Lou Lumenick

There’s a fatally miscast lead (Jack Huston, you are no Charlton Heston), cut-rate special effects, reams of eyeball-glazing dialogue, and a schmaltzy “inspirational” script that pointlessly alters the story in ways that make absolutely no sense.

The first “Independence Day’’ was a lot of fun, with a great lines and cutting-edge special effects. It was much imitated, so the sequel plays like a faded, eighth-generation copy with a cast that’s shooting blanks when it comes to humor.

Jude Law gives arguably the worst performance of his career as Wolfe in Genius, the ham-fisted directing debut of noted British theater figure Michael Grandage, bombastically adapted by John Logan (“Gladiator’’) from a biography by A. Scott Berg.

Smartphone apps don’t particularly lend themselves well to political allegory or satire. But that’s precisely what the makers of this fitfully amusing animated adaptation of the once-popular game seem to be fruitlessly attempting.

Only Bryan Cranston, as Teller’s downsized dad, emerges with his dignity fully intact from Get a Job, whose scattershot direction is credited to Dylan Kidd (“Roger Dodger”).

By the time David gets someone to unleash the gas, I was wishing he could simply erase all memories of the sorry “Divergent’’ franchise.

Christopher Plummer confronts Nazi horrors again in Atom Egoyan’s preposterous thriller, which squanders a terrific performance by the Oscar-winning actor.

Racist, stupid and boasting cheesy effects.

Some handsome location shooting in New Orleans doesn’t make up for the Oscar winners’ relentless hamming and a plot that twists way beyond credibility.

The Hateful Eight is basically an expensive vanity project allowing Tarantino to expound on his bizarre theories about race relations.

Presenting a “true” adventure about a giant whale that supposedly inspired “Moby-Dick” raises tsunami-high expectations about In the Heart of the Sea that are crushed as thoroughly as if star Chris Hemsworth had brought down his “Thor” hammer on the entire enterprise.

This version, flatly directed and risibly written by Billy Ray, is saddled with endless coincidences, questionably motivated characters and an utterly laughable climax.

A decade later, these tabloid hall-of-famers are finally back to share the screen in By the Sea — glumly emoting in a pretentiously arty, humorless vanity production that drags along for two hours that feel like at least four.

“A license to kill is also a license to not kill,” M lectures his new boss in the 24th James Bond film, Spectre. Well, it’s not a license to bore as much as this bloated drag manages to do.

This joyless, 10-megaton bomb fails in just about every imaginable way, as well as some you couldn’t possibly imagine.

With thinly drawn characters, uneven performances and tin-eared dialogue, Stonewall plays at best like a musical without the songs.

If you thought Matthew Broderick looked uncomfortable playing “himself” in “Trainwreck,” wait till you get a load of the actor portraying a married man who wonders if he’s gay in Neil LaBute’s mean-spirited comedy Dirty Weekend.

Even an engaging performance by Margot Robbie as the proverbial last woman on Earth isn’t enough to save Z for Zachariah from becoming yet another ploddingly pretentious Sundance dud.

A screwball farce that pulls off a pitifully low percentage of its gags, even with a star-crammed cast.

A lousy script, unfocused direction, incoherent editing, shockingly terrible special effects — and, probably, panicked studio executives — have left its four talented stars muddling through a dull superhero origin story with zero payoff.

The geniuses behind the new film just don’t understand the difference between genuine subversiveness and pointless vulgarity.

Irrational Man is so clumsily staged and lethargically paced that it makes such clunkers as “Small Time Crooks” and “Cassandra’s Dream” look like minor classics.

Even by the modest standards of the genre, the ending is jaw-droppingly ridiculous.

Director Boaz Yakin (“Remember the Titans”) indulges in an awful lot of gunplay for a PG-rated family film, but sure knows how to stage a dirt-bike race. The Belgian malinoises who play Max way out-act the humans.

