Kimberley Jones

Madame Web is a fender bender – nothing calamitous, just a time suck. An annoyance. A waste.

But in going to such great lengths to avoid that film’s grim weirdness, the Super Mario Bros. Movie filmmakers have flattened the concept into benign nothingness. They’ve course corrected into the side of a mountain. There’s no heartbeat here.

A swing and a miss is too timid a dismissal. It’s a sumptuously dressed table that ends in a wet fart.

There are no insights here, only lavishly budgeted cosplay.

This is a vastly inferior toy-to-film IP expansion, with duller songs, dumber jokes, and forgettable voice work.

A spectacular misfire – is a 180 from Locke’s lean brilliance, overstuffed with plot complications, overheated with bad acting and maudlin sentiment.

This bland romance doesn’t take its own advice. It’s all water, no whiskey.

Busy and boring and oppressively computer generated, Justice League screams we’re back to business as usual.

As for Zach Galifianakis, playing a dim-witted drunk – file his role under head-scratching.

The investigation is dull, the jokes dispiritingly flat-footed, with Ponch’s sex addiction and squirminess over male intimacy supplying most of the setups for CHIPS’ puerile humor.

The film is chockablock with terrible actors (including Tyga, in a bizarro cameo rapping at a frat party), and the jokes he gives his inferior cast to work with are stinkers.

It’s not the unmitigated disaster early reviews suggested. Instead, it is a blandly competent and doggedly uninspired redo of material adapted a half-dozen times already.

Lin’s F&F films are operatically dumb, which was what makes them so much fun; maybe if Star Trek Beyond were stupider it wouldn’t feel like such a chore.

Criminal is a perfectly passable thriller, if you’re cool with no one here passing as an actual human being.

Three films into the ongoing Divergent series, one would hope we’d moved beyond laying plates and folding napkins to get to something more substantial. Yet Allegiant barely makes it to the appetizer course.

Ill-conceived from any number of angles, this Peter Pan origin story, scripted by Jason Fuchs (Ice Age: Continental Drift), plays topsy-turvy with J.M. Barrie’s beloved characters.

The trouble comes when somebody opens their mouth and you’re reminded this is supremely silly stuff, and overall a much lesser version of teens versus the titans of post-apocalypse industry – a copy of a copy of a copy.

I lodge no complaint against the film’s emphasis on prayer, even if, dramatically, it’s not scintillating stuff to watch.

What’s most dispiriting about this garbage burger is its nonsensical characterization of Blart himself.

There’s little here to convince the audience of boy and girl’s special chemistry, and nothing to attach the audience to them, either.

An adaptation of Kody Keplinger’s YA novel, The DUFF is exponentially dumb.

Most Americans will be unfamiliar with the late British writer Kyril Bonfiglioli’s Mortdecai novels, on which this Johnny Depp comedy is based; still, no reference point is required to come to the conclusion this is a rotten movie all around.

Not just narratively crude but aesthetically ugly, Men, Women & Children’s framing occasionally cuts characters off at the forehead, in effect lobotomizing them. I couldn’t think of a better metaphor for this brainless splotch of self-important scaremongering.

Already hobbled by an overwrought story that turns positively Hallmark-Movie-preposterous in its third act, journeyman director Michael Hoffman (Soapdish, The Last Station) can’t conceive of a single memorable set-piece or rouse his actors into action. By the time Marsden’s character has very polite sex with the love of his life with his pants still on, I was done.

Because “all in” – to me, at least – suggests a certain standard of enthusiasm, of emphaticness, and what this latest Step Up movie indifferently chunks out falls far short of that standard.

Unimaginatively filmed and of a misbegotten construction, Tammy goes all in with its namesake character (played by McCarthy), hanging the entire movie around a person who is immediately and irreversibly established as being thoughtless, unperceptive, destructive, and uneducated.

There’s probably a movie out there that can call a happy, anatomical truce between Viagra-hopped, horizontal-dick jokes and heart-on-the-sleeve love stuff, but this ain’t that.

Branagh might as well have opened a can and dumped it on a plate, the ridges of a factory-line production still perfectly hatched on a gelatinous cylinder of crud.

I’m in Love With a Church Girl is not unambitious: It crams into its two hours terminal illness, money laundering, a DEA sting, clubbing, a prolonged coma, and lots of Bible study. But the action – punishingly turgid, spread-it-on-a-cracker cheesy – feels inauthentic, ginned up only to promote the film’s come-to-Jesus messaging, and to call the acting amateurish does a disservice to hard-working amateurs everywhere.

