Nick Allen

Perhaps worst of all, the movie is light on the laughs meant to come from trash-talking; the comedy just doesn’t have the crispiness it needs.

There turns out to be no actual book in Spiral: From the Book of Saw, but it does define what makes an intricately bad movie, with flaws that can sometimes be earnest, unintentionally hilarious, or disappointing.

Lawrence’s latest is fine for its don’t-over-think-it standards, and while it’s glossier than it is deep, it’s at least charted through with a roller coaster’s engineering. There’s something comforting about a movie that has the true ease of a fantastical dream, and for “Slumberland” that fleeting excitement may be enough.

Rodin is no plain biopic, and it certainly doesn’t require knowledge of his work to get hooked on the film. It’s in fact best when it does away with historical details and feels like a film about an artist and their art form, who just happened to exist.

There are simply too many moments here in which the characters, who we are supposed to care about in some form, are conveniently dumb.

It's ambitious, but with such hand-holding dramatic direction and a dreary visual palette that never creates terror out of random corn stalks, it couldn’t be more dull.

You don’t get entirely skilled comedy from the Impractical Jokers, but you do get to see four guys who have turned forcefully messing with each other into a welcoming, idea.

Another lifeless live-action adaptation from the factory that’s inside the Disney vault.

It is too touch-and-go, too speculative about her life and mysterious death, to be of any genuine purpose.

The script's interest in the past becomes a dead weight, which leads to boring emotional monologues from the adults and later a typical referencing of every supernatural movie's guidebook about how to deal with the demon in one's house.

All Eyez on Me is one of the most useless music biopics ever made — it’ll be too confusing for newcomers and too underwhelming for those familiar with the work and the life of rap prophet Tupac Shakur.

One of Bress’ greatest strokes comes with casting — he’s collected five faces you might recognize from younger, more innocent roles, and who are compelling to see here as men who have matured rapidly due to the wartime experiences eating away at them.

Park coats the big heart he has for these people with warm LA lens flares, and finds energy from sharp cuts and wall-to-wall music. It’s the performances that prove to be spotty, with flat line-readings all around and displays of emotions that struggle to reach from the script to the audience.

You might find yourself forcing a laugh during one weak sequence to pretend this is all supposed to be fun.

A plainly affable romantic comedy that’s not too powerful with its romance, and certainly not its comedy.

Tulip Fever reveals itself to be so nutty because it explicitly believes it’s not crazy, rambling through its odd events and obsessions without an ounce of 17th century kitsch.

The director called this “mayhem porn,” a designation and ideology fitting for the latest from indie director Mickey Keating, Psychopaths. This is an active, obnoxious test of an audience’s appetite for blood and how long they can go without novel ideas like purpose or plot.

There’s nothing wrong with a little cheese in a message about life, it’s just that with The Professor there's nothing more to it.

Blomkamp continues to baffle even more with Demonic, as he’s made a horror film that is so rote it’s hardly scary, all to showcase a developing technology that is intriguing as a sales pitch but unconvincing as a narrative device.

With little wit to its name, Sherlock Gnomes becomes far more tedious than playful.

Take away the noise surrounding it, and Sound of Freedom has distinct cinematic ambitions: a non-graphic horror film with what could be called an art-house sensibility for muted rage and precise, striking shadows derived from an already bleak world. If “Sound of Freedom” were less concerned with being something "important," it could be more than a mood, it could be a movie.

Coffee & Kareem is stock R-rated buddy-cop comedy shenanigans by way of cuteness, and it ain't "Stuber."

Awake is not even smart enough to play a little dumb, and so even the silliest, most gratuitous parts involving very cranky humans turning into killing machines are anticlimatic and frankly boring. The apocalypse has rarely been this abysmal.

Can You Keep a Secret? doesn’t elicit warm laughs so much as heavy sighs, even though the film has some zippiness — there’s a slapstick spirit to the movie that doesn’t shine because the jokes are plain, the couple is tough to root for, and the general tension behind this weird situation is on the lazier side of rom-com premises.

Dee Rees’ The Last Thing He Wanted is incomprehensible to an almost impressive degree — usually when a movie's narrative gets so out of control, it over-corrects itself at some point before the end. But not here.

Kevin Pollak's raunchy comedy The Late Bloomer is merely cheesy and horny, but rarely amusing.

The Man from Toronto could have been sharper with much more care all around, but a glaring problem comes from how Hughes isn’t a funny filmmaker. He might have the self-awareness to slap his name on a food processing plant that hosts the movie’s climactic kill, but his sense of making an action scene comedic is seriously lacking.

Their game of cat-and-mouse is not meant to be original in the slightest, but there's no good reason for it to be this dull.

Hand-in-hand with its bleeding-heart nature, Collide has the ballsy idea of making a serious action movie about a fool in love, but that just becomes one of its many bungled stunts.

Euphoria struggles to be little more than a hum-drum meditation on kicking the bucket.

