Liam Lacey

While 88 has characters who have lots to say about the history of white supremacy, dark money in politics, and the delusion of fixing a corrupt system from within, this is a stiff, artless effort that barely makes the transition from explanatory journalism to fiction.

A wearying spoof, the film, with its Regency-era setting, takes a smart, sombre drama and turns it into a juvenile inanity.

The script is a dazed, meandering, thing, involving drugs, pornography, neon-lit slo-mo, debauched starlets, car chases, soft-core sex scenes and loud gun fights.

Neeson maintains a certain doleful dignity as an action star who apparently takes no pleasure in his gift for violence, but Blacklight has little else going for it.

To be fair to Curtis, Off the Rails is more like a Richard Curtis make-your-own-dramedy at-home game, with each character’s personality stamped on a card and they roll the dice to see which complications ensue.

Sometimes researching the background of a movie proves more revealing than the film itself.

A farce that fizzles, a satire that sags, and a dead-end for its gifted cast, Breaking News In Yuba County at least starts well.

A family movie with lots of CGI-talking animals and star Robert Downey Jr. hiding his charisma, Dolittle is a tiresomely chaotic concoction.

The sharks are disappointingly not scary but they’re interesting-looking with their plastic torpedo heads and serrated-saw smiles. When they leap out of the dark to dismember bodies, they bloody the waters in swirling lava lamp patterns that feel almost peaceful. Or perhaps I’m just trying to find a nicer way to say dull.

Perhaps the only scary thing about the new horror movie The Curse of La Llarona is the fear of mispronouncing the title.

At first so-bad-it's-good, then merely it’s-so-bad, Replicas’ source of interest is primarily forensic. How did director Jeffrey Nachmanoff and writer Chad St. John (London Has Fallen) think they could get away with it?

The crude if silly humour of the movie’s first 90 minutes is followed by a dollop of sentiment at the film’s end, resulting in a case of tonal whiplash... like a slap with a wet fish followed by a forced bear hug. No doubt Tag means to be a rude but heart-warming trifle, but it just isn’t funny enough to get past its awful taste.

Unlike Griswold vacations past, the peril in which the family finds itself isn’t leavened by anything funny.

Occasionally a movie comes along that’s such an awkward compilation of ideas it fascinates: The Forger, a Boston-set melodrama involving cancer, Impressionist art and deadbeat dads, is only about half that good.

Eventful, polished, and knuckle-bitingly dull, the 10th film adapted from a novel by Nicholas Sparks, combines fate, bull riding and some powerful Hollywood bloodlines among its young cast.

Familiar in its outline but unusual in the details, Last Knights feels like a year’s worth of post-midnight cable TV viewing run through a blender and served warm for your viewing amusement.

Riding that fine line between misjudged and deliberately anti-p.c., Get Hard is lewd, crude and rude but, despite its disastrous reception at SxSW, not entirely unfunny.

Sean Penn smokes, glowers and shows off his knotty naked torso in this vain, risible misfire of a thriller about a reformed killer, from "Taken" director Pierre Morel.

Torching “witches” is the one part of the story that has some historical basis, and adds an uncomfortable edge of misogyny to this otherwise empty fantasy.

While the pale skin tones (bronzer is selectively applied) and haphazard mix of American and British accents is distracting, it barely scratches the surface of Exodus’s ungainly artificiality.

Sparks’s preposterous approach has crystalized into cliché.

Both cautionary and comforting (yes, some kids today prefer conversation to cybersexting), Men, Women & Children is as anxious to seem contemporary as any after-school special.

Everything about Are You Here feels like a bottom-drawer script idea that was put together too casually and carelessly.

The latest iteration of Sylvester Stallone’s aging warrior franchise, The Expendables 3, is proof that sometimes even your low expectations can be far too high.

A sweet and sloppy jumble of fantasy, sentimentality, comedy and soul-searching that feels like a sitcom that never got past the pilot stage.

Brick Mansions is a non-starter: It chokes on its déjà vu, the hyperactive Mixmaster editing is exhausting and the characters’ banter is so leaden it might violate federal emission standards.

After a while, it begins to feel like a confused comedy: How to explain to the neighbours that your dead husband has moved back home?

It is sincerely, painstakingly and astonishingly awful.