The film finds some momentum once the bodies start dropping – but maybe that was only the sweet relief in knowing the end was nigh.

What a clunker.

All together, it is a wearying display of defensiveness from a man who – by any barometer, not just his own – is wildly successful.

I’m not saying there isn’t comic gold to be mined in the topic of cunnilingus and the senior set, but The Big Wedding couldn’t hit pay dirt even if it face-palmed the film first.

Back to that question of medium: Scrubbed of the few, ill-fitting four-letter words that earned it an R, Language of a Broken Heart might have made a passable Hallmark or Lifetime TV movie, cushioned by the TV-movie context. But as a theatrical prospect, it’s a fail.

The leads project a sunny patina of wholesomeness and share marvelous tans, but beyond that, it’s a shrugging love match.

I have never doodled during a movie before in my life, but holy hell, Parker's two-hour running time takes a lifetime. Plenty of time for mental doodling, too.

In Movie 43's better-suited afterlife in the home-entertainment market, those sort of quandaries can be hashed out between bong rips and bags of Cheetos.

In his English-language debut, Wirkola dabbles in everything but commits to nothing, making for an unmemorable brew best left untasted.

By eliminating the winking, broad strokes of the filmmakers' more successful spoofs, they've made a film that is not only dumb, but dull. It's like watching a snuff film, only it's the audience who's dying inside.

There is running, hiding, fighting, shooting, bleeding, biting, slicing, dicing, and damnably little entertainment value in any of it.

Mostly, New Year's Eve is appalling stuff, a poorly constructed, sentimental sham. Auld lang suck.

Bill Condon (Dreamgirls, Chicago, Gods and Monsters) takes over the directing reins for these final two parts; his most noteworthy contribution to the series so far is a terrifyingly staged birth scene that should turn the teen fan base off of sex altogether … which is precisely what this whole dumb, punishing series has been gunning for from the start.

The Greek myths, of course, will endure. The same cannot be said for Singh's silly, self-serious, instantly forgettable, and inaptly named Immortals.

They have some fun playacting at class warriors on the lam – and Seyfriend, it must be said, rocks a killer bob – but it's all just big-budget dress-up in a futurescape that reeks of phoniness.

But most damningly, Shut Up Little Man! fails to convey what was so hypnotic about the original tapes, and Bate's decision to re-enact the transcripts with actors seems weirdly contrary to the spirit of the thing.

What goes most wrong is the casting. Every facet of Faris' performance feels off.

What does startle is how tiresome it all is.

About as humorless – and joyless – as they come.

As the film's central focal point, Simpson (who also co-wrote the script) is an awful zero – you could hardly imagine a more uncharismatic lead – and his embarrassing swings at big emotion in the climax prove the final blow to a film already hobbled by mawkishness.

The film restages the greatest hits of the show's many musical numbers, to greatly diminished effect, with lackluster choreography and all the narrative appeal stripped away.

I'm not gonna sugarcoat this: Movies don't have to be this bad.

Flaccid, endlessly irksome coming-of-age drama.

There are kernels here of a thoughtful and provocative picture, but they never pop – or POP!, for that matter.

These are boys and girls on their very best behavior, which doesn't sound like any prom you or I remember.

No one would mistake the Benzini Bros. Circus for the greatest show on earth – the Depression-era traveling troupe is a junker compared to the gold-standard Ringling Bros. – but still, a film has to try pretty hard to render lions and tigers and trapeze artists so uniformly underwhelming.

It's hard to decide what rankles most: what an astonishing monument to Shadyac's self-absorption I Am is, or how flat-out bad – incompetent, even – the filmmaking is.

Appallingly bad stuff.

Hall Pass has half the right idea: Scratch out "Hall," and just … pass.

Check the credits: That move is ripped straight from producer Michael Bay's playbook.

Novelty alone does not a good idea make, and in the case of Gnomeo and Juliet, it's rather a disturbing, even fetishy one.

Maybe taking a cue from his namesake dish, that much-maligned Scottish pudding concoction made with sheep innards and root vegetables, Haggis presents a mishmash of genres in this redo of Fred Cavayé's 2008 French film "Pour Elle."

