Michael Rechtshaffen

A towering heap of nihilistic nonsense that plays like a cornball "Children of God."

There's a veil of artifice clinging to every aspect of The Lovers, a thoroughly unconvincing time-traveling epic costume drama pairing a miscast Josh Hartnett and Bollywood beauty Bipasha Basu.

Get past the wince-inducing premise of Helicopter Mom...and you're still stuck with a forced comedy that mines uneasy humor from stale stereotypes.

Writer-director Park Kwang-hyun certainly keeps the visual energy aloft with its frantic genre-splicing, but the over-the-top approach ultimately plays out like several years’ worth of Super Bowl commercials strung out end to end.

By the time the film reaches a faith-based, third-act crescendo, Bean, Walsh and company, despite their best efforts, look like they know they've been beaten, while the score's mournful strings wring out whatever pathos remains untapped.

Despite Presswell's evident enthusiasm, the tediously talky, dramatically stilted results offer conclusive evidence that mastering suspense requires artistic skill beyond sampling the Master of Suspense.

One of those rare instances of a movie being so bad ... it's still really bad.

As written, directed and played by Swartzwelder, Clay is such a self-absorbed, judgmental jerk that anyone who would willingly subject themselves to his endless pontificating could rival Anastasia Steele in the masochism department.

The Adventure Club is a remarkably dull Canadian tween caper about a sought-after magical ancient box with wish-making powers.

While a lot of gunfire ensues, Jesse Gustafson’s mechanical direction and Guy Stevenson’s cut-and-paste script shoot laughably hollow blanks.

A limp sex comedy about men behaving badly.

A risible misfire of a contemporary war drama, the low-budget “Unfallen” stands as an epic fail on all fronts.

By the time one of the gun-toting members of Team Snipes growls “Let’s finish this!” viewers would be hard-pressed to disagree.

Any scrap of charm or honest-to-goodness humor already possessed in limited quantities by the original has been relegated to the outhouse in this sorry follow-up.

The jumble occupies an unfortunate space situated somewhere between the ponderously pretentious and the just plain ridiculous.

Simply put, Sherlock Gnomes is a dreadful bore.

Tediously one-note comedy.

For anyone who's not a Francophone tween girl, the film likely will be a tedious, precious exercise in indulgence.

Easily the worst in a trilogy that has been notable mainly for the presence of its everyman action star, Transporter 3 is a nonsensical, choppily edited bore, with awful dialogue.

While the endless introspection may be therapeutic for those involved, it's not so wonderful for the innocent onlooker, who's subjected to the ponderous musings of the emotionally catatonic group while a series of similarly vapid flashbacks offer little in the way of relief.

At best a kitschy "Catch Me If You Can" and at worst a tedious comedy that grows more tiresome by every self-consciously irreverent minute.

The production is over-stuffed with cutesy split screens, jarring dream sequences and a pushy score by Bright Eyes band members Nathaniel Walcott and Mike Mogis that succeed in dragging the proceedings from merely cloying to increasingly annoying.

Healy is never able to find an absorbing middle ground in Mike Makowsky’s script, vacillating gratingly between shrill farce and murky thriller that flails its way toward an intended twist-ending that really shouldn’t surprise anyone.

The bizarro plot threads, and dippy characters fail to connect in any rewarding way, resulting in a largely unfunny film that proves as repetitive and tedious as the 1971 Philip Glass snippet that provides its entire score.

[An] annoyingly oblique exercise in arty affectation.

What starts out as a screwball “Squid Game” ultimately yields a paltry payoff in the case of “Stanleyville,” a self-consciously quirky social satire that is content to coast on its waning surface weirdness.

Had the film and its poky lead characters at least managed to pick up the sluggish pace, experiencing Buddymoon wouldn’t have felt like such a slog.

The most appreciative audience for this lame National Lampoon release likely will be guys in tour buses.

Although the production establishes the requisite lived-in, small town feel, it has also chosen to take its dramatic cue from the seemingly sedated gaze of its lugubrious, aliens-obsessed protagonist, whom Le Gros portrays with a remarkable economy of expended energy.

For a film about one of the fastest guns in the West, the dramatically lightweight Hickok is mighty slow on the draw.

A raunchy, ploddingly unfunny comedy sequel to 2012’s equally crass but disarmingly endearing “Goon.”

Embracing the worst of Hollywood excess, director Wuershan crams in enough CG effects to fill a dozen Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay features, but the uninspired payoff quickly grows tiresome.

In the end, you'll either succumb to the silliness of it all and cheer Johnny B. on to his green card or, more likely, be in desperate need of your own exit visa.

Despite relocating across the pond to the esteemed British Museum, the creaky Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb fails to capitalize on the comic potential provided by that change of venue.

