Nick Schager

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.

A crude sugary-sweet fantasy.

Rose’s film is just another formulaic found-footage throwaway, notable only for its wannabe-porno sensationalism, replete with a climactic money shot that’s simultaneously graphic and underwhelming.

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

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

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.

Based on a true story that culminated with the expulsion of 3 million Germans from Czechoslovakia, the film leaps through years with a rapidity that negates a good deal of its sweep.

It's a techno-thriller of brain-dead proportions.

Crave is nothing but empty movie-shout-out posturing.

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.

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.

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

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

What’s proffered isn’t a scientific argument against a burgeoning agro-industrial movement, but an emotional, quasi-spiritual case about humanity's relationship with the environment.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Something happens here, but it isn't life.

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

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.

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

It’s a film that feels like it’s simply going through the motions—not to mention one whose ultimate critique of trying to relive the past is, in light of its mass of clichés, more than a tad disingenuous.

It's an over-the-top cautionary doc less convincing than the weight-loss ads on Facebook.

This trio of leads is so wooden, they make Mann’s hysterically over-the-top villainy seem refreshingly energetic by comparison.

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Shanghai Calling eventually reveals itself to be just another stale tale about the virtue of morality over ambition.

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

Loves Her Gun goes nowhere at a slothful pace.

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

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

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

For anyone hoping that Jean-Claude Van Damme's self-reflexive turn in Mabrouk El Mechri's postmodern JCVD heralded a new career direction for "The Muscles from Brussels," Assassination Games puts those dreams firmly to rest.

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

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

Writer-director Michael A. Nickles may momentarily shout out to Peeping Tom via a shot of its DVD, but Playback is merely a voyeurism-tinged horror film of dismal direct-to-video quality.

Roberto Faenza shoots his Manhattan-set action with a glossiness that's as bland as the soundtrack ballads.

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?

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

All's Faire in Love's lackluster compositions and absence of rhythm are a perfect match for writer-director Scott Marshall's script (co-written with R.A. White and Jeffrey Ray Wine), which operates according to a Revenge of the Nerds-style us-versus-them template almost as stagnant as Ricci's phoned-in turn.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Hardboiled noir play-acting doesn't get more sluggish than in this leaden tale that blurs the line between reality and delusion in a way that's less intriguing than simply confusing.

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

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.

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

No amount of industry-jargon blather and flashback-fractured plotting, however, can mask the wholesale phoniness and overpowering lethargy of this dreary drama.

Snow Queen proves both visually cruddy and narratively muddled.

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

Eric Lavaine's midlife-crisis dramedy piles on dreary subplots involving Antoine's grating pals and their one-dimensional romantic and/or financial problems, but his material is unfunny and superficial to the point of inertia.

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

Just as dispiriting as its lack of scares (or sense of humor) is Septic Man’s lack of purpose -- devoid of any commentary, the film pointlessly wallows around in the muck, thereby making itself as valuable as those nasty things routinely flushed down the toilet.

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

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.

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

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

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 comedy whose cliché-embracing stupidity borders on the surrealistic.

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

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

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

The film stands as a pinnacle of revisionist bullshit.

Loren's performance is as tonally off as the rest of Bergmann's jokey lark, which strings together characters and twists with amateurishly chaotic abandon.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

It's a mannered, over-the-top approximation of real anguish and hopelessness that's so phony that it's borderline insulting to those who've truly experienced such tragedy.

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

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

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

Reprinting its entire script would be the only way to properly convey the unintentionally hilarious awfulness of Red Hook Black, which complements its stilted and goofy writing with equally inept performances.

With horror altogether absent and a plot drowning in insipid convolutions, it's a film whose early warning to Heather should be heeded: "Don't go to Silent Hill."

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.

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

From the outset, Streitfeld hopscotches back and forth over her tale's 24 hours with a self-conscious aesthetic affectation (overlapping imagery, shifting camera speeds, elliptical edits) that demolishes any intelligible character or plot development, resulting in a story comprised of pretentious meditative fragments.

There's no more disposable type of comedy than the genre spoof, and no greater example of its general creative worthlessness than The Walking Deceased, an interminable 90-minute goof-off propped up by references to popular zombie-apocalypse fiction.

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

This 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.

It's a sloppy, tossed-off collection of parodic gags of vampire flicks and gratuitous pop-cultural references (oh, there will be pointless Lady Gaga gags!) that are below bottom-of-the-barrel.

Even at a lean 68 minutes, it's a vanity project that's the very definition of insufferable.