Oblivious to both narrative logic and the laws of physics, the cliché-filled San Andreas doesn’t nearly have the star power of earlier, better disaster movies it borrows from like “The Poseidon Adventure,” “Earthquake” and “The Towering Inferno.”

Soggy, strictly by-the-numbers crime thriller.

Franco’s distancing routine helps sink True Story, an already turgid and tone-deaf adaptation of a self-serving memoir by a disgraced New York Times reporter (played by two-time Oscar nominee Jonah Hill) who bonds with a murderer he’s trying to exploit.

The choppily edited and thoroughly wooden Serena utterly fails to catch fire, even when everything literally goes up in flames. So despite its big stars, it’s getting only a token theatrical release.

You know you’re in for a long haul when Kate Winslet’s clipboard-wielding Jeanine, leader of the Erudite faction, comes off less like a Hillary Clinton than a weary Applebee’s supervisor at the end of a 14-hour shift in this plodding sequel to “Divergent.”

A painfully earnest and totally unfunny magic-realist fable set on the Lower East Side that works in no way whatsoever.

“Short Circuit” meets “RoboCop” — with asides to “WALL-E,” “E.T.,” “The Road Warrior” and many other better movies — in Chappie, an interminable, violent, incoherent and wearying R-rated sci-fi action comedy.

This sequel sorely misses the presence of Tom Wilkinson, whose out-of-the-closet character grounded the first film (but died at the end).

There’s no doubt at all that the schlocky The Lazarus Effect should have been euthanized and shipped directly to video rather than haunting movie theaters, however briefly.

Hard-core Hollywood haters will best appreciate Maps to the Stars, a campy poison-pen letter to Tinseltown that makes “Sunset Boulevard’’ look like a tourism infomercial by comparison.

A better cast this time around — Michael Angarano, Milo Ventimiglia, Sofía Vergara and Max Casella, with cameos by Jason Alexander, Stanley Tucci and Hope Davis — tries to breathe life into Goldman’s cliché-ridden plot.

Unintended laughs far, far outnumber intended thrills.

A jaw-droppingly terrible animated musical that mismatches George Lucas’ inane story about a pair of fairy princesses to an oddball selection of the “Star Wars’’ creator’s favorite pop tunes.

The worst Hollywood musical so far this century, it’s another misstep for Sony Pictures, which also sponsored the abortive ‘‘The Interview.’’

An utterly clueless, relentlessly grim and rambling action epic guaranteed to displease devout Jews, Christians and Muslims alike, amuse atheists — and generally bore everyone.

A lazy, noisy ADHD-addled collection of animated clichés guaranteed to give anyone older than 5 a headache, even if you don’t see it in optional 3-D.

Hopefully Jennifer Lawrence will actually be given something worthwhile to do next time around. That would actually be worth paying to see.

Dr. Godard drops and quotes more names than you’d find in a week’s worth of Page Six, but lots of luck figuring any of this out before dozing off. The good thing about Goodbye to Language is that you’ll wake up with no side effects, albeit your wallet will be $12 lighter.

Aside from the very occasional stab with a dagger, John prefers to shoot people at point-blank range. It gets old fast.

“Scratch the surface and there’s only more surface,’’ a character all too accurately observes in this clunky, ugly and dull mash-up of a mystery.

Even with appearances by such dependable performers as Toni Collette, Stellan Skarsgård, Christopher Plummer and Jean Reno, the interminable Hector and the Search for Happiness will most likely inspire audiences to search for the exit door.

Time to pull the plug on this brain-dead franchise.

The only truly lethal weapons in the criminally unfunny action comedy Let’s Be Cops are the lame script, putrid direction and pair of sitcom stars mugging nonstop in frantic pursuit of laughs that have fled over the state line.

Child of God is, like the source novel, loosely inspired by the notorious real-life cannibal murderer Ed Gein. So was Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.’’ Nobody left that classic bored — but they sure will be by Franco’s film.

