Kyle Smith

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.

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.

Almost without exception, the men are either sickening deviants or wise mentors while the ladies tend to be kickboxing hipsters or victims of sexual abuse (many are both).

Name names, please. Or shut up.

Is the Crystal Lake PD really doing such a good job? You'd have to go back to Phnom Penh in 1975 to find a place with a higher per-capita rate of unprosecuted homicides.

The movie boasts five Oscar winners. That figure exceeds by five the number of times I laughed at this cheap collection of icky jokes.

Formerly a maker of bad, but at least angry, movies, Spike Lee now seems to be trying to be the world's oldest student filmmaker. Take out the rookie mistakes from Red Hook Summer, and there'd be nothing left.

It's supposed to be about a Kafkaesque experience. Instead, it IS a Kafkaesque experience. Why are we here? Is everything absurd? Is anyone in charge?

Dopey as the film is on a plot level, it’s equally vapid in its psychology.

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 film is an exposé only of a filmmaker's senseless contempt for the military.

Turn the River lacks almost everything Eigeman has as a performer: charisma, wit and snappy delivery.

You must lead a dull life if it would be enlivened by 76 minutes' worth of Old Joy.

Attempting to fill Dudley Moore's top hat in Arthur, Russell Brand rapidly descends the rungs of the comedy ladder from "unfunny" to "irritating" to "vulgar" to the bottom one - "Andy Dick."

An indie exercise in macho posturing disguised as a tale of grief, reminds us that losing one’s parents is psychically debilitating. But that’s about as useful as knowing that rain is wet.

Not very haunty.

A sleazy and pointless film about sleazy and pointless people, Killer Joe reminds us that what Quentin Tarantino does isn't easy.

The teen movie The Spectacular Now begins like “Say Anything” but soon turns into “Drink Anything.”

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.

The movie chides us for being a sick voyeuristic society, hungry for the sight of violence. The purity of this moral stance is somewhat clouded by the movie's habit of staging sick violent acts.

Inherent Vice, meandering even by Anderson’s standards, is easily the worst of his movies, a soporific 2½-hour endurance test.

No, which has been nominated for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, is largely a gimmick picture: At all times, it looks like hastily assembled news footage shot on grainy videotape in 1988. That means light flaring up to spoil the image, bumpy camerawork, a nearly square picture and all-around grubbiness.

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.

At the end of it all comes McKay’s big angry harrumph about the meaning of the crisis — a sign of failed, frustrated satire. If you can make your message clear through comedy, there’s no need to say, “Here’s my moral.” A funnyman can’t afford to get caught wagging his finger.

The movie independently bungles everything it tries, like a Central Park busker who simultaneously sucks at juggling, harmonica playing and skateboarding.

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

Only rarely does the film present a genuine insight, such as the observation that many black people loved to dress up in their finest for church because, during the week, they were so often dressed as servants and manual laborers.

It seems more likely that a dumb movie will lead only to a time-wasting surge in applications from dummies. Maybe The Internship was secretly funded by Bing.

The movie offers very little that food radicals don't already know.

Combines a sketch-comedy premise with pacing like a philosophy seminar.

The writer-director of Dying of the Light is Paul Schrader, screenwriter of “Raging Bull.” The star is Nicolas Cage — Raging Tool.

For all its outré set pieces it never rises above the level of pretentious trash.

I’m probably more intrigued than 99.3 percent of the American public by the idea of deconstructing the hidden symbols in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” but the theories proposed in the doc Room 237 aren’t eye-opening. They’re laughable.

A backstage drama that has all the sizzle of a glass of water resting on the windowsill, Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria mistakes lack of dramatic imagination for smoldering subtlety.

Moreover, in attempting to update the play to a buzzing CNN world, Ralph Fiennes proves that as a director, he makes a fine actor.

Bidding to be the “Terms of Endearment” of zombie movies, Maggie sucks all the life out of an idea that just won’t die.

