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.