Nick Schager

This behind-the-curtain portrait winds up revealing only the most superficial-and glaringly obvious-of truths.

Unfortunately, Mumbai Diaries addresses these weighty concerns with such delicacy that they barely make an impact, thus calling further undue attention to the creakiness of the warhorse plot.

Chen's attention to character over spectacle pays minimal dividends and is compounded by the fact that his battles - full of standard-issue slow motion and hacked-off limbs - are as dull as an overused blade.

Content to be a typical piece of tween rural-versus-urban fluff from the old Hannah Montana: The Movie mold. Such lazy complacency is almost enough to make you see red.

Remember the "Seinfeld" episode in which Jerry and Elaine try to become friends with benefits, and set up unsustainable ground rules for their new arrangement? Imagine it rewritten by the Romantic Comeditron 2000 as a profanity-laced schmaltzfest, and you've got this tone-deaf dud.

For a film about a stand-up comedian to be mirthless is dispiriting; more problematic, however, is that The Stand Up doesn't make up for that absence of humor with any legitimate drama.

A satire that’s neither sharp enough to make its industry skewering sting, nor sweet enough to compensate for its toothlessness.

Director Jacob Rosenberg's approach is heavy with archival footage and interviews, yet oddly features almost nothing from Way himself; his puzzling absence for most of the film turns the project into less of a biography than a one-note hagiography.

What ensues is the exact same thing that happened to Mia Farrow’s wife, except minus the creepy surprise and, thus, any reason to pay attention.

Caring more about what its characters represent — and its empathetic representation of them — than about crafting a fully formed drama concerning flesh-and-blood people, Cone’s film has little more than its heart in the right place.

Like so many documentaries made in a pop style, Generation Iron is a squandered opportunity, sacrificing depth and insight for superficial portraiture and drama.

[Cage] is the prince of pretentious darkness, and the saving grace of this otherwise slapdash variation on the Bram Stoker legend.

Despite an appealing trio of leads, it seems likely to entice only those with an unquenchable thirst for thriller cliches.

The movie's overall lack of imagination is the real tragedy.

Only faintly touching upon notions of intuitive collaboration and inspiration, For the Plasma wanders about as if it’s in a fog, ultimately to the point of pointlessness.

Imagination is in short supply, with rubbery heroes repeatedly plummeting (down chutes, primarily) or hopping and running in slow motion-images that (to state what has now become the obvious) are seldom enhanced by pedestrian IMAX 3-D effects.

No doubt, these talking-head assertions about DeJoria’s charitable attitude toward work and life...are true. Alas, they’re delivered in a celebratory one-note package that feels like something cooked up by a publicity team.

A lifeless hodgepodge of the hoariest clichés the genre has to offer.

Puenzo dramatizes her material with an overcooked sense of import that generates scant suspense.

Emitting the unpleasant stench of over-affectation, Treading Water slaps together its particular peculiarities with such randomness, it’s as if the film were conceived from blindly throwing disparate elements at the wall.

No matter Jodie Comer’s committed effort to wring something emotional from this cataclysmic saga, the film proves soggy in every respect.

Think of it as “Miss Congeniality” for dogs, replete with the sort of slapstick humor, puerile gags and for-adults-only pop-culture references required of such endeavors. Its frantic pace should make it a mildly amusing diversion for the younger set, but its juvenile imagination (or lack thereof) is likely to drive anyone over the age of 7 barking mad.

Messina's performance has a lived-in, emotional messiness, but the film is nothing but clichés.

Like many similarly twisty tales, Reversion's narrative logic is undermined by its characters' irrational behavior.

Like Shlain's hand-written diagram in which lines twist and knot while linking various subjects, the film resembles not a coherent thesis but a tangle of semi-related ideas.

Unoriginal and ungainly at every turn, it’s a debacle devoid of any genuine magic.

However oblique it remains, Sunset Edge feels like the work of curious filmmakers, searching for intangible truths in sights of people exploring both a past that’s been forgotten by most, and a present that can’t seem to quite move forward in any meaningful, appreciable way.

Content to stay on the surface, it's a puff piece posing as a real documentary.

Like its title, Heist: Who Stole the American Dream? purports to ask a question but is only interested in forwarding its predictable agitprop answer.

After poking fun at both Green's lack of originality and the hackneyed nature of found-footage shockers, Digging Up the Marrow merely resorts to climactic shaky-cam footage of people running through the pitch-black woods -- thereby becoming the very dull, clichéd thing it mocks.

