Keith Uhlich

Every serious narrative beat in the film is ultimately undercut by pro-forma storytelling, or by faux-improvised humor.

Steven Soderbergh takes a macro approach to the scandal, though the results, with rare exception, are vexingly micro.

The film is one that might have been dreamed up by one of the cynical douche bros from the Hangover during a blacked-out stupor.

For all of the film’s attempts to get back to the sinisterly sidling Michael of the first Halloween, his stealth movements no longer terrify because his fixations are less unthinkingly instinctual, more compulsively mortal.

It's never fun watching a comedian's shrewdness ossify into shtick. Yet whatever incisiveness Ricky Gervais once had (and he had plenty, if The Office and Extras are any indication) is barely evident in the new Netflix-released satire Special Correspondents

What spark there is in the movie comes in the scenes when Vivian and Nana are getting to know each other. Both actresses have a sweet chemistry and strong screen presences that you wish were better utilized.

There's barely a scene in IO that's performed with pulse or verve. It's Sad-Face Emoji Sci-Fi, with po-faced references to Greek mythology, Chopin and T.S. Eliot, among others, and empirical techno-jargon spoken at a Valley Girl level of credibility.

No one emerges especially worse for wear because the entire production is wholly apathetic to everything from a compelling story to sharp comic timing.

Tennant is awful, by which I mean wonderful, by which I mean truly terrible, yet in a legitimately magnificent way…I think. This is a you-can’t-kill-THAT-performance! par excellence, beginning at peak nutball and staying breathlessly atop the trash heap.

If there are any dadaist cinephiles out there, perhaps they can reclaim Second Act as a multilayered masterpiece of illogic. Certainly the film seems destined to survive all future nuclear winters, enduring as a time capsule of humanity at its most pitiably pedestrian.

Sutton is aiming to make a grand statement about America's downtrodden, and he never lets you forget it.

Godzilla and Kong’s brawls have the ennui-inducing feel of a child arbitrarily smashing action figures together.

Noah Hawley treats his protagonist’s story as a somber tragedy that at times stoops to trashiness.

[Chazelle’s] torturously glib cynicism is quite the attitude around which to build an epic boondoggle of this sort. Equally as heinous is the 11th-hour optimism that he then attempts to tack onto Babylon via a jaw-droppingly wrongheaded climactic montage.

What played as rousingly dumb fun in "Independence Day" (1996) — all those pie-eyed nationalistic monologues, and U.S. landmarks reduced to rubble — now come off as callously insensitive, even with tongue firmly in cheek.

This moronically unfunny gangster comedy fluctuates wildly between the lowest-of-low humor and pity-the-aged-man pathos, and offers further evidence that the best days are behind its iconic cast members.

As is, this semi-improvised feature comes off as a willfully vague exercise that, like its dimwit protagonist, presumes that profundity and enlightenment will emerge from the morass eventually. Er, maybe - or maybe not. Kinda like "Signs;" only much, much worse.

Berger’s script is little more than a series of contrived comic vignettes that prevent the actors from creating believable characters, forcing them to contort to fit the low-rent farce.

For the most part, The Forgotten Space treats its subjects and settings as exploitable commodities in service to a lot of facile rise-working-man! muckraking. The ism trumps all.

The uniformly awful performances seem beamed in from Planet Ed Wood, while the script is filled with mock-macho zingers (“If I wanted to hear from an a**hole, I’d rip you a new one!”) that would give former Governor Schwarzenegger pause.

This frenetic horror-comedy from "Bubba Ho Tep's" Don Coscarelli is of the make-it-up-as-you-go-along school of storytelling.

The whole sorry enterprise leaves you feeling, well, shafted.

Christopher Isherwood’s seminal queer novel deserves a film adaptation that captures both its sense of place and its activist spirit. Cowriter-director Tom Ford settles for the glossy ephemera of a Vanity Fair cover spread.

Only Gaby Hoffmann makes a lasting impression, as the thick-skinned pariah of the bunch. Somehow she’s able to give the ring of truth to even the hoariest of Hennelly and cowriter Sarah Adina Smith’s conceits (notably a rally-the-troops speech cribbed from founding father George Washington). The rest makes you long for Armageddon.

No stranger to one-joke premises, writer-director Tommy Wirkola (of 2009's Nazi-zombie "classic" "Dead Snow") populates this frenzied horror-satire with tons of incoherently staged bloodletting and f-bomb–accentuated kiss-off lines. It's a grim fairy tale, all right.

By the time The Son of No One reaches its wanna-be-tragic finale, you'd like nothing more than to kick this bastard child to the curb.

Im could care less about these people as characters, presenting them as either obscenely hot or repellently decaying bundles of flesh.

The funny thing about all these sub-"Matrix" shenanigans is that they’re genuinely meant to stoke thought and reflection. Frankly, though, few movies have left me feeling as shorn of gray matter.