Nick Schager

A coming-of-age tale that, with every landscape cutaway and twinkling note from its xylophone-heavy score, begs to be taken as a dreamy slice of countryside profundity.

If both good and evil characters don't behave in ways that make sense vis-à-vis their circumstances, any sense of terror quickly dissipates.

Morgan Spurlock has little to say about Comic-Con other than that its attendees value it on a par with Christmas.

From unique to generic, it's a gear-shift that may prolong the franchise's life (a mid-credits coda confirms that a sixth installment is on its way), but, in the process, also renders it redundant.

The fawning personal-life segments are overdone, and undermine the film's compelling reportage about Madoff's ruse and downfall.

By making John such an unrepentant freedom-opposing monster, Ironclad denies itself any moral thorniness.

Shut Up Little Man! fails to legitimize its topic as one of any significance.

Avoids funny one-liners like the plague, choosing in their place to deliver only squishy faux-outrageousness that, like Sudeikis's one-note stud, exudes an unwelcome air of self-satisfaction.

The icy fatalism of film noir is turned to slush by Thin Ice, a crime saga that reduces its chosen genre to a series of atonal, old-hat clichés.

Paul Schrader blends lethargic self-referentiality with anemic political jabs in The Walker.

That's My Boy lazily exists in a fantasyland of Adam Sandler's perpetual adolescence, even as it generates some moderate comic friction from Sandler and Andy Samberg's testy back-and-forth.

Álex de la Iglesia's film hammers home the opinion that family is more important than celebrity or wealth.

Twelve long years after "The Blair Witch Project" pushed the first-person-POV subgenre to horror's forefront, and four years after [Rec] expertly refined the formula, Grave Encounters can't even pretend to be anything other than hopelessly derivative.

P. David Ebersole so busy flitters from one point of interest to another that Hit So Hard never coheres into anything other than a collection of rock-star clichés.

Chockablock with instances of characters not shooting, running, attacking, or sneaking away when they can or should, this thriller comes off like the world's most rigged game.

Further confirmation that agitprop documentaries have become wedded to a template that undermines their very arguments.

Tim Burton's sense of playfulness feels forced throughout, and as the film progresses, any humor or inventiveness takes a backseat to tumultuous set pieces that reference Frankenstein.

A slice of slight character-driven conventionality in which directorial sensitivity and drama rooted in tense conversations and intermittent blow-ups prove incapable of imparting depth to a tale that plays like a series of simplistic stock gestures.

Doesn't waste a moment on recognizable reality, consumed as it is with checking off various items from its list of clichés.

Supremely awful.

The Hedgehog ultimately illuminates only the continued lameness of employing out-of-leftfield tragedy for cheap bathos.

By wholeheartedly taking its main character's side instead of complicating or censuring his homicidal vigilante crusade, it proves inanely one-note and preachy.

Snyder attaches no larger significance to his arresting visuals. He’s only intent on eliciting “Whoa, dude!” reactions, of which there are fewer and fewer once it becomes clear that there’s nothing sustaining the centerpiece razzle-dazzle sequences except awful dialogue and no-dimensional characters.

The Tickells' style is a predictable grab bag of interviews with outraged experts and journalists, TV news footage, and scenes in which the filmmakers (and, during one trip, fellow activists Peter Fonda and Amy Smart) make faux-daring journeys into the fray to bring back supposed realities that corporate America seeks to hide.

Unlike AMC's Breaking Bad, meth here doesn't reflect current, perilous economic realties; rather, it's just a low-rent drug used by degenerates whose lives say nothing about anything.

Now that Zooey Deschanel has taken a detour into TV land, is Audrey Tautou the most insufferable pixy presence in cinema today?

Sex and love are both novel experiences for two high schoolers in this talky affair that suggests a hybrid of Before Sunset and Some Kind of Wonderful.

Ben Stiller's aesthetics blend overly manicured imagery with soaring rock songs that underline every emotion, lest the film's corporate logo-driven message-making didn't get the point across clearly enough.

Can't mask that, at heart, it's merely a trifling tour documentary that gives further excessive attention to the late-night star's 2010 ouster as The Tonight Show host.

The action is perfunctory and forgettable, albeit no more so than the script's range of clichés.

Michael J. Weithorn's direction underlined its understatement via self-consciously patient camerawork and a doleful score, all in order to further the mournful mood.

There's no spark or humor to the film's situations, just the sense of capable actors trying to make the best of a hopeless situation.

Despite aping its title in order to suggest quality by association, Bad Teacher has nothing in common with "Bad Santa" -- including, alas, a genuinely nasty sense of humor.

