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.