Peter Sobczynski

While the premise has some undeniable potential, it has been executed by writer-director Lotfy Nathan in a manner that is neither particularly frightening nor spiritually enlightening.

While there are several problems with the film as a whole, perhaps the central one is that there are long stretches where viewers are expected to take the concept at least somewhat seriously, which proves impossible.

Even those who admired the “Raid” films for their style and heedlessness might find this to be little more than an accumulation of action movie cliches that they have seen enacted to much greater effect in other and certainly better films.

As a Neil Young fan who has cheerfully followed him throughout all the highways and byways of his singular career, I have always found him to be one of the most vital and fascinating voices in contemporary music, even at his weirdest. Sadly, the only thing that “Coastal” manages to accomplish is something that I would have usually thought impossible—it makes him come across as a bore.

If “Alarum” had been directed by either a complete novice or a total hack, maybe some of its grievous cinematic sins could have been forgiven or at least tolerated.

Here is a work so cloying and ham-fisted in its attempts to move you that there is a point when you find yourself thinking that the only thing that Zemeckis hasn’t thrown into the mix is a needle drop of “Our House” and then he proceeds to do just that.

The only chance of experiencing any actual chills is if you doze off and generate a more interesting nightmare of your own.

While Bautista is still as engaging as ever in the woeful action-comedy “Killer’s Game,” not even he can save this dud from quickly devolving into 100 minutes of blood-drenched tedium.

Here is a film that is so awful in so many ways that at one point, it includes a clip from the notoriously dreadful “The Emoji Movie” and you begin to worry that that film’s reputation might be tarnished by association.

Here is a film that pays lip service to the importance of creativity without ever displaying a demonstrable shred of it during its seemingly interminable run time.

The first two-thirds of "A Sacrifice" are a largely leaden affair that offers viewers little that they haven’t seen before. It isn’t even awful so much as it is intensely forgettable—the kind of film whose title eludes you even as you watch it.

The young ones that this film is being aimed at are of the age when the movies can genuinely be magical, and the best ones can form memories that will last a lifetime. “Migration” may pass the time, but my guess is that those kids will retain more lasting memories of whatever their parents got for them at the concession stand than anything up there on the screen.

There are many points where Expend4bles feels less like a legitimate continuation to a franchise that has been quite profitable to many involved and more like a cheapo television pilot that was mercifully scuttled before it could air.

Here is a film so devoid of thrills, excitement, or purpose that it seems to have been custom-made to play in empty multiplexes during the traditionally dead last weeks of summer.

The only thing holding me back from officially naming it the worst film ever is that it's so slapdash in its construction and inept in its execution that I am not entirely sure it should count as a film.

This film is so smug and self-satisfied that you can practically feel the contempt everyone involved with its production has for its audience.

Coming across as little more than a filmed adaptation of the first two-thirds of Neil Bogart’s Wikipedia page, Spinning Gold is a mess that even those with a keen interest in the subject will find both ponderous and uninformative.

The Devil Conspiracy is nuttier than the proverbial fruitcake and twice as difficult to swallow, regardless of where you reside on the theological spectrum.

A largely tedious cinematic lump of coal that unsuccessfully tries to stretch its one-joke premise out to 101 minutes in a tonally uneven attempt to position itself as a new alternative holiday classic.

In the end, the biggest problem with Slumberland is its utter innocuousness. Because it is bright, noisy, and things are constantly happening, little kids might like it as a momentary distraction—but it certainly won’t inspire them to check out McCay’s original work for themselves.

As an enormous fan of Argento, I would love to be able to report that “Dark Glasses” is a worthy entry in his filmography, even if I had to go out on a limb to make my case. However, there's no branch long enough that would allow anyone to defend this particular effort, perhaps the only way in which the word “effort” could be used in conjunction with this film.

This "Goodnight Mommy" replicates the basic story beats of the original but leaves out all of the tension, ambiguity, and nasty invention that made that earlier effort so effective in the first place.

