Richard Roeper

Baldwin and Moore generate genuine heat and chemistry together, even in some ridiculous moments.

Lawrence, obviously a talented actress, is monumentally bad here. There’s no nuance to her performance as Serena, no gradual descent for the character. She’s a conniving, criminal nutball, and Lawrence overplays her as if she’s a villainess in a mediocre silent film.

After an intriguing setup, “Runner Runner” devolves into a by-the-books thriller.

Lucy in the Sky is an irritatingly self-conscious, maddeningly rudderless and scatterbrained story that bounces all over the place and never finds an identity.

With a combination of bone-dry wit and blood-drenched horror, writer-director Dan Gilroy’s Velvet Buzzsaw skewers some of the most pretentious denizens of the art world you’d ever want NOT to meet — and does so with precision and flair and pitch-black humor.

Carrey and Daniels throw themselves into the characters they inhabited 20 years ago, whether it means allowing their crotches to be doused, using their rear ends as comedic weapons, or just saying really stupid things. Sometimes it’s pretty damn funny. Almost always, it feels just a little bit desperate.

It’s almost astonishing how unfunny this movie is, given the talents of primary cast members Ed Helms, Taraji P. Henson, Betty Gilpin and David Alan Grier. They’re all troupers and they dive headfirst into the material, but the dialogue they’re delivering and the situations they’re mired in make it impossible to wring even a smile, let alone a legitimate laugh, from the material.

In the case of the awkwardly titled, swing-and-a-big-miss workplace comedy A Happening of Monumental Proportions, there are numerous scenes so tone-deaf, so off-putting and fundamentally unsound in structure and dialogue, the execution of those sequences is doomed from the get-go.

Tom Hardy is one of the best actors in the world, but as he flounders his way through Venom, we’re reminded even the finest talents can sink under the weight of a terrible movie.

Clocking in at a bloated and self-indulgent 2 hours and 19 minutes, filled with VFX sequences so cheesy you wonder if they’re supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, and bogged down by a plot so convoluted you’ll be reaching for the aspirin, “Argylle” is a bright shining pile of mediocrity.

It gets to the point where it hardly matters to us who lives and who dies, because they’re all stone-cold killers.

The great Jared Harris does what he can with an underwritten role.

In September of 1946, two months after Mother Cabrini was canonized, more than 100,000 gathered at Soldier Field for a Holy Hour celebration. “Cabrini” the film is a fine reminder of why she was so revered by so many.

The Expendables 3 is proof a movie can be exceedingly loud and excruciatingly dull.

Desperate Hour is well-intentioned, and there are flashes of genuine dramatic tension, thanks to Watts’ performance. Mostly, though, it feels contrived and heavy-handed, with nothing really new to say about this well-traveled subject matter.

Clocking in at a slow-jog time of 2 hours and 7 minutes, filled with howlingly bad CGI creations, green-screen scenes that would have looked rudimentary in the early 2000s and clunky dialogue, “Kraven” doesn’t even provide much in the way of camp value. It’s just an undercooked pile of steaming mediocrity.

Paradise is a ringing disappointment. Cody shows some potential as a director, but her own script lets her down.

Despite the considerable charisma of Kevin Hart and Josh Gad and a strong supporting cast, The Wedding Ringer has only one or two genuinely inspired bits of comedy, a few dopey moments when you laugh in spite of yourself — and long, long stretches of pointless montages, loud and unfunny physical shtick and far too much reliance on gay “humor."

It’s a fractured fairy tale, penned in clunky strokes.

Take the “smart” out of “Booksmart,” the “super” out of “Superbad” and the edge out of “The Purge,” and you get the Hulu movie The Binge, one of the worst comedies of this or any other year, notable only because it features what might just be the most terrible performance in Vince Vaughn’s up-and-down career, and I say that with no glee because I’m a Vince Vaughn guy.

This is a conventional-looking films with a screenplay from brothers David and Alex Pastor that raises some fascinating issues and offers a tease or two of a better movie before devolving into a medley of chases and shootouts.

