Keith Uhlich

There's a shakiness in how Hormann utilizes the fact that Aynur's murder is a foregone conclusion. It's as if the director is delaying gut-wrenching emotion as opposed to letting it emerge organically from the stylistic severity.

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

It would be risible if Ozon’s hand didn’t remain so steady and confident throughout, all the way up to a complicatedly upbeat conclusion that recreates the Christian Annunciation with the straightest of faces.

One's heart sinks the moment the trio is picked up by Prince Caspian (Barnes) and deposited on his ship, the Dawn Treader. Suddenly we're in green-screen land, where everything looks cheap, heavily digital and unfortunately postconverted to 3-D-hardly a fantastical otherworld.

Hurt tries on an English accent as if he were in the Walmart changing room and a splendid-in-theory supporting cast - Simon Callow, Joanna Lumley, Arta Dobroshi - either ham it up or make moony eyes. Extra discredit to the embarrassingly jaunty score by Sodi Marciszewer, which should be taken behind the recording studio and shot.

Winterbottom’s inability to bring off this lurid stew of sex and violence is one problem; his (mis)direction of Affleck is another.

None of the hilarity is enough to keep Wanderlust from feeling like a late-night comedy-show sketch stretched to feature length. But why look a giggle-prone gift horse in the mouth?

For a few brief moments, the film becomes something close to Greek mythology, as opposed to graphic-novel imitator. What a feeling!

Zack Snyder's films have some of the best opening-credits sequences in cinema; the unfortunate thing is that there's always a movie after them.

This handsomely made spook story (love those echo-prone hallways!) becomes less involving the more the narrative's mysteries are solved. By the time all the tarot cards are on the table, it's likely that you too will feel conned.

Niccol's attempts at satire are toothless.

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.

Thompson's imagination-she's also the screenwriter-knows no bounds, and she does a brilliant job of connecting the fantastical elements to the sobering realities of life during wartime.

This iron lady of cinema deserves better.

A Euro gloss on "Pretty Woman" suddenly turns into "Occupy Gaul."

As billion-dollar Hollywood franchises go, this is one of the drawn-out dumbest. The stake through the heart comes not a moment too soon.

Chu does his best to humanize his subject, showing him surrounded by devoted friends and family, and wringing much drama from an on-the-road vocal-cord strain.

Don't go in expecting scares so much as laughs. Scream 4 is a better "Scary Movie" than any of the "Scary Movies" ever were, from its inventively gut-busting kills (watch out for that mail slot!) to the unintentionally humorous sight of the three leads acting as if they're in three separate films.

Clooney occasionally shows a surer hand: He gets great work from Downton Abbey’s Bonneville — notably in an emotionally charged scene revolving around Michelangelo’s Madonna of Bruges — and has a fine monologue himself, in which Stokes dresses down a high-ranking German commander (a moving encapsulation of the American spirit at its best).

What really makes Rudderless a full-blown affront is a late-breaking narrative revelation (no spoilers here) that’s meant to add resonant emotional depth, but instead comes off as jaw-droppingly repugnant. That’s appropriate, though, for a movie with no sense of direction.

Good actors like Vera Farmiga and Brendan Gleeson show up to bust balls and bark expository dialogue with check-in-the-bank-yet? proficiency. Add in a couple of dully pro forma narrative twists to keep you awake in between shots of distractingly exotic South African scenery, and you've got a first-quarter Hollywood release par excellence. Meaning not.

As with many young-adult book-to-film series, Beautiful Creatures plays like an illustrated compendium of scenes from the novel, as opposed to a finely tuned narrative all its own.

Notwithstanding Brown's occasional half-baked critical comment about the sport's corporatization, the film ends up as a cliquish circle jerk that flatters those in the know and leaves neophytes little to mull over.

The badly miscalculated meat of the film is an endless parade of to-camera addresses by performers such as Lindsay Lohan, Viola Davis and Uma Thurman, all reading clumsily from Monroe's recently discovered letters and journal entries as if it were final-exam time at the Actors Studio.

