Nick Schager

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.

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.

Heart of Stone plays like reheated leftovers, its flavor familiar but diluted.

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

Cohen’s willingness to do, or say, anything in order to elicit a chuckle at least somewhat salvages The Brothers Grimsby — right up to a riotously nasty climactic gag shoved down the throat of Donald Trump.

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.

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.

In a streaming landscape already saturated with takedowns of Big Pharma and its pill-popping perfidy, it’s a generic version of far more powerful originals.

Makinov's film expertly crafts a sense of dawning madness that hinges on its villains' unspoken fury at their elders.

A sci-fi story that spirals about in circles on its way to a predictable and underwhelming twist and an even less satisfying conclusion.

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

Little more than a creaky lark that fails to generate consistent laughs, even if it proves that John Cena is a charming goof-off who’s game for anything.

The best one can say about it is that it at least doesn’t feature a lovably cartoonish genocidal dictator.

Brody does his sturdiest work in years as the morally compromised Porter, and Strahovski makes for a fittingly seductive temptress with ambiguous motives. Manhattan Night's pedestrian style and affected atmosphere, however, make it a routine descent into the black heart of a city and its shady inhabitants.

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.

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

Just a pale imitation of scarier bloodsuckers gone by.

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.

Even the least violent passages of this follow-up are a tedious drag, courtesy of a story that asks nothing of its lead Charlize Theron and her underwhelming co-stars except endless, enervating moping.

While incapable of comprehensively contextualizing the craze and only somewhat convincing in its portrait of the power of cocktails to reenergize the traditional local-dive scene, the documentary remains a succinct and lively tribute to the art of the drink—not to mention a handy compendium for those seeking a prime NYC joint to quench their thirst.

Regrettably, both the condemnation of capitalist avarice and violence and the sanctification of nature and youthful innocence are dramatized only in simplistic black-and-white terms.

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

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.

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.

Remains a mesmerizing time-capsule portrait of ’80s-era hopes and fears about computers.

Something happens here, but it isn't life.

The material comes across as too far-fetched to be taken seriously, and too bland to elicit laughs.

Director Wes Ball’s adaptation of the second book in author James Dashner’s popular series is the exact opposite of its predecessor, presenting a sprawling adventure that, when not liberally cribbing from more illustrious sci-fi forefathers, spends plentiful time fleshing out the dull details of its oppressed-youth scenario.

The lesson here, apparently, is that driven women just need to lighten up and stop being selfish - a message that really does feel backward.

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.

[Hamm’s] charm—and a reunion with his 30 Rock co-star Tina Fey—can’t salvage a middling caper that’s critically low on comedic or criminal verve.

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.

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

Whereas Bertino’s original was sleek, sinister and deft, this do-over is noisy, dull and dumb as a bag of rocks.

If Defa's aesthetics are mundane, his leads' performances are not, especially in the case of Audley, whose darting eyes and hushed, stuttering speech express confused longing with transfixing train-wreck magnetism.

This wannabe winsome fairy tale about confronting fears, atoning for sins, and forgiving oneself is a pile-up of preciousness.

When Reggie advises Eleanor, a former cornet prodigy, to protect her artistic "gift," Like Sunday, Like Rain finally achieves maximum phoniness.

Mistaken-identity shenanigans and gooey romance are Monte Carlo's prime commodities.

While the Nitro Circus's many achievements are impressive, they pale in comparison to those of Knoxville and company's.

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

It's content to be childishly silly rather than legitimately weird, veering between gags concerning age-old products and Jan. 6 with a mildness that keeps things pleasantly pedestrian.

The photogenic cast's looks far exceed their featureless performances, and any mood of sunshiny malevolence is undercut by too many studied directorial compositions.

If genre fans will always know what it’s up to, that’s just another way it pays faithful homage to its by-the-numbers precursors.

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.

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

A franchise farewell so underwhelming, nary a tear will be shed over its passing.

Jirí Barta's film is a disturbing through-the-looking-glass reflection of traditional fairy tales.

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.

[Ford’s] presence—along with a winning turn from Anthony Mackie as the patriotic title character—makes this adventure a sturdy return to franchise form.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Despite referring to the tribe as "my people," Routh is wholly miscast, yet his ill-fitting presence is part and parcel of the plotting's general illogicality.

Chalet Girl is just a compendium of genre clichés - minus the usual racism and t&a.

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 script leaps forward with an absurdity almost as great as Lincoln's own strength.

