Robert Abele

Hints of Koy’s stage charm burst through occasionally in Easter Sunday — mostly because he’s also playing a comedian trying to hit the big time, so stand-up-like bits are built in (or crammed in) — but as directed by Jay Chandrasekhar (“Super Troopers”), who also has a small role as an agent, this feature opportunity is a woefully run-of-the-mill, laugh-challenged attempt to translate Koy’s comedy to the big screen.

Director James Kent’s adaptation of Rhidian Brook’s 2014 novel — about a ghost-like Germany, a broken British marriage, and the healing powers of a passionate thaw — has the unfortunate quality of a hot-blooded soap grafted onto rather than merged with a historical-political drama.

This sentimental slog about the relationship between a friendly golden retriever and the growing family of a race car driver is, under director Simon Curtis’ no-nonsense stewardship, about as box-checked and rubber-stamped as mainstream entertainment gets.

If you’re going to see a comedy that isn’t all that funny, you could do a lot worse than the slapdash all-ladies feel-good of A Bad Moms Christmas.

It’s as if Haley viewed his star’s strengths — laconic wit, unforced masculinity, polite romanticism — as the only elements needed for a Sam Elliott showcase, rather than as the building blocks from which to mold an original character.

Visually, Ratchet & Clank has its appeal.... But the story is ultimately too predictable and forgettable to make Ratchet & Clank anything but a kid-targeted holdover between slavishly awaited tentpole behemoths from the comic book world.

The movie’s ambitions are misguided, which makes it all too fuzzy of an experience.

This Flatliners plays like a malpractice case: a cheap horror film grafted on to an episode of “House.”

The clichéd story wouldn’t even be an issue if the movie were enjoyable. But little works as humor or suspense or sentiment once the job is on.

This Ben-Hur may not be an epic fail, but its steady stream of shortcomings are certainly a cautionary journey for anybody with the hubris to try and rebuild the monuments of movies past.

The cars are the stars in Lamborghini: The Man Behind the Legend, a pamphletized biopic that does the easy thing — beautifying Italy and vintage automobiles — but stalls with everything involving humans.

Forster’s haphazard direction is so checked-out it’s painful – he shows no interest in giving anyone a scene that isn’t wholly about snapping something into place, and his comedy mise-en-scène and timing in even the simplest moments of humor is flat. And the less said about Thomas Newman’s phoned-in score, the better.

While we can perhaps be grateful that the superficiality of Brightburn probably kept it from opting to exploit elements of disturbed-kid narratives that have been all too common in our more tragic news stories, what remains is still never terribly entertaining as either popcorn or a bent take on superhero myths.

It’s an eminently missable, cliché-ridden affair.

The Last Witch Hunter is one of those artlessly restless, exposition-dialogue fantasy-action slogs that, thanks to Breck Eisner's untamed direction, never manages to corral all the potion talk, mythology rationale and leaps back and forth in time into anything remotely entertaining.

It’s confused about whether it wants to be a ticking-bomb tale of heroics or a complex insider account.

Even if you’ve been longing for a more grounded, gritty car-chase movie since the “Fast” franchise left physics behind ages ago, Bay’s addiction to confusion and pointlessness as operating visual/narrative principles keeps even this shoulda-been auto-pocalypse from being in any way pleasurable.

We're more than 45 years out from Roman Polanski's director-controlled masterpiece in gestating terror, and yet no gimmick in Devil's Due — no point-of-view shock cut or shaky-cam "realism" — is as dread-inducing as tracking the grim revelations on Mia Farrow's face.

The nonstop adversity lacks any real sense of danger. Or, for that matter, emotional punch. Why these two long-distance runners keep each other alive should be of front-and-center concern. Instead, My Way is mostly an endurance test.

Who knows what Pelé: Birth of a Legend could have been had it tapped more into that mysterious life force and the true messiness in harnessing it and making it glorious. Instead we get what the man himself was canny enough to ignore: a familiar game plan tediously followed.

Consider Twelve its own memory-retarding narcotic.

This film from writer Kenny Golde and director Mark Schmidt slaps a clichéd war-movie dressing over everything so that what should have felt heart-poundingly incredible comes off as heavy-handed, ludicrous and unintentionally queasy.

The overall mood created by the crummy, pinched visuals and logic-strained rhythm is of something scanned and discarded, like a tabloid article or a Lifetime movie.

When Rebecca De Mornay shows up as the criminals' fiercely doting matriarch, the ready crackle of her studiously demonic performance brings welcome distraction from this otherwise crude litany of torture and wretched death.

Realistically depicting full-scale domestic terrorism is one thing, but directors Cary Murnion and Jonathan Milott seem unaware of how their long-take gimmick — the cuts are easily determined — destroys logic, emboldens the use of stereotypes, and kills suspense.

