Neil Genzlinger

The movie tries for propulsive Tarantino grit but ends up being just another annoying example of Hollywood’s addiction to stories in which graying white men bed beautiful young women and beat up men much more youthful and fit than they are.

The Ottoman Lieutenant is an overwrought nurse romance merged with a history lesson, a combination that is hard to take as seriously as the film wants to be taken.

You don’t need an animal-rights group’s boycott to give you permission to avoid A Dog’s Purpose. You can skip it just because it’s clumsily manipulative dreck.

Underappreciated occupations deserve better than the cliché-clogged, utterly predictable Life on the Line, a terrible movie about the workers who keep the electrical grid functioning.

The film, directed by Mario Van Peebles, brays the story in broad strokes and clichés as if the horror of it didn’t speak for itself, which it most certainly does.

My Dead Boyfriend desperately tries to look and sound like a quirky indie hit, but that’s not an achievable goal when you have an unlikable lead character indifferently rendered by a name star.

The movie isn’t interested in fully developed characters, just carnage.

John Moore, the director, and Dan Kay and William Wisher, the screenwriters, don’t have anything new to add to that familiar dynamic.

Everybody involved with the awful comedy Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?... owes Aristophanes an apology. It’s one thing to borrow a guy’s premise; it’s quite another to transform it into something this unwatchable.

There’s not an ounce of suspense in any of this, because you’ve seen it all before, and the director, Jon Cassar, seems uninterested in veering from the well-established formula.

Every new generation has to learn the lesson: Comedy success on the small screen doesn’t guarantee the same on the big screen. If anything, it guarantees the opposite.

It’s not clear whether The 9th Life of Louis Drax is deliberately inconsistent or merely an example of confused filmmaking. One thing is certain, however: It sure leaves an unpleasant aftertaste.

Skiptrace settles for a warmed-over plot, tedious fight sequences and humor that’s heavy on crotch jokes and pratfalls.

The film, derivative (see “The Shaggy Dog” of 2006) and devoid of wit, is about that tiredest of kid-movie clichés, the parent who is too busy for his children and must be taught a lesson.

A film that tries to be both titillating and suspenseful but is neither.

If it were at all original, Andron would be merely a bad movie poorly executed. That it is instead a knockoff of “The Hunger Games” and “The Maze Runner” makes it all the more condemnable.

Mothers and Daughters is full of recognizable stars and heartfelt conversations. Unfortunately, it’s largely devoid of the kind of character development that can give such conversations real impact.

It somehow manages to feel more like a Hallmark Channel romance than like a serious film.

The film doesn’t have the focus, pacing or plotting of the best of such bromance tales.

Will this hard-luck president again defy death while his stoic sidekick vanquishes the nasty, uncivilized terrorists? It’s hard to care when a movie is this formulaic and moronic.

A dreary Australian movie, directed by Nick Robertson, that has more dogs than “Cujo” but noticeably less plot.

Lazer Team ends by setting itself up for a sequel, but that’s mighty wishful thinking. There’s not a big demand for laugh-free comedies.

Even before a “do as I say, not as I do” twist costs it all credibility, Prescription Thugs is a not very good documentary about a very important subject.

Though Mr. Grint and Mr. Perlman both come off credibly, the movie is practically laugh-free.

The Sarah character isn’t developed well enough to make her journey enlightening or involving.

The sci-fi premise that drives the thriller Reversion is probably close enough to being a reality that the movie should raise goose bumps. Instead it’s uninvolving, thanks to uninspired acting and a script that doesn’t take the central idea very far.

You can get away with this sort of thing if your humor is sharp, but here it’s mostly sophomoric and rarely surprising.

Ms. Harden is fine in a role that requires little, but her character is a lazy stereotype that ought to make real librarians wince.

All of the characters here are underwritten, and Mr. Cage and most of the other actors don’t seem to be putting much effort into them.

The movie makes halfhearted efforts to give Kate and others back stories, but mostly it’s content to follow her as she runs around in subway tunnels, down a staircase and through city streets.

It is insight-free and cliché-heavy, with the five sharing obvious reminiscences about the thrill of superstardom, visiting haunts from their youth, shooting baskets and occasionally rehearsing.

Ms. DeLia serves it up in fragmentary fashion, with lots and lots of writhing, brooding, meaningfully vacant stares and so on. Several scenes are in danger of being unintentionally comic.

All Relative, a tepid romantic comedy written and directed by J. C. Khoury, thinks it’s being surprising, but really it’s merely weaving several male sex fantasies together and making nothing insightful out of the resulting story.

