way to do this kind of thing (Just witness Hasbro's other toy-turned-dumb movie franchise, "Transformers"). G.I. Joe, though, hasn't got a kung fu-grip on what it is.

This god-awful, unfunny, stinkingly putrid sketch-comic movie has exactly one snicker-worthy moment, involving Kevin Nealon and a stolen grape. But watching the rest of it will make you whine.

Every summer needs a super-turkey. So barring anything in the next 30 days that's the second coming of "Howard the Duck," the witless, completely terrible "comedy" now called The Watch should win hands-down.

Here we go again. Danish director Lars von Trier has pumped out Nymphomaniac: Vol II just a few weeks after “Vol. I” came out. And the results are the same: zero stars.

What on earth is Salma Hayek doing starring in this exploitative, junky piece of torture trash?

Ender’s Game, the book, may have a special place in pop-lit. The movie, however, is as special as a migraine.

Hollowface, like Intruders (which ought to be just the singular "Intruder," as Hollowface works solo), is all about empty scares. Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo does include perhaps the most half-hearted exorcism ever filmed, which only seems fitting.

One sickening piece of garbage.

Harlin even makes poor Kilmer go running about. Just like that image, "5 Days" is embarrassingly clumsy.

Filled with second-rate Brian DePalma twists, noirishly blurred lights and usually solid actors mouthing potboiler brine, The Lodger resembles bottom-shelf '80s dreck.

The Transporter Refueled should be put up on blocks.

Hot Pursuit gets cold quickly. That’s certainly not the fault of stars Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara, who work to keep this blessedly brief action-comedy shaking and cruising to an unthrilling end. The blame lies with a dopey script, director Anne Fletcher and a lazy Hollywood assumption that female buddy flicks should be as half-assed as their male counterparts.

Every joke is lame, every special effect unspecial.

Has no thrills, no chills, no scares and contains a villain, or several of them, actually, that will turn you to stone -- from boredom.

This slimy, slug-minded mystery thriller starts out dead on arrival and then, like three-day-old fish, gets really bad really fast.

Even Liam Neeson seems bored by the imbecilic, repetitive “Taken 3,” an action movie no one was clamoring for and no one will enjoy.

Summer 2013 has its first bomb, and sadly, it’s landed right on Will Smith.

Goats is just b-a-a-a-aad.

Danish director Lars von Trier makes this tale of one woman’s banal sexual adventures into inadvertent comedy. The film makes an analogy between sex and fly-fishing — and fly-fishing comes off as more intriguing.

Luke Evans, whose higher-profile work includes “Clash of the Titans,” this summer’s “Fast & Furious 6” and the next installments of “The Hobbit,” smolders embarrassingly. But he shouldn’t be embarrassed. In the shadows, that could be anyone.

This unfunny, unoriginal, charmless teen comedy is so stunningly awful from start to finish, it's amazing to think its director has made a single film before, much less a dozen.

From junky production values to the parade of unfunny supporting characters to its lazy energy, Dumb and Dumber To falls on its face.

In the monumentally dull 47 Ronin, Reeves mumbles monosyllabic claptrap between dull action scenes. And it’s a shame: At almost 50 years old, the actor allows this turgid, clanky flick to play to his worst stereotypes.

It’s impossible to find anything that grabs you in Pompeii. This lumpen adventure with a misguided romance buries anything in the disaster-flick genre that might have been a blast.

Isn't prophetic ... just pathetic

The cloddish, confusing action scenes make no sense. Young viewers’ eyes will glaze from the first-person video-game style. Nonaction scenes feature people sniping at each other, or, in Arnett’s case, croaking out the script’s half-assed witticisms, until the Turtles show up.

This poor man’s Norman Bates, though, doesn’t make us wonder what makes him tick; he makes us want to shut our eyes.

Ah, perfect: A banal story to go with intermittently banal porn.

By the end of its way-too-long 98 minutes, there are four things audiences will be haunted by: Jovovich's annoying, whispery monotone; silly closeups of owls; Will Patton's Z-movie turn as a grizzled sheriff, and dialogue like "It's too late to forget what you already know." Ain't that the truth.

Whether one thinks Only God Forgives is laughably awful — like, for instance, “Showgirls,” “The Color of Night” or “Battlefield: Earth” — or just plain terrible awful depends, appropriately, on how much you’re willing to forgive it.

An atrocious mess.

This one isn't original, or even bearable. By its thudding end, audiences may wish they could be zapped from the theater to escape the buzzing in their ears.

Shocking. Horrific. Stunning. The plot twists in Final Girl? No, the fact that the movie itself was even made — and that Abigail Breslin is in it.

Splice is an unholy mess because it fuses together the worst parts of every bad medical-monster thriller, and then boldly cranks up the ridiculous.

The crowd that likes these things will certainly be psyched. Everyone else, not so much.

This ludicrously written, buffoonishly acted, irritatingly filmed sword-and-sandals epic hasn't half the sand, sweat or saltiness of other titles in the genre.

The worst humans-fighting-aliens movie I've ever seen. And I've seen a lot of humans-fighting-aliens movies.

All the men's wives are shrews, prigs or doormats; all the conquests doe-eyed blonds with sucked-in cheeks. All the dialogue is as witty as this exchange: "You're a sick f---!" "No, you're a sick f---!" They're all sick f---s, frankly, and the actors are dreadful while playing them.

No Good Deed is an example of the worst kind of exploitative thriller — and it’s being released during the worst possible week.

The whole thing is such a tedious, foul-mouthed mess that it isn't even worth discussing as a riff on the Bob Dylan doc "Don't Look Back" or a meditation on slovenly semi-madness.

This version of the time machine is more powerful — it’s made me go back and hate the original.

This is the kind of junky, hard-to-watch thriller that apologists claim is part of a long line of tough, grindhouse-style thrillers, but which is actually just amateurish gristle.

Latest, dreadful entry in the vampires-battling-werewolves franchise.