Joshua Rothkopf

A remake could have been fun if it had been made with vision, or at least an appreciation of the original. If that's grade-A beef, call this one a rancid veggie burger.

Mostly, though, as TV newscasters inform us, civilization has taken a serious nosedive — definitely the case when a well-financed Emmerich disaster flick can't even get its dumb-fun groove on.

None of the care that Stallone imparted to his recent Rocky reboots—Creed and Creed II (both of which were produced by him)—is in evidence; it’s as if he were admitting that the Rambo movies were always trash. He may not be the best custodian of his own legacy. Graying, splotchy and barely intelligible, Stallone turns in a self-negating performance, just as ugly on the inside.

Seriously missing the memo in a cringe-inducing way, The Hustle takes a perfectly fine premise from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels—two predatory men get played by a savvier woman—and obliterates it by swapping genders and ultimately selling out its feminist credibility.

There’s a way to make this kind of trashy noir work beautifully—was Wild Things director John McNaughton somehow not available?—but Serenity is too blandly generic to stick its snout in the muck and luxuriate, barring the occasional jail-baity line of dialogue from Hathaway (“You said I was finally old enough,” Karen whispers, reminiscing).

A completely charmless, laughs-free experience.

Stuffed with lifeless gags, this cringeworthy puppet provocation is too pleased with its own naughtiness.

Their movie is a tedious slog filled with pinging bullets, show-offy long takes ripped out of the Children of Men playbook and zero humor.

If you like sexy vampires or ferocious werewolves, you can do much better than this exhausted, computerized sequel.

Mottola has made some brilliantly idiosyncratic pictures: Superbad, Adventureland, The Daytrippers. But as Joneses’s director for hire, he’s allowed zero personality.

The Dark Knight director has had a mortifying effect on movies. In this case, it’s almost as if Affleck’s somber plunge into the calamitous, Nolan-produced "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" has followed him into other projects, like a heavy cologne. Avoid this one like the stink it is.

A ridiculously infantile film, one that flatters itself by intimating a deeper comment about suppressed masculinity or romantic passivity.

No Escape takes pains to pause for some unconvincing speechifying about Western meddling abroad, but its showbiz racism gets an infuriating pass.

After several tedious jump scares and boneheaded escape plans, a bag over your head won't seem like such a bad idea. Or the noose.

The Equalizer is a stone-dumb movie.

From "Police Academy" to "Hot Fuzz," there are satires to be made about undisciplined law enforcement; this will not join their ranks, try as it might.

There’s not enough villainy—nor lip-smacking comeuppance—to justify a smiting by ash or falling column. The movie in your head melts ten times better.

Since this marks the directorial debut of Hollywood hack Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind), there’s a heavy foot applied to the era-skipping leaps made by source novelist Mark Helprin.

If mean-spirited snarksters had set out to trash the reputation of "Juno" screenwriter Diablo Cody, they couldn’t have done a more vicious job than the Oscar winner herself does with her directorial debut.

Where, exactly, is Dario Argento? He’s up there in the title, but none of the horror maestro’s former genius (Suspiria) is evident in this silly, Stoker-by-numbers slog, rife with cheesy digital blood spurts but not a single moment of deep-red gorgeousness.

Technically cruddy and tiresome in its we’ve-seen-a-lot-of-movies dialogue.

She (Lohan) isn’t the best thing about this awful, lounged-out drama — it has no best thing — but in her defense, Lohan has been atrociously directed, allowed to get away with the worst aspects of her vocal-fry laziness, and trotted out like a symbolic objet d’art.

Tired byplay between Reynolds’s mystified straight man and Bridges’s supernatural old pro will kill off any fond memories you have of zesty buddy films past and present.

All the solemnity is deadly: Not one of these superhuman gang members registers in memory, and you feel stiffed on gory giggles. Talk about having your chain yanked.

Smitten to a fault with high-art predecessors, Eric Atlan’s excruciatingly bad drama takes place in an abstract Buñuelian hotel room, glows luminously like Last Year at Marienbad and concludes with a Bergmanesque card game on which the fate of souls rests.

