Neil Genzlinger

Some of the frights work reasonably well; and Ms. Ferland is convincing. But there aren’t enough surprises or innovations to make this one stand out in the sea of horror fare that comes along this time of year.

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.

Compadres tries to be a lighthearted cross-border buddy film, and sometimes it succeeds. But consistency is a problem — it doesn’t hit those humorous high notes often enough, and when it’s not in the comedic groove, it’s muddy.

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

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 story may not stay with you, but don’t be surprised if you come away with a strong desire to visit Florence.

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.

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.

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.

it’s not as original as it wants to be, despite having the able Chris Columbus in the director’s chair.

The fifth Transformers movie, The Last Knight, is far from the worst in this continuing experiment in noisy nonsense based on Hasbro toys. That is thanks largely to two words: Anthony Hopkins.

It takes a while to realize that this is actually a sly, very funny comedy, one that stays admirably deadpan every time you think it’s about to veer into gross-out territory.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

This film doesn’t find any fresh ways to make you jump out of your seat. Ms. Lutz is appealing, though, and fans of the franchise will probably be pleased with the elaboration. Too many horror sequels are content merely to recycle what worked the first time.

After turns out to be working territory that, while emotionally fraught, has already been pretty thoroughly mined.

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.

The film’s tale ends up being less rich than its lovely Georgia settings.

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.

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

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

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

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.

No swear words here; just harmless fun.

For most of the way, Return to Sender merges creepy and sexy to good effect, thanks to a close-to-the-vest performance by Rosamund Pike.

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.

Steve Guttenberg is probably supposed to be a lovable loser in A Novel Romance, a drab, clumsy film by Allie Dvorin, but he can manage to be merely annoying. Mr. Guttenberg, though, deserves only part of the blame for this unrewarding movie.

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.

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.

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 whole affair has an artificial look reminiscent of a community theater production on a cardboard set. The vintage images don’t add enough to make up for the visual distraction. The story, though, is of moderate interest.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

A romantic subplot is formulaic, and, most disappointing, the break-dance sequences don't sizzle, though the film's director, Harvey Glazer, is known for his music videos. Keep an eye out, however, for some nutty cameos.

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

The script, by Mr. Marshall and R. A. White, doesn't contain enough that's genuinely funny, which leaves everybody trying too hard. Only Ann-Margret, as the fair's reigning queen, retains her dignity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is one terrible movie.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For $600, it turns out, you can make a short documentary about aging recreational swimmers that has just enough winning moments in it to let viewers forgive that it's little more than a glorified home video.

Ellington fans will certainly relish the many vintage clips scattered throughout.

It lacks focus and adds little to the awareness of the subject that even a casual follower of the news has already acquired.

Someone really needs to take away Patrick McGuinn’s camera equipment. A few years ago he made a spectacularly bad gay-sex movie called “Sun Kissed,” and now he has made another, Eulogy for a Vampire.

Mr. Rotaru paces the film perfectly, mixing performance footage with scenes of the competitors talking about their lives and the role music plays for them.

The premise had promise, but Baghdad, Texas, a clumsy comedy directed by David H. Hickey, quickly disappoints with an inconsistent tone and painful overacting.

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.

The guy's not much of a filmmaker, but he certainly gets your attention.

The film couldn't be more heartening - yes, individual actions do make a difference. But it's bittersweet as well. You can't help wondering about all the children who don't get tapped on the shoulder by the hand of fate.

Despite these flaws, it's refreshing to see a documentary about a normal grown-up who is struggling with problems of life and love, just as so many invisible others do.

Some of Kevin Hart's fans may be disappointed that Laugh at My Pain, a film version of his recent stand-up tour, offers less than an hour of Mr. Hart onstage. But a couple of adornments - one before the concert footage, one after - flesh out this funny, profanity-heavy movie nicely.

Brian Malone's documentary Patriocracy feels as if it were made by someone who had been out of the country since the Clinton administration and upon re-entering was shocked at the polarized, dysfunctional state of the federal government.

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.

The whole enterprise has a get-off-my-lawn feel; it tries to pass off whining and a rose-colored-glasses view of the past as insight.

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

A sobering study in how individual human beings can become afterthoughts in the face of broad movements like nationalism, a phenomenon that is still much in evidence almost a century later.

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.

A heartfelt documentary about a subject that inflames cat lovers everywhere: declawing.

After a promising start, it degenerates into unconvincing ticking-clock melodrama.

The problems are clearly explained, though the film doesn’t have solutions any more than public officials do, since shoreline development is already a fact of life.

Ms. Riggs gives each actor a story arc of sorts, and all three are personable guides to this backstage world, explaining the process and terminology and talking openly about their lives and jobs.

Though colleagues and former students chime in, Mr. Miller lets Mr. Mann and his violin do most of the talking, drawing on assorted interviews and vintage performance clips that convey both the skill and the enthusiasm underpinning his subject’s long career.

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.

Marvin, Seth and Stanley aims to be a deadpan travels-with-my-wacky-dad story, but the father in it is almost an afterthought. It still has sublime moments, but it leaves you wanting more of them.

The documentary “Tanzania: A Journey Within” is two travel diaries woven together. One is somber and moving. The other is distractingly annoying.

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.

The Rule, by the married filmmakers Marylou and Jerome Bongiorno, doesn’t show us enough detail about how they’re applied to distinguish St. Benedict’s from countless other parochial schools, private institutions and military academies.

The animated tale Henry & Me aims to inspire sick children, but it also aims to promote the Yankees and the team’s mythology. The two goals don’t mesh very well.

Bonobos: Back to the Wild is an uncomfortable mix of fictionalized account and nature film, but you have to admire the work it documents.

The subject matter is only part of what makes Poached one of the more unsettling documentaries to come along lately. The presentation is also pivotal.

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

Feels as if it’s arriving late to its discoveries and, given the current political climate, as if it’s only scratching the surface.

About Scout is another entry in the “charming road movie” genre, one that banks a little too heavily on charm and not enough on story.

The script, besides being full of bad-guy clichés, doesn’t give the actors enough opportunities to work up a buddy rapport, though the glimmers of it that they are permitted are promising.

Even when it could be specific, Love Thy Nature isn’t.

Seed: The Untold Story is one of those documentaries that get you riled up about a situation but leave you feeling that nothing significant can be done about it.

At this point no documentarian can possibly have a fresh take on climate change, right? Wrong. The Anthropologist, a stealthily insightful film by Seth Kramer, Daniel A. Miller and Jeremy Newberger, improbably mixes that topic with a mother-daughter story to produce a distinctive study of change and human adaptability.

The movie has a roughly equal number of clumsy moments and sweet ones.

Mr. Brook and Ms. Wells are in a sense not documenting a controversy at all; they are capturing an endemic, heartbreaking defeatism.

The journey could be a bit more eventful, but the payoff is charming.