A plucky ensemble fails to elevate Crash Pad, a forced, formulaic revenge comedy about an obnoxious slacker whose new housemate turns out to be the husband of his older ex-mistress.

Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder may have worked together in the past (most notably in “Bram Stoker’s Dracula”), but Destination Wedding, a painfully indulgent anti-romantic comedy about a pair of miserable misanthropes who bond over their shared contempt of the universe, forces their screen chemistry well beyond any reasonable limits of tolerance.

Gratingly unfunny groaner littered with zero-dimensional, unlikable characters and hackneyed, threadbare comic setups.

Oliver Parker’s Swimming with Men is a lazily formulaic male-bonding comedy.

A gutter ball of a sophomoric, white middle-age male sex farce fantasy that quickly wears out an already tenuous welcome.

The results might make for some swell production stills, but as a motion picture, Teknolust never really makes it alive out of Hershman's head.

An examination of a sexual relationship that's about as viscerally explicit as hardcore can get...But as satisfying viewing experiences go, the film comes up mighty short in terms of story, interesting characters and technical prowess.

[A] misguided hybrid that makes tediously clear from the outset that the conceit just isn’t working.

The melody may be as old as the Bible, but The Song could have benefited from a fresher voice.

Flaming out from the get-go, Trash Fire represents another soggy batch of Southern Gothic horror-comedy from writer-director Richard Bates Jr. that spews out pitch black smoke with little combustible substance.

Problem is, filmmaker Martin can’t seem to decide whether he’s making a tribute or a send-up, and the overlong, yet under-plotted, results, with awkward close-ups and prolonged, flatly delivered exchanges, take their toll.

As directed by Bill Condon (Sister, Sister) it could be redubbed "Farewell to the Fresh," having been watered down into a standard, run-of-the-mill slasher film, the only remaining hook being the one that its one-handed heavy uses to impale his victims. [17 Mar 1995]

With the exception of a decent train-top chase, Torque is all vroom and no action.

Essentially a telenovela with cinematic pretensions, La Mujer de Mi Hermano (My Brother's Wife) is a vapid slab of soap depicting a love triangle among three remarkably uninteresting characters.

A disappointingly dreary affair.

A crass, sophomoric and, more to the point, offensively unfunny parody that sets out to remake Shaft and his blaxploitation ilk as a Jewish action hero.

May have been adapted the 1996 French film "L'Appartement," but pretty much all evidence of what was once an engaging psychodrama has been lost in the translation.

While the main characters appear to have been given a bit of Powerpuff Girl sass by screenwriters Meghan McCarthy, Rita Hsiao and Michael Vogel, it ultimately does little to goose the limited hand-drawn 2D animation.

Instead of taking the audience in unfamiliar directions, filmmaker Mora Stephens (who wrote the script with Joel Viertel) is in such a heated rush to get to all the salacious bits, the story doesn't build crucial dramatic tension.

Returning director James McGrath and screenwriter Michael McCullers had an opportunity to build on an entirely workable formula, but instead have settled for a frenetic sugar rush of a retread that rapidly wears out its welcome. Pint-sized viewers might be distracted by the noisy, chaotic result, but most others will be hard-pressed to find the proceedings cute and adorable.

Farrelly’s loftier impulses work against the material. The result is a meandering, disjointed production that struggles throughout to find a satisfying tone.

The childhood years of Brazil’s national treasure have been given a lamentably pedestrian big-screen treatment by Pelé: Birth of a Legend.

Rose’s pickles might have a pleasant snap, but there’s none to be found in the tired, limp shtick in Sheldon Cohn and Gary Wolfson’s screenplay, which has been choreographed at a lumbering, drawn-out pace by director Michael Manasseri.

Although the performances, including that of Rebecca Romijn channeling Cybill Shepherd as a femme fatale type, are sturdy, their characters have been given absolutely nowhere interesting to go.

While Vikander and McAvoy are two undeniably photogenic actors who also radiate considerable intelligence, their best efforts are lost in the claustrophobic environment.

The end product is surprisingly charmless -- a shrill "Devil Wears Prada"/"Bridget Jones"/"Sex and the City" knockoff that keeps threatening to fall apart at the seams.

Witless, excessive and ultimately boring gore-a-thon.

Director George Gallo, taking a cue from his 1991 film, “29th Street,” romanticizes everything in a nostalgic glow, but without a sturdier script featuring fully dimensional characters at his disposal, the performances prove to be as unconvincing as their ethnic accents and period wigs.

As vapidly generic as its title, British director Scott Mann's Heist is a by-the-numbers crime thriller that squanders a decent cast, including Robert De Niro, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Dave Bautista.

Rather than sticking with that entirely workable setup, writer-director Martin keeps distractedly flip-flopping back and forth in time leading up to the big heist, preventing the plotting from building any tangible tension.

