Richard Roeper

Even with a terminally ill teenage son character, a pill-popping absentee mother and a crotchety grandpa character, The Forger is consistently ineffective as a sentimental tearjerker — and an even bigger failure as a heist movie.

A couple of action sequences are well staged. That’s about it for the plus side.

Shirley MacLaine is still a big-screen force. With a quick dismissive glance or a sharp-edged delivery of a one-liner, she creates a handful of genuine and genuinely funny moments.

In the home stretch, Fifty Shades Freed leaves the sexy stuff behind and turns into a combo platter of a cheesy, easily solved mystery-thriller and an overwrought, daytime soap opera melodrama.

Despite a game performance by Lively, The Rhythm Section is a junk pile of missteps, from the convoluted screenplay that hops from locale to locale in Advil-inducing fashion to the overly stylized directing to the self-consciously “cool” oldies pop music selections.

This is one of the most irritating movies of the year.

A giant pile of shiny gift-wrapped garbage.

Stiller the director does a fine job of making Zoolander 2 look like an actual spy movie, but we’ve seen far better takeoffs, including “Spy” and “Kingsman: The Secret Service” in just the last couple of years. As for the jabs at the transient nature of popular culture and the ridiculousness of high fashion world — easy, tired targets.

The dialogue and exposition scenes in G.I. Joe are like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon from the 1980s, but the PG-13 violence is a little intense for the 7-year-old boys (and girls) who might love this stuff.

Sasquatch Sunset is the kind of film that seems almost pre-ordained to reach some level of cult status. Godspeed to those who will embrace its epic-level gross-out factor. I guess I’m just more of a Bucky Badger guy.

Even most of the fine actors, including Aubrey Plaza, John C. Reilly and Cheryl Hines, at times seem lost as to whether they should be playing the material for laughs, or going for a more straightforward approach and letting the laughs come to them.

On the heels of his brilliant one-two punch of “Hereditary” and “Midsommar,” writer-director Aster stumbles badly in an impressively staged and photographed film that has flashes of stunning originality but for the most part careens madly between dark comedy and surrealistic horror, badly missing the mark in both genres. It’s funny here and there, but it’s never scary, and it ultimately commits the sin of becoming a well-made bore.

Besson has always demonstrated the ability to chuckle at the madness of his own material, and he provides some solid laughs from time to time. But these winks do nothing to erase the reality of a plot that becomes unintentionally hilarious.

This movie is so excruciatingly dumb I felt as if someone had shaved 10 points off my I.Q. by the time I bolted for the exits.

For all of von Trier’s attempts to go big and go bold, the two Nymphomaniac films ultimately come across as a self-indulgent marathon run on a treadmill.

Ghostbusters is a horror from start to finish, and that’s not me saying it’s legitimately scary. More like I was horrified by what was transpiring onscreen.

As the plot twists grow increasingly ridiculous and some of the main characters have to act like complete idiots just to keep the story rambling along, “Fatale” commits the crime of somehow becoming tedious and dull even as the body count piles up.

Painfully long, exceedingly tedious, consistently unimaginative and quite dopey.

From start to finish, this film seems strangely out of touch, never more so than when it tries to come across as enlightened.

A clumsy, off-putting, uninvolving hybrid of domestic tragedy and sci-fi drama with zero payoffs and one of the most infuriating codas of any movie this century.

I couldn’t wait for this movie to end.

Even though they look nothing like sisters, they’re believable as sisters. Every once in a while when we take a break from the thuddingly unfunny slapstick stuff, there’s a nice and genuine moment.

This is a messy, confusing, uninvolving mishmash of old-school practical effects and CGI battles that feels … off nearly every misstep of the way. It’s like watching a master musician play a piano he somehow doesn’t realize is out of tune.

This isn't a strict remake of Sam Raimi's hugely influential 1981 horror classic, but it does include the basic framework and some visual nods to the original. On its own, it's an irredeemable, sadistic torture chamber reveling in the bloody, cringe-inducing deaths of some of the stupidest people ever to spend a rainy night in a remote cabin in the woods.