From overwrought flashbacks of Third Master and Madame Kang's initial meetings (and sexual encounter), to the present-day arguments and maneuverings of Lord Kang, Empire of Silver is so determined to stage its material with reverence that it embalms any flickers of passion or tension.

Its characters may be desperate to remember the things they’ve willfully suppressed, but as this dud confirms, some things are best left forgotten.

The apparent byproduct of watching too much Bad Boys II, The Viral Factor is a cops-and-criminals saga slathered in glossy Michael Bay-isms.

Blackthorn's last-man-standing circumstances, far from a cautionary tale about the cost of the gunslinger life, are glorified as the height of macho nobility.

The FP has a one-note joke of a conceit, and when that runs out, it has few actual jokes to fill the humorless void.

A B-movie with a C+ premise and D-minus execution, the last of which largely falls at the feet of director Robert Rodriguez.

By choosing to reside in abstraction, it imparts only generic and empty truths.

A feature-length ego-stroke of monumental hubris that instantly assumes pole position in the race for year’s worst movie.

Merely more of the same gung-ho corniness, delivered with a chintziness and wink-wink self-consciousness that undercuts its aggro appeal.

Eliciting exasperated laughs at its every manipulation, it may be the most ridiculously corny movie of all time.

A B-movie of unholy bombast and absurdity.

Just as busy, corny, and predictable as its 2003 iteration—as well as destined to swiftly pass into the cinematic afterlife that is both convenience store bargain bins and cluttered streaming platform libraries.

Regardless of how you feel about Ronald Reagan the president, most will be united in finding this biopic a preachy, plodding, graceless groaner.

Just as readers will likely get lost in its gobbledygook subtitle, so too does Rudd get swallowed up by the consuming CGI insanity of his latest comic book extravaganza.

With very rare exceptions, it’s less entertaining than a year’s worth of marriage counseling.

A dismal misfire that strains to meld Meet the Parents-style comedy with The Exorcist-grade horror.

Offsetting its naughtier impulses with feel-good schmaltz, it employs a tired formula to losing results.

Worst of all, Scream 7 doesn’t concoct the sort of ludicrous denouement that has always been these movies’ signature, instead delivering perhaps the most deflating conclusion in the series’ three-decade history. That alone should indicate that Ghostface has lost his luster and should withdraw to the Horror Hall of Fame where he deserves to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Freddy, Jason, and the rest of the genre’s genuine icons.

Its phoniness epitomized by Emma Mackey’s lead turn, it’s the biggest dud of the artist’s career, and the holiday season’s most egregious misfire.

Most notable for excessively straining for R-rated credibility at every turn.

Fails to locate a humorous rhythm or coherently develop its collection of characters. It’s the skeleton of a promising idea rather than a full-fledged movie.

A far cry from [Stanton’s] Pixar gems Finding Nemo and WALL-E, both of which have infinitely more to say about the human condition than this schematic and bathetic bowl of chicken soup for the soul.

It’s the safe and simplistic course correction that—neutered of the very absurdist immensity that was this franchise’s calling card, if not its sole reason for existing—lands with a crashing thud.

So drearily routine and slapdash that even an A.I. would deem it too plagiaristic.

From fawning beginning to maudlin close, it’s a monotonous, wannabe-mythmaking biopic for Ip completists only.

Bornedal's fondness for punctuating abrupt cuts to black with a solitary piano-key note is so pathological that it soon turns risible.

Mickey Rooney's own ordeal of being swindled by his wife's son gives the material a tiny bit of star power, but his mismatched interview clips merely exacerbate the earnest but graceless documentary's editorial clumsiness, aesthetic flatness, and endless repetition.

Admirable only for its sincere responsibility-over-selfishness message and for giving "The Wire" alums Chad Coleman and Jamie Hector some big-screen work, Life, Love, Soul otherwise proves to be just a low-rent Tyler Perry–style melodrama.

A tiresome film that itself knows nothing but other rom-com plots.

It’s stale B-movie rubbish of a barely watchable sort, albeit slightly more depressing than many of its genre compatriots.

The result is a lumbering attempt at sweet-and-saucy romance, all affected emotion and strained bad-boy humor.

The film so diligently eschews any tempered analysis that it eventually comes across as akin to the very thing it's decrying.

While his images have been composed with care, Nelson's screenplay is a far less impressive invention.

Devoid of characters or a story about which one might care, Psychopaths proves to be a fright-free pastiche without purpose — save, that is, for unimaginatively paying homage to a string of superior genre predecessors.

Purportedly about a quest for spiritual enlightenment and the question of what binds global religions, In Search of God is instead defined by simplistic philosophizing and rampant narcissism.

