Peter Sobczynski

The end result is a movie so resolutely bland and forgettable that the cast and crew probably expended more sheer effort dragging themselves to the set every day than they did in staging all of the various chases and shootouts and whatnot.

This is one of those movies that is as dull as it is well-meaning and man, is it ever well-meaning.

The end result may be little more than an exponentially more expensive version of those cheapo Syfy channel movies, but at least it has the good taste to be exponentially better as well.

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.

Simply put, this is one of the craziest films to come along in a while and I can confidently say that anyone who sees it will either hail it is some kind of crackpot masterpiece or dismiss it as one of the silliest damn things they've ever seen.

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 result is a bit of a mess and an oftentimes dull one at that, the kind of bland cinematic Euro-pudding that Miramax used to release in bulk back in the day.

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 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.

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 Western may not be entirely dead yet, but The Old Way is not exactly doing it any favors.

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.

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

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.

Unless you are a L.S. Lowry fan of the highest order, the only reason to sit through Mrs. Lowry & Son is to watch actors as strong as Timothy Spall and Vanessa Redgrave going toe-to-toe for 90 minutes.

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.

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

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.

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 it has some good performances and noble intentions, it doesn't really bring anything new to the conversation and ultimately fails to give viewers any compelling reason to wade through all the bleakness and misery that it has to offer.

Huppert is still there plugging away in every scene. To the extent that False Confessions does intermittently succeed, it is due almost entirely to her efforts.

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.

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

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.

As a result, anyone who does bother to show up will find themselves bearing witness to unpleasant people doing and saying unpleasant things to each other while hoping in vain that the two guys from "Funny Games" will show up hoping to borrow a couple of eggs.

The Astronaut isn’t terrible, I suppose—the performance by Mara is solid, and Varley’s work on the directing front shows that she knows how to take familiar genre elements and present them with style and efficiency. However, these efforts are undone by a screenplay that kind of goes off the rails for a while, leading to a conclusion that fails to inspire the overwhelming emotional impact it was clearly intended to evoke in viewers.

While Smurfs: The Lost Village may not be better or more entertaining, the acknowledgment that it is aiming solely for the kiddie audience this time around at least makes it slightly more palatable than its predecessors.

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.

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 end result is a sturdy and frequently dazzling version of the material that should leave audiences swooning with delight.

The Gunman isn't the worst action film that you will see this year — you will be lucky if you even remember anything about it a couple of weeks after seeing it — it will probably go down as one of the more dispiriting ones.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

A terribly uneven narrative that doesn’t especially work as drama or noir and which manages to waste a pretty good cast in the bargain.

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.

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 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.

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.

Despite having a life story seemingly tailor-made for the big screen, it transforms his potentially fascinating tale into a narrow and borderline fawning hagiography that will no doubt find great favor among his fan base, while inspiring shrugs of indifference from those less invested in his tale.

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.

This is a modestly scaled B-movie by one of the best genre filmmakers of our time, Walter Hill, that has enough skill and personality going for it to make it worth checking out, even if it doesn’t quite live up (or down, depending on your perspective) to its borderline sleazy premise.

To be honest, the film does not exactly make a convincing case for the idea of Berlin as a hub of passion, or really for its existence as a movie.

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

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.

Devil's Due is one of those films that borrows so many key elements from other and often better movies that genre buffs could amuse themselves by composing lists of all the titles that it blatantly rips off throughout.

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.

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.

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.

Although presumably meant to be a modern-day version of the classic conspiracy thriller "The Conversation," Paranoia is so vapid that it plays like "Antitrust" sans the food allergies.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

Alternately idiotic and boring horror thriller.

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.

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

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.

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.

It is ridiculously lurid trash from start to finish and anyone trying to argue otherwise is as crazy as its central character. However, while its aim may be low throughout, it at least comes close to consistently hitting its targets.

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.