If Affleck stumbles, Smith's script does nothing to catch his fall. Surprisingly, Smith's truest talent – that of writing – is Jersey Girl's weakest link.

The fictionalization of their journey is simply not that engrossing, nor are their alter egos, with their tightly scripted character arcs.

Fails because it takes itself so seriously, and because it is itself so seriously dull. Soderbergh's straining to give us a wink -- come on, guys, this is fun -- but really it just feels like some awful eye twitch -- a spasm of yawning self-indulgence in a mostly captivating career.

Indisputably awful comedy.

Instantly forgettable.

He is meant to be brooding, I think, but Tatum’s vague features read more “meathead” than anguished young lover. He has to carry the film, but he’s the least interesting thing going on here.

Astonishingly dull. The leads have zero chemistry, the supporting actors are even worse, and the script is a lifeless, draggy thing.

This one has the feel of being penned on rolling papers, with room to spare.

The actors do a fine, if unsoulful, job, but the real problem with A Love Divided is its unwillingness to unromanticize its heroes.

I was consistently aghast at how unabashedly alpha-male, heartless, and chauvinistic this film is.

The 3-D angle is the only one I can identify to justify Alpha and Omega not going straight to DVD.

Takes the giant leap from your run-of-the-mill mediocrity into an alternative universe of awfulness.

It's not particularly fun, or funny, for starters.

Everything else here – from the gross caricatures to the so-called comic mayhem – is sour to taste.

If LaBute wants to plumb the depths of human unkindness, have at it -– only dig deeper next time.

Another casualty of the uncomfortable branding so common to the teen genre, the same branding one sees in a film starring Hilary Duff, or Amanda Bynes, or the next sweet but bland blond actress that comes down the assembly line.

Overlong, overplotted, and pocked with improbabilities.

Vacant and pointless.

Screenwriter Dean Georgaris gets a hell of a pass here – the story is canon, and, in terms of emotional wallop, does all the heavy lifting for him – but he still manages to gunk up the works with dialogue that is dull-witted at best and outright howling at its worst.

The politest way to assess Spike Lee's latest polemic is to call it too ambitious. "An unholy mess" might come closer to the truth.

Isn't much more than a self-indulgent picture about the feeble delirium of a lovesick girl -- lightweight stuff that labors to seem terribly important.

There’s nothing especially offensive about the actress (Hudson); if anything, it’s that lack of offense, her overwhelmingly benign vibe, that has become increasingly repugnant with every picture she puts out.

This is the kind of movie in which every other line of dialogue feels like a metaphor – and from there on, the film seesaws between the uncomfortable extremes of glum and twee: an overwrought dirge keyed to a xylophonic ping.

A paint-by-numbers romantic comedy, but without the heart or laughs to make it work.

Head Over Heels whitewashes the originality and, well, weirdness Waters showed in his first film, although it's impossibe to imagine anything starring young poster-pups Potter and Prinze Jr. could be particularly edgy.

The film goes by in a wash of uninspired action and unmemorable comedy.

It's all infuriatingly simplistic, and the performances help matters little. Quinn and McTeer are wholly uncompelling.

The only actors who walk away unscathed are Kattan -- the best thing in a very bad movie -- and former cover girl Shaw.

It's cheap and it's lowdown, and to those responsible for this exercise in devolution: Honestly, I'm not sure I want to know someone like you.

What this really comes down to is the film's central lie. Made of Honor pins its hopes on a character who acts utterly without honor, and on an actor who has only two settings – sensitive or smarmy. The smarm wins.

Hey, guys, when you repurpose a disco hit to poke fun at gay men, not only do you look like assholes, you look like assholes who rip their jokes off of YouTube.

Some things are best left undiscovered.

Indeed, the largely computer-generated Jack acts the pants off his co-stars, which can and should be taken with a whole trough full of salt.

Wretched. And while the dirtiest, low-rottenest part of me wouldn’t mind watching the institution of Ben/Jen get reamed, the heft of the blame should be shouldered by Hollywood vet Martin Brest, who wrote an incoherent, incompetent script and further mangled it with his direction.

Very little here begs to be paid attention to.

With all the wrong Stealing Harvard has done, it at least bestows one gift upon its audience: the gift of forgettableness.

The blandness of The Wedding Planner burlap-sacks their appeal in an altogether dowdy outing for two stars who deserve much snazzier threads.