Without a complex thought about narcissism, merit, or addiction, Limitless is content to be an empty, one-note, satire-free fairy tale of avarice and corporate-political ambition.

Come for the healthy servings of capuzzelle, zeppole, and scungilli, but prepare to choke on the stale and squishy platitudes about family and tradition.

Less inept than its worst-of-the-year title suggests, 3, 2, 1 . . . Frankie Go Boom nonetheless proves too ramshackle and aimless to ever achieve true absurdity.

It’s too busy pleasing itself with lame references to (among others) Eddie Vedder and Hillary Clinton that suggest the film believes old stuff is funny because, you know, it’s old.

Devoid of plausible characterizations, decision-making, and plotting, it’s a dud of epic proportions—literally, as its 130-minute runtime makes it feel like it’ll never end.

The director’s grim commitment to shocking his audience is fanatical to the point of being enthralling, as he dramatizes one bit of extreme, rancid cruelty after another for little reason other than to turn viewers’ stomachs. It’s far from a noble goal, but there’s no denying its effectiveness.

The mood is generally melodramatic and ends as mushy, aided by the soft-focus cinematography that drenches it all in melancholic nostalgia.

The trio's mourning feels more like immature self-absorption.

Despite the subtitles, it's basically a slice of formulaic Hollywood-style mythmaking, writ large and woefully empty.

The director posits that the world is now shaped by clandestine arms deals conducted, often illegally, by the U.S. and Great Britain, but Shadow World sells its argument about the West's criminality not with reporting but through paranoid propaganda.

A thriller in name only, it has all the grace and cunning of an anvil to the head.

For the most part, the film is similarly content to repeat the past, all the way through to its predictable liberating-feel-good wrap-up.

Cohabitation "commandments" and talk of "chick flicks" further send the material into a cutesy tailspin, with the script's low point an egregious scene featuring Nate sneaking a peek at a silhouette of Jenny undressing behind a curtain.

The film is as lightweight as the ganja-puffing is plentiful, little more than a vanity project that allows its subject to wax philosophical on his past triumphs, tragedies, and spiritual development (aided by Louis Farrakhan) from gangland pimp to nonviolent family man.

Director Calmatic sanitizes every aspect of his source material until the entire thing looks, sounds and feels like a Disney sitcom. Thus, it’s no surprise when things get self-help maudlin.

A musty ghost story that morphs into a sluggish serial-killer mystery, Nicholas McCarthy's film tries to distinguish itself by minimizing dialogue and settings, a stripped-down approach that extends to sketchy characters and a script rife with convenient, easy-to-assemble clues.

Rob Savage’s adaptation of Stephen King’s 1973 short story is as stereotypical as they come, so devoid of originality that the most pressing emotion it elicits is pity for its leads, Sophie Thatcher and Chris Messina, who deserve better than to be put through this paint-by-numbers ringer.

The pitfall of a tantalizing set-up is that it requires a sterling payoff to match — a recipe for disappointment born out by Rebirth, whose premise-establishing early passages lead only to underwhelming revelations.

An aesthetic showcase whose repetitive nature winds up diminishing the excitement of its breathtaking feats of mountainous flight.

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.

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").

By ultimately softening its stance toward McIver, Grassroots disingenuously has it both ways, reducing politics first to a David-versus-Goliath adventure, and then to an everyone-is-cool bowl of mush.

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.

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.

Kirkpatrick's color-deficient visual scheme is sturdy, but it can't compensate for a mechanical, unsubtle script.

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.

From Dave to The Dictator, politicians-replaced-by-doppelgängers has long been a favorite comedy movie device — yet never has it been employed for more torturous faux-funny business than in Viva la Libertà.

Any initial, intriguing otherworldly atmosphere is negated by answers that are more pedestrian than terrifying.

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.

The battles are staged with moderate intensity but a dispiriting lack of surprise that's also characteristic of the story in general.

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

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

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

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

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.

It's all so much turgid brooding, dialogue underlined with import, and leaden symbolism involving Rapace's white and red dresses, none of which is salvaged by a typically understated Farrell performance.

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 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.

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.

There's no type of documentary as shallow as those covering modern music festivals, a fact reconfirmed by Made in America.

Taking the notion of toilet humor literally but incapable of delivering its promised religious satire, The Catechism Cataclysm is more muddled than its tongue-twister title.

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.