A better movie would have explored Foster's way-of-the-future objectives with more beyond-the-hype insight and less Zen-master bullshit.

The effort is commendable and the complicated emotions of the piece (for a place and a people) come through loud and clear. To paraphrase the great Ms. Russell, the movie has the power to make you laugh and the power to break your heart in half.

The movie amounts to little more than Marky Mark's South American Vacation.

It isn't the first time death has figured in an Allen movie, but the way he grapples with it here (leaving each character at a moment of irresolution comparable to staring down the man with the scythe) is much more potent and direct.

So many blockbuster movies are impersonal, micromanaged hashes that Jack, with its bare minimum of craft and commitment, comparatively comes off like a diamond in the rough.

Melodrama often risks the ridiculous to achieve the sublime, and though this unabashedly earnest tearjerker doesn’t completely transcend its narrative absurdities, it’s enough of a distinctively odd duck to keep you engaged.

This fascinatingly knotty movie never becomes a facile screed against the powers that be. Instead, it plays as a more relaxed and leisurely requiem for a slowly vanishing way of life, with sounds and images-a time-lapse contemplation of the cosmos is in the running for scene of the year-that are as mesmerizing as they are subtly pointed.

Mileage will vary from viewer to viewer as to whether this singularly eccentric movie is ultimately illuminating or enervating.

Don’t look to this skin-deep biopic to offer any insights beyond the head-slappingly superficial.

The tone never stops waffling, and nothing truly revelatory ever emerges about those terrible few days in Texas. What we’re left with is the Disney theme-park version of history — all waxworks and weepiness.

Aside from a few inspired vistas and alien life-forms (the Road Runner–fast red planet dog Woola is sure to sell a bazillion action figures), John Carter is as deadly dull as its basso-voiced, beefcake slab of a star, Taylor Kitsch.

Other than ludicrously pulpy fun, Anonymous, true to its title, ultimately signifies nothing.

Whether blithely comparing American prisons to retirement homes or gleefully recalling the time he chewed off his own fingers in Siberia, the moonlighting German New Wave auteur injects some much-needed black humor into what is otherwise a soporific star vehicle.

The trek to get there is sluggish at best, torturous at worst. March away, penguins. Far away.

Antal and his performers’ pure B-movie esprit is undeniable.

Interminable scenes of macho posturing and mock-Tarantino dialogue (including a lengthy dissection of the word fags!) mark time between a number of ineptly staged car chases that would embarrass the makers of "Cannonball Run II."

Since the lead character is effectively a mystery man, some lack of grounding is appropriate. Unfortunately, the impressionism — the improvisation, you might say, of this particular life (mirroring, one supposes, Bolden's approach to music) — is so dominant that it finally proves a crutch.

The promise Dumont once showed has ossified into unholy shtick.

Fortunately, Teegarden and McDonell make up for the hand-me-down plotting with a sweet, unaffected chemistry.

A Jerry Bruckheimer–produced video-game adaptation--it has to be good, doesn’t it? (Ya, sarcasm.)

Favreau's direction is so boulder-heavy-the action sequences, especially the climactic assault on the alien mothership, are an eye-and-ear-shattering mess-that the small moments of poetry...are lost amid too much digital sound and fury.

No new ground is broken, and viewers will, not unpleasantly, get everything they expect. It’s apparently morning in America again.

Only Jones seems most at home, striking just the right note of low-key malevolence. You’d follow him anywhere — maybe even into a better movie.

Brühl, meanwhile, is saddled with the unenviable task of being this hollow movie’s slow-dawning voice of reason: His climactic conversation with newspaper editor David Thewlis (never worse) is one of the most embarrassingly didactic Way We Live Now™ summations ever filmed.

The fully committed Rush, at least, commands our constant attention, and no movie with a kookier-than-usual Ennio Morricone score (dig those staccato-chanting chorines!) could ever be a total waste of canvas.

When it comes to scenes in which characters are asked to say more than two words, however, the filmmaker's a decided amateur; Moretz, in particular, seems hopelessly stranded as the attitudinal wild child.

