Nick Schager

Plays like a torturous tone-deaf joke that won’t end.

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.

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.

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.

[Its] sole imperative appears to be boring its audience to death.

A B-movie of unholy bombast and absurdity.

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

Heed its title’s advice and just don’t.

Arguably the least inspired film in the actor’s canon, if not all of movie history.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A documentary that not only formally resembles a conspiracy-minded YouTube post, but is about as reliable and convincing as one.

A sequel that ups the ante in virtually every way—none of them good.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Featuring not a single convincing element or exchange, this fiasco plays like a wannabe-Knight and Day exercise in eliciting annoyed reactions.

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.

Dismally lazy nonsense whose only redeeming element is that its credits roll a good 10 minutes before the conclusion of its stated runtime.

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

To call the proceedings one-note is to oversell their depth; the sheer dearth of ideas in this fiasco is almost impressively profound.

Some of the chintziest and most uninspired exploitation cinema this side of Sharknado.

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.

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.

Strives to scrutinize mother-daughter relations through a darkly comedic lens and only comes up with grating incoherence.

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.

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.

In any decade, the film’s bevy of unexplained details, dropped subplots, paper-thin characterizations and fright-free mayhem would disappoint.

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

It strikes not a single authentic chord, and that also goes for the lead performance of Ben Platt, whose overdone theater-kid turn further dooms the material’s stabs at humor and pathos.

With low stakes and even lower energy, writer-director Maria Bissell’s feature debut isn’t sure if it’s a thriller with amusing elements or a comedy of criminal absurdity. What it winds up being, therefore, is neither, stuck in a dull middle ground that will please no one.

Despite having characters incessantly explain key plot points, Separation lacks basic logic.

Aiming for a darkly humorous portrait of marital bliss — and the difficulties of maintaining it — the film comes off as a half-formed “Twilight Zone” joke minus the punchline.

“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.

Unfortunately, the invention on display is of a helter-skelter variety, as Samantha Buck and Marie Schlingmann’s film so madly lurches about in search of a tone that it feels like the first draft of a gonzo faux-biopic.

Laced with white-savior undertones this vaguely “The Blind Side”-esque sports drama doesn’t bother investigating (if it recognizes them at all), Overcomer offers nothing in the way of nuance — even its title is awkward — and, also, no respite from its religious propagandizing.

dreary...Bright, crude and aggressively hackneyed, director Nacho G. Velilla’s follow-up prizes energy over originality. While its humor elicits far more eye-rolls than laughs — and will thus leave franchise newbies cold — its high-octane style should appeal to fans of the first film.

The film moves along lackadaisically, without any knack for establishing scenarios, or setting up punchlines, that might lead to laughs — which, in turn, often makes it play like an enervating drama. Bruce!!!! makes a lot of verbal noise, but it says nothing worth remembering.

From the get-go, Levinson makes every wrongheaded directorial decision imaginable in an apparent effort to make one loathe Assassination Nation—and his success in that regard proves this teensploitation schlock’s lone triumph.

Broken Star is a thriller interested in voyeurism, the camera’s affect on both subject and photographer, and the tangled relationship between art and artist, fiction and reality. What it’s not, however, is capable of processing those ideas in a manner that might be compelling, much less thrilling.

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.

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.

Pacific Rim Uprising delivers plentiful CG mayhem.... What it lacks, though, is both del Toro’s trademark Lovecraftian imagery (all slick tentacles and dank subterranean locales) and the sense of thunderous heft that the Mexican auteur bestowed upon his titans.

While eschewing genre formula is admirable, England’s tack proves enervating, since Hank and Josie generally feel like archetypes devoid of purpose.

When the jokes don’t actually materialize (or land), the proceedings become bogged down in drama that the film’s one-dimensional characters can’t sustain.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw is a charming actress who radiates poise and intelligence, which is why Irreplaceable You — in which her character acts in ways that are clearly self-destructive and counterproductive — rings so false.

Like James’ direction, full of off-center and oddly angled compositions that aren’t warranted by the action, Entanglement dresses up familiar romantic-comedy themes with affected gimmicks to jumbled ends.

Pleasant in the blandest sense of the term, writer-director Pavan Moondi’s film likely won’t entice anyone outside die-hard fans of cult-comic co-star Tim Heidecker.

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.

As amateurish as its 1990-grade VHS title graphics, Surviving Peace is possibly the clunkiest — and most one-sided — film ever made about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Armed Response has less story than your average first-person shooter video game — and far fewer moments of exciting action or nerve-wracking suspense as well.

Writer/director Tom Costabile's found-footage conceit is painfully hackneyed, although not nearly as enervating as his actual drama.

Compounding the action’s lack of originality are both the amateurishness of every performance and the wobbly-camera aesthetics. Worse, though, is the wholesale absence of any political point of view on its immigrant-horror-story subject matter, leaving the film feeling like the thinnest type of retread.

