John DeFore

Sans a compelling marriage of danger and eroticism, much of the third-act suspense fails to captivate

The movie's soul, such as it is, remains unimproved, and at 242 minutes, very few of them offering much pleasure, it's nearly unendurable as a single-sitting experience. If it were watched in parts — title cards identify six chapters and an epilogue, and some rumors suggested it would be released as a series — those segments would fail to deliver the shapely balance of energies and pacing that one expects these days from even a merely competent TV show.

It's parental wish-fulfillment that isn't at all interested in what being a kid actually feels like.

Tim Story's Tom & Jerry is five to ten minutes of action that might have worked in one of the cartoon duo's shorts, surrounded by an inordinate amount of unimaginative, unfunny human-based conflict.

A deeply disappointing follow-up to her promising 2015 short Kiss Kiss Fingerbang, Gillian Wallace Horvat's I Blame Society is a first feature that points out many of its faults as it goes, as if to transmute them into satirical jabs at an uncertain object.

Monotonous, unimaginative actioner.

Design values and Conrad W. Hall's photography are as flatly unimaginative as the rest of the film, which, in its avoidance of distinguishing features, would make a better candidate for witness-relocation anonymity than Margot does.

Emperor has difficulty mustering a seriousness to match its subject.

Several people get wrongly accused of being responsible for somebody's death — there's as much undeserved guilt floating around in this picture as in a Fundamentalist kid's puberty years — and all three of our aforementioned protagonists find they have family issues that need working out. All are broadly drawn and unconvincing, like everything else in this pandering supernatural romance.

Numbingly dumb and impersonally executed, you'd call it derivative if only it managed to steal anything worth using from the many movies it apes.

A dispiriting film that has languished on the shelf since 2014, it stars Dakota Fanning but is likely being released now with the hope that small appearances by Evan Rachel Wood and Zoe Kravitz will add commercial appeal. Fans of the latter thesps will likely feel cheated.

A poorly imagined crime flick that comes nowhere near justifying its 2.5-hour running time.

Even with locked-down consumers scraping the bottom of the Netflix content trough, this new addition to the lineup is pretty dreary.

Less outrageous or provocative than puzzling, it will appeal to a very specific sort of irony-hungry moviegoer and leave most others shrugging.

Making a film that feels two days long is not the same thing as making 48 Hrs.

If this were the feature-length pilot episode for some cheap reboot on a streaming service — which is what it feels like — a generous viewer might half-heartedly agree to tune in next week and see if things get more interesting. But on the big screen? A sequel would be less welcome than a new episode of, say, Charlie's Angels. Or Starsky & Hutch.

Nearly devoid of scares for the casual horror consumer, it will likely elicit a respectful dismissal from genre connoisseurs: "We get what you're trying to do," they might gently say to the filmmakers. "It didn't work."

Initially a sluggish stalker flick whose undergraduate moral debates are tiresome instead of provocative, it eventually transforms into a patriarchy metaphor as obvious as, well, all those Greek-lettered paddles that decorate both the frat's and the sorority's clubhouses.

You might think that director Michael Bay is angling to make his star, Ryan Reynolds, the Tom Cruise of a dumber, car-crashier version of the Mission: Impossible films. But what his new 6 Underground actually feels like is the over-serious pilot episode of a gimmick-d

Drowns in its own preciousness.

Nearly everything misfires here — bizarrely so, since we can see where the laughs should come, how they would work, and how a more competent movie would get from A to Z. (To be fair, some jokes do land, just not as satisfyingly as you'd hope.)

A movie so bland and forgettable it hardly merits a groan from the Frankenstein-like butler called Lurch, The Addams Family strongly suggests that directors Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon deserve little credit for 2016's Sausage Party, the hit they directed for writers/producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg.

While Travolta may believe he's seriously engaging with the character, following thesps like Dustin Hoffman and Sean Penn into the always-dicey enterprise of mimicking disability, his performance is all shtick and no heart.

Neither funny, insightful nor moving, it's mostly objectionable for its failure to exploit the facets of Coogan's screen persona that line up so neatly with the smug blatherers who dominate the AM dial.

As jumbled as all this is, the film never achieves the kind of sweaty intensity of the original.

Excitement is hard to find in Joo-hwan Kim's The Divine Fury, a leaden good-vs-evil tale that takes issues of faith very, very seriously but fails to make K.O.-ing the Devil look the least bit fun.

A surfeit of bad-ass mystery-man posturing and dearth of either convincing emotion or visceral kicks makes this pastiche unmoving, an assemblage of tropes few will enjoy wading through.

Given the utter incoherence of the main characters' comings and goings, the pic's main point of interest is its documentation of Burning Man's many oversized art projects.

The kind of bad movie that makes you wonder, "How did so many good actors decide to take this job?," this one comes with an easy answer: First-time director Greg Kinnear presumably used a career's worth of goodwill to enlist co-stars Emily Mortimer, Luke Wilson and others.