Indeed, you leave the film feeling like Wiseman has given you a glimpse of one of those ephemeral ports in a storm to which all of us retreat at times.

Her (Angela Ismailos) heart's in the right place, but her subjects' ruminations demand a much larger canvas.

Watching this see-in-the-dark muscleman brooding against gorgeous otherworldly vistas, all while crafting pointy homemade weapons and befriending a scene-stealing CGI canine (no joke), is a sci-fi aficionado's delight.

Gerwig is plenty charming, considering the rote stuff she has to work with. Yet this still feels like a real devolution - hopefully short-lived - after her distinctively eccentric turns in "Greenberg" and "Damsels in Distress."

For all of Cloud Atlas's pseudorevolutionary blather about upending the "natural order," the execution couldn't be squarer.

Let’s not dance around it: Nine--is a dud.

It's hard to hate a movie that affectionately references the oeuvre of Kathryn Bigelow (both The Hurt Locker and Point Break!) and uses a whiny Third Eye Blind ballad as an acidic punch line.

Even this terrifically talented performer can't sell a Shyama-lana-ding-dong of a third-act twist that will make more eyes than heads roll.

It's a pleasure to watch the granite-faced action star do his own stunts, particularly a death-defying leap from a bridge. Yet everything feels hurried.

Stem to stern, this 88-minute slasher runs like the clockwork bit of machinery it is, and that baseline competence effectively leeches it of personality.

It's pure comic-book malarkey, adapted from a graphic novel by French artist Matz. But the skeletal plot affords Hill the opportunity to go atmospherically hog wild.

That all sours by the time of the film's "shocking" climax, which is so hilariously telegraphed, it plays like a Benny Hill gag rather than a tear-duct stoker.

Credit Broderick and the cast for putting across the fey Indiewood bullcrap with committed, nearly convincing effort.

Writer-director Nick Tomnay needlessly convolutes what should have been a taut, focused two-hander with flashbacks, alternate realities and too-clever-by-half reversals.

Though Lemmons’s parable-like intentions are clear, almost every beat of Langston’s tale, with its absent father figures and heated gun-pointing melodrama, rings false — hardly a fitting contemporary complement to the Greatest Story Ever Told.

As in the first film, the seasoned-pro cast provides the few fleeting pleasures to be found.

The sights and sounds are splendid--a lovingly hand-detailed portside city, a touching musical interlude in a windswept field--though they're largely disconnected from the narrative proper.

Earnest to a fault and soft-edged in its approach to faith (God is more in the margins here than he is a central, narrative-driving presence), yet direct and moving in some scene-by-scene specifics because of their basis in reality.

The divas rule in this glossy musical.

We certainly need all the ecological jeremiads we can get. But must they be so numbingly pedantic?

It still works its way under your skin and, by the time the highly disturbed Frank’s casualties come back to haunt him en masse, cuts sanguinely to the heart.

Fans of Moulin Rouge–esque repurposing will be in hog heaven. Everyone else will want to hop that midnight train going anywhere pronto.

Even supremely talented actors like Melissa Leo (as a confidently sexy trucker) and Brendan Sexton III (as a train-station beggar) are stifled by all the pseudo-redemptive mush.

The cast to die for is almost entirely wasted in this machismo-marinated slab of Brit-crime nastiness.

Whatever pathos is generated comes from Reynolds' commitment to all the self-exploitation. His inimitable charm is still there beneath all the corporeal decrepitude on which Rifkin and company shamelessly linger.

Sarah’s circumstances are so ridiculously dire that there’s little left to do but laugh at them.

So narratively old-fashioned it creaks.

The film doesn't come within spitting distance of vintage Landis, e.g., "Animal House" or "An American Werewolf in London." But at least it's not "The Stupids."

The filmmaker's work is infinitely more exhilarating when he's relieved of the need to be in any way serious. He should play dumb more often.

Like all of Tarsem's films, story takes a backseat to visuals, and there's plenty to pop the eyes-love those life-size string-puppet assassins!-if not, ultimately, to stir the soul.

