Manohla Dargis

A witless, thrill-free hodgepodge of shinily packaged action-thriller clichés.

Joker: Folie à Deux is such a dour, unpleasant slog that it is hard to know why it was made or for whom.

The only point of this ridiculousness is to watch Skarsgard flex his sculpted arms and take a great deal of brutal punishment so that he can dole out more. Rinse, repeat.

The director Kevin Macdonald asks Galliano questions in “High & Low,” but the answers are largely self-serving and unsatisfying in a movie that, for the most part, plays like yet another installment in a highly publicized redemption narrative.

The only real bummer about Madame Web, the latest installment in the Spider-Man chronicles, isn’t that it’s bad, but that it never achieves memorably terrible status. The story is absurd, the dialogue snort-out-loud risible, the fights uninspired. Even so, there are glimmers of wit and competency. And then there’s its star, Dakota Johnson, who has a fascinating, seemingly natural ability to appear wholly detached from the nonsense swirling around her.

An overlong, undercooked comedy of manners about how, yes, indeed the rich are different.

If Dominik isn’t interested in or capable of understanding that Monroe was indeed more than a victim of the predations of men, it’s because, in this movie, he himself slipped into that wretched role.

It has a few scattered laughs, some apparently intentional. But this is thin, unimaginative hack work, and it lacks the deranged seriousness and commitment that distinguishes a pleasurable misfire from bland dreck like this. It is, I am sorry to say, no “Gods of Egypt.”

Vedette joins a recent roster of documentaries about the uses and abuses of farm animals (others include “Cow” and “Gunda”). It’s disappointing that Bories and Chagnard fail to add anything to this environmentally urgent topic beyond their own surprise that these animals are more than indistinguishable milk factories.

I didn’t believe a single second in Cha Cha Real Smooth, but the movie isn’t trying to convince you of anything. It just wants you to like it. It wants you to smile, nod in recognition, shed a tear or two and feel good about yourself for liking it. It’s an exemplar of American indie entertainment at its most canned and solipsistic.

At least give Sony credit for recycling. That is the best that can be said for its nitwit treasure-hunt movie Uncharted, an amalgam of clichés that were already past their sell-by date when Nicolas Cage plundered the box office in Disney’s “National Treasure” series.

Flat acting, risible dialogue, a witless story — sometimes when a movie hits this trifecta so completely, it engenders a feeling of disreputable pleasure. It’s bad, and you know it, and maybe the filmmakers know it too.

It’s a lot of hooey and might have been at least tolerable if the movie had been rougher, meaner, tighter, and if the filmmakers — the writer is Nicolaas Zwart, the director is Miles Joris-Peyrafitte — had never watched a Terrence Malick movie.

The charm of this fantasy has always been dubious and will presumably fade as the natural world continues to disappear and more and more species become extinct.

Actors make lousy choices all the time and if Like a Boss makes money no one will care that it’s formulaic, unfunny, choppy, insults women and seems to be missing much of its middle.

Banks wants to fight a righteous fight. But she is selling stale goods in which adult women spout girl-power clichés and conform to norms that make it very clear what kind of heroines still get to fly high: young, thin, beautiful, perfectly coifed, impeccably manicured and profoundly unthreatening.

You don’t wait long to be disappointed.

It’s a dispiriting mess and waste of talent, sunk by a lack of focus, misguided choices and insistently unproductive, at times incoherent clashing tones.

The movie’s truth is presumably meant to rest in its emotions, in the spilled tears of its characters, but the only things at stake here are the cozy sniffles of the art-film patron.

An offense against feminism, narrative logic and Fleetwood Mac, The Kitchen is a terrible, witless mess.

A pileup of clichés in service to technological whiz-bangery, “Alita” is one more story of the not quite human brought to life with hubris and bleeding-edge science.

Akerlund, a veteran music-video director who intersperses Lords of Chaos with mildly surrealistic bursts, never establishes a coherent or interesting point of view. The tone unproductively veers from the goofy to the creepy, which creates a sense that he was still figuring it out in the editing.