Teeming with familiar war-film clichés and at times almost unbearably melodramatic, Twice Born is nevertheless worth the effort, thanks in large part to a magnificent performance from Penelope Cruz and some fine work from the international supporting cast.

The cinematography has a washed-out, dull tone. The special effects are mediocre. With a few exceptions, the dialogue is stilted and filled with expository passages so obviously intended to explain things to us, I half-expected characters to turn to the camera and say, “Here’s what you need to know so you can understand what’s happening.”

It’s just deadly and dreadful, loud and obnoxious, convoluted and irritating, horrible and dumb.

From its juvenile double entendre title to its fascination with prison rape and homophobic humor, “Get Hard” practically announces itself as an offensive, tired and unimaginative comedy in nearly every scene. And yet I didn’t hate it because Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart had such terrific comedic chemistry.

Alas, you can spend nearly two hours watching the slick, cynical, vapid and brain-numbing actioner “Ghosted” on Apple TV+ and find yourself regretting the decision pretty much every predictable and overblown step of the way.

It’s always a shame when a group of talented humans get together and deliver something that comes across as a halfhearted effort, even if they poured their blood, sweat and tears into it.

It’s awful, but disposable and easily forgotten.

By the halfway mark of the screen-popping and kinetic but ultimately tiresome and borderline dopey AI thriller “Mercy,” I found myself yearning for a wireless mouse so I could log off.

The sequel to Tim Burton’s 2010 mega-hit “Alice in Wonderland” is loud, frantic, stunningly unfunny, off-putting and riddled with mediocre, out-of-tune work from normally outstanding actors. It’s one of the great movie disasters of 2016.

This is the kind of movie that keeps the great Ellen Barkin literally in the shadows as a criminal mastermind, and relegates the wonderful Kaley Cuoco to an embarrassing supporting role as a man-hungry best girlfriend who might as well have stepped out of a cheesy 1970s rom-com. Is anybody even trying here?

For all its predictability and averageness, Texas Chainsaw Massacre does have two fantastically executed shock scenes.

The English-language debut from the brilliant talent behind best foreign film picture nominee “Mustang” is a terribly uneven, borderline absurdist jumble that undercuts its own message again and again.

Everything about “Uglies” is average. Not terrible enough to be campy, not deep or provocative or visually impressive enough to merit further chapters in the story.

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 Mummy is so wall-to-wall awful, so cheesy, so ridiculous, so convoluted, so uninvolving and so, so stupid.

I’m all for bawdy, politically incorrect, wildly inappropriate humor — when there are consistent and genuine laughs to be mined from the material. This stuff just sits there like a steaming pile of stuff you walk around.

The dreary, derivative and punchless action comedy “Love Hurts” is proof that a movie can have an 83-minute running time and still seem like a slow-motion slog.

To call this a Netflix Original movie is only half-correct. True, it’s on Netflix, but no, there’s nothing original about this uninspired knockoff of “Fatal Attraction” (even the title and the poster borrow from that 1987 classic of the genre), which is marred by stilted dialogue, predictable plot turns and surprisingly halfhearted performances from a talented cast that acts as if they know this is slick garbage and they’re just trying to make it through the shoot so they can call their respective agents and say, “We need to talk.”

The Bubble is ultimately a mediocre movie about the making of an even worse movie.

The true story of Freddy Heineken’s kidnapping is fascinating, but Kidnapping Mr. Heineken is a disappointingly superficial film in which neither the kidnappers nor their captives are particularly interesting.

Deliberately ambiguous, The Reluctant Fundamentalist provides just enough answers while leaving us with more than enough questions. It's a film that demands discussion afterward.

The director of the film is Tim Hunter, whose feature career goes back to such 1980s gems as “Tex” and “River’s Edge,” and whose TV credits include everything from episodes of the original “Twin Peaks” to “Mad Men.” That explains why it’s such a good-looking film. Nicolas Cage’s starring presence explains why it’s such a compelling and offbeat little thriller.