A pretty young actress. A casting call. A private meeting with the lecherous man who has the power to give her the role. Starry Eyes tries to wring a horror movie out of this tired old setup but, halfway in, seems to realize it has nothing new to offer and becomes a mere gorefest.

A raunchy comedy that is so poorly executed and so unfunny that no one involved with it should ever be allowed to work in the movies again.

Mumbly dialogue, relentlessly jittery camerawork, a star who is also co-director and co-writer: Yes, it’s time for another movie that mistakes the claustrophobic world of young New York artsy types for something interesting.

Listening to these three swear up a blue streak is amusing for five minutes or so, but that’s about it.

It’s an awkward mix of sentiment, underdeveloped relationships and rock ’n’ roll pretensions, and it never quite gels into the “Love Story” for the 21st century that it wants to be.

This terrible attempt at a political thriller for the religious right is aimed not at Christians in general but at a certain breed of them, the kind who feel as if the rest of the world were engaged in a giant conspiracy against their interpretation of good and truth.

With its underwritten characters (especially Walter) and scenes, it seems like a generic ABC Family plotline melded to a commercial for Facebook, Twitter and Skype.

It’s not clear what Aram Garriga thinks he is accomplishing in his simplistic “American Jesus,” but he’s not accomplishing much.

Little of it is funny or genuine, and the benefits and beauty of real faith are nowhere in evidence.

Unthinkable is unwatchable, which is too bad, because there are certainly enough oddities in the incident it tries to dramatize to have made for a decent conspiracy theory film.

A sex comedy can sometimes get by, even if it is deficient in one of the two things that term promises. But a sex comedy that is short on both sex and comedy is unlikely to please anyone.

Jessica Goldberg, who wrote and directed the film, prefers showcasing the somewhat treacly soundtrack to fleshing out back stories.

The dour McCanick banks way too much on what it is not telling us, making for a movie that thinks it’s being cryptically suspenseful but is really just annoying.

A terrible movie about a bland, morose young man’s search for love.

Nurse 3D isn’t nearly as fun as a movie about a homicidal, sex-obsessed, clothing-averse health care provider ought to be.

Allegories involving astronomy, baseball and sandwiches are hinted at but are no better developed than the characters.

There are a lot of odious movies yet to come in 2014, no doubt, but they’ll have to work to beat Back in the Day for awfulness.

One of those who’s-the-murderer parlor games is a plot pillar of Merry Christmas, an experiment in filmmaking by Anna Condo that itself feels like a parlor game, and not a particularly entertaining one.

It’s as thinly written and unoriginal as made-for-television seasonal filler, and why it isn’t on the Hallmark Channel or Lifetime is a mystery, but fans of the singers in it might get a kick out of seeing them.

The film, a comedy without much comedy in it... clumsily tries to merge road trip humor and beauty pageant parody.

The director, Mike Mendez, shows no signs of knowing how to make campy horror work the way that the creators of similar movies on Syfy do. It has to be either subtle or over the top. This is neither.

When insects are the best thing in your movie, it’s probably time to retire.

There’s no way to prepare yourself for how awful The Secret Lives of Dorks is.

The film, written and directed by Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, rarely dares to be smart, settling instead for familiar gags that would have the Devil himself yawning.

Though the tale, based on a novel by Harold Frederic, remains relevant to our time, the film is too self-conscious and tedious for the message it delivers.

Though the young actors...are appealing enough, you keep waiting for a boatful of humor to come along and rescue them. The whole film is a campy put-on, right? Apparently not.

If you’re watching this film and waiting for something funny or insightful to come along to assuage your annoyance, you’ll wait a long time.

When it comes to film plotting, too many twists just result in an annoying tangle. And there are too many twists in Antoni Stutz’s uninvolving Rushlights.

This one is well photographed, yet it’s still just a lot of cars and noise.

Too busy with limb-severings and gunfire to bother being intelligent.

This is one terrible movie.

The film, directed by Conor Allyn, is rarely more than a few minutes away from a gun battle or a tedious chase, and soon you cease to care who is shooting at, or running from, whom or why.

The film, a sleepy, low-budget affair, merely enacts a series of horror movie clichés, as if that were enough. Its bland actors and wit-free script do nothing with the familiar elements but present them.

The film’s director, Jon M. Chu, executes a pretty good high-altitude fight scene. Still, there should be a “Fans Only” sign at the door of every theater.