In many ways, this effervescent drama from Susan Seidelman (Desperately Seeking Susan) upends conventions, even when it sticks to a familiar narrative path.

Once the undead start walking, however, the film loses some of its footing: Most of the bloodletting is staged with quick-cut inelegance better suited to the hack horror production of your choosing, though there’s still a potent air of hopelessness that lingers as the cast is winnowed away "Ten Little Indians"–style.

This smug and callous action-comedy is about nothing but teeth.

Though the story's wrapped-with-a-bow finale is never in doubt-ol' Meathead remains a populist, pandering Hollywood man through and through-Belle Isle still manages to cast enough of an enchanting spell.

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.

It would be kind to call this satire; what it comes off as is a pummeling, testosterone-fueled sensory assault that the film then makes minor variations on for two very long hours.

This one barely musters a pulse.

The casting, from lead roles to supporting, is uniformly terrific.

Sadly, “Get out of my lab!” is not the new “Get off my plane!”

Lee and Schamus make history blandly palatable; in the process, they rob the times and the people they’re portraying of their complications.

The jittery aesthetic is a bit grating - there's a three-cut minimum per roundhouse kick - but the spectacularly named Olivier Megaton (Transporter 3) still manages to deliver the action-film goods.

Superficiality reigns, but then a truly affecting scene will pop up.

The movie builds to a particularly deflating anticlimax, passing over an inevitably apocalyptic confrontation between spheres with a wink-wink, nudge-nudge bit of dialogue that’s like a rejected punchline from a Douglas Adams novel.

It's a contemporary movie musical that makes you feel genuinely sky-high.

Marvin Kren’s enjoyable if ephemeral horror movie gets by for a while on its dopey premise.

Lumbering, lifeless, and—strange thing to say about a cadaver—almost entirely charmless. Almost entirely because both Lily James, as headstrong heroine Elizabeth Bennet, and Sam Riley, as her brooding suitor Mr. Darcy, make for a delightful onscreen pair.

What follows is pulp made near-profound through director Jonathan Mostow’s sure-handed guidance.

The aural and visual overload that marks most of the director's work is here in spades--few documentaries look and sound so distinctive.

That T.J. and his family willingly allow this headbanging psycho(analyst) to move into their cluttered, dankly lit abode-the emotional damage is palpable, yo!-is just one of the film's many eyebrow-raising contrivances.

The thought behind this body-splattering nostalgia trip is unformed and stagnant.

Someone surely thought to call this knowingly ridiculous genre mash-up "Cowboys vs. Ninjas," though even that title wouldn't hint at all the you-gotta-be-kidding-me craziness on display.

It’s a dud.

An hour and half of comparable barbarity follows-all of it monotonous, none of it enlightening.

It’s unfortunate that Stelling and his cast aren’t able to lift the story much above mawkishness.

This is, in abstract, a bold and brilliant performance, an act of possession, really, and Smith never personally steps wrong in the film’s 96 minutes. But his work, sadly, is continuously undermined by everything surrounding him, beginning with a script, written by Timoner and Mikko Alanne, that frustratingly sticks to the then-this-happened conventions of a standard biopic.

It’s an earnest hope, to be sure, and the greatest strength of Sam Raimi’s imaginative, if highly uneven, take on L. Frank Baum’s series of children’s stories about that magical land over the rainbow is its unabashed sincerity.

More stupid movies should leave you with such a blissfully stupid smile.

The Rock deserves better than this ho-hum revenge picture.

You’re probably better off heading to an actual watering hole than patronizing Douglas Tirola’s humdrum doc on the art of the cocktail.

Lovingly designed, but dramatically inert.

Mostly, though, this Creek has run dry.

Probably the biggest sin in a movie filled with many is turning Fonda into a nymphomaniacal sight gag who makes Barbarella look like Gloria Steinem.

The tone this time out is primarily comic.

Credit the appealingly paired McAdams and Tatum for making this Valentine's-month hokum watchable.