Waiting for Inescapable to finally reach its unearned, sentimental conclusion is a tiresome experience, but seeing Tomei submit to its badness is several measures worse.

The smidgen of dramatic color offered by Jennifer Lopez, as a divorced real-estate broker drawn into Parker's payback scheme, is offset by her character's shocking naïveté, shedding her clothes on command (as if she still couldn't hide a wire somewhere) and falling unconvincingly for Statham's featureless cipher.

As sick-making sketch comedies go, this stupefyingly bad one-somehow rife with A-list talent-must rank near the very bottom.

Time to fire up the critical Black & Decker: Somebody-there are six credited screenwriters-really wasn't clear on the concept.

Unlike a truly daring movie like Lars von Trier's "The Idiots" - about a gang of clever jerks who pretend to be mentally retarded - The Comedy never musters an articulate indictment, nor does it have much to say on the subject of free-floating fatigue.

Let your mind wander during this painfully generic teen-sex dramedy (trust us, it will), and there might be emotions worse than frustration in store.

Never do you sense an overriding intelligence; Cortés once found laughs and shocks within the coffin-confined Buried, but here's he's got too much room to wander into realms of the ridiculous.

A last-minute twist implicating the audience in the bloodlust isn't clever so much as hypocritical.

From the auteur of "Torque" (2004) comes this instant headache: a panicky snark-schlock horror-comedy that reduces everything to a hyperactive squall of white noise.

Charmless and histrionic, this mean-spirited movie takes place in the toyscape of McG (Charlie's Angels), a monomonikered director who makes Michael Bay seem thoughtful.

An excruciatingly awkward stab at generational sympathy, I Melt with You presents a quartet of thickening college buddies gathering at a Big Sur rental house to mourn their lost ambition.

Dropping on top of the heap is Lucky McKee's barely competent domestic thriller, bound to make you groan more than think.

The question remains: Exploitative films are a dime a dozen, but how low will two-faced art-film distributor IFC go?

Lacking a single serious scare or sly idea, the movie dies in ways that merely mediocre horror films can't even dream of.

Puiu offers zero insight into his character; only suckers will find the pose artful or nourishing. Skip it.

You can take the phoenix-rising actor out of straight-to-video trash, but-well, you know the rest of it.

The whole movie aches from tired blood.

Skip this one, even if your hipster significant other whines a blue streak.

Hollywood's hocus-pocus machine has turned out swill like this before, but even ultra-observant Catholics will find their interest waning. Hammy acting should make nonbelievers of the rest.

Yogi Bear on the big screen feels not just needless, but wasteful.

A tiresome mess that's completely bereft of a quiet moment in speech or manner, The Tempest aches for the wisdom of discipline.

Russian-born schlockmeister Andrei Konchalovsky has flirted with the good kind of bad in the past (Tango & Cash), but here, he's finally made his disaster-piece. Unclean.

So bland it's easy to forget the title only minutes after exiting, this Emmerich-by-numbers invasion movie exists only to offer you the cutting edge in unconvincing special effects.

A distinctly shameless and shoddily made family comedy.

Watching people play a board game ain’t ever going to be scary, and that’s essentially what we have here.

Excruciatingly stupid movie.

Even on its own limited terms, the jokes are sub–"Friday" sequel, and a last-act grab for "Boyz n the Hood" pathos is seriously reaching.

The new movie is a joke, a toxic cocktail of banal psychobabble, laughably arty slo-mo flourishes and unmotivated sexual violence that only brain-in-jar types could take as a serious statement.

This sex thriller is trapped in a tepid zone between quality trash and pretentious psychodrama.

Harsh-voiced Sarah Butler lends zero personality to her avenging antiheroine, and the retributive torture sequences approach "Saw" levels of unlikelihood.

The only aspects marking The Back-Up Plan as modern (not fresh) are its skanky wallowings in hormonal urges and an equally sour penchant for potshots at the target audience: women who want to be mothers.

Keep your coin far away from this toxic fountain of crap.