Sure to be a favorite with racists, Beasts of No Nation sheds no light whatsoever on Africa’s civil wars but turns its gaze on black people brutalizing one another with machetes, howitzers, rifles and anything else that comes to hand. I picture Calvin Candie, the plantation owner in “Django Unchained,” yelling, “Yeah! Git ’em!”

Situations get increasingly ridiculous, and none of the characters ever seems like anything but a screenwriter's sketch.

Fifty Shades will make you dumber.

The similar Kevin Bacon HBO movie "Taking Chance" got there first. Worse news: The earlier movie was sober, meticulous and quietly convincing, not a shouty, shoddy bore like this piece of flummery.

The ludicrous action thriller Beyond the Reach fails to achieve the Southwestern noir potency of “No Country for Old Men,” but there’s no denying it brings to mind another Southwestern classic about malicious pursuit: the Road Runner cartoons.

The first time I saw Yes Man, I thought the concept was getting kind of stale toward the end. As it turns out, that was only the trailer.

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.

With Philomena, British producer-writer-star Steve Coogan and director Stephen Frears hit double blackjack, finding a true-life tale that would enable them to simultaneously attack Catholics and Republicans. There’s no other purpose to the movie, so if 90 minutes of organized hate brings you joy, go and buy your ticket now.

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.

Even if you overlooked the production values from a 1986 porno and special effects like something your nephew cooked up on his Mac, the movie's "Yay, money!" zingers are just a big bag of sad.

Every Little Step shows only this: It hurts to flunk an audition, and it's nice to get hired. Everything it has to say about Broadway was said better in Bob Fosse's movie "All That Jazz" -- in its opening five minutes.

Has the aroma of an autobiographical confession by someone for whom life hasn’t been overly difficult.

Guardians of the Galaxy brings to mind some of the most unforgettable sci-fi event movies of the last 30 years. Alas, those films are “Howard the Duck” and “Green Lantern.”

The laziness of this filmmaking (which assumes you know that Gray killed himself in 2004) is of a piece with the emphatically uninteresting tales told by a classic dinner-party bore who once referred to his ramblings as "creative narcissism." He was half-right.

Proves that what might be (but probably isn't) worth five minutes of your time while you're passing through the Times Square subway station really isn't worth a 1 1/2-hour movie.

The movie's prideful silliness makes it semi-watchable in the manner of Saturday afternoon cable flicks like "Delta Force."

No, this film by director/co-writer Gillian Robespierre just isn’t funny, and the mismatched leads aren’t even interesting together.

It contains no poetry. It simply conjures up a horrible feeling -- and then sits back awaiting congratulation.

The only thing that's shocking about Death of a President is how boring it is.

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

Porno plus Parkinson's don't quite add up to sexy fun.

Just Before I Go is a “Garden State” retread in which filthy jokes gradually cede ground to sentimental slush.

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.

Shot through with ’60s London energy, illuminating on several fronts and featuring bits of many great Who tracks, the film is nevertheless a mess that should be taught in film schools to illustrate how not to edit a documentary.

Calls to mind Grandpa taking out his dentures and trying to put on a comedy monster show for little kids at Halloween: When he tries to be scary, he's goofy, but when he tries to be goofy, he's scary.

"Dark World” is low-stakes, low-emotion, lowbrow.

The climate-change documentary Time To Choose makes the disaster movie “The Day After Tomorrow” look like a model of judiciousness and restraint.

Like its subject, a lawsuit that is expected to go on for another 10 years, Crude has no ending. This is the perfect ending for this Goliath versus Goliath documentary about powerful personal-injury lawyers taking on a powerful corporation.

Spits out enough scares and twists to maintain our interest, but the film's psycho-sociological layer is almost as cheesy and unconvincing as its low-rent action scenes.

Even at a supposed celebration, the well-bred and well-off aren't really happy at all. So the title is ironic. Thanks for that profound insight.

The movie is trying to do far too much and doesn't do anything well. "Ambitious" isn't the word here; "random" is more like it.