The thrill is long gone in Anna, a lifeless and instantly forgettable spy flick whose lead, Sasha Luss, shows zero promise as a movie star.

Back to the Fatherland is too shallow to do justice to its psychological quest.

A tale as generic, and as dull, as its title.

Standup star Jim Gaffigan, who mines domesticity for laughs so successfully onstage, would seem an ideal choice for a man with twice the responsibilities and one big secret to hide. But Bailey and Lakin give him next to nothing to work with, and the result flops where it should crackle.

Chauncey Page (Jason Woods) is no Michael Myers, and this Homecoming killing spree is far from "Halloween" in almost every respect. Notable only for a cast consisting solely of people of color (and for the involvement of RZA), the pic fails to deliver what its title promises.

It's just lousy. Bloated, vastly less funny than it aims to be and misguided in key design choices even when it scores with less important decisions, the film does make bold choices that might've paid off under other circumstances. But these aren't those circumstances.

A nearly one-note comedy.

A by-the-book script and stiff direction fail to milk any suspense from this scenario, and in the absence of thrills, the picture's heavy focus on the long-lasting impact of trauma is suffocating.

Veteran comic actors make the most of the not very original (though well-timed) one-liners the script gives them. But the movie's last act drags almost as slowly for viewers as for the gang in the cave, and the story's resolution is no better.

This Bannon is a snooze, occasionally making a wry aside but nearly never saying anything unusually smart or new. ... It's hard to see what ordinary viewers at any point on the political spectrum will gain from this particular status report.

In a genre populated by an unusually high percentage of nearly unwatchable movies — the surprise-paternity comedy — John Asher's I Hate Kids comes as something of a surprise. Not because it's any good (no, no, no), but because of the number of talented people who, presumably having read the witless script, agreed to appear in it.

Passion is spoken of and clumsily envisioned in The Aspern Papers, but not a drop of it is felt.

Scurfield's directing debut is marred by all manner of clunkiness, from the embarrassing performance of Kellan Lutz (playing Lansky's chip-on-shoulder nephew, who winds up Aronoff's nemesis) to the tissue-thin montages that try to sell us on Aronoff's second career as a racer and maker of speedboats.

The screenplay suffers from a severe imagination deficit, as if this twisted take on "meet cute" should be enough by itself to hang a movie on. It isn't.

The film mostly tests viewers' ability to stay awake — and the one or two actual creepy moments it has up its sleeve come far, far too late to be potent.

It's a derivative bore, all popped collars, douchey bros and hand-me-down psychology, that gets its characters up to their necks in borrowed money just long enough to have it really hurt when the accounts run dry.

Beyond the obvious complaints about objectification of women, this second feature from the Canadian who calls himself Director X is just a bore.

This derivative B movie is sure to disappoint fans of prior JCVD/Lundgren outings — which are an awfully low bar to hurdle.

The doc is so eager to tell you who's visited the hotel and eaten at the restaurant (JFK allegedly trysted here, which didn't keep his widow from enjoying the Cobb salad) that it shares very little about the hotel's origins and operations.

Vaughn Stein's Terminal blends tropes from several sorts of crime flicks into a soundstagey affair that's more brittle than hard-boiled.

The action doesn't start until an hour into the picture, and is as unimaginative as everything that has preceded it.

It is full of the signifiers of musical devotion but lacks the hummably acerbic insight of the best music it namechecks.

The cast does what it can with this thin material, but even at its best, 4/20 Massacre is duller than exploitation cinema has any right to be.

The picture sometimes briefly achieves that rare feat, of being so terrible it entertains. Sometimes it's genuinely offensive as well. Unfortunately, enough dull stretches interrupt the action that only the most hard-core cinematic dumpster-divers will care.

Miracle is godawful, even by the standards of sports dramas, where healthy doses of manipulation and hagiography are accepted as part of the inspirational formula.

The solution to Kyle's problems is as predictable as everything else in this cookie-cutter picture, which is only made tolerable by the surprisingly solid cast Speer has attracted.

Eli Roth and screenwriter Joe Carnahan could have done the same thing, manifesting the rages and fears that afflict the country we live in right now. Instead they offer a cheap and dishonest Death Wish that (references to social media notwithstanding) is interchangeable with get-tough knockoffs that have flooded cinemas for decades.

Though competent in technical aspects, the pic's third-hand script and uninspired direction make it hard to invest in the heavy weight each character carries around with him.

A trainwreck of a sci-fi flick bent on extending a franchise that should have died a peaceful death almost exactly one decade ago.

The movie soon devolves into an extremely familiar escape-the-monsters affair, with all the compounding dumbness usually involved when our fleeing heroes are forced to keep filming the action.

The mob-war stuff here could not possibly be more rote.

The finished product, though plenty embarrassing, isn't quite involving enough to merit the kind of pile-on mockery that greeted Ayer's DC Comics abomination Suicide Squad.

Soul of Success does little to capture the eureka moments Canfield evidently produces for his followers. Maybe the doc is worried about giving the goods away for free.

