Kimber Myers

Pretty but oh-so-dumb, Sugar Mountain is the cinematic equivalent of a himbo.

The Bye Bye Man just skirts so-bad-it’s-good territory, unintentionally making the audience laugh more than they gasp.

Berlin gives a good enough picture of its host city, delving into its complicated history and giving glimpses of its beauty. But few of the segments connect us to its inhabitants and visitors in any meaningful way.

All around, the performances are fine, but they can’t move past the script from first-time director Jessie McCormack. She’s created a group of people that you’d avoid at a party, and being stuck with them for an hour and a half makes you feel like you’re being punished for doing something really awful.

It’s the first feature film for director Aleksander Bach, and he shares the blame with the pair of screenwriters. His creation is a muddled mess that is briefly lifted by some fun set pieces, but never is more impressive than a 108-minute Audi commercial.

Rattlesnakes imagines itself as a neo-noir, but that genre is more evident in its themes of revenge and ambiguous characters rather than in its nondescript style. This is a bland, unpleasant watch, all set to an equally grinding score.

The director gives the audience a story that takes off in as many directions as the prison corridors, leaving us lost and dazed. But unlike the characters, the viewers never feel a moment of fear.

While The Storyteller aspires to be a feature-length Hallmark card, it only manages dollar-store sentimentality in its plot and platitudes.

John David Ware’s directorial debut is sloppy in its editing and camera angles, though the script from Bonné Bartron gave him little to work with. Unbridled stumbles further with clumsy product placement, making the film seem less sincere in its efforts despite its good intentions.

Its incoherent script is packed with more “Star Wars” references than Kevin Smith’s entire oeuvre, but none of the laughs.

It wants to be a commentary on the depravity of Hollywood and what people find entertaining, but instead it mostly just mirrors the media's habit of using sexual trauma as a plot device and surviving such horrors as a character trait.

Scrolling through internet videos is generally regarded as a waste of time, but watching 100 minutes of cute animals on your phone is preferable to sitting through the laughably bad The Wolf and the Lion.

Jexi is such a dumb, lazy film that it might have even the most ardent cinephile reaching for their device, ready to defend their defection to the dark side when faced with this clunker of a comedy.

Somehow worse than its ridiculous title, Awaken the Shadowman is sillier than it is scary.

Animated comic book panels hint at an attempt at style, but bad camerawork captures bad performances of bad dialogue.

There’s more sex than dialogue here; it’s a small win because the clunky dialogue and its flat delivery from amateur actors is nigh unwatchable, not that the sex scenes are much better.

This ambitiously titled documentary never really makes the reasons for its existence clear.

While there are some cool creature effects and committed, physical performances by the actors playing the monsters, the movie’s worst sin isn’t the found-footage rules it ignores. Instead it breaks the cardinal rule of the larger horror genre, running 95 minutes without a single scare or moment of dread.

This mess never knows whether it’s a mob movie or a raunchy comedy.

Unfortunately, Hell Mountain lacks basic cohesiveness in its storytelling, taking strange, unnecessary detours and not fully developing its details.

Unfortunately, the worst fault in this horror movie isn’t the amateur performances, beginner-level editing or the special effects; it’s the dreadfully dumb script.

Blind stumbles with unlikable characters and a lack of depth, leaving audiences simply wishing for its ending, happy or not.

This teen musical comedy is set at a girls performing arts camp, but it never convinces the audience of anyone’s talent.

The script from Billy Morrissette — featuring disappearing narration, awful characters and no humor — is largely to blame, but director Anthony Edwards makes uninspired choices throughout, such as inserting random animated characters and allowing Gina Gershon to do a cartoonish French accent in a supporting role.

This is writer-director Matt Sivertson’s first film, and he and his cast and crew are able to offer only a maudlin drama that inspires eye rolls rather than tears.

The flaws of Nola Circus aren’t limited to its outrageous and offensive approach. It’s that it never succeeds in bringing viewers onto its wavelength, which is probably a good thing for humanity’s sake.

The Hustle is profoundly stupid and it treats its audience as though they’re even less intelligent than it is.