Kyle Smith

Much of this roams pretty far from Orwell’s vision, but that’s not the reason the film fails. It fails because it’s obvious, witless and dull. The animation is charmless and bland.

Even a day later, contemplating this willfully nauseating work carries much the same sensation as having ingested a plate of bad clams.

Some movies are toxically misconceived, and “The Drama” is among them. It wants to be wicked and outrageous but it’s really just dismal and depressing.

There’s nothing wrong with making movies for 5-year-olds. But, as directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic and written by Matthew Fogel, “Galaxy” seems very much like a movie made by 5-year-olds.

Why an Oscar-winning screenwriter would make a film that makes so little attempt to dig into its central character is baffling. That an Oscar-nominated director with a celebrated eye for the ethereal, strange world of girl-women living in beautiful boxes could make a film as workaday as this one is frustrating.

An experience that’s like being slowly asphyxiated by puffy clouds of baby powder.

If there’s a single witty idea in the entire two-hour slog, I missed it.

Ms. Buckley quickly becomes the centerpiece of the movie, or rather its central headache. Her overacting meets Ms. Gyllenhaal’s over-filmmaking like the Hindenburg crashing into the Titanic.

As a comedy “Killing” is simply dead.

The director’s trying-too-hard approach to everything, meant to make the film exciting, instead makes it so frenetic that it’s a slog, and the script by Marco van Belle falls short of the standard that you would expect to draw a star of Mr. Pratt’s magnitude.

Universal conscription for every able-bodied man from 18 to 40 is about to be instituted, and the events of this shallow, cheap and corny story seem unlikely to offer much in the way of comforting memories for those who get sent to the trenches.

Ella McCay is not quotable. It is not believable. It is not likable. It’s not even digestible. For an ordinary filmmaker, it would be merely a disaster. For James L. Brooks, it’s more like a tragedy.

With so much going on, there’s no time to make any of the action truly engaging, especially given Mr. Fleischer’s rigid determination to be as flashy as possible all of the time.

Mr. Powell remains one of today’s most promising leading men, but he’s running in place here.

Thin characterizations, bland acting and a surfeit of bubbly cuteness combine to make a throw-pillow of a movie: It’s soft and decorative without being particularly useful or interesting.

The potential for an interesting sci-fi spectacle is there, at least at the start, but Tron: Ares does nothing with it.

It ought to be a treat to see such charismatic talents falling in love, but the only overwhelming and unstoppable force in the movie is its love for cutesy and cloying gimmicks. It’s a cinematic crime to waste these two stars: I charge “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” with unconscionably aggravated whimsy in the third degree.

Mr. Tipping ditches reasonable motivation to deliver a satirical haymaker aimed at those whose religion is football. Like many failed satires, the conclusion is more vehement than amusing.

As the Roses start to become increasingly hostile to each other in front of others, the tone is meant to be hilariously nasty. Instead it’s merely monotonously vulgar, as a long string of one-liners relies more on the supposed shock value of profanity than on wit.

Mr. Coen and Ms. Cooke’s plot is such a muddle that they more or less expect us to dismiss it. The interstitial moments and incidental comedy are meant to be the chief attraction here. Minus Joel Coen, however, the jokes are thin and tired.

The entire movie comes across as awkward, even flailing to hold our interest.

The several mediocre songs seem like filler intended to pad out the running time to 90 minutes, but then again, everything else seems like padding too.

At no point does anything shocking, or even interesting, happen.

Mr. Boyle has made more than his share of memorable films, but he has also delivered some stinkers and unfortunately his new one carries the fragrance of a zombie underarm.

The two human leads, Nani and Lilo, don’t have nearly enough charm to make up for the deficiencies around them, which leaves the entire movie essentially in Stitch’s claws. Yet even his demented-toddler-on-three-espressos energy isn’t funny, perhaps because the digital animation is so dismal.

Mr. Malek is incapable of providing the audience with an emotional hook.

I’m not sure I’ve ever before come across an original feature with a screenplay credited to 11 writers (not to mention four “story consultants”), and yet nobody in this mirth brigade brought any operational comedy ammunition.

Even an audience expecting very little would be underwhelmed by this meandering, snowy dud, which, for all its extravagance, at a reported $120 million budget, combines insipid messaging with witless comedy and a weak plot that gets resolved in a silly way.

Mr. Hausmann-Stokes hopes to keep the movie darkly comic until pivoting to a final, emotional payoff, but the mawkish late scenes are even more inept than the supposedly funny ones, as the director stages tearful hugs accompanied by soapy attempts at emotional dialogue.

Adolescent is the ruling adjective here; this is an increasingly tiresome and almost wholly senseless feature.

The intricately choreographed fight scenes are amusing enough, not that they have a lot of impact given the overbearingly silly musical score and the lurching, chaotic plot.

Mr. Kamiyama has sent into battle nothing but armies of clichés.

Repetitive, meandering and dull, Mr. Ross’s film keeps steering attention to its director at the expense of narrative by relying on two tics that quickly wear out their welcome.

