Keith Uhlich

A tedious example of speculative fiction.

This is like a subpar "Naked Gun" feature cooked up by Eisenstein and Godard during a drug-addled lost weekend. Where's Leslie Nielsen when you need him?

This highly fictionalized look at the Wild West early days of Internet porn is off-putting in almost every way, with sledgehammer stylistic flourishes (incessant shaky-cam; a Rolling Stones musical cue as ironic comment) and dialogue that sounds like it was written in a testosterone-fueled haze.

Since this is a House of Mouse production, sentimental order must inevitably be grafted onto nature's pitiless chaos. The cornball voiceover ascribes human wants and desires to the animals.

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.

Darren Aronofsky’s big-ticket retelling of the biblical legend of Noah (Russell Crowe, so damn serious) is a wildly stupid, yet still train-wreck-fascinating piece of work.

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

The curtain can't come down fast enough.

Cheap Thrills is little more than low-budget torture porn for the doobie-addled dudebro contingent.

Best is Viggo Mortensen's William S. Burroughs proxy Old Bull Lee, holed up in a perspiration-saturated Louisiana mansion with a shell-shocked Amy Adams and a gas-huffing chamber at the ready.

The title character himself is also an unimpressive digital creation-Rogen might as well be performing his stoner-from-another-world shtick during a wee-hours movieoke session.

False moments far outweigh the genuine ones, be it smarmy Dan’s indisputable genius (he’s such a stubble-sporting rebel, he refuses to wear suits) or the bogus anticorporate finale that leaves an especially slick aftertaste.

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

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

The filmmaker’s second feature is an unfortunate sophomore slump, an abrasive and opaque artist-in-crisis story that feels protracted at barely 80 minutes.

It's supremely annoying to see the ups and downs of romance reduced to archer-than-arch line readings and bloodless mortal kombat. What's more frustrating is that the film, adapted from Bryan Lee O'Malley's popular comic, is an endless visual delight.

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

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.

Lone Scherfig directs it all as if it were a breezy lark, so a third-act tonal shift makes for an incongruous, excessively moralistic fit with everything that’s preceded. Most insulting, though, is the way in which the climactic passages miraculously tidy up every frayed edge of Jenny’s life.

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.

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

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.

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

So narratively old-fashioned it creaks.

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

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, 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.

By the time Nick decides to have an emotionally purgative yard sale-the primary holdover from the short story-all the adult ambiguities have been traded in for facile Indiewood profundities.

This isn't the NASCAR-fellating cash grab that is the Cars franchise, but it's still Pixar on preachy autopilot.

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.

There's no sense of the oppression France felt under Nazi rule. It's all just play-acting in period-specific attire. You can almost hear the AD calling lunch.

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.

Niccol's attempts at satire are toothless.

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

Even in this fictional context, the line between portraying and exploiting abused innocence gets uncomfortably, offensively blurred.

This iron lady of cinema deserves better.

A dumb comedy out to prove its genre-defying smarts--the title is both an onscreen-supported reference to Walt Whitman and a wacky-tobaccy allusion--Leaves of Grass is a mostly mirthless affair; not even the sight of Edward Norton portraying twins tickles as it should.

The promise Dumont once showed has ossified into unholy shtick.

The true soulfulness of Sendak’s parable never emerges.

The unintentional hilarity of the whole enterprise - especially when Albert attempts to romance one of the hotel's naive employees (Wasikowska) - at least keeps you engaged, as does the scene-by-scene suspense over which pitiably wide-eyed expression Close will choose to use next. Hopefully, she's practicing her gracious-loser face for awards season.

It’s a hit-and-mostly-miss affair: For every gut-buster like McBride and Franco’s lengthy exchange about drenching each other in seminal fluid, there’s a fall-flat gag.

Writer-director Jane Campion approaches the tale with an artiste’s respectful solemnity, but it too often comes off like "Twilight" transplanted across oceans and centuries.

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

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

The results make your head spin more than they make your spirits soar.

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.

It almost becomes comical to count the number of "who's holding the camera now?" reverse shots that the filmmaker haphazardly inserts to propel the story forward. Such visual ineptitude, like much else in this tediously cocky enterprise, is downright criminal.

Leaving is a tawdry potboiler slathered riotously in portent, complete with a lamebrained detour into vengeance that only Claude Chabrol would be able to pull off.

Props should be given to Rodriguez’s breathless “let’s put on a show” inventiveness. Plus, Macy and the booger--kick ass!

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.

