John DeFore

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Emperor has difficulty mustering a seriousness to match its subject.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

This film neither really embraces the mechanics of primitive cinema nor creates a coherent syntax of its own.

Sometimes, deadpan observation of the mundane isn't Jarmuschian. Sometimes it's just dull.

Viewers who’ve never seen a Dobrik video and have only cursory (if any) knowledge of the allegations that briefly interrupted his career will come away feeling they understand the buoyant, boyish 25 year-old’s appeal — but they may be frustrated by the film’s less-than-probing look at behavior that should have caused him much more trouble than he endured.

A nearly one-note comedy.

Battles are sickeningly brutal, and viewers who have no ethical problem with that may object to their sheer lack of imagination.

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.

In the end one would rather be back at one's own computer, tending to the tedious details of digital life, than watching this clique get pinged to death.

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

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

Managing to make the lore of snuff films not just repulsive but mind-numbingly dull, the horror film Gut offers two characters -- and, one imagines, a filmmaker -- who should have put splatter films behind them many years ago.

As puerile and go-nowhere as the script is, Clement and Berry are more successful than their costars at making the dialogue their own. Clement even gets a laugh or two. But be assured that the pic's big reveal is not worth the wait.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

A few bright moments aside, these annoying characters don't grow on us anywhere near as much as the filmmakers expect them to, and the shoestring-budget FX work, which would be more than good enough in a film buoyed by some wit, just underlines the movie's pedestrian qualities.

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

The film becomes a hodgepodge that will enlighten few viewers.

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.

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."

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.

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

[An] empty ponderousness suffocating the film.

Monotonous, unimaginative actioner.

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

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

A no-budget "Alien" ripoff with little reason to exist beyond the few creature-effects shots its design team now can add to its reel, Roger Christian's Stranded might leave viewers yearning for the director's "Battlefield Earth" -- a film that, terrible though it was, at least couldn't be accused of a lack of ambition.

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

When the gags a movie is most confident in — the ones it uses three or four times, as if they were sure things — involve pushing unsuspecting pedestrians into a bush or riffing on "Bond, James Bond," something's wrong in the yuk factory.

A seemingly well-intentioned but deeply flawed film about dementia that becomes as erratic and misguided as its protagonist, Sharon Greytak's Archaeology of a Woman does no favors to those afflicted with cognitive disease or those hoping to understand them.

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

The movie only wakes up when Hart and/or Arkin are on screen (preferably together).

Where Attenborough's script lent an air of dignity to the shorter film, Allen's reading of Philip LaZebnik's cutesy narration has a canned feel, and is unlikely to connect with viewers too young to appreciate cliched humor about the joys of bachelorhood versus the duties of parenting.

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.

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.

A case study in how storytelling contrivances can sabotage a courageously vulnerable performance, the movie addresses American parents’ deepest fears but is just one or two steps away from inviting ritualized communal mockery, à la The Room, at midnight screenings.

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

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.

Small-screen comic talent is all over Fresno, with key players from series including Parks & Rec, Arrested Development and Portlandia teaming up for a tale of two sisters stuck with a hard-to-dispose-of dead body. The feature, sadly, exhibits none of the smarts or agility that fuel those series.

Art fans might reasonably expect one of the world's most successful painters to display a distinctive or at least appealing visual sense here, but they will be disappointed by Yasutaka Nagano's pedestrian photography; the film fares even worse in terms of storytelling and pacing.

Rather than engage in slow-build horror, Pascal Trottier's screenplay flips the switch into Poultergeisty chaos.

A rote captivity drama with aspirations of sociopolitical relevance, As Good as Dead has nothing to say about torture or racism and little excitement to offer as compensation.

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

A barrage of unbelievable stereotypes try to kill each other in Barry Battles's dispiriting exploitation flick.

A grindhouse slasher picture that swings from dull to ridiculous without finding any pulpy pleasure in between.

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 disregard for the rules established by George Romero (or the alternatives imagined by Danny Boyle) is far from the only problem with Christopher Landon's film, which does prove one thing fairly handily: Even beings deprived of the intellect and spirit granted to living humans can team up to produce a major studio motion picture.

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

A rom-com whose agreeable individual elements aren't enough to sell the witless contrivance around which they revolve.

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.

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 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.

The whole thing reeks of fiction being used to process missteps in its makers' own lives. This story isn't nearly ready to leave the shrink's couch.

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.

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

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 film as soul-sucking as any of the fang-baring bores who populate it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Speed-Dating seems designed to exploit the black indie theatrical circuit but hardly merits even a DVD release.

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.

Every word of the story may be true, and if it happened to someone you knew, you'd be captivated. In Jamesy Boy, though, it's hard to see why we should care.

This Lifetime-grade pic is bad enough to have no impact, a vanity project whose ostensible story -- a grieving dad fights bureaucracy to build a children's hospital honoring his dead daughter -- is one of the least dramatic things put on screen in recent years.

A wrong place/wrong time actioner stupid enough to damage the art-house credibility of actor Paul Walker.

The dark fantasy manages to be grindingly dull despite its many quirks.

A flop-sweaty cash grab that gives a bad name to sequels in which key talent has jumped ship... Viewers who expected nothing from the first but were pleasantly surprised will get burned badly here.

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.

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.

With a frost-bitten script whose skeletal plot cuts and pastes bits from innumerable other survival yarns, the biggest surprise the film offers is that four people were required to write it.

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

In terms of real horror, nevermind sexual-politics provocation, "Grave" can neither re-create its predecessor's impact nor compete with stranger new beasts like Lars von Trier's "Antichrist."

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.

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.

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

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