To give Deception, the latest attempt to bring Roth to the screen, a little bit of credit, it does come closer than most to rendering his prose stylings into cinematic terms. But it does so in a film so lifeless and inert from a dramatic standpoint that few viewers are likely to notice or even care.

The Long Night wants to create a sense of encroaching fear and unease in viewers but cannot inspire much of anything other than boredom and apathy.

The best family films capture the imaginations of younger viewers and teach them the power of storytelling in ways that can affect them for their entire lives, possibly inspiring them to create their own stories as well. By comparison, “Sing 2” serves no other purpose than to waste a couple of hours.

Such a spectacular misfire on every imaginable level—and even some you haven’t begun to imagine—that there are times when one might mistake it for an especially clever and relentlessly deadpan satire of the type of film it's desperately trying to evoke.

Small Engine Repair is little more than 103 minutes of a would-be provocation whose only real advantage is that it's ultimately too dopey to be as offensive as it clearly could have been. It has nothing of note to say about the issues it pretends to raise, though it does try to say them as loudly and as pseudo-colorfully as possible.

While I like the laid-back attitude the filmmakers apply to the theoretically devastating situation, it quickly becomes apparent that attitude is the only thing the film really has to offer to viewers. Although there are a few amusing moments here and there, the comedic situations are too droll for their own good and too often seem to waste potentially interesting ideas.

What could have been a powerful, timely, and potentially funny meditation on the grieving process is instead a work that's about as thin and flavorless as a gum wrapper.

Director Nick Stagliano doesn’t help matters much by presenting the material with a poky pace that does not exactly bring the narrative to vivid life.

Although Vanquish is otherwise as forgettable as can be—that may be the closest thing that it has to a virtue—there's still one thing about it that I cannot immediately shake, and that is the presence of Morgan Freeman in a role that requires so little effort it's a wonder that Bruce Willis didn’t take it.

Even taken simply as a deliberately formless freak-out, the kind that used to turn up regularly back in the heyday of the midnight movie circuit, Tyger Tyger proves to be little more than a tedious bore.

A film so lazy and inane that it feels as contemptuous towards its audience as I am towards it.

This is Allen’s 48th movie (a 49th, “Rifkin’s Festival,” premiered last month) and while he has certainly made worse films than this one during that time, rarely has he come up with something as utterly inconsequential as this collection of rehashed themes, characters, and punchlines.

Lost Girls and Love Hotels is too vapid to work as a psychological drama, too silly to work as a passionate romance, and too tepid to work as a sexy guilty pleasure.

So yes, Fantasy Island is a terrible movie — this probably won’t come as a shock to most people — but more than that, it seems to have been made with absolutely no one in mind.

Countdown pretty much fails on every level that a horror film possibly can — the characters are uninteresting dullards, the story is idiotic, and the scares are nonexistent.

The title is perhaps the cleverest thing about it.

Not even the most devoted of Mandy Moore fans would mistake 47 Meters Down for a good movie by any means.

Anna was written and directed by Besson himself and it still feels like a misfired rehash of his greatest hits.

Although Pet Sematary is a largely dreadful film, it is slightly better and never as offensively bad as the first version.

A gross, stupid and relentlessly ugly film from start to finish, this may not be the absolute bottom of the barrel in terms of Netflix Originals but nothing else worthy of that title immediately springs to mind.

So excruciatingly awful that you have to wonder what it was, other than their paychecks, that could have possessed the cast and crew to keep coming back each day, when it must have been obvious from the first day of shooting that the project was the most hopeless of cases imaginable.

The worst thing about The Girl in the Spider’s Web — the element likely to enrage most fans of the franchise — is how it betrays its central character by eradicating almost every aspect that made her so initially fascinating.

A boring and garish mess that even fans of the book will find nearly impossible to follow, this is easily the most embarrassing film with which Amis has ever been even vaguely connected.

A disjointed and at times off-putting mess that veers wildly and unconvincingly between a road movie, a family drama, a violent crime film and an offbeat sci-fi thriller before arriving at a finale so loopy that even if I spoiled it here and now, many of you would just assume that I was kidding.