It's a dull drag-show routine headed nowhere until Pacino (playing a self-important version of himself) begins stalking Jill.

The Foxy Merkins would have made an idiosyncratic and amusing short film; at 80 minutes, it's a one-joke comedy that quickly overstays its welcome.

The resultant smorgasbord is a misshapen mess, short on humor, tension, or chemistry among its bickering protagonists.

A corny saga of social and generational conflict, it's ultimately yet another Chinese period epic that functions as a thinly veiled treatise on the nobility of socialist equality.

A film that's all airy, abstract pretentiousness.

Plays like one long, slow descent into cloying moralizing and uplift that's well past its expiration date.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Throughout, the complexities of the charismatic fighter's life are only cursorily referenced so that the celebratory tone may not be marred, with Manny ultimately content to treat its subject with kid gloves.

The film's recognition of its (and its makers') own failings doesn't stop them from being unbearably accurate.

Nearly every scene is clunky, and the film's commentary about TV as the unifying glue of American culture is embellished through lame incidents of sex and violence that eventually validate the Chinese tourists' anti-U.S. critiques.

Wearing out its welcome long before its moralizing finale, the film...does manage to mine contemporary fears about the increasing worthlessness of a college degree.

Weaver's story slowly begins to buckle under the weight of its own self-seriousness and familiarity, concluding with a showdown and resolution marked by one implausible and unsatisfying been-here-done-that twist after another.

That My Lucky Star isn’t serious is less an issue than the fact that its comedic action is so broad, ridiculous, and predictable that it soon feels juvenile, akin to a training-wheels variation on various genre formulas.

A stew of cartoon stereotypes, violence, and "Freebird" cast in a skuzzy "Sons of Anarchy" mold.

Director Wayne Kramer (Running Scared, Crossing Over) makes plain his cartoon-comedy intentions early and often via comic-book-panel-style title cards. The presiding atmosphere of over-the-top zaniness, however, is of a broad, banal sort involving little people, rampant nudity, and quasi-religious nonsense.

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

The incessant tumult drowns out any real message for the kids - or pleasure for their parents. It's a film so obnoxiously frantic that its most restrained element is a banjo-strumming elementary school teacher played by none other than '90s tween-mugging icon Jaleel "Urkel" White.

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

Scene after scene is defined by blunt exposition and gooey maxims, not to mention cornball visual metaphors.

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.

The result being a film that, devoid of both laugh-out-loud humor and the righteous indignation that characterizes most agitprop efforts, winds up being just a voting-for-dummies primer.

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.

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.

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.

Hickey's overarching arguments about war, diplomacy, and American intelligence aren't just muddled, but altogether nonexistent, leaving his comedically challenged film Iraqi-desert-level barren.

Michael Corrente's film is a mush of poses. The director's saga revels in cornball romance, imitation tough-guy attitude, and awkward flashbacks.

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.

His (Gonzalo López-Gallego) this-is-authentic conceit is by now a tediously corny device, and his story delivers no scares during the interminably long, uneventful build-up to its deflating climax.

Its suspense is so nonexistent, and its supposed concerns—about the reliability of memory and the nature of truth—are handled so facilely, the film sells its own conceit short.

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

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.

The film is proof of both Garrett’s titanic skill at putting bow to string, and his decidedly less accomplished gifts as an actor.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

The film's tossed-off look and clunky editorial construction are still secondary to the sheer silliness of its story.

As sure as marijuana gets you high, you can count on weed-themed comedies cropping up every few years, each hoping to become a stoner-classic staple--a fate to which High School falls far short of achieving.

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.

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.

Shamelessly mimics Michael Bay's larger-than-life dialogue, sweeping cinematography, cornball romance, and military fetishism.

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

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

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.

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.

Girl in Progress operates like a training-wheels melodrama for genre-uneducated tweens.

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

At least Roberts has some star wattage to burn; her megawatt smile is the only thing that ultimately pierces, however faintly, the film's blinding schmaltz.

Nonsensical and all-around third-rate, American Mary offers up Human Centipede-style surgical horror, except this time with endless absurd eroticism.

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

For a film about a killing machine who can see at night, it's fittingly ironic that the film itself is, both narratively and visually, a dark, muddled mess.

Amityville 3-D—one-dimensional in every way but its hokey visuals—is too poorly written, awkwardly staged, and pathologically stupid to register as campy fun.

A committed Bosworth gives herself over to the role. Yet, there’s ultimately no real role for her to play.