This is one good-looking, occasionally titillating, mostly soapy and dull snooze-fest.

Quite simply, this is one of the worst films of 2013.

This clunky dud about a same-sex union would have come across as trite and behind-the-times 20 years ago, let alone in 2015.

The Longest Ride” treats us to a twist that’s so ridiculous I think we’re almost supposed to laugh. It’s not quite on the “Are you KIDDING ME!?” level of awfulness as the big reveal in “Safe Haven,” but it’s close. It’s close.

Imagine how great it would be to see a vehicle worthy of the respective likability, comedic chops, intelligence, onscreen charisma and beauty of Tiffany Haddish and Rose Byrne. No, I mean you’re really going to have to imagine that, because Like a Boss is not that movie.

The Shack is a well-acted and sometimes moving but far too often slow-paced and unconvincing spiritual journey.

It’s a well-photographed story with an intriguing setup, but soon we’re mired in a meandering, stilted story with forced dialogue and some surprisingly subpar performances from the talented cast.

Age of Extinction is just another warmed-over, cynical, ATM machine of a movie. It’s soulless eye candy.

Ride Along 2 is the movie equivalent of a cover band. We’ve seen it all before, and often in much better films.

This is a disaster by committee.

As can be said of most Apple products, it’s a wonder to behold — despite a few irritating glitches.

Cats is a slick and tedious and weird-looking exercise in self-indulgence.

Careful What You Wish For is aiming for lusty, lurid, B-movie titillation, but it’s not nearly as sexy nor nearly as clever as it would like to be.

Directed with a more fittingly dark, austere, horror-movie vibe by Keith Thomas and featuring grounded performances from an excellent cast headed by Zac Efron, Sydney Lemmon and newcomer Ryan Kiera Armstrong, this Firestarter is a combustible supernatural thriller that embraces its borderline campy qualities and works well enough as 21st century drive-in escapist fare.

Egerton is miscast. He and Hewson have nary a spark in their love scenes. Dornan overplays his hand. Foxx belts out nearly every line as if he’s trying to be heard above a parade of fire engines on a Fourth of July parade

I’m not going to say the ridiculous and off-putting romantic text-message dramedy “Love Again” is the worst movie of the year, but it might be the most implausible film I’ve seen so far in 2023, and I’m not necessarily excluding “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” “Cocaine Bear” and “65” from the competition.

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.

Is it a hard-R road trip comedy that makes no apologies for politically incorrect humor — or a sweet family film with a message about tolerance and acceptance? It’s both, I suppose. And neither element is particularly convincing or particularly funny.

The star power trio of Samuel L. Jackson, Selma Hayek and Ryan Reynolds have a few funny exchanges, and there are a couple of physical shtick routines so over the top it’s as if they dusted off the Monty Python playbook for a modern-day action film — but there are far more misfires than direct comedic/dramatic hits in this blood-drenched, explosion-riddled, live-action cartoon of a film.

There might indeed be a fine movie lurking within the pages of that original source material, but “The King’s Daughter” is not that movie.

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.

Unless this is a parody of “Star Wars,” it looks like we’re in for a long and ponderous, CGI-dominated slog filled with stock characters, slow-mo battle sequences and interminable flashbacks designed to give clarity to a murky and convoluted story. Spoiler alert: It’s not a parody. We should be so lucky.

The Lazarus Effect is nothing but a cheap horror film cloaked in scientific mumbo-jumbo.

Again and again, Death Wish feels anything but real.

The new Hellboy lands with a thud that’s loud and dark — but almost instantly forgettable.

In its own cheesy and entertaining way, Hangman kept me guessing throughout

So much talent — and everyone goes down with the ship in one of the worst movies of 2021.

This is a clichéd, cynical, occasionally offensive, pandering, idiotic film that redefines shameless.

Here’s proof two females can make a bickering-opposites-action-comedy that’s just as lousy and sour as any clunker starring two guys.