And So It Goes appears to be targeting an audience segment that rarely goes out to the movies — while providing them a cringe-worthy incentive to never do so again.

Manages to be excruciatingly unfunny despite the presence of Pierce Brosnan and Emma Thompson in the lead roles.

James Franco, all is forgiven. His woebegotten “Oz: The Great and Powerful’’ is practically a masterpiece compared to this eyeball-gougingly ugly, charm-free animated musical sequel.

Vanity, thy name is Kevin Spacey.

Veteran screenwriter John Pogue, in his second directorial outing, tries repeatedly and mostly unsuccessfully to jolt his audience by amping up the abundant sound effects to ear-shattering levels.

Lethargic direction, bland visuals, credulity-straining plotting and tin-eared dialogue turn even pros like Rebecca Hall, Paul Bettany and Morgan Freeman into sleepwalking bores.

Tedious and pretentious.

As in genuine porn, most of the acting (except for Skarsgard, who deliberately tries to be funny and sometimes succeeds) is as flat and uninteresting as the script — even when the older Joe narrates a montage of flaccid penises.

It doesn’t add up to much of anything exciting, even with an appearance by Isabella Rossellini (of Lynch’s “Blue Velvet’’) as the mother of one of the doubles.

It largely consists of Franco musing about depictions of homosexual activity on film. As well as gay cast members speculating whether Franco will take off his clothes and perform in explicit footage. He doesn’t.

All the tedium of an endless trans-Atlantic flight gets packed into the 105 minutes of Non-Stop.

Basically a much schmaltzier fantasy version of “Love Story.’’

Endlessly lame.

Poor John Leguizamo, who hopefully got well-paid to voice a stereotypical Latino bird providing a stream of nonsensical narration.

If you’re going to invest three hours watching a movie about a convicted stock swindler, it needs to be a whole lot more compelling than Martin Scorsese’s handsome, sporadically amusing and admittedly never boring — but also bloated, redundant, vulgar, shapeless and pointless — Wolf of Wall Street.

There are probably enough moments to satisfy hard-core fans, but for the rest of us, this amounts to the Middle Earth equivalent of “Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones,’’ a space-holding, empty-headed epic filled with characters and places (digital and otherwise) that are hard to keep straight, much less care about.

The feel-bad movie of the holiday season, Spike Lee’s often-repellent Americanized reimagining of Korean director Chan-Wook Park’s twisty 2004 revenge thriller Oldboy is relentlessly gruesome, self-consciously shocking and pretty much pointless.

Tiresome cavalcade of bickering — which feels like it lasts even longer than your typical Thanksgiving dinner.

The schmaltzy Diana is directed at a dirge-like pace by German director Oliver Hirschbiegel, whose film “Downfall’’ depicted the final days of Hitler and provided one of the Internet’s most enduring memes.

Like “Traffic’’ on a massive dose of downers, Ridley Scott’s The Counselor is a great-looking and star-filled but lethally pretentious, talky, lethargic drama.

Hollywood’s ongoing campaign to remake every horror movie of the 1970s and ’80s has finally caught up with the Stephen King-Brian De Palma classic “Carrie,’’ and the results are distressingly anemic, pig blood and all.

Their misadventures in the Big Apple, including Giamatti’s involvement with a Russian house sitter (a bizarrely cast Sally Hawkins) are neither funny nor touching, just tedious.

Overall, the rambling Jayne Mansfield’s Car is almost as big a wreck as its namesake.

Jobs amounts to, at best, a Cliffs Notes version of the man’s early life. If you want the real story, you’ll have to read Walter Isaacson’s fascinating 2011 biography, which would make a much better film than this one.

Paul Schrader’s The Canyons is not the worst movie of 2013 — it's marginally better than "InAPPpropriate Comedy" and "Scary Movie 5," two even worse bombs that Lindsay Lohan also lent her rapidly diminishing talents to — but it is surely the most boring I’ve seen.

