Matt Zoller Seitz

Wahlberg should not be cast in any role predicated on the idea that he’s good with words and ideas. Hauser is one of the best actors in the English language and will escape this disaster and do more great work, so there’s that.

Hallow Road is an earnest attempt to make a movie no one has seen before, only to end up with one few will want to watch again.

Although it has a solid cast, some amusing bits, and lots of imaginative violence, “Play Dirty,” a comedy-thriller-action movie about the theft of already-stolen treasures in a plot to topple a dictator, is easily the most forgettable of Shane Black‘s films, as both writer and writer-director.

It has a lot of the flaws that are common to super-low-budget movies produced outside of the system, such as it is, including hit-and-miss performances and a look that falls somewhere between a “Saturday Night Live” short and a student film.

Admittedly, the logistics of filming a Tyler Perry film with Perry performing multiple roles is not what most viewers will be thinking about. But there’s little else to recommend it except for the performances.

When future generations of media scholars need an example of a work that gathered up and displayed with peerless skill all of the techniques yet devised for a new medium—in this case, second-screen entertainment, which superficially resembles cinema or television, but is meant not to make any demands on anybody—”Fountain of Youth” might be the work that they they name-check.

Based on a 2016 memoir by Tom Mitchell, “The Penguin Lessons” wants to be a thoughtful light entertainment about ideals and courage, but ends up seeming grotesquely misguided.

Millers in Marriage isn’t a science fiction movie. Which is unfortunate, because if it were, we might’ve gotten a decent explanation for why one minute of the characters’ lives makes you feel as if you’ve aged a month.

A handsomely produced, nearly empty experience, "Unfrosted: The Pop-Tarts Story" is hard to describe because it's tough to tell what the filmmakers were going for, much less argue about whether they achieved it.

Even for a picaresque plot comprised of incidents and moments, it's a flat and disjointed effort that lurches forward and stops and lurches forward again throughout its brief running time—a labor of love that doesn't deliver.

Next Goal Wins exists as proof of the invulnerability of a certain movie template and as a Frankenstein patchwork of previous films.

Old Dads has a great cast, but it's barely a movie. That's a shame, because it's the directorial debut of Bill Burr.

This second sequel is escapist in a next-level way: it escapes from drama as well as life.

Nearly every aspect of this feature from Tyler Spindel, formerly a second unit director for Adam Sandler's Happy Madison Productions, is derivative and desperate and, at the same time, bizarrely pleased with itself.

Waking Karma is the kind of small movie you root for even when it fails to live up to its potential. There's a lot that doesn't quite work, but you can tell by the strong performances and the production's overall sincerity that everyone involved was hoping to create something memorable; the missteps are mainly about what the film decides to emphasize.

This is the kind of earnest but inept and obliviously indulgent indie flick that a film festival's artistic director would program in full awareness of its deficiencies, because they thought the name of someone associated with the project (in this case, the director) will put butts in seats.

Once in a while, you see a film where it's clear that everyone involved is operating at the peak of of their skills, yet the whole is so misguided that the result is still awful. Such is The Desperate Hour.

Unfortunately, the craftsmanship is lacking.

This isn't an unwatchable movie, just an underachieving and forgettable one, and somehow that's more irritating than a disastrous swing for the fences would've been.

The crime comedy Pixie dissolves in the mind as you're watching it. You've seen it before. And the "it" you've seen before is the most derivative version of "it."

The United States vs. Billie Holiday is so misguided that it's hard to know where to start griping about it. It wallows in cruelty, misery, and degradation without providing insight into the historical personages who are so thoughtfully depicted by its cast.

There's nothing fun about panning a feature by a first-time director, especially when it seems to come from a place of good intentions, but Music, a musical fantasy drama about an autistic teen, is bad. Mystifyingly bad. Verging on "What were they thinking?" bad.

A mediocre film that's unaware of the poor choices it's making is much harder to watch than a bad film that relishes its stupidity and poor taste. At least the second kind of film can be fun.

But still! Even if Irresistible were released a year ago, when its face-down-on-the-bar, abandon-all-hope vibe would've made more sense, it would still be entering a pop culture landscape in which "Sorry to Bother You" and "The Death of Stalin" existed, and it would seem imaginatively as well as politically bereft in comparison.