Indeed Get a Job is an uneven, strange little movie with a hit-and-miss screenplay, some distractingly weird camera angles and a few subplots that never should have seen the light of day (or the dark of theater), but it also has an infectious charm, some genuinely funny set pieces and winning performances throughout.

Winter’s Tale is a good old-fashioned train wreck of a film. This is one of those deals where all the ingredients are Grade A, but the final product is a dud.

Though it would have been lovely to take in the lavish set pieces and the cool CGI creations and the whiz-bang action sequences on the big screen, Artemis Fowl still plays well as a warm and funny and entertaining at-home family viewing experience.

Seventh Son moves at a fairly quick pace and has a sense of humor about itself. That doesn’t mean it’s thrilling, or funny. Just that it’s a quickly forgotten pile of junk.

It’s essentially a stand-alone film, though it doesn’t really stand so much as it wobbles and careens all over the place before exploding in an overwrought orgy of grotesque images, religious psychobabble and second-rate CGI nonsense.

Director Todd Phillips has delivered a film so different from the first two, one could even ask if this is even supposed to be a comedy. I'm not saying it's an unfunny comedy wannabe; I'm saying it plays more like a straightforward, real-world thriller with a few laughs than a hard-R slapstick farce.

Everyone in The Boy Next Door has to behave like an idiot at least once or twice, just so the movie can keep going. It’s an act of mercy when it finally grinds to a halt.

The Electric State short-circuits from a severe case of Character Overload, with great actors mired in hopelessly silly and underwritten parts.

It is a terrible film, and it skirts (but does not cross) the line of offensiveness...but it is undeniably watchable in the same way you can’t turn away from a talent show featuring a medley of acts that are pretty awful but quite confident they’ve got something to share.

Despite the pairing of the eminently likable and talented Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler as the leads, and about a dozen recognizable (and usually funny) supporting players, The House is a fetid, cheap-looking, depressing and occasionally even mean-spirited disaster.

While the talented and versatile director Paul Feig (“Freaks and Geeks,” “Bridesmaids,” “A Simple Favor”) displays an admirably ambitious reach, and there are some impressive visuals, The School for Good and Evil never quite finds its footing.

This is the kind of movie where you can anticipate the next big shock and it usually arrives right on cue, and yet it still gets you right in the gut.

Much of the “humor” in Daddy’s Home 2 is of questionable taste at best.

In the stylishly directed but gratuitously nasty and cliché-riddled Peppermint, Garner plays essentially two characters cut from the same person.

Given the considerable comedic talents of Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, Adam Scott et al., and the ragged, what-the-hell charms of the original “Hot Tub Time Machine,” it’s surprising how rotten this movie is from start to finish.

The Mean One has a handful of inspired lines, e.g., “Time to roast this beast!” but the production values, editing, score and photography are average at best, and we’re left with a film that will be remembered mostly for a cleverly twisted marketing hook.

This is an unholy mess — a jumbled, tone-deaf satire in which seemingly vital characters are introduced and then inexplicably disappear, never to return; superb actors disappoint by relying on old tricks they’ve used to much better effect in much better films, and every attempt at political commentary comes across as ham-handed and naïve.

It doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it’s not nearly as self-deprecating and funny as it needed to be.

Force of Nature is more of a nasty little rainstorm than a Category 5 anything.

The plot is just high-tech Swiss Cheese, filled with holes and smelling like last week’s refrigerator contents.

Infinite has some impressive set pieces combining practical effects and CGI, and the terrific cast approaches the material with grim-faced sincerity, but it’s ultimately a big bag of nonsense wrapped in glossy packaging.

This is an extra-cheesy and terrible film.

It’s difficult to imagine anyone appearing in this film thought of it as more than a payday.

There’s not a bad performance in this movie. De Niro, Keaton and Sarandon are particularly good, what a surprise. But it feels as if all the guests at “The Big Wedding” are wearing ID tags telling us their one Plot Point.

At times it’s funny as hell. At other times it’s pretty much a disaster. But it never commits the crime of being tedious.

Sometimes we talk about seeing a performance so real, so believable, so authentic, it takes our breath away. Then there’s Shia LaBeouf’s work in Man Down.