Virtually every big twist and every major reveal in The Commuter is telegraphed well in advance, and from the moment the train leaves the station and the story really begins to kick into gear, we find ourselves rolling our eyes about every 10 minutes.

We’re not even halfway through 2018, but when it comes time to compile my list of the worst movies of the year, I have a strong sense there will be a moment when I’ll be saying to Tag: You’re it.

Maleficent is an admittedly great-looking, sometimes creepy, often plodding and utterly unconvincing re-imagining of a famous romantic fairy tale as a female empowerment metaphor.

What a waste of a wonderful cast.

It’s a dopey, only mildly chilling, uneasy mix of horror and dark comedy, scoring few points in either category.

From the unconvincing CGI to the meandering and convoluted storyline to the preachy messaging to the unfortunately hammy performances, “Megalopolis” is a most foul and unpleasant journey.

This ensemble piece plays like “Crash” in a minor note, with one heavy-handed scene after another, all leading up to an ambivalent, unsatisfying ending.

Nothing about The D Train feels the least bit authentic, and worse, little about it is funny.

In more ways than one, this is one of the dopiest films of the year.

The problem is, the plot wavers from nearly indecipherable to semi-ridiculous to … I stopped caring.

Most problematic of all is the character of fictional FBI Agent Jack Solomon (Jack O’Connell), who is tasked with leading the surveillance and digging up dirt on Seberg and becomes deeply conflicted about his job.

All the cutting-edge pyrotechnics in the universe can’t overcome the uneven (and ultimately unsatisfying) screenplay.

Life Itself begins with a cinematic shell game, with Fogelman pulling a short con on the viewer for no discernible reason.

The Hollars is an uneven, ineffective and self-conscious dysfunctional family comedy/drama with a Sundance-y vibe, and scene after scene in which the greatly talented and usually quite likable cast members keep stepping in big piles of wrong choices.

[A] cartoonish, offensive, overblown, clanging, steaming piece of ... cinema.

Central Intelligence is one of those slick, gunplay-riddled, stupidly plotted, aggressively loud buddy movies — so formulaic and dumb, even if you see it you’ll probably forget you’ve seen it by the end of the year...And if that’s the case, consider yourself fortunate.

Virtually every single element in Everything, Everything rings false and manipulative — and that’s BEFORE we get to a Big Reveal so contrived, so insanely implausible, so monstrously tone-deaf, we can see the entire movie plunging off a cliff, landing with a sickening thud in the Land of the Worst Movies of the Year.

How bad is “Fallen Kingdom”? How terrible is a movie that pounds us with a pretentious, nearly operatic score while indulging in B-movie clichés and calling for the main characters to make idiotic decisions just to keep the story rolling? I have to dig deep into the Awful Sequel Playbook to draw parallels to this exercise in wretched excess.

Sure, the pricey special effects are impressive to behold (though, as usually the case, the 3D is nothing to text home about). And yes, at times “Valerian” creates a strange and beautiful universe. Which ultimately means nothing, because the plot is paper-thin.

Rough Night doesn’t begin to cover it. It’s also “Painfully Unfunny Night,” “Contrived Night,” “Unsurprising Plot Twist Night” and also, “How Do These Dimwits Ever Make It Through Any Night”?

The only thing less satisfying than the build-up is the finale, which goes from mind-boggling to you’ve got to be kidding me.

Time and again, supposedly smart characters do really stupid things, just so the plot can continue to stumble along.

This is a slick con, all flash and no substance. Now You See Me seems awfully sure of itself, with self-important, intrusive music, sweeping tracking shots and actors chewing up the scenery.

It’s a memorable performance in a film that wants to dazzle us with its trick bag of visuals but is rotten at its core.

So many scenes in Wilson play as if they’re dropped in from a different genre.

