Peter Sobczynski

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

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

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.

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.

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.

America is like the cinematic equivalent of one of those forwarded e-mails of mostly discredited "facts" that you receive from an uncle and at least those sometimes include family photos or a meat loaf recipe that can be of some value.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The problem with “Deep Water” is not that it is a bad movie (which it is), but it’s a gratingly familiar one that doesn’t have a single point of interest to call its own. Instead, it prefers to spend two hours rehashing elements that even newbies to shark-based cinema will find devoid of any real inspiration.

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

In extending itself to reach a conventional feature length, however, it becomes a below-average programmer in which brief moments of interest are interrupted by long stretches of boredom.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.