Speed can be a virtue, but there’s something extremely off-putting about the way The Wolfman, Universal’s latest horror classic redux, races through its opening scenes.

Who would have thought that the man behind such wackadoo fantasies as "The Professional" and "The Fifth Element" was capable of being so bloody boring?

Scene by scene, you want to laugh at all the ham-fisted kismet, even if the committed cast holds your attention. Hopkins is especially good in his chaste May-September interactions with Flor, and he has an AA confessional that is genuinely moving.

Much cut-rate melodrama ensues, none of it particularly painful to watch, until a ridiculously redemptive finale negates almost all of the preceding dramatic tension and resurrects a cloying Richard Marx chestnut to boot.

M. Night Ghyamalan’s film is aimed at an audience from whom he cringingly craves fealty.

There are a few too many twists on this highway.

This 3-D cave-diving adventure plays on a lot of fears, so avoid it if you have an aversion to claustrophobia, drowning or really bad acting.

The film slowly reveals its true colors, pointing a fanatically accusatory finger at teachers' unions while using twisted Obama-esque sloganeering about "order" and "hope" to further its simplistically anticollectivist agenda.

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.

Scene by scene you wish 55 Steps made you angrier than it does. Yet August's docile filmmaking acts as an emotional soporific, removing even the potential camp pleasures of Bonham Carter's histrionics.

Despite a committed performance from Palminteri (ripping through scenes like an aged bulldog), Debbie Goodstein's loosely autobiographical drama is as nondescript as made-for-pennies independents come.

John Travolta breaks the braggadocio meter in the latest tightly wound actioner from "Taken’s" Pierre Morel.

All the problematic aspects of the Hollywood bad boy's filmography - reactionary rah-rah patriotism, sneer 'n' drool female fetishization, callously detached bloodletting - remain in soul-shattering force.

It goes off the rails early and often. You almost have to give it props for how resolutely batshit it is. Almost.

Union certainly dedicates herself to all the huffing, running, jumping and emoting, though her efforts never counter Breaking In’s aura of trashiness and disposability.

This ludicrous CGI extravaganza, based on the comic horror novel by Seth Grahame-Smith, can stand proudly beside the best-worst of Ed Wood and Uwe Boll.

The satire rarely stings, as first-time feature directors Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod give a polite Masterpiece Theatre gloss to this most impolite of tales.

Kilcher makes the slog worthwhile--her face gleams with possibility, even in the character’s darkest moments--though one prays she escapes the typecasting trap ASAP.

Though both lead actors are able to coast for a while on their natural charm, it's evident by the soppy finale that their "Sleepless in Seattle" and "Pretty Woman" salad days are long past.

If What to Expect represents the best tearjerking laugh-machine that Hollywood can birth, it's probably time to get those story ideas implanted in vitro.

Plays like a tiresomely extended evening of channel surfing.

The longer this "Abbott and Costello's Lethal Weapon" goes on, the more the fun dissipates - until a queasily violent climax, which, naturally, fully embraces genre stereotypes rather than dismantling them.

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.

You’re thankful when Ayer stops trying to artistically tart up this Peckinpah-lite tale of vengeance and just lets his leading man do what he does best: blow the bad guys away.

Quentin Tarantino showcased her bubbly personality (and ass-kicking dexterity) in 2007’s terrific gearhead horror movie, "Death Proof." Now, seasoned stuntwoman Zoë Bell gets a vehicle all her own—a disposable battle royal no-budgeter that’s immensely elevated by her presence.

The various plot threads-E.B. is pursued by a trio of ass-kickingly cute long-eared operatives; a disgruntled worker chick (voiced in emphatic Telemundo tones by Hank Azaria) orchestrates a coup d'état-mostly get lost amid all the allusions. Even Hugh Hefner pops up because, you know, Playboy Bunnies.

The story's treacly all-souls-in-alignment outcome is never in doubt, but as Kasdan dogs go, this is light-years better than Dreamcatcher.

Though based partly on actual events, Ruben Fleischer's ludicrous shoot-'em-up plays fast and loose with the facts, and plenty else besides.

