Nick Schager

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.

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

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

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.

A wretched excuse for a comedy.

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.

Chris Fisher so over-directs his material that the action takes on the sheen of a parody or, at least, of a film that doesn't realize its clichés are being exaggerated to the point of absurdity.

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.

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.

Tom Six's threequel races to the bottom with abandon, all while indulging in tired wink-wink self-consciousness that includes Six himself showing up to witness his movie monster made real (and to be slandered by Laser as "a poop-infatuated toddler").

Rarely has the terminal seemed as interminable as it does in Lullaby.

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.

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.

A mushy concoction that's not only unfulfilling, it's gag-worthy.

Borderline creepy, Courageous endlessly expounds on the importance of God in men's lives but fails to answer the more pressing question of why religious sagas such as this treat subtlety as a sin.

Hell is family in Another Happy Day, a portrait of one clan's reunion for a wedding that overflows with characters even more repugnant than the irony of its groan-worthy title.

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.

Incapable of energizing Mark Poirier's leaden script (based on his own novel), Christopher Neil directs with a mechanical blandness made more tedious still by a score of gentle guitar strumming so aggravatingly benign it might inspire you to partake in one of Wendy's climactic, cathartic primal screams.

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

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.

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

A film that's all airy, abstract pretentiousness.

Insidious Chapter 2 picks up where its predecessor left off-- in abject silliness.

It's simply one wearisome '90s crime-cinema cliché after another.

Is Josh "Skreech" Sandoval the least deserving documentary subject ever?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

If the Adam Shankman film's debasement of its subject into campy kitsch is the unavoidable fate of all culturally dangerous art, that doesn't make it any less palatable.

There's no deliberate Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2-style comedy to the film, just dim-witted gruesomeness retrofitted with gimmicky contemporary trappings.

Rather than having its characters’ circumstances reveal something about societal dynamics or human nature, Aftermath avoids depth; Engert casts his material in strictly suspenseful terms.

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.

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

A second-rate dude comedy in which an untalented knucklehead becomes a star through brute violence.

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

The way in which the action indulges in long, underlined silences furthers the overriding sense of trying too hard to muster up a suspenseful mood from a conceit better suited to a half-hour television program.

It’s a film that’s about as funny and/or scary as a lump of sod.

The film's interests are mainly relegated to wallowing in the frigid-starvation-suffering of its protagonists.

Seth MacFarlane's comedic modus operandi is to shock with outrageousness and pander with TV and movie citations via one non sequitur after another, a strategy that leads to a few laughs but nothing approaching lasting humor.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

Far more concerned with pratfalling animal shenanigans and unearned uplift than crafting a single complex or amusing moment, it's a film caged in by formulaic plotting and plentiful pap.

Michael Goldbach's pretentious take on identity development is woefully lacking in either subversive humor or genuine pathos; the overwrought end-of-the-world backdrop of a rampaging serial killer and a toxic industrial fire only poisons the concoction further.

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

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

Though it boasts its fair share of shots that approximate the turtle's first-person point of view, the film's most dominant presence is its heavy-handed maker.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Maudlin and mirthless, it's a film misbegotten enough to almost make one hate Christmas.

Kid Cannabis presents its material not as cautionary tale but as celebratory fantasy — which, like Nate's mom turning a blind eye to her son's illegal operation, seems to be the by-product of either inanity or excessive THC.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

A comedy whose cliché-embracing stupidity borders on the surrealistic.

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

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.

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

A feeble stab at topicality from that master of overripe Gallic melodrama, Cédric Klapisch.

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.

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.

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.

As bluntly unimaginative as its title.

Heist, swindle, and other like-minded genre films thrive or flounder on the mechanics of their story's dangerously elaborate scheme, a fact ably proven by Contraband, a tale of high-seas smuggling without a clever thought in its leaden, derivative head.

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

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

Loves Her Gun goes nowhere at a slothful pace.

The film succeeds only in turning one's stomach via implausibilities, inanities and the unwelcome sight of Brian Dennehy's naked ass.

Amid much talk about character, story structure, and theme, Grant delivers his usual rakish-charmer routine in a role that’s as hackneyed as the script’s portrait of women, the movie industry, and Star Wars fanatics is one-note.

The real scam was the filmmakers tricking Rebecca Hall (and a cameoing Amanda Seyfried) into participating in this blunt instrument of an indie.

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.

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

Brandishing a literal-minded title as laughable as the rest of its action, Cowboys & Aliens mashes up genres with a staunch dedication to getting everything wrong, making sure that each scene is more inane than the one that preceded it.

Rather than a mature, multifaceted approach, the director's portraits of Dubai, Beirut, Riyadh, and Cairo are heavy on still-photo montages comprised primarily of smiling young people and spontaneous encounters with random jokesters.

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.

Edited to ribbons so that every peripheral player — Kate Bosworth, Radha Mitchell, Josh Lucas, Henry Thomas — is even more one-dimensional than Kerouac himself, it’s a work that accurately expresses the awfulness of narcissistic self-destruction, and nothing else.

Without any engaging small-scale human drama or larger social or culture-clash import, the film comes across as trivial, and too often also indulgent and pretentious.

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.

There isn't a scare to be found in the series's second installment.

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