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.

Sadly, most of the film's dull edges have to do with De Niro, who is clearly in rest-on-his-laurels mode; at his worst, he approaches radioactive, Robin Williams levels of bathos, as when Jonathan - roaring like a bush-league Lear - is banned from the shelter for bad behavior.

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.

Charlie Victor Romeo would probably work best as a training tool for commercial airline pilots (the play, interestingly, has already been used in this fashion by the Pentagon). In a movie theater for a paying crowd, it’s little more than minimalist snuff.

Several quick-witted touches-such as a hilarious nod to Depp's role in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"-can't make up for Gore Verbinski's leaden direction of this digitally animated feature.

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

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

In a word: Ugh.

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.

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

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

The film is made up of plundered parts from the "Oceans" series and "The Usual Suspects," and—like several of the forged tomes that figure in the plot — it’s a pale imitation.

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?

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

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.

As with many a first feature, Gordon-Levitt’s so-so directorial debut is pumped up with ambition. The early scenes, heavy on caricature, promise to puncture much of the cocky illusions surrounding modern relationships.

Though the Tavianis’ intent is clear—to comment on the thin line separating part and performer, as well as on the quite literally liberating powers of art—the meanings rarely emerge with any elegance or resonance. Hardly a dish fit for the gods.

The main talking point of this empty-headed thriller from Mexican director Amat Escalante is a sure-to-be-notorious instance of penis incineration — a dubious distinction.

Despite the chronological juggling, the film's stylistic debts (a Hitchcock flashback borrowed from Stage Fright, a Bertolucci-esque apartment sequence that could be titled Last Tango in Auschwitz) are simplistic to a fault; they lack the multifaceted suspense and sensuality typified by those directors at their best.

The stylistic conceit of keeping us entirely with the clones (so that we are as ill-informed as they are and never get to meet their powerful oppressors) only reveals what an empty-headed abstraction this tale was from both page and frame one

Things quickly fall apart, with a pileup of sub–Rod Serling narrative twists, a choppy action sequence heavy on the Michael Bay slo-mo and a sequel-ready climax that reveals the whole project as little more than a feature-length calling card.

There's more than a few things off in this tale of a disillusioned professional thief (Affleck, dull), his unlikely inamorata (Hall, wasted) and the determined FBI agent (Hamm, solid) out to apprehend him.

It’s a neurotic treatise that simply adds to our cultural dementia instead of illuminating it.

It’s only when the sentient snacks are front and center that this middling sequel to the 2009 animated hit truly comes alive.

The more the visual ephemera piles up, the more the emotional thrust of the story gets buried beneath all the monotonous pageantry. (Anna's many tête-à-têtes with her two lovers - especially a should-be-dizzying dance-seduction scene - are frigid pomp without any real heat.)

By the time the film takes a glib turn into role-switching farce - as Muslims become Christians and Christians become Muslims - the overall toothlessness of the satire becomes damningly apparent.

Director-cinematographer Steven Soderbergh’s indifference to the material is palpable and of a piece with his deathly dull output of late.

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

Irritated, you realize you've been watching an object that's all surface, no soul.

Clearly there's a lot of myth-dispelling to do; indeed, the film often seems like a public-service announcement wrapped around a sketchy narrative skeleton.

What starts as an intriguing reverie ends as a hollow allegory.

Fortunately, a few striking sequences break up the tedium.

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 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.

There’s a ruthlessly effective movie to be made from this material, and you couldn’t hope for a better performer than Shannon, who can turn on a dime between quiet malevolence and volcanic rage, to inhabit the sociopathic central figure. Unfortunately, this overproduced biopic constantly counteracts the actor’s committed efforts with its pale-imitation slickness.

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.

Only Gandolfini comes off as a character as opposed to an effigy, his sad-sack posture and f-it-all unprofessionalism truly capturing the tragedy of a working man with a one-way ticket to 99-percenter hell.

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.

There’s little that can be done with material wrung of its complications to accommodate an ultimately life-affirming, it-all-works-out agenda.

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

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

The sole saving grace of this treacly middlebrow dross is the naturally sweet chemistry between Brosnan and Dyrholm. In the few scenes in which they’re alone together, wistfully recalling the past and discussing various misfortunes, you glimpse a much deeper movie.