The dark comedy Bad Therapy, about a married couple that becomes prey for a disturbed and manipulative therapist, contains so many promising elements that it's a shame that it never figures out how to mold them into a satisfying shape.

It's the kind of film where you start trying to guess which of the characters will turn out to be a figment of the narrator's imagination. The answer, of course, is all of them.

The comedy thriller The Con is On is a Who's Who of 1990s indie film character actors, but the movie ends up delivering a lot of cliches from that brief but extremely specific era of filmmaking, and not necessarily the ones you might want.

The cast's heroic exertions fail to save Flower from its own worst tendencies.

The new Death Wish is a vigilante film that's also about vigilante film cliches, when it remembers to think about such things, which is only occasionally. Most of its attempts to subvert or freshen up familiar elements aren't well developed, and they're certainly never strong enough to counter the bloodlust and gun worship that's invariably going to power this kind of project.

The Cloverfield Paradox is a bit of a scam job, promising to reconcile entries in a series that have little in common save for a shared genre. It fizzles so badly at the end that you might legitimately wonder if it ever had anything to do with the other two films in the first place, or if it was produced independently of the series and retroactively added.

Despite a few good scenes and ideas, and a final ten minutes that will be affecting for anyone who lived through the aftermath of the attacks on New York, the end product often feels like a standard-issue high concept romantic comedy with scaffolding of 9/11 solemnity built around it.

The whole thing is too much of a tease, and once you figure that out, there's no actual suspense to speak of, just momentary manipulations.

Maybe the heart of the problem is that Kate and Meg's behavior doesn't track with the practical realities of lifelong, functioning friendship between (most) women as experienced by...well, any functioning adult who lives in the world.

Co-directors Éric Summer and Éric Warin and their collaborators seem determined to crush the life out of an original premise and many promising characters by stealing every available page out of a substandard American studio animated feature’s playbook.

Wish Upon is another one of those movies that would be memorable if it were a lot better or a lot worse.

The result is an oxymoron: a frenetic slog. That’s unfortunately what happens to King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.

Has a lot of good ideas and a few engrossing sequences, but it never quite finds a groove, or even a mode, and it ends in an abrupt, unsatisfying way.

The film is quite repetitive, essentially a very long sketch, and offers little in the way of character development for supporting players. In contrast to the original "The Office," everyone else is there mainly to stare in shock at David as he offends people or does something stupid.

I've seen this film twice and I'm just not convinced it's all that interested in the subjects it claims to be interested in. And that's a deal-breaker of a problem.

The film will play well among standup comics who feel they've been muzzled by humorless slogan-spouting liberals, bluenoses and the generally squeamish.

Holy Hell should have dug a lot deeper and told its story with a lot more finesse. What happened? Maybe, after all these years, Allen was still too close to his subject?

I removed my eyeballs from my head as soon as I got back from Alice Through the Looking Glass and cleaned them in a sink. I could have left them in and only cleaned the fronts, but I didn't want to take any chances.

If truth in advertising applied to movies, they would have titled this one "Reheated Cultural Leftovers."

Throughout its last hour it keeps jumping into your lap and demanding love without doing anything to earn it.

A decent idea for a low-budget movie that never gets past the idea stage, and after a brief while, you may start to question whether it should have been a movie at all, much less a 90-minute one.

There are no people to watch in Fantastic Four, only collections of character traits and attitudes brought fitfully to life by actors who might've mistakenly thought they were hitching a ride on the superhero movie gravy train by signing up for this misfire.

It is not merely a bad film. It is a collection of notes for a film that never quite evolved to the rough draft stage, much less cohered into a finished movie. That makes it more dispiriting than other notorious Woody Allen misfires.

There are a few nice moments of performance and filmmaking (including the elaborately choreographed final shot), but not enough to redeem a film that seems to flinch from the harsh truths it was presumably created to address.

The problem — and wow, it's a big one — is that none of these actors have material firm enough to shape into a bona fide performance.

The worst American film I've seen this year.

The car chase thriller Getaway has a wild premise and few good moments, and if there were an Oscar for wrecking police cars, it would absolutely win.