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

While following a typical rom-com pattern isn’t inherently unpleasant, the movie’s wink-wink insinuations that it’s going to take things in a novel direction, followed by its embrace of the very clichés it’s poked fun at, makes it feel disingenuous and stale.

A coherent characterization of Robert Pattinson's striving schemer is nowhere to be found in this pedestrian period piece.

Jem has less in common with its neon-drenched ‘80s source material than with the real-life Internet-to-red-carpet trajectory of Justin Bieber — a similarly generic teen idol with moves dully modeled on superior artistic predecessors.

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.

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.

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.

Cartoonishly gory and drearily unoriginal and predictable, it’s a collection of tired devices and shout-outs that plays like training wheels slasher cinema.

Merely a cheeky pantomime rather than an actual adventure in which one might get swept up.

The meager surprises it does contain aren’t particularly effective, considering that early clues suggest only one possible twist and the proceedings do little to mask it.

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

If this truly is the pair’s big-screen goodbye, at least it ends on a fittingly wacko note of pure, unadulterated sentimentality.

While the star adequately acquits himself, Neil Jordan’s throwback noir is a cover song that knows all the notes but can’t capture its predecessor’s spirit.

For sheer unadulterated geekiness, it’s got few contemporary equals.

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.

The result is a work that radiates a boozy, Bukowski-esque downward spiral, all alcohol-fueled anger and aimless sadness.

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.

A film of precious, romanticized misery and squalor.

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

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.

Raze leaves the background particulars about this competition oblique, partly because it adds a layer of ominous mystery, but primarily because it doesn't matter; witnessing women-on-women violence is the thing here, regardless of any narrative context.

Save for a single sterling jolt, his compendium of clichés is a case study in knowing a genre’s tricks but doing absolutely nothing of interest with them.

Despite its scattered frenzy, Hop-thanks to its fondness for smushing together seemingly incongruous elements and Marsden's goofy, bug-eyed mugging-is just demented enough to deliver a fleeting sugar rush.

A lost-dog drama so insufferable it makes one wish its human characters would also run off and never return.

More problematic than its lack of a compellingly laid-out time line is the film's habit of hopping between points of interest, so that every one of its chosen topics...is treated with a few catchy sound bites.

Carano’s badass-beauty charm notwithstanding, it’s a grim, formulaic saga in desperate need of some genuine B-movie fury and flair.

Whether sleuthing or smacking around thugs, Sisley makes a dashing hero, but this glossy action flick is heavy on tedious convolutions and depressingly light on character depth, suspense or political-economic intrigue.

The proceedings resemble an impromptu game of make-believe concocted by a kid playing with his or her toys—a situation that renders it both inane and lighthearted.

[Wheatley’s] chaos and madness is of a blandly cartoonish variety, neither serious enough to scare nor outlandish enough to elicit laughs.

From hairstyles and clothes to autumnal-hued cinematography and a raft of clichéd incidents involving pills, suicide, sneaking out, and blackmail, everything feels dainty to the point of stale.

In the race to achieve unadulterated fourth-wall breakage, Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie is the new pack leader.

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

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

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

Out of the Shadows’ barrels forward like such a rampaging beast that it decimates everything – plot, character, emotion, basic visual lucidity – in its wake.

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.

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

Tin-eared, corny attempt at fairy-tale interpretation.

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

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.

Even with the grungy aesthetics and earnest preaching, Inhale is really nothing but crass topical exploitation, milking this social issue for every salacious drop.

Yet as is so often the case with the frat-boy genre to which this film panders, so many gags feel like desperate, self-conscious attempts to be outrageous that the effect of its abundant cursing and boob shots is more depressing than delirious.

Despite the usual end-of-world crisis and Mount Olympus MVP characters, there’s no sense that anything’s truly at stake; rather, it feels as if the filmmakers are coasting on the fumes of teen-angst fantasy and making up their fairy-tale rules (Cyclopes are fireproof!) as they go along.

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.

Cheerfully dumb and dutifully formulaic, it’s “content” in the worst sense of the term.

The epitome of a knock-off B-movie—and one that’s only mildly entertaining when it shows its cards and goes full-on gonzo.

Affected and artificial to the point of aggravation, it’s an interminably draggy endeavor that gives the lie to its oft-spoken phrase, “Time flies.”

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

A subpar exorcism movie that’s all the more depressing for being directed by Lee Daniels, whose distinctive flair is only sporadically spied amidst its shopworn clichés.