The movie takes on the shape of a video game, with the heroes swaggering confidently from one blowout action sequence to the next with hardly any thought given to making us care about the characters or establishing the film’s heart.

It’s thin and flat, the opposite of inventive, surprising, daring or insightful. Though it’s billed as a comedy-drama, nothing in it generates laughs, even of the cringe variety.

The inch-deep approach to history and social issues, the high-concept device, and the trite characters all seem better suited to a different type of movie—such as one of those gee-whiz featurettes shown at the EPCOT theme park.

Mr. Forster’s affinity for flat dialogue, cartoonish characters, hokey contrivance and dull inspirational messages continue to be his hallmark, and the Hallmark Channel seems like an ideal place for his future work.

If the principal actors weren’t so watchable, the movie would be an outright bore.

There is a difference between gleefully bonkers and tragically inept, and I’m afraid this omnishambles has earned a place in the anti-pantheon of the worst films ever made by a great director.

The plot beats are so dull, contrived and poorly engineered (for a few minutes the wolves must pretend to be rivals who don’t know each other) that the movie becomes an onerous chore comparable to the one that launches the action. Who can I call to make this dead movie disappear?

Mannered acting, dismal cinematography, clunky attempts to enhance excitement via gimmicks such as slow motion, and a musical score like a fountain of goo all serve as flashbacks to Reagan-era network schlock.

The film proves to be as smug and shallow as the plutocrats it lampoons.

Though Mr. Skarsgård (who played the terrifying Pennywise in “It”) is gravely charismatic and FKA twigs is touching, the dour, depressing dankness of Mr. Sanders’s vision makes The Crow a turkey.

The charming, gentle simplicity of the book, with its childlike art, has been displaced by a mania for digital images and frantic attempts to be funny. This crayon should have been left in its box.

Mr. Liman handles each plot beat maladroitly, piling one utterly absurd contrivance or coincidence upon another.

Fly Me to the Moon could have worked beautifully, if only someone had first figured out a coherent story.

Fewer and better-drawn supporting characters would have helped give some substance to Chris Bremner and Will Beall’s script, but as it is the movie centers on the chatter of the two principals, creaky one-liners and blowout action scenes that mistake frantic editing for excitement.

Swamping the audience with Michael Giacchino’s oceans-of-syrup score, IF expects viewers to cry at the end, but if so it’ll be due to regret at wasted time, or possibly from hyperglycemia.

Director Luca Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes tell the story out of order, jumping around in time so often that it becomes tiresome, especially since there is so little forward-moving plot.

Spectacular? I guess, if you’re wowed by soulless CGI chaos. Thrilling? Not really. At the end, I was left feeling the way Kong does at the beginning: tired and bored.

What was once thrilling, inventive and funny is now desiccated and limp. The pertinent question, it turns out, is not “Who you gonna call?” but “Why did they bother?”

The most annoying tactic in the script is its repeated, strenuous attempts to convince us that we’re in the rarefied air of serious literary discussion.

The screenwriter starts to seem like a sweaty basement-of-the-coffee-house magician who keeps sawing ladies in half long past the point of diminishing returns.

Tiresome digressions mixed in with philosophical banalities add up to a pointless, inert drama.

This movie seems proud, even smug, about recycling scraps from other fairy tales.

Mr. Woo’s frenzied love of operatically heightened violence may have influenced some talented younger directors, but without an interesting screenplay to work from his movies sink into mindlessness. “Silent Night” is nothing to shout about.

This more than 2 1/2 hour film would rank as one of Hollywood’s sleepiest fantasy blockbusters of the century even without the pointless musical interludes, of which there are at least half a dozen.

"Dial of Destiny” is, if anything, even more breathless and filled with stunts than “Raiders,” but everyone’s feats look like insipid fakery.

Although the climactic battle sequence is, as usual in these movies, teeming with spectacle . . . it feels busy rather than exciting.

“Rise of the Beasts” is shamelessly vapid filmmaking that stacks up poorly against several other entrants in the series.

The entire film feels like an exceedingly stale stand-up comedy routine, which is to say it’s exactly like one of Mr. Maniscalco’s stand-up comedy routines.

Hiring France’s Louis Leterrier to direct was a bit like managing the pandemonium at a toddler’s birthday party by bringing in a soda machine.

Every element other than Mr. Grant is brain-scarringly awful—the flat characters, the dull acting, the rusted-battleax dialogue, and above all the action scenes, which are frenzied, chaotic, meaningless and vapid, overflowing with CGI that is no more awe-inspiring than the average TV commercial about lizards selling auto insurance.

As the runtime lumbers on to the two-hour mark, with one scene after another fizzling out, its warm nimbus of niceness seems to be the sole reason for its existence.

The title is by far the most noteworthy element of this lumpy horror-comedy.

No catharsis redeems the horrors we’ve witnessed; no useful lesson is learned; there isn’t even so much as a sociological observation. One leaves the theater with an unpleasant feeling, equal parts depleted and cheated.

