Kimberley Jones

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.

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

Instantly forgettable.

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.

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

It isn't all the actors' faults, of course. You can't, ahem, turn straw into gold, and straw – dull, brittle, lousy to taste – is entirely what director Mark Rosman and first-time screenwriter Leigh Dunlap deliver.

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

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.

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.

If you're gonna hire one of the funniest American comedians working today – Zach Galifianakis – and shove him to the side of the frame, then frankly, you can take what happens in Vegas, keep it in Vegas, and keep the rest of the us out of it.

From "Hands on a Hard Body" to an 89-minute ogling of another hard body: It boggles the mind that 11 years after his engrossing documentary about an endurance competition to win a truck in Longview, Texas, filmmaker Bindler has channeled his talents into this regrettable comedy.

A stiff drink or maybe some pharmaceutical assistance might have made me overlook the film's sour tone, or the unremarkableness of its direction.

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.

"By practicing his art, he revealed himself to us." Fellini: I’m a Born Liar provides proof positive: The art indeed reveals far more than this pedestrian documentary ever does.

Holy hell, having to sit through nearly three hours of M:I making like Ethan Hunt is the Messiah is not just exhausting: It’s a total misread of what makes these movies so fun. What a bummer.

Very little here begs to be paid attention to.

Bait equals bad.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

These days, Allen's pictures are more like snuff films, in which the viewer must suffer both gifted actors committing screen hara-kiri and a once-brilliant filmmaker soldiering on with his long, bullheaded decline.

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.

There are no insights here, only lavishly budgeted cosplay.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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."

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.

In practice, and played as farce, the characters are one-dimensional cutouts kept at a dogged remove. Their miseries are a bore – maybe to Allen, too, who abruptly ends the film, after so much inaction, when it finally catches some dramatic traction.

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.

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.

A succession of shrill overacting jobs.

Clearly the film is archly trying to connect the dots between Rove and the supreme mishandling of Iraq – and a compelling case might be made – but it isn't made here.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Even though She’s Out of My League ends exactly where you think it will, it does so without ever having actually gone anywhere at all.

No film that requires a woman to jump in water and dogpaddle toward a man has the "sisterhood's" best interests at heart.

And then there's the overacting. And then there's the hamminess of the script. And then there's

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

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.

Irritating throughout, Love Me if You Dare turns positively appalling in its last half hour, with the inevitable final showdown producing an image that continues to curdle my stomach days later.

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

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.

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.

I’m told Bella’s helplessness is true to the spirit of the novels, but so what? It’s almost 2010 – let’s get hip, people.

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.

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

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.

It's a botched job through and through, made all the more distressing by Bullock's recent announcement that she's throwing in the romantic comedy towel for a while.

Vacant and pointless.

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

The jokes just aren't there, which makes it very hard for the stars -- who are trying very, very hard -- to really make a dent.

The Virginity Hit is repugnant.

Overlong, overplotted, and pocked with improbabilities.

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

What a clunker.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Little Black Book isn't your run-of-the-mill romantic comedy – it's much worse – and, rather disgustingly, the devils on earth it unmasks are all female and vindictive.

How many screenwriters does it take to screw in this dim bulb? Five – no joke – and another one credited with “story by.”

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

Flaccid, endlessly irksome coming-of-age drama.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Ghosts indeed: This romantic comedy by name alone attempts to make funny – not to mention culturally relevant – the kind of swinging-dick misogyny that went out of fashion years ago.

Aggressively unfunny and unromantic, Valentine’s Day’s chief concern appears to have been the corralling of its cast of a thousand stars; it seems far less attention was paid to what to do with that cast once assembled.

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

The script's tone veers chaotically -- and ambitiously -- at once aiming for a Noel Coward kind of elegant sparring, then for the lightly raunchy, rompy absurdism of "What's New, Pussycat?"

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.

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.

Appallingly bad stuff.

Love Happens? It depends on your definition of “love.” And “happens.” There isn’t much of either in this predictable, putzy drama.

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

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.

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

Christina Applegate, of Eighties white-trash pinup fame, is a comic foil par excellence, delivering a snazzy, self-assured performance that lands the biggest laughs in a movie made mostly of hollow chuckles. She, in fact, is the sweetest thing in this sour, sucky film.

The collective charisma of Robert De Niro, Eddie Murphy, and Rene Russo is the only reason to slap down eight bucks for this limp action/comedy, but then, it's difficult not to want to avert your eyes out of embarrassment for the trio.

Never aims higher than the urinal.