Too bad that the best that can be said about the woeful movie version of the The Aspern Papers, based on the Henry James novella, is that it might send you running to the original.

Alvarez tries to pep things up with chases, near escapes, dramatic rescues, fetish wear and female nudity. But the whole thing is a bummer, at times risible.

There are many ways for a movie to go wrong, and Tomb Raider goes wrong in many of the most obvious: It has a generic story, bad writing, a miscast lead, the wrong director and no fun.

A leaden, clotted, exasperating mess.

For her directorial debut, Home Again, Hallie Meyers-Shyer, Nancy Meyers’s daughter, has made a shabby copy of a Nancy Meyers romantic comedy.

About the only thing holding it together is Idris Elba, whose irrepressible magnetism and man-of-stone solidity anchors this mess but can’t redeem it.

There is little to recommend here, even for Huppert completists who follow her anywhere.

A weepie, a thriller, a tragedy, a sub-Spielbergian pastiche, The Book of Henry is mostly a tedious mess.

A professional with real credits, so I assume that [Mr. Foley's] not finally responsible for the ineptitude of Fifty Shades Darker, which ranges from continuity issues to unsurprisingly risible writing. There are also abrupt swings in tone, dead-end detours and flatline performances, including from Ms. Johnson.

Mr. McDonagh’s palette and spleen remain mostly intact, but here he’s neglected to include a story or point.

Many of the words that I would like to use to describe this waste of talent and time...can’t be lobbed in a family publication. So, instead, I will just start by throwing out some permissible insults: artificial, clichéd, mawkish, preposterous, incompetent, sexist, laughable, insulting.

Witless, soulless, often amateurish and filled with product placements (nice going, Coors), the movie has nothing going for it other than some wasted talent.

The lackluster, at times abysmal writing wouldn’t much matter if Resurgence popped visually or featured a charismatic star who could lift a movie as effortlessly as Will Smith did in the first feature.

Mr. Cohen just seems off his game in “Grimsby,” and it may be that the movie’s high concept proved too constricting for someone who has done some of his best work (as in the “Borat” film) with a looser, more episodic format.

The combustible Mr. Ironside vaulted into movie immortality as the antagonist in “Scanners,” David Cronenberg’s down-and-dirty, exploding-head anti-classic. Synchronicity, a low-budget misfire about time and love, could use some exploding heads, dialogue and ideas.

The movie is a pummeling slog — 45 minutes of setup and an eternity of relentless combat.

Clichéd, enervating, insulting — it’s tough to settle on a single pejorative for Rock the Kasbah, though abysmal might do.

It’s a bummer to see Ms. Page and especially Ms. Moore — who at this point in her career can usually act her way out of any cliché — so badly stranded by a generic script, credited to Ron Nyswaner, and by a director, Peter Sollett, who can’t figure out how to lift his actors and the material above the bad writing.

Dragon Blade is the kind of nutsy maximalist entertainment that isn’t content merely to tap a handful of influences. Instead, it stuffs an entire encyclopedia of dicey ideas (visual, narrative, political) into a blender to create a wacky, eyeball-popping and -glazing extravaganza.

It’s amusing to see identical Arnolds clash like titans, but nobody here seems to have fully grasped that they had another heavyweight in Mr. Clarke.

Mr. MacFarlane can be funny, but Ted 2 is insultingly lazy hack work that is worth discussing primarily because of how he tries and fails to turn race, and specifically black men, into comedy fodder.

There’s more flab than muscle packed on this galumphing franchise reboot, which, as it lumbers from scene to scene, reminds you of what a great action god Steven Spielberg is. Too bad he didn’t take the reins on this.

Zombies, Arnold Schwarzenegger and a certain Terrence Malick je ne sais quoi — what could go wrong? More or less everything in this low-budget head-scratcher and periodic knee-slapper.