What it looks like is warmed-over Tarantino mixed with a third-rate tribute to the Coen brothers with a dose of David Lynch-ian madness, two decades late to the party.

Pixels has a few inspired action sequences and a handful of laugh-out-loud moments, but overall the special effects are surprisingly average — and the lazy acting by Adam Sandler, the shameless mugging by Kevin James and the hammy performance by Brian Cox don’t help. Not even Peter Dinklage in a mullet can save the day.

Hope began to die about five minutes into this off-putting, cheap-looking, virtually laugh-free disaster. Hope was dead at the 10-minute mark.

This particular “Blacklight” is pure, overblown, cliché-riddled fiction.

Even when it doesn’t work, Terminal is a film with never a dull moment.

We’ll eventually see dozens if not hundreds of projects using the pandemic as a plot point. Songbird will be among the least memorable.

A lightweight and basically unnecessary attempt to once again bring some cinematic life to one of the lesser teams in the Marvel Universe.

We have the first serious contender for Wasted Opportunity of the Decade.

The Choice is classic Sparks, and by that I mean it’s a mediocre, well-photographed, undeniably heart-tugging, annoyingly manipulative and dramatically predictable star-crossed romance.

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

Everything about it seems flat and artificial and contrived, from the limp dialogue to the annoying special effects to some surprisingly uninspired performances, given the talent level of the cast.

This plays like a live-action cartoon where you root for nobody. Everyone seems to think that yelling their lines will make the dialogue funnier. It doesn’t.

​I’ll tell you what got Taken. A hundred and twelve minutes of my life got Taken.

This is not a movie. This is mutilation porn. This is a gratuitously violent, shamelessly exploitative, gruesomely sadistic and utterly repellent piece of trash with no redeeming qualities other than its mercifully short running time of less than 90 minutes.

It’s an intermittently entertaining endeavor thanks mostly to the effortlessly suave lead performance by Pierce Brosnan as a career thief who looks like he wakes up wearing a jacket with a pocket square and with his hair perfectly coiffed, but the action sequences are ho-hum, the editing is stunningly clumsy, and the main heist is so cartoonishly ridiculous we don’t even believe the actors believe it’s possible.

Arsenal is garbage. The cast includes familiar faces...but it’s still a trashy, blood-spattered, sadistic thriller with a goes-nowhere plot, overwrought dialogue and a throbbing soundtrack that’ll leave your ears ringing.

Writer-director John Hamburg (writer of “Meet the Parents,” director of “Along Came Polly” and “I Love You, Man”) has the ability to wring big laughs out of absurdist situations, but in Me Time, nearly everybody delivers their lines in the forced manner of 1980s sitcoms, the situations bear little resemblance to anything that would occur in the real world.

In the stunningly tone-deaf and horrifically unfunny The Very Excellent Mister Dundee, Hogan plays himself in a “Curb Your Enthusiasm”-esque conceit gone terribly wrong.

The long-delayed biopic Gotti is an entertaining and well-acted but uneven B-movie.

This is a well-made, well-acted and sometimes intriguing but also coldly cynical and manipulative murder mystery.

Collateral Beauty is a fraud. It is built on a foundation so contrived, so off-putting, so treacly, the most miraculous thing about this movie is this movie was actually made.

The Cobbler goes from bad to you-have-to-be-kidding in that final act, when we’re given a big reveal that makes no sense, even in the context of a bat-bleep crazy fable.

This is a competently made film with decent cinematography and production design, and the casting is never less than ... interesting, but it favors a simplistic approach and a narrative that verges on adoration.

Many scenes are bathed in a sickly green, as if we’re watching everything through cheap night-vision goggles; others are tinted blood-red. No matter what filters are used, there’s no disguising this is garbage wrapped in a glossy package.

The Tax Collector is an underachieving, exceedingly violent urban gangster film with a meandering storyline and a contrived final twist.

You wouldn’t want to spend five minutes with these insufferably juvenile jerks, let alone an entire movie.

