Peter Sobczynski

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.

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.

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.

Rise, from French filmmaker Cédric Klapisch, is not blazingly original by any stretch, and any moviegoer paying even the slightest amount can predict most of the plot's moves. And yet, something is to be said about presenting a familiar narrative in a straightforward and undeniably entertaining manner.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

The writing-directing team of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer now take aim at "The Hunger Games" with their latest effort, The Starving Games, and the fact that the title, as witless and uninspired as it may be, constitutes its humorous high-water mark should indicate just how ineptly they handle things this time around.

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.

For fans of Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Mountaintop is pretty much a must-see—it gives them a chance to see their heroes at work in a raw and unfiltered manner, and the fact that the Colorado album is Young’s strongest collection of new songs since Psychedelic Pill is certainly a sweetener to the deal. Those who cannot stand their sound, on the other hand, are not likely to be won over.

This is a movie so strange, bizarre and so unclassifiable that as soon as I was done watching it, I contacted my editor to see if deploying the phrase “batshit crazy” would be acceptable.

Limbai captures all of this in a direct, unforced, and restrained manner that makes its points about the need for reform to social services without becoming overly strident.

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.

Even though the film is ultimately not much more than an exercise in nostalgia, that's hardly a bad thing when you're delving into a past as rich as the one on display here.

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.

A film that is a somewhat uneven journey, though one that proves to be ultimately rewarding in the end.

Endangered is unlikely to change the minds of anti-press zealots (not that they'd even be watching it in the first place) but others will hopefully come out of it both shocked and startled to see what is happening to journalists around the world these days.

Listening to these people grapple with Proust’s work and relate it to their own individual lifetimes of experience is often fascinating.

This unabashedly trashy project from director Peter Thorwarth has its moments of invention and excitement in the early going, but the constant spray of bullets and body parts proves numbing.

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.

While the film is clearly telling a story that wants to come across as profoundly emotional, I always felt as if I was being kept at too far of a distance from it while watching it.

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

In the end, “Dead Money” is little more than a modern equivalent of the B movies of old, a meat-and-potatoes programmer designed to appear as the less heralded bottom half of a double feature.