Ceremony passes by quickly and painlessly, its annoyances easily forgotten. On the plus side, Thurman and Angarano do work up a sweet odd-pair chemistry.

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.

The story's knotty aspects reverberate under its sentimental-cum-inspirational surface. In the guise of a glossy entertainment, Welcome to Marwen gets at some unnervingly irresolvable truths about humanity.

Bless you, R.Patz & Co., because this gloriously steaming pile is officially in the bad-movies-we-love pantheon.

Sandler's drool-accompanied ogling of the female form is now near Woody Allen levels of ick.

Gallo and Dalle are sublimely tragic figures; the scene in which Shane stalks around Notre Dame like Frankenstein unleashed is a pitch-perfect encapsulation of the way the film plays with and deepens movie-monster archetypes.

Dull and perfunctory, the film's saving grace is MVP Neil Patrick Harris as Kyle's blind tutor, who has a witty aside for every woodenly expressed sentiment. You go, Doog!

Whenever this Lantern returns to terra firma (too often), its imaginative flights are ground down under the Warners overlords' demographic-pandering heels.

It helps that Fame has been cast with performers who have the glow of possibility about them.

Injecting a devil-may-care attitude into a franchise-focused blockbuster only gets you so far. When all is said and done, this wasp's got no sting.

People become mere punch lines: fleshy avatars for the gory grist.

Nearly eight years on from the signing of all the brand extension contracts, here is the primarily pop-star-voiced animated musical UglyDolls, an imbecilic eyesore that could lay claim to being one of the worst movies ever made if it was worth such hyperbole.

They have little feel for the technical side of filmmaking; the imagery is flat and the editing amateurish. Most shots seem held for a beat too long or too short, wreaking havoc with the comic rhythm. Nonetheless, McCarthy and Falcone’s attempts to make Tammy more flesh-and-blood than a figure of fun are often poignant.

The characters may soar, but viewers’ spirits stay grounded.

None of it adds up to much beyond painting the band, despite their often repellently bad behavior, in a flattering light.

Lay the Favorite is frenzied without being funny. Like Judy Holliday on a particularly manic day, Hall tears from scene to scene with a bubbly effervescence that is technically impressive yet increasingly exhausting.

To call this a turkey would be an insult to poultry.

Only Kinnear manages to give his role some shades beyond the broadly farcical, though even he ultimately succumbs to his leading lady's toothy grin and Oprah-sanctioned bromides.

You can barely stifle a laugh, and the way Wright and Watts deliver rote, morally searching dialogue with deer-in-the-headlights stoicism (“We’ve crossed a line,” Lil blankly notes) doesn’t help matters.

There’s nothing more boring than a life embalmed with halfhearted Hollywood bombast, which only makes the film’s fleeting pleasures stand out all the more.

Trespass is assembly-line product through and through - unabashedly mediocre and instantly forgettable. A Joel Schumacher joint, in other words.

The early scenes of Gabe Ibáñez’s impressively mounted but uneven thriller do some terrific dystopian world-building.

Anderson makes often-inspiring use of the 3-D effects.

It's all too much and not enough—a succession of disparate, can-you-top-this episodes inelegantly piling up like skidding cars on a freeway. And that's not even taking into account the action scenes. Lord, those action scenes: Monotonous, loud and relentless, they're a punishing example of the self-satisfied, digitally augmented ephemera that typifies modern Hollywood moviemaking, and House Bruckheimer in particular.

Cue those weepy violins. Indeed, you get everything you'd expect from this mostly saccharine melodrama.

As the screws turn, and the double crosses begin, the film sinks under the weight of its own ridiculousness. (The ever-reliable Cranston’s thick Euro-villain accent actually turns out to be one of the least ludicrous elements.)

This is one case where there’s more life in the morgue than out.

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.

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.

The film's secret weapon proves to be Freddy Krueger–fingernailed witch Marique, whom Rose McGowan plays with the kind of fuck-it-all brio - imagine a cross between Madeline Kahn in "History of the World: Part I" and Lady Gaga - that should garner her a Razzie and an Oscar.