Things get tedious as the filmmakers reach the end of their money and have to pack it all up without getting any celebrities on their record other than Glee's Naya Rivera.

It's odd, for a film that ostensibly makes male vulnerability its ultimate goal, how much contempt it has for its most open and loving character.

Big, dumb, and boring, it finds the cowriter of Independence Day hoping to start a directing career with the same playbook — but forgetting several rules of the game.

In the end, the scariest thing about Boo 2! is the idea that A Madea Easter might be next.

Instead of improving on the original's visualization of the liminal state between life and death, director Niels Arden Oplev turns the conceit into just another excuse for rote haunting, making this Flatliners often indistinguishable from its 2017 thriller peers.

A giant thud of a film that makes one doubt the fact that West ever directed a proper Hollywood movie.

More of a challenge to the eyes and ears than most pics of its ilk, it invests slightly more in its characters than usual, but not enough to make us care if they live or die.

It intends to introduce novelty to its overfamiliar setup, but uneven casting and a very thin script get in the way.

Its central conceit is so nonsensical that even devoted horror buffs may balk.

Dead air left in conversations may be meant to unnerve viewers, but is more likely to bore them.

If there was a shred of life in the movie's performances (Snipes is joined in his phone-it-in appearance by Anne Heche and the obligatory pro wrestler Seth Rollins), or in Stockwell's direction, some in the audience might actually make that rarely true claim, "This is so bad it's good." They'd probably still be wrong.

If not always imaginative or digestible, the look of the settings and characters should keep kids awake for 86 minutes; and if the trick that eventually saves the day makes very little sense to critical moviegoers, at least it's cutely frantic eye candy.

A loathsome redemption tale that rings false on every front except when depicting capitalistic assholery (and sometimes fails to convince us even then), Williams' directing debut The Headhunter's Calling (from a script by former corporate headhunter Bill Dubuque) not only expects us to root for its unlovable protagonist, but expects us to do so when that man is played by Gerard Butler.

Very funny people are running around onscreen doing very unfunny things.

As generic paranormal mysteries go, this is an awfully dull one, filled with dead air and stiff direction.

A cross-cultural buddy-cop flick so bottom-of-the-barrel it would've been hooted off screens even when such things were in commercial demand.

Van Cotthem's performance is wholly convincing, which might not be something to brag about, and the film flatlines right along with him.

Leonard and Foley offer enough semi-naked sex scenes here to prove that quantity is no substitute for chemistry.

Amateurish on many levels and at some point seeming to have been made up on the spot (which would be quite a feat for animation), the collaboration between directors Thorbjorn Christoffersen and Stefan Fjeldmark is a strong contender for the year's worst film, and not in a fun way.

A deeply unpromising debut horror flick by visual-effects veteran Robert Legato.

Several respectable actors offer dicey performances here, but Rappaport's screenplay is the real villain, expecting thin references to real-world financial peril to paper over gaping holes in credibility and plain-old drama.

A very hard-to-believe premise sinks an overserious drama.

Producers may have envisioned a Die Hard-like cat-and-mouse game between their protagonists and the heavily armed goon squad. But even using the more appropriate Olympus Has Fallen as a benchmark, Kill Ratio is a snooze.

It's one of the worst performances Cage has given — and perversely, since he's playing a madman, it contains none of the unabashed weirdness that has made some bad Cage performances guilty pleasures.

[An] empty ponderousness suffocating the film.

Many Christians yearning for faith-based entertainment will be moved by this film, and that crowd may well ensure a profit for the production. But more picky viewers will admit that even taken solely as an exploration of the trials of being a Christian teen, it's awfully weak tea as a movie, instantly disposable if not for the tragic backdrop.

One of those not-rare-enough limp comedies that leaves viewers wondering who managed to round up so much underexploited talent.

The film is as shapeless as a real life — amusing in an extremely mild way on occasion, but no more goal-oriented than a protagonist who, time and again, shows that all he really cares about is getting high and tossing a ball around.

Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV is so lacking in human interest, or even in merely satisfying action, it is difficult to imagine anyone wanting to pay to sit through it. What Takeshi Nozue's movie does offer is massive, vividly rendered landscapes of sci-fi/fantasy pastiche, home to mayhem that is prettier than it is involving.

Irving and screenwriter Peter Warren find it surprisingly hard to milk the charms of performers like Amy Sedaris and Justin Long for laughs.

This is a family movie about cats? Please, somebody tell the three separate teams of screenwriters credited with penning this thing.

Laughs do not exactly pour forth from this dreary and frequently insulting picture.

There's not a scary moment in the movie, and its characters are neither likable enough to root for nor so repulsive we eagerly await their deaths.

Jonas is, it should be said, the most likeable thing about this watered-down noir.

Amid the rarely very creepy buildup to the Amityville-ish showdown to come, the screenplay piles on more unrelated domestic drama than the picture can take.

What it all adds up to is either laughably baffling or just plain laughable, depending on how much attention one has paid.