Peter Sobczynski

A wildly inconsequential action comedy that contains a couple of genuine laughs but which otherwise feels like an extended version of its own television ads.

As it turns out, this literary curiosity proves to be far more interesting than the finished film, which takes an undeniably interesting premise and then fails to make good use of it.

This is a bleak nugget of a film that is trying so hard to take the typical sports movie narrative and unleash its darker and more nightmarish side that it runs out of steam long before arriving at its frustratingly oblique conclusion.

That is actually one of the key problems with the film as a whole — there are times when it tries to embrace its silliness and times when it wants to be treated as a serious action film and the clash of tones is simply too jarring.

Someday, there will be a take on the life and work of John Belushi that is as fascinating, complex, and entertaining as he was. Belushi, however, is not quite that film.

It has a couple of interesting ideas, a certain degree of style and one impressive performance but never manages to pull them together into a cohesive or satisfying whole.

Are you consumed by an overwhelming desire to fork over the price of a movie ticket in order to see the kind of meagerly funded nonsense that the SyFy network provides for the price of a basic cable package? If the answer is yes, then Bounty Killer is right up your alley.

Ultimately, “The Surfer” proves to be not much more than an audience endurance test that offers up plenty of upsetting imagery and moments of emotional torment but never quite manages to make them pay off.

Most viewers will find themselves wishing that writer/director Patrick Ridremont had come up with a few variations on this standard theme in order to liven up this competently executed but painfully familiar genre exercise.

Unlike a lot of comedians working these days, Iglesias is not particularly aggressive or vulgar--at least not as seen here--and the material that he covers is not particularly edgy or radical.

This could well be the single most implausible film playing at your multiplex this weekend and bear in mind, "Mr. Peabody & Sherman" is still in release.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

One of those films that expends so much time and effort in trying to become the next big cult sensation that it never gets around to simply being a good movie.

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.

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

Alternately idiotic and boring horror thriller.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A film that is not so much bad — although it is quite bad — as it is utterly inexplicable.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 end result is the kind of vaguely distasteful Yuletide concoction that viewers normally find playing on cable channels that they don't even realize that they have.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The problem with Pawn Shop Chronicles is not the fact that it is a clone of "Pulp Fiction." The problem is that it is a lousy clone.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Not even the able actors that Glanz somehow managed to rope into his project can do much with the draggy story and the vapid characters that they have been given to play.

The title is perhaps the cleverest thing about 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.