Sometimes a movie is so awful that the word awful is not up to the task of conveying its awfulness. The awful InAPPropriate Comedy is such a movie. It is memorably awful. It is stunningly awful. It is so awful that we are fortunate that “awful” has an adverbial use that means “very” or “extremely.” This movie is awfully awful.

These days, when paranormal-themed shows are all over television, Mr. Lutz sounds like just another guy peddling an unverifiable spooky story.

The film grasps for credibility with scenes of a support group (featuring some real veterans) and cryptic voice-overs that strive for profundity but achieve only pretentiousness.

Northeast is as tedious as the life of the film’s central character.

There isn't much swashbuckling chemistry between Mr. Renner and Ms. Arterton, and the script doesn't give them enough of the witty lines that can elevate these types of movies to must-see status.

If the opening gag in your R-rated movie is an extended flatulence joke you should reconsider whether you're qualified to make such a movie. Not that flatulence jokes aren't funny; 8-year-olds love them. The thing is, not many 8-year-olds go to R-rated movies.

The worst thing about the animated film Delhi Safari isn't that it's awful. It's that it shamelessly rips off much better animated movies.

New Jerusalem feeling like an acting exercise in search of a theater class.

If the Boy Scouts offered a merit badge for inept filmmaking, Todd Rohal would certainly earn it with Nature Calls, an unwatchably bad movie about a camping trip gone haywire.

A lumbering mess in which he has somehow trapped several recognizable actors.

Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, a film based on Peter Cameron's novel, is several kinds of excruciating.

Among the problems with the humorless comedy General Education is that the lead character's sister is more interesting than he is, and she spends much of her screen time as a mute mime.

The director, John Gulager, has no idea how to mix his ingredients to create a savvy self-parody.

The lovebirds' dialogue has the sophistication of a junior high school romance, and Mr. Schaeffer appears to have pasted his story together from the button-pushing plotlines of other films.

The Viral Factor wants to be both an action movie and a soap opera. But the merging of the two genres by Dante Lam, a director based in Hong Kong, is clumsy, and so is the film.

Someone involved with Beneath the Darkness has either watched too many horror movies or not enough. There is not an original thought in this story, written by Bruce Wilkinson, or in the way it is directed by Martin Guigui.

Somebody must think Joe Swanberg's mumblecore mush is worth the time it takes to watch it, because he keeps making it. But anyone who sees his insufferable Art History and doesn't wish for the 74 minutes back has an empty life indeed.

The six actors in the central, edible roles seem as if they could have pulled off a "Scream"-like satire, but since they weren't asked to, there's nothing much for them to do but follow the clearly visible paths to their doom.

Everyone spouts nicely turned baloney elevating golf to the level of a religious experience, which grows tedious fairly quickly. The film almost works, though, if you view the whole thing as a very, very dry comedy.

The real problem here, though, is that noting the it's-all-about-me nature of modern life already feels like a point that no longer needs making. Yeah, we're self-absorbed and shallow; so what else is new?

The intent is perhaps some kind of dark tone poem, and the cinematography (by Jody Lee Lipes) is lovely. But oh, the tedium.

It's not outlandish enough to work as slapstick, not intelligent enough to make a comment on the fickleness of immigration policy.

The product - sloppy even by guerrilla filmmaking standards - has no revelations to offer that are worth the slog of watching it.

Comes close to being that rare film that is perfectly bad -- i.e., that has not a shred of social, entertainment or even curiosity value. But it misses out on this dubious honor by having one tiny redeeming attribute: it answers the question "Whatever happened to Edgar Stiles?"

Gregory M. Wilson, the film’s director, has made the kind of movie that makes you wish you could rinse your brain in bleach, to wash all traces of it from your memory.

The sex (of which there isn’t much) isn’t sexy, and the humor isn’t funny.

Ms. Zeta-Jones is too elegant for the lowlife she's supposed to be, Ms. Ronan isn't endearing enough to be a ragamuffin, and, under Gillian Armstrong's direction, never for a minute do you believe they're mother and daughter.

The computer-generated world is visually rich, but short on the droll humor that makes good children's films bearable for adults.

When a movie aspires to be gay pornography but can't even manage that, well, you know you've got a bad movie.

Mr. Yudin keeps dragging things back to the restaurant and bathroom humor. He sabotages his own story, as well as the creditable work being done by Mr. Qualls and Ms. Reed.

It’s like choking down 72 minutes of a stranger’s unedited home videos, only without the occasional cute kiddie or pet to lighten the tedium.