What a mess. What a pretentious, uneven, off-putting, not-nearly-as-clever-as-it-thinkd-it-is MESS.

The only redeeming value of Bohemian Rhapsody is it’s so bad, there’s plenty of room left for a much better biopic about the one and only Freddie Mercury.

In the case of David O. Russell’s jaw-droppingly terrible, aggressively tasteless, profoundly unfunny and interminably dull conspiracy thriller and would-be comedy “Amsterdam,” the all-star ensemble has less chemistry than a high school freshman on the first day of class.

Underwater breaks no new ground as a sci-fi horror flick — other than as a possible contender for the murkiest movie ever made.

For the first hour or so, The Mountain Between Us is a tedious and corny survival story, but at least it’s bearable, thanks mainly to the all-in performances from Kate Winslet and Idris Elba.

Even with all its pyrotechnics, and even with arguably the finest and deepest team of actors ever to appear in any of the three dozen movies about the big guy, King of the Monsters careens about all over the place in search of an identity, never really finding its footing as a campy treat, an exciting popcorn adventure or a monster movie with humans we actually care about.

The only thing worse than the first three-quarters of Morgan is the supposed payoff, which veers from the dumb to the really dumb to the so-dumb-you’ll-hardly-believe-it. This is one of the worst movies of 2016.

The dialogue is schmaltzy and often painfully unfunny. The special effects are often so 1980s-bad... Time and again, terrific actors sink in the equivalent of cinematic quicksand, helpless against the sucking sound of this movie.

A cringe-inducing mess.

The whole thing is just so sloppy and dumb and overflowing with clichés.

They say this is Halloween Ends. I say: Can we get that in writing?

There’s nothing and no one to like in The Hitman’s Bodyguard. This is one loud, generic, forgettable late summer action flick.

Before it was even over, I was already forgetting about it.

On its own “merits,” it would still be a dud. A sluggish, uninspired, period-piece retread of so many earlier and much better Allen films, filled with overly familiar characters and situations and of course a soundtrack seemingly selected from Woody’s personal record collection.

Sitting through the smug and convoluted and ridiculous Now You See Me 2 is like being subjected to a dunk tank again and again — and then being handed a wet towel when it’s finally over.

We’re not buying what the script is selling, not for a hot second.

Director R.J. Cutler is fond of time-lapse establishing shots and rapid-fire montages, none of them particularly effective in conveying this bizarre dual world Mia now inhabits.

The long-awaited, highly anticipated, much-discussed film adaptation of the first segment of E L James’ inexplicably popular "Fifty Shades" trilogy is a tedious exercise in dramatic wheel-spinning that doesn’t have the courage to explore the darkest elements of the characters and doesn’t have the originality to stand on its own merits.

It’s potentially fresh and unique material, but from the first scenes through the tone-deaf conclusion, Capone is a noxious film about a noxious man — a gruesome and grotesque viewing experience that tells us nothing new about Capone while rubbing our noses in one detestable scene after another. By the time we get to a typically overblown scene in which a diaper-wearing Capone wields a gold-plated Tommy Gun while on a shooting spree, we surrender.

Given that director and co-writer Florian Zeller’s “The Father” was a powerful and nuanced and creatively presented original work with Anthony Hopkins winning an Oscar for his moving portrayal of a man with advancing dementia, it’s truly shocking how Zeller’s “The Son” is such a tone-deaf, emotionally manipulative, leaden stumble into the abyss.

Writer-director-star Angelina Jolie Pitt’s By the Sea is awfully pretty and mostly dreadful. It’s pretty dreadful.

For all the visceral depictions of hatred and violence and human destruction, it feels as if the director is chasing his own tail and forgetting about making it all mean something.

Rampage might not be the worst movie of the year so far, but it’s a contender for most pointless.

If you liked the original, the best way to preserve that memory is to stay away from this sequel.

