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.