The Exorcist: Believer trots out Burstyn for continuity credibility and then treats her with stunning disrespect—the most brazen of many indications that the film is a soulless cash-in on an established name brand.

Anderson utilizes slow-motion 3-D to hyperbolic effect while again casting Jovovich as the epitome of badass sexiness.

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.

All “Thriller," no infamy, presenting an uplifting, crowd-pleasing version of events that, for all its expert impersonations, is simply the palatable half of this sordid tale.

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

The film tackles its issues with a furrowed-brow solemnity that eventually spills into outright sluggishness.

A B-movie of unholy bombast and absurdity.

No amount of narrative wackiness and star power can make [cabbages] or this Sundance Film Festival offering funny.

No matter how sensitive the orchestral-string score gets, the film can't locate the bone-deep sense of tragedy of Leslie Schwartz's novel - it just keeps belching out empty, grief-stricken histrionics devoid of insight.

The legendary star spends the majority of this misfire looking alternately bored and really bored—an emotion that viewers will find all-too-relatable.

A preposterous, monotonous action saga primarily notable for boasting a miscast lead and advancing a less-than-tolerant geopolitical fantasy.

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.

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

Waters’ comedy — like its forerunner — comes impressively close to elevating cursing to an art form, especially when wielded by Thornton and Cox, who spit and sneer vulgar invectives at each other like gutter-trash virtuosos.

Girl Most Likely strands Kristen Wiig in a dreadful, disingenuous city-vs.-suburbs comedy that mercilessly mocks New Jersey before turning around and celebrating its provincial trashiness over the hoity-toity snootiness of Manhattan.

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

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

The charismatic Pfeiffer deserves much, much better than this soggy stocking stuffer.

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

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

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.

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.

A crude sugary-sweet fantasy.

There are good intentions here, but too little nuance.

The star and co-director appears hopelessly out of place, trapped in a variety of awkward-fitting uniforms while forced to offer up laughably obvious battlefield advice ("Avoid gunfire!").

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.

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.

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.

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.

[Its] sketchiness is second only to its inside-baseball humorlessness.

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.

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.

Amid much overacting, Kaige addresses the subjectivity and unreliability of images through this-isn't-what-it-looks-like scenarios that would make Jack Tripper groan.

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

Even at a brisk 81 minutes, this indie can barely sustain its boozy comedic buzz.

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

If not for its lack of self-awareness, The Art of Getting By would seem to be a spoof of ennui-inflicted teen dramas, because how else to explain the fact that Gavin Wiesen's debut is comprised of only clichés of clichés?

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

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

Gervais’ tale is primarily consumed with middle-of-the-road squabbling between its headliners, whose yin-yang chemistry never results in more than a few chuckle-worthy bon mots.

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

A dog in wolf's clothing, Lionsgate's drab, anthropomorphic animal saga does little more than reconfirm the preeminence of Pixar.

Nothing but a million little pieces from prior superhero series and the "Twilight" saga.

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

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.

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.

There isn't a moment in Hôtel Normandy that isn't painfully contrived, yet, worse still, its mix-ups boast all the inspiration and excitement of a weekend getaway at the local mall.

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.

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.

Its comic touch almost as heavy-handed as its slow-motion-drenched action is dull, it seems primarily designed to answer the question, “How many movie stars can one fiasco squander?

Treading well-worn ground to diminishingly creepy returns is a bone-deep problem for Zombie’s latest, especially with regard to his characters.

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.

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.

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

A corny and turgid saga that should bring to a close Sony’s live-action “Spider-Verse,” if not the faltering genre as a whole, it’s an unspectacular affair that melds Marvel, Tarzan, and John Wick to depressing and forgettable ends.

Quirky indie hell, thy name is Family Weekend. Benjamin Epps's film is the very definition of affected cutie-pie whimsy and weirdness.

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

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.

Java Heat's title refers not to hot coffee but to the Indonesian island, though caffeine is certainly recommended to make it through this tepid buddy-cop action flick.

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.

Set to Tom Holkenborg’s bombastic score, Gregorian chanting, and endless pew-pew-pews, Rebel Moon—Part Two: The Scargiver roars and rampages, yet its drama can’t match its aesthetic pomposity.

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

Director Ron Maxwell (Gettysburg, Gods and Generals) shows a flair for mythologizing via beautiful panoramas of upstate New York landscapes but less so, unfortunately, through his film's inert story and flat performances.