Clever trappings aside, Brightburn is filmed mostly as a horror movie, with the monster lurking just around the corner or pounding on the door as the dopey victims behave just like all the other dopey victims in forgettable slasher films.

Careening wildly from the black comedy tone of the aforementioned sequences to deadly serious World War I battle scenes, from somber spy thriller to broad comedy, The King’s Man has little of the wickedly outrageous and subversive style of the original film as it flies this way and that and never sticks the landing.

Ewan McGregor is a versatile and durable actor who has spent a lot of time on film sets, and someday he might become an accomplished filmmaker, but his feature directorial debut is one of the most unfortunate literary adaptations in recent memory.

This is a visually arresting film with two attractive and charismatic lead actors, but it’s doomed by the melodramatic twists and turns, and the ridiculous behavior by nearly every major character.

Director/co-writer/actor Zach Braff’s Wish I Was Here is a precious and condescending exercise in self-indulgent pandering, featuring one of the whiniest lead characters in recent memory.

I don’t think you and I need to connect on InstaSkypeChatFaceSnapTweeterBook for you to understand I’m saying we’ve seen this movie before. It’s just usually not this smug or condescending or muddled or inconsistent.

Unfrosted is one of the worst films of the decade so far.

Run, don’t walk, away from any temptation you might have to see the off-putting, unfunny, clunky and cartoonishly terrible would-be mob comedy “Mafia Mamma,” which is so lacking in subtlety, cohesion and humor, it makes “Murder Mystery 2” seem like a Rian Johnson thriller.

The Great Wall is so fantastically misguided and so wonderfully bad, I could see some coming for the action and staying for the camp laughs.

The running time is 104 minutes, but it felt longer than “The Brutalist.”

Maybe the dingo ate their screenplay.

It’s sloppy to the point of distraction — not that the forced hijinks and ridiculous storylines are actually worthy of our attention.

Time and again, Ride Along comes up with a clichéd setup — and then blows the payoff.

Kick-Ass 2 is an uninspired retread. All too often it plays like a Comic-Con gone insane, with costumed do-gooders taking on costumed criminals in gratuitously vicious battles.

Cruz is a deadpan treasure, never cracking the hint of a smile even as he delivers some well-timed one-liners. Wish we could have had an entire movie about this guy. Instead, we were cursed with the annoying and shrieking but not even close to terrifying La Llorona.

The Woman in the Window is filled with dramatic touches such as a dizzying overhead shot of a staircase, a skylight just begging for someone to come crashing through, pieces of evidence conveniently left lying about and visual references to far superior noir thrillers, including the aforementioned “Rear Window.” It’s also filled with cheap scares, false alarms, dumb cops, loud storms and tricky camera angles designed to make us feel as disoriented as Anna. The only thing those elements really succeed in doing is giving us a headache.

This is a well-designed, initially intriguing, visually interesting sci-fi romance torpedoed by a premise — and a payoff — so creepy and misogynistic, it’s amazing nobody who read the script or green-lit the film (or chose to star in it) raised concerns about how it would play with an audience of, you know, people with working minds.

Gina Rodriguez: You deserve much better than this.

This is one of the worst movies of the year.

The jokes in The Week Of are big and obvious and sometimes mildly tasteless.

I wouldn’t be surprised to hear Michelle Darnell was a hilarious onstage comedic creation. On film, she is a flimsy, one-dimensional, tiresome character, surrounded by equally unconvincing and unfunny players.

Every once in a while there’s an inspired montage, or a one-liner that made me laugh out loud. But how can you have the great Christoph Waltz playing a villain in a comedy, and you get almost nothing out of it?

With The Comedian arriving in theaters, it’s safe to say I now have only nine spaces left on my list of the 10 Worst Movies of 2017.

Pitch Perfect 3 feels like an encore nobody asked for.

There’s no defending Jupiter Ascending. There’s no explaining Jupiter Ascending. There’s no way Jupiter Ascending isn’t making an appearance on my list of the Worst Films of 2015.