The only thing preventing me from dubbing this one of the dumbest movies of any type that I have ever seen in my life is the fact that I am not entirely certain that something as shabbily constructed and artistically bankrupt as this actually qualifies as a movie in the first place.

Even the most easily satisfied fans of Washington will be unlikely to find much of anything in this sadistic, stupid and sloppy sequel.

Then again, even they may find that this collection of half-baked scenes, inscrutable imagery and, yes, a couple of splendid musical performances wears out its welcome long before its conclusion.

One of the dumbest variations of the weather-based action thriller subgenre that I have ever seen, you can be rest assured that I know what I am talking about.

The problem with Samson is that while it cannot be faulted for its sincerity, it can be faulted for its sluggish pacing, inconsistent performances and lack of cinematic style that gives the proceedings a tacky feel throughout.

The end result is pretty much what you might expect—a work so desultory that you wonder how all involved managed to work up the energy and enthusiasm to make it to the set each day.

The film may be completely worthless from an artistic standpoint but it certainly can’t be beat from a convenience standpoint.

Geostorm fails to work either as awe-inspiring spectacle or as campy silliness.

Gun Shy is an action-comedy starring Antonio Banderas that is lacking only action, comedy and a performance by Antonio Banderas that is anything other than a complete embarrassment.

A work so completely devoid of wit, style, intelligence or basic entertainment value that it makes that movie based on the Angry Birds app seem like a pure artistic statement by comparison.

A depressingly rote piece of corporate product that has so little on its mind other than presumably making hundreds of millions of dollars that you half expect the ticket sellers to hand out copies of Comcast’s latest earnings report along with the 3-D glasses.

An utterly lifeless and profoundly unoriginal animated effort that is desperately lacking the very thing in its title.

The Shack wants to be a sincere exploration of faith and forgiveness but somehow manages to be both too innocuous and too off-putting for its own good.

More wearying than frightening, Rings is a total non-starter.

Speaking of the characters, they are as bland and uninteresting as can be.

The only notable aspect of the film is that it marks the feature directorial debut of Anna Foerster, a rare example of a woman being allowed to direct a reasonably large-scale franchise film. Alas, all it proves here is that a female director can make a film of this sort that is just as listless, derivative and perfunctory as one made by a man.

Incarnate is such a pointless bit of hackwork that it almost makes the recent horror dud “Shut In” seem focused by comparison.

The kind of lazy genre hackwork that will inspire more yawns than screams—at least until the final reels, when the sounds of incredulous laughter will no doubt take over.

Little more than an extended version of the kind of political screeds that can be found online with only a minimum of effort, this is just a terrible movie.

The Darkness is pretty much a total bust—it isn’t scary, it isn’t exciting and it plods along at such a snails pace that even though it clocks in at just over 90 minutes, it plays like it runs at least twice that.

None of the actors are able to find a way to rise above the material, instead just plowing through in the broadest manner possible while trying not to look too obviously embarrassed.

You will be hard-pressed to remember anything about it even only a few minutes after watching it, which should come as a relief to everyone involved with its production.

Criminal is the kind of dunderheaded enterprise that leaves viewers reeling from the idiocies they have just endured, wondering how something like that could possibly get made in the first place.

A horrible and wildly unnecessary follow-up that might actually be worse than its predecessor.

As an action movie and as a historical document, it is a bombastic and wholly inauthentic mess that displays precious little interest in the men whose actions and sacrifices it purports to honor.

Although nowhere near as obnoxious as such recent faith-based offerings as “God’s Not Dead” and “Do You Believe?,” The Masked Saint is still kind of a chore to sit through, even for those predisposed to like anything that brings together Christian faith and sleeper holds.

The idea of remaking "Point Break" was not necessarily a bad idea, I suppose, but whatever charms that film might have had, they are utterly lost on the people behind this embarrassment.