Is American ready for a feel-good movie about a toxic, conservative talk show host who learns to listen? Maybe, but Frank Coraci’s Hot Air is too shallow, sloppy, and unfunny to lead the cause, basing itself off the nation’s divisiveness as if it were a wistful set-up for ideological kumbaya, all while being afraid of starting a tough—and true—conversation.

The thrills here, whether you want to believe what Hypnotic is hawking, are far too mild to be satisfying for even a mindless viewing.

Absolutely Anything is more than its unique place in history, and serves to remind us that no one made movies for goofy adults quite like Jones did.

As the story bloats to two hours by mistaking itself for an epic, The Outsider falls into a pit of boredom somewhere between the white savior complex of Tom Cruise in “The Last Samurai” and the much slicker kills by Alain Delon in “Le Samourai.”

A project clearly made by a first-time actor-turned-director, who is most concerned with their own scenes and casting.

A parody only by legal definition, The Mean One has no teeth as a naughty comedy or gory horror.

It's one of the year's most convoluted original screenplays, but is probably best taken as a test in plot summarizing.

America has long had its wildest forms of fantasy and comfort fueled by promises about things that are not of this world. Stuff we can’t confirm until we die. An afterlife, the pearly gates. After Death follows this tradition, with a cadre of talking heads who had incredibly traumatic physical instances that are bundled here as Near-Death Experiences that prove the existence of God and Heaven.

That the story is never scary is the least of its problems.

While empathy is first to go in the tasteless When the Bough Breaks, there is nothing good in its place.

It’s all too passive, and lacking in incisiveness cleverness for its own good, barely served by Day’s nostalgia for better films and voluminous silent stars.

It’s the presence of Gibson and his co-star Sean Penn, who give the project a stuffy sanctimoniousness, as it so transparently yearns to be the definition of “powerhouse acting.”

It’s the closest you can subject people to a horror potluck without being "The Cabin in the Woods." So why can’t the six writers of this story have more fun with this premise?

You’ve got to lower the bar for a cliche-at-best thriller like Survive the Night. If it keeps you awake, consider that a success.

There are vikings in this movie, and there is destiny. Pure to its junky intentions, if you like your movies served to you without confusion as to the character or their narrative arc, here it is: The destiny of a viking.

Midnight in the Switchgrass is the type of crime thriller that’s so full of cliches that it becomes one big cliche itself.

Filled with insincere wackiness and sappiness, Father Figures never quite figures out whether it wants to be a raunchy, zippy road movie or a more dialogue-driven dramedy. Despite having no personality of its own, this movie just yearns to be recognized at all.

The laughless mess of Sextuplets proves that Marlon Wayans still has a big obstacle in the way of his comedic greatness — himself.

As a horror and a comedy, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey has no rhythm with either, and it's too dim to be worthy of a curious look.

Start to finish, the movie is delightfully dorky, irreverent and scrappy, the exact kind of project a young filmmaker would make if they just wanted to make fellow nerds laugh and were pretty good at doing so.

With a movie like this, it’s hard to tell where the good idea ran out, as it seems to have been lost many drafts ago. 2:22 really just wants to be seen as clever, which often renders something not very clever at all.

From start to finish, Uziel’s packaging of the story seems more inspired than its contents.

In its righteous outrage, I Am Evidence pulls no punches, and is unafraid to call out the system.

It's telling that Demon House features a real-life exorcism, but it feels more superficial than supernatural.

The film is essentially one long joke about a dick, with various gags built into that concept, as if it wants to be the movie that says the word “dick” more than any production with roots to the Judd Apatow family tree. It might just be the winner of that designation, or at the very least, it deserves some type of special achievement award.

With Rockaway, you don’t have to know all the details of Budion’s life—or have even seen “Stand By Me”—to get a strong feeling of what’s honest here, and what isn’t.

Its greatest value is probably in how it could educate budding movie-lovers on cheesy and predictable storytelling, but even that seems like a lesson Rim of the World cynically teaches at an elementary level.

Falling Inn Love may look and sound like a lot of other movies, but you could never confuse it for being dishonest.

Yet while the doc might prove that his approach worked, it’s progressively tedious to revisit these hits through such a thick air of self-affirmation.

A wholesome fantasy built of serene settings and cute animals is more fun when it gets a little wacky, and thankfully A Whisker Away has some left-field ideas to make the tale more magical as it goes along.

Mighty Oak is clumsy when presenting its darkest stuff, and can't balance that with its sporadic attempts at broad humor.

Any degree of sleaze requires a little wit, and Yummy has none. As it struggles to be even mildly significant in the sprawling history of zombie stories, it eventually leaves viewers with a movie that's just plainly ugly.

Kevin Tran’s The Dark End of the Street is a warm, modest film all around—its ambitions, filmmaking, and especially pacing.

The Wasteland is the unique case of a horror movie with a more robust visual sense than a lot of its contemporaries, but that still doesn’t create a larger terror. It’s more the stuff of directors' reels, not nightmares.

It is a horror/fantasy that puts every bit of its imagination on the screen and constantly impresses with its DIY spectacle.