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

This is little more than an expensive-looking celebrity vacation video—more evidence in support of the notion that the Hollywood house always wins.

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

Mostly laugh-free black comedy, which gathers an impressive cast - Marisa Tomei, Jennifer Connelly and Ciarán Hinds round out the ensemble - for bad sitcom-level shenanigans.

Zombie is still committed to showing how violence perverts all touched by it, yet his carnivalesque approach undercuts his empathy. He panders to the cheap seats whenever he’s not being scary.

Probably best to dissuade the so-bad-it’s-good crowd: There’s nothing here to laugh at with the communal glee of a "Rocky Horror" or "The Room"; only a spectacularly bad composite shot of a fire-fighting plane induces any real giggles.

This is a man-versus-nature parable heavy on the sappy existentialism that's very much of our time. Call it Nicholas Sparks's The Grey.

All three of you clamoring for a sequel to "Wild Wild West" have got your wish: Jonah Hex--an adaptation of the DC Comics series about a Western antihero with otherworldly abilities--gives that Fresh Prince–starring disaster from 1999 a run for its wasted money.

Ticking-time-bomb suspense is not Nair’s forte, so she relies on Michael Andrews’s Middle East–inflected score to do most of the heavy lifting in the present-day scenes, which feel shapeless and perfunctory.

Begins in the land of lunacy and ends up somewhere on the far side of deranged.

Maybe Douglas Sirk could have made something profound out of the pseudo-ennobling horsepucky. As is, The Last Song is what the crinkle-nosed Southern belle in all of us would resoundingly deem “Trash! Trash! Trash!”

The Young Messiah is just, like, barely competent enough that the faith-based target audience won't feel entirely cheated.

What undoes the film is its rather rancid parent-child sentimentality (a Shyamalan staple, admittedly) and a charisma-free performance from the younger Smith that suggests the apple has fallen very far from the tree.

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

Often resembles a prime John Carpenter thriller--call it "Assault on Manger 13"--until an overcaffeinated angel-fu climax significantly lowers the intelligence quotient.

This is truly De Palma–ville, and the filmmaker’s remake of Alain Corneau’s tale of corporate bloodletting, "Love Crime" (2010), is a welcome return to the carnal shockers that he does so well.

A tedious example of speculative fiction.

All highs eventually fade, and The Last Laugh quickly returns to its noxious mix of sweet and sour.

The belly laughs do come, many of them courtesy of the mechanical bird companion.

This is mostly all reefer, no madness.

Desperation oozes from every frame of Cop Out, which front-loads its best joke -- then spends the rest of its running time endlessly spinning its wheels.

Take the last train to anywhere but here.

Smurftastic! Now where's that noose?

Aside from some character-defining flashbacks, a godawful score and sweat-enhancing color photography, it's the same movie as before - a divertingly tense yet superficial time-waster.

The highlight, though, is Julie Christie as Grandma, whose GILFy gorgeousness (especially in the "better to eat you with" scene) is the only thing in this overblown campfest with real teeth.

We’re a long way from this shoot-’em-up franchise’s John McTiernan–helmed heyday. Willis gives one of his laziest ever performances, leadenly tossing off each quip (“I’m on vacation!” is the most abused) and acting like he’s passing a kidney stone during the bathetic father-son bonding scenes.

The basics of the story remain unchanged, but it’s the wanna-be-blockbuster additions that rankle, be it the incoherent direction of first-time feature director Carl Rinsch or the copious CGI beasties who look like rejected "Lord of the Rings" villains.

This is hackwork of the highest order, lacking in all poetry and barely comprehensible aurally or visually.

It's "Centurion Deux" without the second-coming-of-Carpenter pretense, though you still wish the trashiness were more distinctive.

For an especially egregious bit of miscasting, look no further than Mena Suvari, star of this tony adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's posthumously published novel about a disintegrating marriage.

Only Wilson acquits himself, finding a few insightful layers in his black-sheep stereotype and working up a sweet chemistry with Taraji P. Henson as his sassily devoted lady-friend.

