Joe Williams

Minions is product, pure and simple. Little kids will love it, but grown-ups will feel like they’re being held hostage in a Fisher-Price test laboratory.

With stingy portions and plenty of filler, Magic Mike XXL is the worst sausage party ever.

This mash-up movie is like a greatest-hits collection for obsessive collectors. On its own terms, Terminator Genisys makes virtually no sense.

The documentary Live from New York is a separate thing. It doesn’t try to be wild and crazy, and it can’t be comprehensive. Like a land shark, it’s an uncomfortable hybrid that bites off more than it can chew.

The setting and offbeat tone may remind some viewers of another recent comedy, but whereas “The Descendants” was a substantive meal, Aloha is a pu pu platter.

We need to have a dialogue about the wages of war in the remote-control era. But it’s hard to spark a good dialogue with movies whose dialogue is so bad.

Second verse, not as good as the first.

Starved of sufficient comedy or drama, The Age of Adaline is a pipsqueak.

If you don’t crave the taste of motor oil on your popcorn, Furious 7 can’t end fast enough.

Based on an acclaimed novel by Ron Rash, Serena is like a towering tale that’s been fed into a woodchipper.

If you can’t guess that the whole thing ends with a big dance number, you’ve been snoozing in your samosas.

The movie version of Fifty Shades is better than the book. It's still awful, but when a filmmaker starts with stupid source material, he's handcuffed.

Squeezes plenty of color and noise from a thin concept, then runs with it until non-fanatics can’t keep up.

The special effects remain good, but the jokes are creaky, the sentiments are forced and the pop-historical lessons are obligatory.

Whose story is this? There’s an old saying that history is written by the winners. The screenplay for The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies must have been written by elves.

A handsome movie with a handsome leading man. Christian Bale is widely considered the finest actor of his generation. Yet here he’s adrift in the bulrushes. This might be the most indifferent performance of Bale’s career.

Further proof that likable actors have to take an occasional sick day.

There’s a good movie to be made about the alienating effects of modern technology. In 2013, a little-seen indie called “Disconnect,” starring Jason Bateman, came closer than this well-intentioned failure, which has virtually no heart, humor, sense of place or central point of view. In trying to be a big, important movie, Men, Women & Children is about none of the above.

Although the ratio of comedy to drama becomes increasingly weighted toward tearjerking, few of the emotional moments are realistic or effective.

Although The November Man shows us some attractive people in motion, the cumulative effect leaves us neither shaken nor stirred.

The settings and supporting roles suggest that If I Stay started out as someone’s passion project, but the final product only requires its star to sleepwalk through buckets of schlock.

Land Ho! is a tepid little movie that goes almost nowhere, and if I had to sit in that rental car for one more boob joke, I’d rather jump into a volcano.

Because the affable Wahlberg is making the sales pitch, you could kid yourself that this is just a high-tech vacuum cleaner, built to siphon loose change like popcorn. But our failure to understand the terrifying significance of the “Transformers” series is why we're in the age of extinction.

By design it’s monotonous, and with so much clunky hardware, Liman can’t generate the same pace he produced in the “Bourne” movies. Edge of Tomorrow has neither an edge nor a vision of tomorrow that matters today.

’Round these parts, when a movie promises a million laughs but only delivers a dozen chuckles, that’s a hanging offense.

As usual for the comedies he produces, Sandler keeps pooping in the sandbox, and he expects the audience to give him a cookie for it. It’s a shame that he forces Barrymore to get soiled too.

The latest Hollywood version of the Godzilla story is neither fun nor fearsome. It’s an empty spectacle in which the humans are as meaningless as the monster.

Yet if you’re old enough to read this and you find yourself at a screening, try thinking about the munchkins who worked so hard on the psychedelic scenery.