Jessica Alba gets plain-Jane crazy for An Invisible Sign, a syrupy "A Beautiful Mind" redux in which the starlet sports big brown bangs and Pippi Longstocking pigtails.

It’s an egregiously transparent endeavor modeled after the finest swindle-y works of David Mamet, but boasting none of those predecessors’ cleverness, surprise or precision.

This pious drama is a work of minimal imagination and even less subtlety.

Avoiding the genre's typical werewolfism-as-puberty metaphors, director Jonas Alexander Arnby instead casts his material as a drawn-out character study — the problem being that his characters are all one-note dullards, which turns his slow, portent-heavy drama into a giant slog.

Dream House also manages to commit a cardinal thriller sin: casting well-known actors in ostensibly inconsequential roles, which in this case reveals the real culprit before the mystery proper has even begun.

The only faint upside to this excruciating dud is that, in its movie clips of Charlie Chaplin - who the mesmerized birds view as a kindred waddling spirit - the film might hopefully function for some kids as a gateway to superior comedy cinema.

Obvious and derivative in borderline-shameless fashion, it’s a B-movie knock-off with little originality and even less flair.

Like so much teen-targeting modern horror, it opts for dull angsty brooding over the very sort of grim-and-gruesome sleaziness that might have made its premise interesting.

Intentions and effect are at odds throughout Jorge Hinojosa's one-note documentary.

Tracers is a tedious, clichéd slog from start to finish, and only briefly enlivened by two prolonged chases in which handheld cameras maintain intense proximity to their subjects.

Designed for maximum corniness, The Tiger Rising peppers its action with enough references to God, upturned-to-the-heavens gazes and warm enveloping light to make clear its function as a homily.

An insufferable import indebted to "Mrs. Doubtfire" in which a man in prosthetics helps a family cope with, and overcome, divorce.

Everything and everyone lurches about in a desperate bid to be hilariously weird, and the effect is to make the proceedings feel hopelessly strained, as if they know that there’s nothing funny going on and thus must compensate via out-there quirkiness and constant mugging.

Maudlin and mannered, this contrived indie squanders another fine late-career performance from Frank Langella, dousing its treatment of the subject in affectations until it’s snuffed out any trace of genuine life.

As bluntly unimaginative as its title.

A time-traveler becomes fragmented in disastrous ways, and so too does the film itself, in “7 Splinters in Time,” edited to ribbons in a schizoid manner that likely only makes complete sense to its maker.

Alongside electricity and clean drinking water, one of the casualties of Go North's Armageddon was artistic inspiration.

“You think you’re in the movies or something?” crows Davi’s Genovese to an underling, but Mob Town’s wink-wink address of its own artificiality doesn’t excuse its inept execution, which extends to a stereotypical Italian score by Lionel Cohen.

Any message about the need for open-mindedness in life and love, however, is muddled by a slapdash plot that ultimately cares less about taking a stand in favor of progressive values than it does in superficially employing such feel-good ideas for unimaginative, hyperactive adolescent slapstick.

The overweight, gays and little people are cheerfully mocked while writer/director Siddique ratchets up his story's disparate comedy-romance-action elements to an insanely over-the-top degree.

Fairbrass proves a hulking wannabe ass-kicker without much distinctive charisma, and his leaden performance is matched by sleepy, one-note supporting turns by the slumming-it Patric and Caan.

The phoniness of their cross-country saga is compounded by a gaggle of cipher sidekicks.

McPhee's latest saga neither conjures the humanistic heart of "Babe" nor addresses father-son separation issues with the sobriety of "The Water Horse." Instead, it's merely a compendium of photocopied elements, cartoonish special effects, and easy-bake happily-ever-afters.

Robert Scott Wildes’ directorial debut is the sort of out-of-control whatsit that spins about like a decapitated chicken in its spastic death throes.

Gosnell directs as if every scene must be either a nauseating roller-coaster ride or a syrupy melodrama, resulting in a seesawing tone that's not stabilized by the presence of Neil Patrick Harris.

There's no surer way to murder horror than to literalize it, a mistake incessantly made by The Moth Diaries.

Snapping necks and shooting limbs have rarely been carried out in service of such a principled cause — or been executed with such formulaic tedium.

Nice to look at but tedious to endure, A Five Star Life boasts a muted classiness that doesn't mitigate its phoniness.

Given its true-life basis, the story is already devoid of suspense regarding Hirohito’s ultimate fate, and Fellers’s inquiry is made more sluggish by dramatically inert conversations with Japanese officials.

At every turn, Frankenstein’s Army exhibits a preference for jolt scares and gore over actual suspense, which never materializes, thanks to a general indifference to plot and minimal interest in character.