Little girls never stop loving their daddies in Festival of Lights, a drama that never stops loving soap-opera-style melodramatics.

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

Despite an A-list roster, the performances are universally one-note, a fact largely attributable to a script overflowing with blunt dialogue and heavy-handed symbolism.

A Yuletide misfire that lands like a lump of coal.

Designed in every way to make one bleary eyed, it’s the new year’s dreariest, and goofiest, film.

Its tolerant messages remain buried beneath lame pop-culture references, hectic slapstick, fart jokes, and endless Smurf-puns that—Azaria's funny, over-the-top cartoon villainy aside—make one pine for the Smurfpocalypse.

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

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

Supremely awful.

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

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.

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.

To say that it’s a fourth-generation knock-off of myriad similar YA sagas that have come before it would be an understatement.

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.

Without comments from Akka's Jewish residents or any conflicting voices, the film plays like a propagandistic attempt to reshape historical and contemporary narratives.

The main takeaway from this dreary dud, however, is that winning an Academy Award is no guarantee of continued big-screen success.

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

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.

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.

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

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

It’s not improbability that dooms this Al Pacino-headlined genre throwaway but a crushing lack of originality and a form that makes its clichés even harder to swallow.

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.

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.

Haunt winds up being memorable only for its absence of subtlety or surprise.

Moretz strikes a convincing empowered-badass pose but has no amount of charismatic fearsomeness can energize the illogical latter portions of The 5th Wave, which are driven by revelations about the aliens that, to put it bluntly, make no sense.

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

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

This is a swift and searing attempt to pull back the curtain on Jobs and, in the process, investigate the relationship between the myth and the man.

Rife with classic-cinema shoutouts, the film is a cutesy, toothless variation on "Mulholland Drive," one whose attempts to pay tribute to movie magic are ultimately undercut by stagey aesthetics and narrative theatricality.

Unfortunately, no amount of softcore titillation can compensate for all the cheap special effects and faux-profundity dispensed by this superhero-self-help dud.

Enduring this brainless kid's film is akin to witnessing the end of the world.

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

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

Amidst this goofiness, Skrein proves a serviceable Statham replacement, capable of executing elaborate martial arts-inspired fight moves, glowering behind the wheel of his car, and generally acting like a cold, detached thug-for-hire who, deep down, has a heart of gold.

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.

With the faux-verité aesthetics of [Rec], the American-tourists-in-Eastern-European-hell setup of Hostel, and the brain of a mushy radioactive mutant zombie thingie, Chernobyl Diaries is little more than decomposed horror leftovers.

This misbegotten attempt at creating a new out-of-this-world Snyderverse is merely a knockoff dressed up in its director’s stylistic signatures.

Despite its often-overwhelming nonsensicality, there’s ultimately something irresistibly fiendish about Silent Hill, which not only condemns holier-than-thou religious zealots, but also—if I understand its gruesome finale—seems to be firmly on the side of the Devil.

An odyssey that—weird characterizations notwithstanding—is tiresomely unexceptional.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

A wretched excuse for a comedy.

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

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

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.

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

Proving that its chosen genre is best when its tropes are treated with a balance of sincere sweetness and wink-wink absurdity, Playing It Cool thrives through sheer liveliness, as well as the chemistry of its perfectly paired stars.

The paeans about national pride and brotherhood may be regional, but constant slow-motion battle scenes and squishy sentimentality are strictly wanna-be Tinseltown.

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

The Electric State" is just about as derivative as a modern blockbuster can be, and worse is that it skates along from one cacophonous and jokey set piece to another as if on rails.

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.

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

Mistakenly convinced that cuteness can compensate for a lack of basic believability, The Right Kind Of Wrong squanders its engaging leads and cheerful joviality with a plot of stupefying senselessness.

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.

A pandemic thriller infected with horror-film clichés, Cabin Fever: Patient Zero ditches the nasty allegory of Eli Roth’s original and Ti West’s studio-butchered first sequel for far duller, standard-issue conventions.

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

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

So little occurs, and so little seems to be at stake, that the action takes on the quality of a tossed-off, not-especially-melodic country-music ditty.

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.

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

These grating characters frequently burst into songs that are not only ill-fitting, but also — as with every other aspect of this indie — awful.

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

Rarely has a mainstream comedy boasting this much talent been so structurally amateurish, to the point that the film’s lack of humor seems a secondary problem to its more pressing storytelling incoherence.

