John DeFore

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

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

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

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

The silliness of the conceit is far from the biggest problem in a picture that has no clue what to do with the wealth of talent in front of the camera.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A nearly one-note comedy.

Though on paper the idea has some potential -- as a historical meditation on the suffering of East Berliners and the arbitrary nature of borders -- its execution stumbles on multiple fronts.

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.

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

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.

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

Deeply unpleasant to watch with little edification to offer in compensation.

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

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.)

[An] empty ponderousness suffocating the film.

Drowns in its own preciousness.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Lincoln's script has no knack for the pacing of cinematic exorcisms, and the truncated climax he does offer is short on action and scares.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Even fans who've stuck with Smith for two decades may draw the line at this outing, which offers ingredients just as inexplicable as those in Tusk (it's a sort of spinoff of that film) without the captivating weirdness that sometimes brought that midnighter to life.

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.

Emperor has difficulty mustering a seriousness to match its subject.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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 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.

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.

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

Ralph Ziman's Kite repackages an assortment of genre tropes into an instantly forgettable Luc Besson-aping slog that would be unneeded even if Besson hadn't just returned to big action flicks himself.

This earnest but painfully clunky film, though professional in tech respects and seemingly well financed, plays like the work of an ambitious high school history student.

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.

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

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

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

Throughout, gags are cartoonishly broad and afforded so little time for setup and delivery we seem to be watching less a story than a catalog of tossed-out material.

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.

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

The story makes 94 minutes seem as long as a season of Lost and as fresh as the seventh viewing of a Gilligan's Island rerun.

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.

Offering a silly conceit that requires either finesse on screen or a cast whose magnetism overrides disbelief, Mind has neither.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Getaway seems built for non-English speaking territories in which dialogue is as disposable as Bulgarian police cars. If only those audiences were as dumb as the action itself.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Monotonous, unimaginative actioner.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Amateurish vampire/musical mashup begs for a wooden stake.

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.

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.

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.

When a slasher pic can't exploit a woodchipper for more sadistic thrills than we get here, it shouldn't expect moviegoers to salivate for a sequel.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.