Lynskey has raised the quality of innumerable feature films (as a soft-spoken New Republic reporter in Shattered Glass; a housewife on the verge of a nervous breakdown in Away We Go-that film's sole saving grace). So it's a delight to see this stalwart character actor move to center stage, even when the result is so by-the-numbers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

What we’re left with are a bunch of unseasoned performers and a first-time filmmaker clearly out of his depth (good lord, those green-screen shots!) hocking loogies at Mickey and friends with hit-and-mostly-miss fervidness.

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.

This is mostly all reefer, no madness.

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

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

Simon Curtis's watchably third-rate biopic doesn't try to sort out truth from fabrication; that would be like "teaching Urdu to a badger," as the short-tempered Olivier - played by a whole-hog-slicing Branagh - might say. Better to print the legend and be done with it.

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.

Spencer, a superb performer mainly known for small character parts, gives a star-making turn as the won't-take-no-guff Minny.

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

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.

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.

Cluzet and Sy nonetheless make for ingratiating foils; the extended opening sequence in which the duo outwits a pair of cops like a hell-raising Laurel and Hardy could be a stellar short comedy if it weren't married to the deadly self-serious shtick that follows.

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.

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 film has the look of unflinching truth, yet it too often feels like a calculated ploy to stoke viewers' liberal-guilty consciences.

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.

This routine animated feature is a perfectly fine thing to waste.

The satire becomes more scattershot and strangely cuddlesome (didja know sequestered holy men enjoy socializing and playing sports, just like us?), while the usually great Piccoli-saddled with a ridiculously contrived failed-actor backstory-comes off like an unholy mix of Gérard Depardieu and Robin Williams at their sad-puppiest. That's some cinematic blasphemy, Moretti.

A grimy kitchen-sink melodrama with an Ajax cleanser script: The muck is all surface, the turmoil cleanly shallow and contrived, though never less than gripping.

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.

A slipshod documentary about a fascinating subject: the loaded history and current complications of African-American hairstyling.

Though it holds your attention all the way through to an enigmatic, spiritually tinged climax, the movie leaves you wanting more than the Vega Vidals' secondhand artistry is able to provide.

2 Guns quickly degenerates into boilerplate Hollywood sound and fury, complete with a climactic Mexican standoff that revolves around a massive, burning pile of money. Irony, thou art lost.

Plays like a tiresomely extended evening of channel surfing.

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 story — aside from a climax that plays like a too-knowing rebuke to Disney formula — goes tediously through the motions. It isn’t only Papa Walt’s head that’s been put on ice.

Jinn consistently lets down its premise and performers with a by-the-numbers-at-best screenplay that triple-underlines all of its forward-thinking themes.

This is the kind of autumnal sentimentality that the Academy goes wild for-a (rightly) venerated performer acknowledging his own mortality by pandering to cheap-seat emotions.

The script—which Jones, Kieran Fitzgerald and Wesley Oliver adapted from Glendon Swarthout's 1988 novel—shifts uneasily between tragedy and comedy.

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

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.

The film slowly loses the sobering toughness of its initial inquiry, and finally comes off as bloodline-biased hagiography.

Jolie must eventually become a comic-book supergirl impervious to explosions and bullets, all the better to set up a "Bourne"-like franchise by the final fade-out.

Once Miller lays all his cards on the table, however, you realize you haven’t been watching people struggling with the very real temptations of unchecked privilege, so much as fumbling blindly in a glib, gloomy satire of American exceptionalism.

The director races far too quickly to get to his ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust punch line. This is the film of a pretender, not a believer.

One wrongheaded jaw-dropper follows another.

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 filmmakers treat their material sternly and humorlessly, as if there's some great moral lesson to be imparted from Erin's inexhaustible blotto jerkiness.

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.

By the end of Pray’s skin-deep love letter, only one sweeping reaction seems appropriate: “A pox on all your houses.”

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

Berg may be adhering to the basic facts, but his movie’s childish machismo is a disgrace to all involved.

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.

I'll respect the studio's wishes to abbreviate all plot description. God knows, they're marketing it like the second coming of "The Crying Game," though the revelations that await Nev are only shocking if you believe P.T. Barnum was really in possession of a genuine Fiji mermaid.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

This one barely musters a pulse.

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

Take the last train to anywhere but here.

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.

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.

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.

Smurftastic! Now where's that noose?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

It’s a dud.

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.

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!

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.

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.

You can practically taste the grime in Jorge Michel Grau's art-house horror show-the film looks like it's been slathered with gooey discards from a backyard barbecue.

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

Waititi is incapable of dealing with the twin horrors of oppression and indoctrination beyond cheap-seats sentimentality and joke-making.

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.