You don’t have to be a historian to wonder about the timing of the opening or a critic to regret that Mr. Crowe has signed onto a preposterous, would-be sweeping historical romance that’s far too slight and silly to carry the weight of real history.

It’s of course unfair to blame Quentin Tarantino for all the terrible movies he has inspired, but enough already!

The actors don’t just look uncomfortable in their period duds, they also look uneasy in their own skins, which is a feat for two such natural, physically confident screen performers.

If nothing else, it’s amusing to imagine what [Mr. Bridges] and Ms. Moore chatted about between takes and how each managed to keep from cracking up, more or less.

In the end, it taketh — your time, patience and faith in newly imagined dystopias — more than it giveth.

Sabotage isn’t any good, even if its jagged, jolting visual excesses and frenzied energy keep you awake, gasping and guffawing by turns.

Directed by Shana Feste (“Country Strong”), this new Endless Love doesn’t have enough going on to make it memorably terrible: Banality is its gravest sin.

Is there a point? All the filmmakers seem interested in is the ugliness of the main Israeli characters.

A.C.O.D., an unfunny comedy about a guy mooning over his parents’ divorce decades later, is so eager to please it’s hard to hate. But it’s sluggish even at 87 minutes, clichéd and gives you nothing of interest to look at other than some familiar faces.

Long on atmosphere and short on believability.

The Great Man theory of history that’s recycled in this movie is inevitably unsatisfying, but never more so when the figure at the center remains as opaque as Jobs does here.

The writer and director, Jeff Wadlow, can’t obscure the movie’s misogyny, and he also has a tough time staging a scene and selling a joke. His worst offense is that he has no understanding of the power, gravity and terrible beauty of violent imagery, which means he has no grasp of cinema.

What’s missing is what’s often absent in industrial moviemaking of this type: story and characters, yes, but also the human touch and a sense that someone behind the scenes actually cares about the work.

Written by Mr. Vaughn and Jared Stern, The Internship spreads the corporate gospel with sporadic jokes, the usual buddy-film shenanigans (a visit to a strip club, a teasingly shared bed) and a lot of motivational cant.

For the most part it is an uninteresting slog alleviated only by the occasional unintended laugh and moments of visual beauty. Mr. Shyamalan generally torpedoes his movies with overweening self-seriousness.

There’s no denying the real Heyerdahl’s bravery, but if this movie is to be believed, his voyage was largely bereft of tension and interesting conversation.

By literalizing the idea of American military aggression and all that it implies Ms. Nair doesn’t just invest Mr. Hamid’s story with Hollywood-style beats, she also completely drains it of ambiguity.

Oblivion never transcends its inspirations to become anything other than a thin copy.

The movie lurches from the improbably silly to the drearily so, while the characters remain so emotionally and psychologically divorced from life that they might as well be zombies or sitcom stick figures.

Dopey, derivative and dull, The Host is a brazen combination of unoriginal science-fiction themes, young-adult pandering and bottom-line calculation. That sounds like it should work (really!), but it never does, largely because the story is as drained of energy as are its moony aliens.

Can the major studios still make magic? From the looks of Oz the Great and Powerful, a dispiriting, infuriating jumble of big money, small ideas and ugly visuals, the answer seems to be no — unless, perhaps, the man behind the curtain is Martin Scorsese or James Cameron.

The Condemned is uncanny only in its resemblance to a television soap, with acting as flat as the lighting and scenes that end with the kind of cliffhanger moments that otherwise announce commercial breaks.

A grim, dispiritingly stupid waste of time, energy, money and talent.

The movie is apparently the most popular British comedy in history. I guarantee that its success has nothing to do with the quality of the actual movie.

A cringe-inducing romantic comedy turned cancer tragedy turned inspirational hosanna about living in the moment, embracing your bliss and other clichés.

The mousetrap setup and tight fight spaces, the bad blood and cruel deaths - soon makes the movie grindingly monotonous, a blur of thudding body blows.

