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.