The only thing more insane and contrived than the Big Reveal is the epilogue, which contains not one but two maddeningly bizarre developments that are beyond strange and inconsistent, even for a movie that’s been strange and inconsistent all along.

This whole movie is crazy, with all sorts of well-known folks stumbling and bumbling about in search of a character. At times Reach Me is undeniably intriguing, mostly because it’s just so weird and disconnected. Eventually, though, it just becomes tiresome.

Gun Shy is a loud bang signifying nothing, a tired and second-rate actioner — and an embarrassing resume entry for the likes of Antonio Banderas (“Desperado,” “Once Upon a Time in Mexico”) and Olga Kurylenko (“Oblivion,” “Quantum of Solace”).

If Dirty Grandpa isn’t the worst movie of 2016, I have some serious cinematic torture in my near future.

It’s just a muddled, overcrowded, trigger-happy heist movie brimming with clichés while constantly trying our patience.

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

The satire is broad and forced and unfunny, there’s no cadence to the setups and visual punch lines, and the likable cast is hopelessly lost. Some disasters should remain forgotten.

An average Adam Sandler comedy, which, sadly, means it’s a below-average comedy — because whatever comedic fire and bursts of genuinely inspired humor Sandler once possessed have long ago burnt out.

The Ridiculous Six is sunk by a terrible script by Sandler and Tim Herlihy and some truly cringe-inducing work by a few of the players.

Nothing could have prepared us for the offensively stupid, shamelessly manipulative, ridiculously predictable and hopelessly dated crapfest that is Mother’s Day.

A loud, dopey chase film filled with substandard shootouts.

This is an astonishingly uninvolving and at times almost laughably melodramatic effort, marred by overwrought voice-over narration from Theron, a relentless barrage of scenes depicting horrific human suffering and a love story featuring one-dimensional characters we don’t particularly care about.

Yes, it is a movie. But just barely so. I’d say it’s more like an excruciating, embarrassing, profoundly unfunny, poorly shot and astonishingly tone-deaf screech-fest featuring some of the least charismatic performances this side of one of those dreadful “reality” shows.

Everything about this film feels forced, clunky and overwrought.

The title gives fair warning. If you watch this movie, you’re in for an absolute, unmitigated, cringe-inducing, “WHAT IN GOD’S NAME WERE THEY THINKING?” disaster.

It’s just an awful and ridiculous and clumsily edited B-movie mostly of interest because of the name cast, an insanely horrible concert within the film — and the incredible back story about the making of “Grizzly II,” which could be great material for a fictional adaptation a la “Argo” or “The Big Short” or “American Hustle.”

[A] richly textured, sometimes flat-out hilarious and at times sobering documentary.

Russo has never been better than he is in this film. It is a quietly powerful, sometimes devastating and heartbreaking performance.

Almost nothing about Illicit rings true — but thanks to the likable, earnest and attractive cast, and the semi-salacious, soap-opera vibe to the proceedings, my attention never wandered, and I’ll admit I was mildly curious about how everything would play out.

The end result is a brilliant and brave and beautifully honest film.

Kudos to director Kelly Richmond Pope for applying just the right mix of “What the Heck?” whimsy and respectful, serious reporting to this incredible tale.

This is essential viewing for any Bears fan, and for that matter any football fan.

Writer-director Jack C. Newell’s 42 Grams is a smartly executed, well-photographed and at times almost painfully raw profile.

Gaffigan’s a regular guy holding up a mirror to our everyday world, and turning those reflections into laughs and bigger laughs — and sometimes best of all, smiles of recognition.

This movie had me smiling from start to finish. Murray can be a mercurial and elusive figure, but we come away from this doc convinced there is nothing cynical or self-serving or ego-driven about his interactions with “regular” folks.

Director and co-writer Rhyan LaMarr’s made-in-Chicago indie film Canal Street is a work of fiction, but it contains so many essential truths, so many recognizable situations and characters, so many (sadly) familiar moments of heartache, it rings as true as a documentary.