The silliness of Moore's oeuvre is so self-evident that being able to spot it is not liberal or conservative, either; it's a basic intelligence test, like the ability to match square peg with square hole. His documentaries are political slapstick that could have been made by a third Farrelly brother or a fourth Stooge.

Tender, heartfelt and exquisitely dull, the drama Félix and Meira illustrates the perils of trying to tell an emotional love story with meaningful stares and long pauses.

Few kinds of art are more boring than the insistently transgressive, and few movies are more boring than Humpday.

Even for a mumblecore film, Computer Chess is weak stuff, a punitively dull chunk of quirk that is about, and feels like, being stuck in a motel with a gaggle of programming nerds for a weekend.

Jacques Rivette's film is full of painstaking historical detail, but the behavior of the two nonlovers is mired in inaction and emotionally incomprehensible.

The only possible interest the movie will inspire in anyone comes when Paltrow flashes a breast toward the end, far too late to pump any excitement into an aggressively boring film that gurgles with self-indulgence.

The nicest thing I can think of to say about the doc Neil Young Journeys is that at least it isn't in 3-D.

This film is narratively inert (we spend a lot of time listening to the same questions being asked over and over) and, like virtually all docs in its genre, less than vigorous in its pursuit of truth.

Depravity and addiction can be dramatic and fascinating, or they can be as they are in this week's indie filthathon Cook County.

The computer-generated flying effects are the only reason to see the movie, but at some point somebody left the computer on too long, so it went ahead and spat out the script.

A searing, penetrating look inside schizophrenia is exactly what Enter the Dangerous Mind isn’t.

Imagine “Moby-Dick” rewritten in crayon, and you’ll get the idea.

There’s nothing wrong with being a brainless B-movie, but this one is funless and lackluster, a grinding mess of pulp clichés with dull characters, perfunctory violence and dim plotting.

Liberal Arts comes to us produced by Josh Radnor. Written by Josh Radnor. Starring Josh Radnor. Josh Radnor is much like Woody Allen, except for the talent.

An English-language film from Italy, Tale of Tales toys with the ogres, princesses and crones of classic fairy tales to almost no dramatic effect, albeit with lots of sex and gore. Imagine the Brothers Grimm’s cousins Tyler and Jake writing for a late-night slot on Cinemax and you’ll get the idea.

In the Land of Women is one of those films informed by intimate personal experience - the experience of seeing "Garden State."

I've seen a lot of rip-offs of "The Truman Show" and a lot of rip-offs of "Scream." I guess I have to give credit to The Cabin in the Woods for ripping off both at once.

This is a horror movie that’s really a supposed comedy; she’s (Lohan) a supposed comedy actress who’s actually scary.

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.

The dull, predictable direction is the perfect match for a watery, nondescript cast.

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.

Slow West certainly lives up to its title: It’s one poky Western, plodding and perambulating and moseying across the 1870 frontier on a grim march to a pointless ending.

If Ed Wood had directed "The Silence of the Lambs," it might have been as unintentionally hilarious as the goofball would-be thriller The Abduction of Zack Butterfield.

Two dull people have a dull love affair in Summertime, a French drama that drags on like an August afternoon.

The considerable talents of Banks make the movie bearable.

This indie documentary is egregiously Hollywood in spirit. That a take-charge white football coach can buck up a place like Manassas HS with some gridiron grit is a lie we want to believe.

There needs to be a 12-step program for movie people to stop sharing their "deeply personal" yet insight-free stories of addiction.

Even at a cramped and frenetic 82 minutes, the movie feels long. That’s what happens when the audience can guess everything that’s going to happen in advance.

At 86 minutes, the film spends exactly 86 more minutes with its subjects than can possibly be tolerated. Coincidence?

A wan effort at "Annie Hall"-style comedy, has about as much Manhattan sophistication as a gas station in Chippewa Falls, Wis.

The real mystery is this: Even if you find this guerrilla art project utterly fascinating, why would anyone bother to release an incomplete film about it?