Not that anyone watching #Horror is likely to care in the slightest about who is doing the killing and who will survive.

It is baffling to discover that for her third directorial effort, By the Sea, she has produced a film that is such a borderline unendurable exercise in vapid self-indulgence that it almost feels like an exceptionally straight-faced parody of empty-headed star vehicles.

Loud, repellent, badly written, indifferently directed and almost completely devoid of any genuine laughs, Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse is essentially a film for 12-year-old boys who can still derive some kind of basic entertainment for the mere sight of spurting blood or a bare breast, all the better if they can appear at the same time

The sixth time is not the charm with this load of hooey that tries to make up for its lack of legitimate scares or basic narrative clarity by adding the alleged miracle of 3-D into the mix.

To be honest, this storyline is not noticeably stupider in theory than any of the other "Transporter" films.

Films don't get much dreggier than No Escape, a dreadful and creepily exploitative would-be thriller, low-grade trash that it is too silly and stupid to be as offensive as it frequently comes close to being throughout.

Alternately idiotic and boring horror thriller.

Dreck of the lowest kind — a sleazy exploitation film that is all the worse because it has somehow convinced itself that it is thoughtful and profound.

When one considers how good this material might have been if placed in the right hands, to see it squandered this way makes it almost more painful to view than the typical Sandler stinker.

While Lila & Eve is not supposed to be funny — indeed, the central topic is about as unfunny as one could possibly imagine — but nevertheless inspires huge laughs, albeit of the unintentional kind, thanks an idiotic screenplay and a supposedly "shocking" plot twist that even the most inattentive viewers should be able to figure out within the first fifteen minutes or so, tops.

A ridiculous fusion of "Paranormal Activity" and "Glee" that is so incredibly dumb that it is almost, but never quite, scary to behold.

An odious stew of murder, revenge, casual racism and overt misogyny that is all the worse because of its apparent celebration of those ingredients.

I could not see it as anything more than a giant bore that presents viewers with the most familiar plot devices imaginable but fails to present them in a way that makes them worth sitting through once again.

Hyena is such a nasty and brutish item that even the hardiest of moviegoers may find themselves repulsed by some of the sights that Johnson has in store.

A film that starts off on a reasonably restrained note but which quickly grows so ridiculously ham-fisted that it almost makes its predecessor seem reasonable and open-minded by comparison.

An exhausting slog through overly familiar cliches that is nowhere near as profound or touching as it clearly thinks it is and is utterly lacking in the kind of intelligence and artistry that it so often pays lip service to in the dialogue.

This isn't a real horror movie — this is the kind of horror movie that the characters in a real horror movie watch in order to comment on the lameness of the genre before their authentic terrors begin.

If Hot Tub Time Machine 2 accomplishes anything — and it really doesn't — it is that it too never manages to find a way to justify its own existence.

This long-delayed would-be erotic thriller is a shabby bore that promises viewers any number of kinky thrills and then proceeds to deflate those expectations.

One of those rare birds that is so off-putting in so many ways that all I could do for the most part was wonder how so many presumably intelligent people could be persuaded to sign on to produce and appear in something that could not have possibly seemed like anything other than a total mess from its earliest stages.

In news that will probably not startle too many of you, The Pyramid is pretty much junk from start to finish.

Every holiday season sees a new influx of Christmas movies desperate to become the next big seasonal perennial destined to provide laughter, tears, humanity and healthy residuals for years to come.

A potentially interesting premise is handled so badly that what might have been a provocative drama quickly and irrevocably devolves into the technological equivalent of the old anti-dope chestnut "Reefer Madness," squandering the efforts of a strong and talented cast struggling mightily to make something of the ridiculously trite material.

In order to keep the flimsy narrative going, both allegedly brilliant characters are forced to act like morons throughout.

The best things about Parker are the two lead actors. Although working with material that is lackluster even by his standards, Statham manages to demonstrate a commanding screen presence that cannot be dismissed. Opposite him, Lopez delivers one of her more convincing performances.