This is one of those wonderfully convoluted guilty-pleasure actioners with so many WTF moments.

7 Days to Vegas works as a broad and funny comedy about some truly bent but hilarious characters.

As the quarantine continues, this is a great time to revisit or introduce yourself to some of the most iconic cult films ever, and the three-part series “Time Warp” (the first episode debuts Tuesday on multiple streaming platforms) is a breezy and insightful look at dozens of wonderfully strange, sometimes campy, often hilarious, exceedingly endearing favorites.

In the funny and insightful and loosely structured comedy/drama 2 Minutes of Fame, Pharoah plays an aspiring stand-up comic not unlike the young Jay Pharoah, which presents the opportunity for him to trot out some of his Greatest Hits impersonations — but he also proves to be a more than capable actor.

The performances and the production design are first-rate, but even at 74 minutes, Guest Artist is an overly talky, at times outdated and cliché-riddled two-hander that wears out its welcome by the halfway mark.

The young and attractive cast does a fine job of selling the ridiculous plot developments; it’s probably great fun to make a drive-in horror film complete with gallons of fake blood and one character after another biting the dust in creative fashion. Plus, Danny Trejo!

It offers some valuable insights into Trump’s behavior, and offers a compelling counterargument to some widely accepted notions about whether or not psychiatrists should even be allowed to comment on the mental health of individuals they have not personally treated.

Foster Boy certainly follows the legal thriller blueprint, sometimes to credulity-stretching limits — but this is a solid and important story about systematic abuse within the foster care system, featuring an outstanding cast including a half-dozen seasoned veterans who know how to sell even the most melodramatic moments.

Writer-director Amy Miller Gross clearly is a competent director and has a fine ear for dialogue; it feels as if “Sister of the Groom” exists in the real world. Alas, it’s not a world where you’d want to hang out, unless your thing is watching selfish narcissists do verbal and sometimes physical battle over decidedly First World Problems.

You’ll hear the warning bells signifying a Category 5 Pretentiousness Alert right from the start of the ponderous and stiff psychological drama “Elyse,” and it’s not a false alarm.

Not that Frank is without talent or without charm. He’s still out there performing, and he’s got a hell of a voice, and he sure has a way with a story.

A lovingly compiled tribute to a groundbreaking comedian and actor who was adored by his colleagues and loved by the fans — but wrestled with alcoholism for decades, eventually succumbing to symptoms brought on by the disease.

What we have is the movie, and it’s a well-intentioned, well-acted and sometimes visually arresting picture that unfortunately features a primary character who is so foul and irredeemable it’s virtually impossible to believe certain happy-ending developments late in the film. It feels contrived and forced.

This is a lovely tribute that will appeal to longtime fans and those who are just discovering the amazing Peanuts universe.

Skate or Die is culled from more than 100 hours of footage shot by Ferguson in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and with a great assist from editor Zebediah Smith, the end result is an 84-minute, journalistically impressive documentary that knows how to get out of its own way and let the story and the subject matter come to three-dimensional life in a stylistically appropriate fast-paced fashion.

Thorne’s performance as a college student and waitress with a hidden and perhaps nefarious agenda is the best thing in this howler of a wannabe psychological crime thriller, a nasty little film that requires every single one of the lead characters to behave in infuriatingly dopey fashion, just so the story can keep plodding along until we’re slapped with one of the most ridiculous and maddening twist endings in recent film history.

For all its sobering reporting and imagery, Fin also has moments of pure beauty, as when Roth literally swims among sharks, who greet him with mild curiosity and a benign approach. Despite the handful of stories every year about a shark attacking a human, we know the truth: We’re the predators, and they’re the prey.

The result is a comprehensive doc-biopic that works as an introduction to Del Close for those who might not know the name — but the comedy nerds who revere Close will certainly be geeking out over this deep dive into the man’s life and times.

It’s a great American story of a great American life, and “The Blues Chase the Blues Away” does that story justice.