The pretentious and unrelievedly glum first feature from music-video and advertising director Nenad Cicin-Sain, The Time Being looks sharp, but it’s about as dramatically satisfying as watching paint dry.

De Niro mostly looks miserable and very tired (a document glimpsed on-screen hilariously claims his character was born in 1970) and prattles on endlessly about forgetting the past.

The sad truth is these durable 80-year-old characters, who peaked with a 1950s TV series, never even come to life in this bloated, misshapen mess, a stillborn franchise loaded with metaphors for its feeble attempts to amuse, excite and entertain.

Nothing in Redemption quite adds up, including the paranoid hero’s insistence that he’s being watched by drones.

A rare dud from great Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, I’m So Excited! is a campy, sex-obsessed spoof of airborne-disaster movies that never really gets off the ground.

Basically, this is Smith and his real-life son, Jaden (both affecting ridiculous mid-Atlantic accents) talking the audience to death for something like 90 minutes before the closing credits.

This is less a documentary than a wholly uncritical celebration.

The only darkness here — besides the dingy-looking images dimmed by 3-D glasses — is the murky plot, which is as silly as it is arbitrary.

“I’d rather gouge my eyes out with hot spoons!’’ De Niro exclaims at one point. I’m not sure exactly what he was talking about, but I’d like to think it referred to the prospect of being forced to watch The Big Wedding.

As far as I’m concerned, death couldn’t arrive quickly enough for these eight stereotypically self-absorbed Los Angelenos gathered for Sunday brunch at which the hosts (Blaise Miller, Erinn Hayes) plan to announce the demise of their marriage.

Though it tries — with a much too heavy hand — the new Evil Dead is far less humorous than its predecessor.

A long, tedious and often unintentionally hilarious adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s sci-fi follow-up.

An inept, brutally unfunny collection of sketches.

Love and Honor may be politically clueless, but Hemsworth and the student journalist he hooks up with (fellow Aussie Teresa Palmer of “Warm Bodies’’) do make an undeniably attractive couple.

Steve Carell is fatally miscast as an arrogant, flamboyant third-rate magician in The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, which by all rights should have been a second-rate Will Ferrell vehicle.

Admittedly, I’m far from a fan of Korine’s “Gummo,’’ “Julien Donkey-Boy’’ and the absymal “Trash Humpers.’’ But that he is proud of making intentionally sloppy and tedious movies doesn’t make them any easier to watch. Or all that much fun, for that matter.

Save your money and wait for the new 3-D version of the 1939 classic that Warner Bros. has promised for later this year.

Actually, Bruce, what stinks is the script — which is woefully lacking the kind of one-liners and memorable bad guys that helped make working-class hero McClane so iconic he’s still around after 25 years. Even the action sequences are pretty much by the numbers this time.

So feeble it fails even as train-wreck exploitation. I’d be unkind, but not entirely inaccurate, to label Coppola’s sophomoric, er, sophomore effort as a director an offer you can refuse.

If you mashed-up the worst parts of the infamous "Howard the Duck,'' "Gigli,'' "Ishtar'' and every other awful movie I've seen since I started reviewing professionally in 1981, it wouldn't begin to approach the sheer soul-sucking badness of the cringe-inducing Movie 43.

An exceedingly dull and stillborn attempt to update the Brothers Grimm.

O'Brien also provided the lethargic direction and collaborated with Messina on the cliché-infested script, which is long on booze-filled confessions.

There's nothing you haven't seen before - and better - in Deadfall, which would seem to appeal mostly to fans of snowmobile chases.

Slicker than most attempts to document Monroe's successes and tragic trajectory, but even her own words don't provide much more of an insight into what made this troubled icon tick.

The Oscar-winning director of "Rain Man" - whose last film, the abysmal documentary "PoliWood" never went much further than the Tribeca Film Festival - demonstrates he can make a shakycam found-footage horror movie every bit as fake-looking, clumsy and unscary as your average college student working on a $200 budget.