At once superficial and overblown, this documentary also often feels downright phony.

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.

So tasteful it’s torturous, Despite the Falling Snow is a Cold War espionage thriller for those who like their period-piece action airless and derivative.

Somewhere buried deep within You’re Killing Me Susana is a commentary on loutish manliness, and the way in which romances are inherently fraught with tensions between individual and shared desires. Unfortunately, such notions are drowned out by all manner of irritating shenanigans.

From homophobic start to misogynistic finish, My Father Die is a parade of thrift-store images and scenarios as dull as they are repugnant.

Pseudo-revelatory bombshells and heart-healing epiphanies inevitably arrive by film’s climax, which only reaffirms that — no matter how it’s cleaned up, reconstituted and transformed into something new — garbage is still garbage.

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

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.

The underlying point of this elaborate stunt is that modern audiences are all too willing to believe (and be manipulated by) anything sold in a familiar nonfiction package. No matter how valid that theory might be, there are surely more compelling ways to offer it than via a one-note, 88-minute-long joke.

A film that — from its basic set-up to its dearth of tension — plays like the tedious inverse of Don't Breathe.

It's the rare film to miss its every mark.

An insistent, clunky sermon about triumph through faith, David Hunt’s film is so determined to turn its subject into a Christ-like saint that it loses any sense of him as an actual flesh-and-blood man, the result being a third-string sports saga only apt to play to its devout target audience.

Writer-director Brett Allen Smith’s quasi-romance meanders about with the same aimlessness as its characters, revealing nothing substantial about them, or twentysomething love and identity formation.

A crude sugary-sweet fantasy.

Bazodee itself dutifully hews to convention, but its plotting is so torpid that it never feels as if there are any genuine stakes to the protagonist’s which-beau-should-I-choose predicament.

With characters who range from mildly aggravating to out-and-out intolerable, and revolving around a game whose outcome is of no meaningful consequence, this underdogs-make-good fairy tale is a dramatic and comic rainout.

Throughout, Bird’s visuals are consistently flat, and his habit of cinematographically spinning around his characters (at a dinner table, on a dance floor, in a field) is dizzying in an unpleasant, nausea-inducing way — thus creating a fitting marriage of form and content.

The off-putting aesthetics of ‘Looking Glass’ are complemented by an equally putrid tale that’s determined to make its protagonist loathsome.

Dramatically speaking, God’s Not Dead 2 operates at the level of your average middle-school play – except with far greater levels of upside-down logic and bald-faced intolerance for anyone not enraptured by the New Testament.

A wretched excuse for a comedy.

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

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

Amid Kiefer's narrow-eyed glowering, Donald's exhausted-sage routine, and Moore's approximation of rural homeliness, only Wincott seems to fit in, exuding a poised, laconic cold-bloodedness that stands in stark contrast to the film's inert phoniness.

This contemptible fiasco is not only comfortable courting laughs through ugly mockery of minorities, but also doesn’t even have the courage of its own crass-as-I-wannabe convictions.

As pitifully generic as its title, The Forest hews to clichés until its final, dying breath.

Despite the capable presence of Jason Patric in a thanklessly one-note role, this generic chiller clings so tightly to conventions that it fails to even moderately raise one’s pulse

O'Brien's slow-motion-heavy staging is graceless, and his script is twice as unwieldy. With characters stuffed full of clichéd platitudes about fate, love, honor, and other topics the film isn't capable of addressing in any mature way, it's a fiasco of frontier-wide proportions.

This ungainly B movie makes virtually no sense in terms of either mythology or basic plotting.

Without an amusing instinct in its cowboy-hatted head, this painfully protracted, puerile effort meanders about the Old West as if it were making up its nonsense on the fly. The result is a torturous genre joke that marks a new low not only for the star, but for the art of cinematic comedy.

Opting for dutiful, reverent beatification over flesh-and-blood characterizations (or insights), the film is merely a clunky primer on how poor storytelling can make even the grandest of figures seem small.

Every Thing Will Be Fine is torturously slow and hopelessly mannered.

Deformed from the start, it confirms the very thing argued by its narrative – namely, the folly of unwarranted resurrections.

Decked out in the usual tinsel-and-mistletoe trappings, the film lurches awkwardly between gloominess and giddiness, never hitting the boisterously bittersweet groove it seeks.

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

Aiming to give teens everything they ostensibly like, and yet coming up with little more than a steaming pile of mash-up nonsense, Freaks of Nature proves a lifeless combination of alien invasion saga, zombie thriller, vampire romance and high-school drama.

It might be asking too much for The Diabolical to fully live up to its cheesy-ominous title, but the sheer unadulterated inanity of these proceedings suggests that it'll soon be teleported to the far corners of the B-movie streaming-video abyss.

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.

Pan is a cacophonous assault on the senses, all computerized cinematographic mayhem and deafening noise, and its hurried pace extinguishes any genuine character development.

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.