Nathan Rabin

It plays like unwitting art-house self-parody from a narcissist who takes himself, and his brooding subject matter, way too seriously.

The film is too violent and dark for kids but too juvenile and bland for grown-ups.

At an egregious 106 minutes, Joe Dirt 2 feels like a director’s cut where every single moment of footage was carefully preserved, no matter how pointless or unfunny or digressive it might be.

In the past, James at least had likability on his side. He was a big, lumbering oaf, the ideal drinking buddy. But there’s an arrogance to the way he treats people here, particularly a gorgeous hotel employee he’s convinced is in love with him, that renders him strangely unsympathetic.

this old-school international hodgepodge production is weighed down by a lumbering humorlessness and a glacial pace that makes it seem far longer than its 115 minutes.

The deathly silence doomed to haunt theaters during Get Hard allows audiences far too much time to think about its problematic attitudes toward race, gender, sexuality, and class, as well as its borderline-nonsensical plot.

The Cobbler is such a weirdly somber comedy that it would almost be in poor taste to laugh during it, though there’s not much danger of that happening.

Unfinished Business aspires to high-spirited antics, but it feels defeated and exhausted from the very start.

The humor is seldom character-based: It’s more a matter of actors saying whatever outrageous thing springs to mind at that moment.

Luke Matheny’s perversely milquetoast romantic comedy seems to have escaped from the afternoon schedule of the Lifetime network and secured a VOD and theatrical release it patently does not deserve.

The film’s lazy reliance on distraction extends to keeping its female lead underwritten and unsympathetic.

Perversely low-budget and oddly devoid of imagination, Vice seems less like a proper film than a bargain-basement SyFy pilot, shot on the cheap and drafting off Willis and Jane’s star power. It’s about androids aching to be real, but it doesn’t have an ounce of genuine humanity in its tin heart.

As well-intentioned as it is thoroughly inept, Black November would be a serious contender for year-end worst lists if it weren’t so painfully noble and sincere.

Ribald yet frantically unfunny, it wears out its welcome within the first five minutes, and never comes close to gaining it back. It feels like an alternately flat and flailing television pilot for a bro-comedy no one in their right mind would ever pick up.

It feels like the series has run its course, and should be relegated to the dustbin of history alongside the hardware it so lovingly pays tribute to.

A Yuletide comedy so slight, it sometimes feels like a bonus-sized Christmas episode for a sitcom that never should have been green-lit in the first place.

Sex Ed takes a lot of glee in subjecting its timid hero to a rancid sewer of sexual excess early on, but the film’s apparently strong belief that it deserves to be taken seriously—despite its title, premise, and utter worthlessness—both as a comedy and as social advocacy might just be the most offensive thing about it.

Dolphin Tale 2 makes audiences wade through endless oceans of tedium for those scattered, fleeting moments of grace.

The film’s constant nods to the artificiality of its narrative highlight its precious, cloying phoniness rather than subvert it.

As Above/So Below purposefully generates a certain air of mystery by keeping the exact nature of its protagonists’ experience enigmatic, but for a film that takes place underground in tightly enclosed spaces, it’s surprisingly thin on suspense and palpable physical danger.

It’s so egregiously awful, so utterly without merit, that it makes its predecessor seem much worse by association. The film’s brainless, chest-beating brand of hyper-pulp calls into question whether Sin City was any good at all, or whether the novelty of its visuals and storytelling merely masked a howling nothingness at its core.

Let’s Be Cops takes its premise in the dullest, most predictable direction imaginable, as a wacky mismatched-buddy-cop movie pitched to the lowest common denominator.

TMNT confuses “dimly lit” for “gritty” and humorless for substantive. It’s afraid of being too fun or too light, and doesn’t seem to know whether it wants to be a Nolan film or a 21 Jump Street-style spoof.

Made In America is a puff piece, a shallow, insufferable exercise in hagiography that seems to operate under the delusion that a festival bill combining rock, pop, and rap acts represents a dazzling innovation, not the status quo for festivals like Lollapalooza, Coachella, Bonnaroo, and countless others.

Cannon is a big believer in the power of repetition. He apparently nurses a strong belief that if a gag isn’t funny the first time around, it will somehow become hilarious the eighth or ninth time it’s repeated.

Think Like A Man Too isn’t a movie, or even an arbitrary sequel to an arbitrary adaptation of a novelty book, so much as an extended victory lap from filmmakers and actors convinced that all they have to do is show up to equal or top the first film’s success. The sad thing is that they’re probably right.

The Signal would desperately like to be a film of ideas, but the few it presents are vapid and secondhand. Eubank’s overachieving work on the film suggests he’s destined for bigger and better things, though given the airy nothingness of the film’s mind games, that’s setting the bar awfully low.

The film’s reliance on formula and stereotypes wouldn’t be so frustrating if that formula worked and provided the glib pleasures the filmmakers are going for; instead, Ping Pong Summer feels stilted, undernourished, and oddly sour.