Conspiracies are everywhere in Poolman, although the greatest mystery might be how anyone involved was attracted to this tidal wave of dire kookiness.

Writer-director Guy Moshe's crime saga is a work of second-generation derivation, weaving together scraps from homages to Westerns, film noir, samurai films, gangster pics, and class-warfare dramas.

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.

“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.

A wannabe French-style infidelity farce that keeps indulging in unnecessary bathos and subplots.

Brash, brutal, and simplistic in equal measure, it’s a retrograde work that, for better and worse, delivers its old-school mayhem with punishing precision and unrepentant glee.

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.

Of all the questions raised by The Amityville Horror, the most vexing one revolves around the external range of a haunted house’s supernatural powers. Because while it makes sense for a demonic abode to slam windows shut on small children’s fingers, let loose with swarms of buzzing flies, and turn bearded wood-chopping fathers into homicidal paterfamilias, it’s not quite as clear why such a structure would have the ability to sabotage the brakes of a sedan driving on the highway, or to cause a woman’s briefcase, sitting on her car’s passenger seat, to magically burst into flames.

The film stands as a pinnacle of revisionist bullshit.

The trouble is that Grovic's attempts to generate suspense by keeping character identities and motivations unknown leaves the proceedings feeling vague and slapdash.

The overarching sense is of a thriller awkwardly stitched together in the editing room, and still failing to fix its many flaws.

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

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.

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

The story is ultimately nothing more than a decrepit vehicle for the moldiest of scary-movie clichés: screechy specters, inane character behavior and jump scares that a toddler could anticipate minutes ahead of time.

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

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

On the basis of Madame Web, however, Sony’s Spider-Man Universe is now completely lifeless—and in no need of resuscitation.

The Best and the Brightest's sharp one-liners and strong cast, especially McDonald's gleefully lecherous performance as an unabashed Republican pervert, help make it a sturdy bit of subculture-tweaking silliness.

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.

The only thing more narcissistically indulgent than the film's repugnant protagonists is Mark Pellington's iPod-scored, visually flashy, thoroughly hollow directorial celebration of them.

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

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

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.

From a bevy of cheesy jolt scares (alarm clock! barking dog!) to the embarrassing sight of Zellweger and Ian McShane treating this Orphan-style B-movie silliness with grave seriousness, the film proves to be one hokey-horror riot.

Agent-turned-director Tony Krantz has a penchant for stylization that quickly slides into a velvet-painting cheesiness, which-along with the script's pseudoprofound Philosophy 101 maxims-renders the atmosphere less noirish than ridiculously cartoonish.

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.

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.

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

Michael J. Gallagher's half-cocked horror fiasco is filled with clichés, pitiful dialogue, and clumsy aesthetics.

The story overflows with reverence but is drastically short on passion or suspense.

It’s a spectacular mess that’s shameless in its desire to entertain through sheer, misbegotten excess.

What's really absent from this fiasco is a sense of purpose or an interest in character, as the participants in this weekend-getaway contest are ciphers defined mainly by their degree of obnoxiousness.

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.

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

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.

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 hard to quibble with Steve Race's film on theological grounds, though in narrative and aesthetic terms, there's something unholy about its mixture of inane clichés, shallow music-video glossiness, and incessant preaching.

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.

Dax Shepard delivers an I'm Still Here-style mockumentary of staggering incompetence with Brother's Justice.

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

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

John Whitesell's extraordinarily witless movie operates as a checklist for cultural and racial clichés.

Even caped do-gooders couldn't save Supercapitalist, a dramatic dud whose title refers not to some big-business hero but rather to wheelers and dealers living lives of swank suits, fast cars, loose women, plentiful drugs, and goofy corporate-espionage spy games.

Never less than predictable and all-too-often torpid, it’s a work that filters roiling true life through stolid formula.

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.

Self-aware narcissism has rarely been this unjustified-or insufferable.

Against all good sense, Exists plays its material straight, possibly proving itself the year's most laughably derivative and dreary film.

Flirty bickering is rampant but, courtesy of Heigl's inert performance, there's no heat or humor to the proceedings, just an avalanche of grating big-hair-and-bad-accent New Joisey caricatures.

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.

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.

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.

Too derivative to be amusing and too earnest to be parodic, it assumes the form of countless other teen comedies minus any wit or drama.

Further marred by second-rate 3-D and the sort of cornball one-liners that even a fairy godmother couldn't love, it's a tolerance-testing tale that puts the grim in Grimm.