Joshua Rothkopf

As proven by Mary Elizabeth Winstead in Final Destination 3 or the spunky Jessica Rothe in Happy Death Day, these fate-driven, high-concept horror flicks can be redeemed by a committed central performance. Countdown’s Elizabeth Lail, as a nurse who wants to get to the bottom of things, joins their company; she’s got a certain Jennifer Lawrence scrappiness.

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.

The hard fact, though, is that Harlin's instincts - always toward the massive and slo-mo - make him a fairly dunderheaded political analyst.

A new Red Dawn could have been so much more fun had it thrown a properly out-of-bounds tea party. (It lacks the signature brawn of original director John Milius, a guns-first libertarian.)

And then, Robert Duvall appears—or, should I say, insinuates himself out of the muck. Cagily, his character wends his way into the story, played by the one American actor who might best understand the limits of bluster. “It’s foolish to ask for luxuries in times like these,” he mutters in the Duvall twang, the weather and indignity beaten into him, and The Road suddenly feels major.

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

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

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.

Too many digital effects ruin the spell of a tactile world of evil objects scheming your demise. But even a mediocre FD is better than more Jigsaw.

There’s still too much flashback material here about apprentices and evil cops. But if you’ve ever raged at nameless, insensitive service people, you won’t mind seeing them strapped into a rotating turret, the shotgun cocking.

No viewer goes into this movie expecting John Cassavetes's "Husbands," least of all from soft-serve director Denis Dugan (You Don't Mess with the Zohan).

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.

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.

Look, the movie didn't have to cure cancer or anything. But sans the original's redemptive nostalgia or any newfound cleverness, it's just a manic, flop-sweat-drenched mess.

Unintentionally true to its title, The Divide first goes for a similar bleakness (it barely registers as entertainment), then lurches into a rousing, vengeful finale; both sides of the equation add up to less than zero.

Fellini used to get away with such slender crises, but he had Marcello Mastrioanni behind the shades, as well as a more vivid penchant for psychosexual fantasy. Coppola and Swan are stuck in their obsessions with dorky album art and old-man cocktails at Musso & Frank. A precious, arid thing, Glimpse arrives pinned to Styrofoam like a prize arthropod.

The truly mystifying thing about the movie is how desperately it caters to Gen-X junk nostalgia without bothering to think that maybe those Reagan-era kids have grown up a bit.

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

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

While the movie isn't "Witness," you know that comic scenes of target practice are going to make sense around the bend.

Clangorous and nonsensical, the fifth installment of the toys-to-world-saviors franchise still has a spark of grandeur that could only come from one director.

The little action here will disappoint fans; it’s way too choppy.

There's really no focking place for the franchise to go anymore.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

A distinctly shameless and shoddily made family comedy.

A completely charmless, laughs-free experience.

Like a stumpy limb requiring quick cauterization via steam pipe (our first cringe), the Saw series is begging for closure.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Queens-born horror specialist Stevan Mena has mastered the slow camera creep and the unusually artful vista-he even composes his own orchestral scores, good ones. But he needs to give up screenwriting, pronto. Put down the laptop, Stevan.

Unfortunately, Truffaut fell into a pit of awkwardness on the project; editingwise, he's hardly in the league of Hitchcock, his sequences rushing ahead, his ironies too obvious. The Bride Wore Black only makes you yearn for better imitators like Brian De Palma. (Unlikely agreement came from Truffaut himself, ever the film critic, who hated his own movie.)

Shockingly modern and the most politically enlightened (and enlightening) comedy of the 1930s, Leo McCarey's winning quasi-Western is a model of Hollywood broad strokes coalescing into a sophisticated whole.

If you know nothing of the concentrated work of France's Robert Bresson, it's almost a crime to start here - like launching yourself, on the "expert" level, into the most boring, baguette-laden video game ever.

The young actors' vacant-eyed brazenness may be true to life, but there's a whiff of exploitation, matched by the script's disinterest in exploring any friction that isn't skin on skin.

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.