Throughout this dry, dull and bloodless movie, nothing like an honest grappling with the depravity of killing one’s own infant ever seems to occupy anyone’s attention.

There’s laying it on thick, there’s laying it on with a trowel, and there’s laying it on like A Man Called Otto.

The film does a poor job of illuminating human frailty because everything in it is so transparently contrived, so clumsily aimed at your tear ducts.

Mr. Fraser looks so spectacularly awful as Charlie in the film, directed by Darren Aronofsky, that this chamber piece amounts to a variation of torture porn for highbrows, with a fat suit rather than a meat cleaver as the bringer of cinematic shock.

Fans of Mr. Ferrell and Mr. Reynolds have likely never seen them in anything this earnest and tacky before, and are liable to feel somewhere between betrayed and stunned.

Much forced joshing about the conventions of the genre undercuts the impact of the film’s action, which is also severely limited by the smash-em-up frenzy of the special-effects department. Not for the first time in a comic-book epic, the CGI cart comes before the storytelling horse and leads it off a cliff.

To describe “Amsterdam” as an unfunny comedy would be unfair, because it’s so much more than that. It’s also a non-thrilling thriller and a not particularly mysterious mystery. As an allegory for our times it is vapid and irrelevant.

The film is painfully slow from the beginning, then really starts to drag as it reveals that it essentially has no plot. A late turn to drama makes a bad film even worse. May Mr. Brown and Ms. Hall quickly move on to more rewarding roles. The way this movie squanders their talents is a sin.

Mr. Kormákur somehow elicits a shoddy performance from the sturdy English actor Idris Elba, whom I’d never seen flail like this.

The fur flies, the claws come out and the bad jokes hit the fan.

Whatever the charms of the book, they are entirely absent from the dull and listless film.

There’s no sense to almost every element in the movie, and its sensibility is this: that dull dialogue is bound to sound witty if delivered in an English accent. It doesn’t. At least the costumes are pretty.

All of the roaring and thundering in “Dominion” carries roughly the dramatic impact of a robust sneeze, because Mr. Trevorrow has forgotten that what we human beings care about, despite our addiction to spectacle, are human beings.

For all its promise to be a wry commentary on the savagery of office politics, The Belko Experiment is more like an experiment in how many cracked-open skulls can be crammed into one movie.

Congratulations are in order to Table 19: This comedy about the random losers stuck together at a wedding reception actually, uncannily, creates an experience as dull, awkward and excruciating as the thing it mocks.

Fifty Shades will make you dumber.

In “Raging Bull” and “The King of Comedy,” Robert De Niro did stand-up comedy badly. In The Comedian he does it badly again — there’s that same air of menace and gracelessness — but this time the movie want us to think he’s brilliant.

Heavy-handed message movies don’t come more harrumphing than “Miss Sloane,” a clunky dramatization of the gun-control argument liberals still don’t understand is being conducted solely among themselves.

The Will Smith weepie Collateral Beauty couldn’t be more calculated and manipulative if it slapped you on the back, shoved a giant lollipop into your mouth and immediately tried to sell you a time share in Tampa.

Dramatically inert, satirically inept and thematically insufferable, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is the most disappointing film of the year.

If the makers of Trolls must keep going, I won’t be present for the next entry unless it’s “Trolls Meet Smurfs.” With chainsaws. In the Thunderdome.

"The Titanic" is now the second-biggest disaster Kate Winslet has ever been associated with. Her new one, The Dressmaker, is like some hellborn alloy of film noir, campy melodrama, “High Plains Drifter” and the Darwin Awards for people who die in moronic accidents.

Less enjoyable than making a baby but more enjoyable than raising one, the animated feature Storks delivers a bouncing bundle of blah.

Running and screaming may be essential to a lot of horror movies, but as Blair Witch shows, they’re not scary in themselves. For that, you need the stuff between the running and screaming.

Snowden could have been a character portrait, but instead it’s like “The Bourne Identity” minus the chases and fights, which is like a ham and cheese sandwich minus the ham and cheese. As a consequence, I suspect, this film will make no bread.

This movie is resolute about being as homey and obvious as it can possibly be. Somewhere, Norman Rockwell is thinking, “Sheesh, even I was edgier than this.”

A dopey psychological thriller that combines elements of “The Sixth Sense” with an overbearing sentimentality, The 9th Life of Louis Drax flat-lines from beginning to end.

A dull, listless, derivative chunk of celluloid lacking any spark or even basic storytelling ability.

A gooey morass of indie-movie clichés, the wacky-family dramedy The Hollars marks yet another egregiously cutesy attempt to rekindle that “Garden State” magic.

Trite and vulgar boxing flick.

After an hour or so, when the would-be comedy War Dogs finally gets around to a point to focus on, it’s stale ammunition that’s been sitting in a dusty Albanian warehouse for 40 years. I assume the movie got its jokes from the same place.

If it has a genius for anything, it’s disorganization: What promised to be a Super Bowl of villainy turned out more like toddler playtime.