Via the steady direction by Theodore Bogosian and the golden-throat narration from the one and only Bill Kurtis, we learn the full and amazing story of the joint one newspaper wag dubbed a “supernova in the local and national nightlife firmament.”

It’s more exhausting than entertaining, and the multiple conclusions to the interconnecting storylines are more on the level of the dud that was “Rocky V” than the thrills of “Rocky III.”

This is a sentimental, utterly predictable and thoroughly charming confection from Jack C. Newell (head of TV, film & digital for Second City), featuring a myriad of gifted local actors delivering warm and witty performances against the backdrop of wintry locales that look like the inside of a snow globe.

The gifted writer-director Michael Glover Smith (“Mercury in Retrograde,” “Rendezvous in Chicago”) continues to grow as a filmmaker, as he expertly moves around the pieces on the chessboard over the course of a story told over three days and filled with potentially life-changing confrontations, revelations and realizations.

An astonishing, horrific, fascinating and complex true-crime story that starts with a brutal act of murder in the late 20th century and winds its way well into the 2000s and 2010s.

We’re gifted with the powerful and comprehensive documentary, Punch 9 for Harold Washington, which serves as an invaluable reminder of that time in Chicago and American history for those of us who were around in the early 1980s, and a must-see piece of living history for younger generations.

It was a feel-good story that turned horribly tragic.

There’s nothing subtle or deeply original about “Fear,” though it does feature some impressive albeit low-budget special effects, first-rate production design and strong performances from the cast.

Yes, Letterman is a big U2 guy (he once had the band on for an entire week’s worth of shows) — but this is one odd albeit sometimes charming duck of a documentary.

Clocking in at a brisk 88 minutes, Assassin reaches a heartfelt but ludicrous conclusion, and you’ll start to forget it moments after the final credits.

The dry, drab and disappointing would-be crime thriller Heist 88 is a prime example of a movie that has all the right ingredients on the table but fails to create an appetizing entrée at nearly every turn. It’s a film that initially intrigues but quickly loses its way — and ends so abruptly it almost feels like everyone lost interest and decided it was time to go home.

We’ll leave it at that, with kudos to director Hobkinson for taking a no-frills approach to material that is wild enough as is, and praise for the investigators who painstakingly pieced together a truly fractured puzzle and eventually delivered justice.

This is a deeply personal and introspective piece of work, with Davis telling us, “I hate dolls,” at the beginning of the journey, but eventually coming around to acknowledge and appreciate the importance of something as seemingly simple as a doll can be in the development, self-esteem and worldviews of impressionable young minds.

The running time for the doc is a robust 2 hours and 27 minutes, but hey, the 73-year-old Van Zandt has lived too much life for it to be encapsulated in a zippy hour or so.

This is a B-movie through and through, but thanks in large part to a deep cast of familiar faces and reliable character actors, it’s a solid crime thriller that respects the true-life blueprint of the story.

The straightforward, docudrama style by director Walpoth captures the degenerate-gambler mindset that is an element of the culture, and a cast of familiar talents creates a bounty of colorful schemers and dreamers.

After spending a bit too much time taking us through the all-too-familiar chapters of Elvis’ career, from his embrace (and yes, appropriation) of Black music to his ascension to stardom to the Army stint to the movie career that turned him into a caricature, “Return of the King” soars in the final segments, as we see Elvis rise to the challenge and achieve greatness in the live-on-tape performance.

Alas, the songs are more on the level of Lara Trump than Taylor Swift in this corny romance between Bowyn and Laith Wallschleger’s pro football star.

If you’re a Chiefs fan, you’ll probably get a kick of out the whole thing.

This is a serviceable, suitably gory and intermittently scary film with some solid action sequences.

It’s a predictable and straightforward accounting of events, featuring interviews with 1985 stalwarts Mike Singletary, Willie Gault, Jim McMahon, and Gary Fencik (who all look great some four decades later), and a treasure trove of archival footage in era-perfect, beautifully imperfect analog—slightly grainy, with warm color palettes and that “mildly smeared” look that screams mid-1980s.