Even for something preaching spiritual tranquility, Milton’s Secret exhibits the barest trace of a pulse.

Smultaneously silly, ostentatious and terribly boring.

An unpleasant exercise in self-indulgence

Sharing its title with a historic Reno hotel that's seen better days (or maybe not), El Cortez is a clumsy lump of ponderous pulp fiction with "Cooler" aspirations.

Unfortunately in the hands of writer-director Adam Alecca, this overly talky, slackly executed game of cat-and-mouse comes off as cheesy rather than chilling.

Director Grau seems to be making up the film as he goes along — never a good idea when tackling the sort of genre piece that requires building tension and some semblance of dread to succeed.

Despite its high-profile cast and a sizable marketing push from distributor Summit Entertainment, audiences won't require any paranormal powers of their own to realize they've seen this one before.

The film’s prevailing theme may be that nothing is black and white, but the execution, with its strident lobbyists, salt-of-the-earth farmers and onscreen admonition to “investigate before you donate,” proves spottier than a kennel full of caged Dalmatians.

The back-to-the-beginning approach unimaginatively goes through the motions, offering scant justification for its boring existence, at least from an artistic point of view.

It's all quite a mess, with awkward performances, worse dialogue and a painfully protracted running time conspiring against any chance of enjoyment, even in a so-bad-it's-good guilty pleasure way.

A dysfunctional drama.

There’s howlingly awful and then there’s The Assignment, a thoroughly ridiculous, numbingly slow neo-noir thriller.

A tepid ghost story filled with all the usual things that go bump in the night minus the somewhat crucial element of suspense, this bland effort from Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert's Ghost House Pictures is surprisingly devoid of the creepy, claustrophobic atmospherics that haunt the brothers' Asian work.

By the time they're done with all the tinkering, "Scooby-Doo" ends up bearing as much a resemblance to Hanna-Barbera as the recent "Cat in the Hat" did to Dr. Seuss.

Along comes Elektra to effectively lower the bar for Marvel Comics page-to-screen transitions.

No less noisy, obnoxious or just plain groan-inducing than the previous installments.

Truth be told, Lies We Tell is a pretentious and muddled dud of a melodrama.

Presumably a glib attack on sanctimonious small-town religious hypocrisy informed by Black's own strict Mormon upbringing, the film is tonally all over the place, eventually settling in a rut that comes a lot closer to resembling bad camp than edgy satire.

In his first feature outing, director Soham Mehta overplays the significance of virtually every aspect of Rajiv Shah’s script, no matter how minor, with painfully slow pans and needlessly lingering establishing shots.

In terms of inspiration or even the slightest shred of ingenuity, Banks ranks more like an 000 than an 007.

A decent premise — and a game Gina Carano — get left in the dust kicked up by Scorched Earth, a dull, draggy post-apocalyptic western set in the not-too-distant, environmentally toxic future.

Comprising reclaimed bits from "Blade Runner," "A Clockwork Orange" and "Children of Men" and glibly served up with hyper Guy Ritchie attitude by first-time feature director Miguel Sapochnik, the resulting in-your-face mess never knows what it wants to be when it grows up.

It's like being trapped for an hour-and-a-half in a pound full of yappy puppies.

An acutely misguided, purported satire dealing with the prickly subject of child molestation.

What might have been a pertinent, evenhanded examination of the notion of free speech on today’s college campuses wastes little time in exposing an overwhelmingly right-leaning bias in the disappointingly sensationalistic agitprop that is No Safe Spaces.

A plodding comic caper that fails to deliver.

The star wattage quickly dims in this slick-looking but ringingly hollow affair that starts off generically at best before collapsing into a convoluted heap of shrill screen cliches.

With a dirge-like pace that provides ample opportunity to figure it all out well ahead of the protagonists, you keep wishing somebody would buy a vowel to hurry things along.

Inept on every level, Panic 5 Bravo is a virtually unwatchable, blood-soaked crime drama serving as the writing-directing debut of actor Kuno Becker.

Coming up short on tension and long on talky exposition, Josie emerges as a Southern-fried dramatic thriller that fails to deliver the pulpy goods despite a nicely rooted Dylan McDermott lead performance.

Overlong, over-the-top dirge.

Despite his attempt to graft an environmental message onto a traditional musical template, there's little about director Danny Baron's feature debut that feels convincingly organic to either the plotting or the characterizations.

Writer-director Hadi Hajaig was obviously shooting for a mid-1980s indie vibe along the lines of Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild,” but aside from an overstuffed soundtrack that goes heavy on the B-52’s, there’s nothing particularly engaging or nostalgic going on beneath all the forced irreverence.

David Hubbard's script is so steeped in sludgy sentimentality that the film's early hints of quirkiness quickly give way to heavy-handed faith healing.