One wrongheaded jaw-dropper follows another.

Crank’s Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor direct with their usual flashy brio, and basso profundo Keith David has a sublime cameo as a cop indignant at the thought of a pistachio peanut butter sandwich. It’s that kind of movie, folks.

A wrongheaded, utterly incompetent, and nearly laugh-free satire.

It should surprise no one that, as Hell Fest comes to a close, Evil Hoodie Man pulls a Michael Myers disappearing act. This leads to a narrative twist so ridiculous that all non-syringe-pierced oculi will roll.

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.

The Looney Tunes nature of Rambo’s murder spree tempers much of the script’s ideological offense.

There are plenty of formulaic boo! moments, yet Craven intelligently treats Bug's otherworldly issues like hormonal growing pains that must be tamed.

Twi-Hards shall attend en masse. Adults shall roll their eyes. And on our human comedy shall go.

Only Billy Connolly, as the boys’ way-of-the-gun pa, brings a smidgen of sobering gravitas to the proceedings, though he can hardly counter the pounding hangover brought on by all the mock-virtuous butchery.

It’s too easy to say that Peter Billingsley shot his eye out with this inept comic trifle, but…well, he shot his eye out.

The film's sure-to-be-brief theatrical release is a mere stopover on the way to basic-cable eternity.

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 now, it's clear that every Adam Sandler movie is dada of the high-concept, low-hanging-fruit variety, in which the Happy Madison stock company uses filmmaking (loosely termed) as an excuse to take an extended tropical vacation.

From the moment Joel Schumacher's dour teens-in-crisis melodrama establishes its group of spoiled (and so, so unloved) Manhattan silver-spooners, you long for anything to leaven the tsk-tsk prurience.

Only "Slumdog Millionaire's" Dev Patel, as the bastard prince of the villainous Fire nation, truly gets jiggy with the fantasy. Everyone else stares off into green-screen space and waits for lunch to be called.

Polar is pure trash, but the generousness — and, in the final stretch, the poignancy — with which Mikkelsen approaches even the most lurid of the film's conceits at least pushes it toward the top of the garbage heap.

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

Good God almighty: Not since Edward D. Wood Jr. unleashed a flotilla of paper-plate UFOs on beautiful downtown Burbank has there been a movie as stem-to-stern inept as this adaptation of the bestselling Christian novel series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins.

Strangely enough, our knowledge of what’s to come makes Word Is Out that much more affecting, because it shows that there were—and are—pockets of peace amid the brutality of an ongoing civil-rights struggle.

Sontag’s true talent was for the printed word; behind the camera, her limitations come more harshly to light. Upon Promised Land’s release, she recounted her experiences in Vogue--an all-too-appropriate forum since her film is mostly chic posturing.

Best seen on the big screen; even those with a cursory grasp of avant-garde cinema are likely to come away with their minds opened and altered.

Once the story takes a murderous turn, things quickly fall apart. Too many perfunctory side characters, such as Dennis's clueless parole officer, dilute any sense of tension; the bargain-basement visuals-all overlit interiors and unmotivated zooms-never rise above the luridly cheap; and hoo-boy, those final scenes.

The haphazardness of the film's structure mutes the power of the subjects' recollections.

The longer the film goes on, the more it seems like a collection of gorgeous images without an overall organizing structure. Our youthful lead’s slow disillusionment with his complicated surroundings ultimately plays less profound than petulant.

In the moment, the film's simplistic spirit is intoxicating. But take my word for it — the real-world hangover that follows is fierce.

By the end, you'll feel like you've seen it all before. But for a good while, Retake...seems like it's carving out some distinctive new territory in the well-trod world of queer cinema.

The blurring of the lines between fiction and fact still mostly feels like a crutch or an affectation. It's as if Cordero and Croda are trying to goose the drama rather than unearth it, never entirely trusting that Felipe's life is interesting enough as is.

A challenge inherent to a parable of this sort is that evil, being so seductive, can make good seem dull or prissy by comparison.