The scariest thing about The Devil Inside is that a major studio like Paramount Pictures, which is distributing it, may be able to squeeze more profit out of a tedious, tediously exhausted subgenre that was already creatively tapped out when "The Blair Witch Project" spooked audiences more than a decade ago.

Whatever the case, Mr. Owen and Mr. Statham (who provides a nice duet with a chair) make a prettily matched pair amid the pileup of sub-Bourne action set pieces, sad laughs and clichés.

If you tune out the dialogue, which is packed with raunch that has neither rhyme nor story reason, there are passable moments. The interludes of Nick shifting gears as he tries to beat the clock on another pizza run are nicely managed and say something about a character whose talent behind the wheel is a kind of grace note.

Green Lantern is bad. This despite Mr. Reynolds's dazzling dentistry, hard-body physique and earnest efforts.

A family circus of dysfunction that's so familiar you may feel tempted to place bets on how everything will shake out.

The director Alister Grierson, not grasping that bad dialogue is sometimes best delivered quietly, encourages his actors to shout and thrash about, and so they do, like fish out of water and performers out of their depth.

Apparently, because all the good jokes were used up in the first two "Fockers" movies, the wisenheimers behind the latest installment in this unnecessary trilogy decided to bring in some spew, opening a sick toddler's mouth like a fire hydrant and letting it rip.

An airless, sometimes distressingly mirthless comedy.

It’s hard to know what the director Allen Coulter could have done to improve Will Fetters’s absurdly contrived, yakky script about love and loss, largely set in the summer of 2001. But Mr. Coulter doesn’t help matters by infusing the movie with grave self-importance.

There is very little fun in The Ice Harvest, which wouldn't pose a problem if the film had some fleshed-out ideas to go along with the booze, the booty and the recycled plot points.

What Jackson's Shaft can't do is talk the talk, or much of anything else, in director John Singleton's feature-length insult to one of the more cherished modern screen icons.

The concept of an intelligent woman is apparently so exotic to Ms. Bullock and her director, Phil Traill, that they frantically kook the character up, as if female smarts were a kind of disability. This being a contemporary big-studio release, I suppose it is.

But since Costner canít save his movie, it's something of a stretch to think he might be able to save the world.

I laughed a couple of times, but mostly I was bored out of my mind and not a little depressed.

A junky-looking romantic comedy that’s neither remotely romantic nor passably comic.

Worth commenting on only for its shocking ineptitude.

At once illogical and insultingly stupid, filled with dead-end twists and the sort of dialogue that makes a mockery of actual adult relations.

The amateurish production values might be pardonable if the clichés -- the hard-core porn star with the soft heart, the therapist who needs to heal herself -- inside the poorly lighted, badly shot images weren’t so absurd and often insulting.

The television commercials for the movie say something about this being the same team that brought you “Face/Off,” which is about as relevant to this picture as noting that Paul Thomas Anderson got Wahlberg to drop his pants in “Boogie Nights.”

Mimi Leder shows none of the vigor she exhibited when directing for E.R., and screenwriters Michael Tolkin and Bruce Joel Rubin betray a real aptitude for hack work.

Unfunny comedy. Nearly everyone is terrible except for Cumming, who just does what comes naturally and steals his every scene.

As the requisite love interest, Amy Smart gives the film's only professional performance, while co-star Eric Stoltz, as the story's villain, walks somnolent through the scenery with what seems to be barely suppressed mirth. Given the deeply unpleasant plot machinations and amateurish direction, the actor's amusement is understandable.

The film isn't just banal, it's aggressively, arrogantly banal.

Doesn’t seem as if it would translate easily to the big screen. It hasn't.

The result is that what was once insignificant is now insufferable.

A cringing romance that Mr. Vinterberg tries and fails to spin into a political allegory.

A tediously didactic, often condescendingly reductive 10-part lesson on cinema.