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

The film folds narratives on top of narratives in a vain attempt to mask the fact that there's nothing to read between its graceless lines.

Guy Ritchie may have creatively moved on from his Tarantino-inspired debut, but international crime cinema has not, as again evidenced by Magnus Martens's film.

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

Prizes computer-generated wizardry above logical plotting or thoughtful character development, a misguided set of priorities exacerbated by the fact that said digital effects prove so chintzy.

Coming across as a promotional showcase for a gaggle of young up-and-coming singer-actors, Don't Go in the Woods tethers together numerous indie-rock musical numbers with a backwoods-horror-film framework that's the definition of an afterthought.

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.

Just an extended dramatization of the 1980s anti-drug PSA that memorably cautioned "I learned it by watching you!"

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

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.

Todd Robinson's film is a third-rate submarine-set drama until, in its final moments, it sinks to fourth-rate.

Wither the rollicking verve and whip-crack humor in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows?

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.

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

No amount of intentional stabs at humor can offset the hilarious awfulness of Dario Argento’s Dracula.

Gus Van Sant's cinema, which of late has been fixated on immersing viewers in particular times and spaces, takes a detour into excruciating quirkland with Restless.

A film of precious, romanticized misery and squalor.

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.

If The Hangover was a boorish blackout fantasy for our binge-drinking age, The Hangover Part II is something like the contents of a fraternity house's toilet the morning after an insane kegger-namely, regurgitated elements of a more entertaining prior adventure.

A film that plays like a long, tedious inside joke for fanboys.

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

While it may make the City of Light look beautiful, ultimately, this insufferable indie auteur's navel-gazer is just another faux-kinky vanity project in which its creator's neuroses are placed on an undeserved pedestal.

As if written by a robot whose frame of reference wasn't human reality but merely fairy-tale romantic comedies, Love, Wedding, Marriage strips genre tropes down to their scrawny, brittle bones.

A wretched excuse for a comedy.

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

Not a single arresting image is found amid the sci-fi rubble, though unintentional laughs eventually arrive courtesy of a cornball motivational speech by Eckhart's hero.

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

Fans of incessant flashbacks and endless whooshing zooms into close-ups will find much to love about Assassin's Bullet; less satisfied, alas, will be those with a fondness for lucid plotting, compelling intrigue, and credible performances.

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

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.

Dark House practically drowns under the weight of mismatched horror tropes, including a preponderance of loud-noise jolt-scares and idiotic character behavior.

A multicultural mini–Thelma and Louise but far duller than that description implies, Just Like a Woman peddles feminist empowerment with one-note didacticism.

Romanycheva exudes cunning carnality, yet her wiles are as rote as the rest of this B-grade genre flick, which feigns interest in post-Communist Eastern European power dynamics but favors listlessly staged shoot-outs and heists devoid of emotional, psychological, or sociopolitical substance.

The film indulges in much wannabe-funny wailing, shrieking, and flopping about by Nénette and Paul, only to then lace its buffoonish material with semi-serious undercurrents.

The real bogeyman is incomprehensible plotting in director Steven C. Miller's Under the Bed, which matches narrative incoherence with one of the most over-the-top portentous scores in horror-cinema history.

A few decent one-liners notwithstanding, the movie comes off as willfully uninspired.

Throughout, Helberg's awkward-anxious routine proves insufferable, and it's made no more tolerable by supporting turns from Zachary Quinto, Alfred Molina, and Judith Light, who are given so little to do that their presence in this mess feels downright cruel to both them and us.

The latest—and perhaps dreariest—horror film to employ a found-footage conceit.

Between the cast's modern hairstyles and attitude, and the paint-by-numbers set design and period costumes...the action comes across as a prolonged, dreary game of dress-up. That director Danny Mooney shoots his material like a TV show doesn't help.

Why anyone would want to spend time with a foursome whose bathetic misery is, like the overly mannered visuals of writer-director Dennis Lee (Fireflies in the Garden), defined by such insufferable quirkiness is anyone's guess.

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.

It's the wooden plotting and cornball sentimentality--and, most unpleasant of all, the full-frontal nudity of Jamie Kennedy--that truly make this AVN-themed fairy tale, ahem, hard to swallow

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

A respectable cast and much noisy boisterousness isn't enough to generate a single laugh.

Director Luc Besson treats his protagonists as likable cartoons yet never provides a single reason to view them as anything less than remorseless, repugnant psychos.