Lowell, a sitcom actor ("Enlisted") and photographer, lards his "The Big Chill" ripoff with plenty of arty touches... He assumes this will lend the needed heft to paper-thin characters, witless exchanges and emotional recriminations you can see coming a mile away.

Bryon’s real experience is certainly incredible, but Nattiv’s in-your-face approach to every scene — literally so, since the frame is rarely anything but a sloppy, unimaginative close-up — strips this character study of believability, or any nuance or gathering power.

Nothing about Sinister 2 comes close to the feel-bad ode to literally and figuratively dark interiors that distinguished the title-earning original.

Despite some scenic territory, there's just not much to this journey, leaving Lost in the Sun feeling like a short story stretched way too thinly toward feature length.

Writers Skip Woods and Michael Finch have a few tricks up their sleeves as betrayals emerge and allegiances shift. But it's not enough to make us care or to keep the third act from being a head-scratching mess.

Hansel and Gretel are this movie's breakout stars, but it's not enough to make Hoodwinked Too feel like anything but a storybook hurled straight at your head.

Tower to the People means well, and Tesla deserves his own movie, but it's like being cornered by a zealot: an educational slog that morphs into an infomercial.

Well-intended seriousness dismantles Regression, a not-exactly-horror horror movie that's also a mystery with no mystery.

The humor is way more miss than hit, prone to the kind of raunch (analingus debates, homophobia teasing, who’s-hot-who’s-not) that feels available, not thought-out, and pain gags that don’t get funnier the more they’re repeated.

As a big sci-fi entertainment, it hardly feels like a movie about the problems of two emotionally desperate people in a crazy situation, and therein lies the problem.

Besides never knowing where to stick a camera, or how long a given scene should last, Hopkins quickly ditches any potentially subversive joy in her cartoon vigilante by saddling her with a redemptive love story opposite James Badge Dale's kind-eyed sheriff.

By the umpteenth disruptive shock-cut and patiently framed shot of Carter staring us down, Darling has worn out its welcome even as a mood piece.

Erased is eminently forgettable.

The pedestrian filmmaking and community-theater pacing mostly recalls PBS pledge drives hawking Bocelli records.

An undercooked, "Glee"-like hybrid of grating indie pop songs and forest slasher flick.

Movies can warp any urgent issue into disposable melodrama, and what’s cringe-worthy about Trafficked, directed by Will Wallace, is how unnecessarily eroticized it is, like something from the made-for-video bin in a ’90s-era Blockbuster.

Plodding, predictable, amateurishly staged and with wild swings in acting quality - sometimes within the same person (Roberts) - this is the kind of well-meaning, homemade concoction hopelessly enamored of the kind of clichéd potboilers that don't get made anymore. And with good reason.

A treadmill sex comedy, huffing and puffing in place until its time is up.

A routine home invasion movie more interested in B-horror tropes and bloodletting than a thought-provoking look at "Hunger Games"-ish class warfare.

[It] is it all forced and regrettably laugh-free, despite the considerable energy the actors put into it.

Gallo, whose direction has an undeniable paciness but a numbing competency, seems eager to check things off a list and move on.

Along With the Gods strains to whimsically entertain, but routinely fails its smaller human-sized moments due to convoluted plot twists.

A famously crackpot conspiracy theory, psychedelic humor and arty ultraviolence make for dreary bedfellows in the scattershot British comedy Moonwalkers.

South Korean filmmaker Sngmoo Lee's debut feature is less a genre-spanning romp than a tiresome lab experiment in computer-generated tropes and green-screen oppressiveness.

It’s more of an action gallery, not a blood-pumping story accelerated by its flights of fury.

With all the finesse of a bullhorn that sprays noise and blood, All Cheerleaders Die shows just how difficult it is to pump life into the shopworn teen horror-comedy genre.

Suffers from the tired POV gimmickry, the weak characterizations, the numbing sameness of stuck-in-the-woods-with-dolts narratives.

As a misfit-centric slap at religious conformity, the story's premise couldn't be more primed for trenchant social comedy, but screenwriter Knight and director Eyad Zahra opt for maintaining a thin veneer of tiresome obnoxiousness over exploring the contours of an emotionally complicated subculture.

Under Mikael Håfström's visually clunky, rhythmless direction, it's a snooze of epic sameness: choppy action scenes, a blankly stern Cusack, and too many allegiance shifts to count or care for.

[An] amateurish, terribly acted piffle, which devolves from dull conversations behind store counters into witless farce on a movie set.

Unformed protagonists don't come more wallowingly irritating and contradictory than George.

While not enough to sell Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, Bardem’s mission to out-cartoon his animated scene partner (admittedly not difficult) still feels like a blow struck for old-school flesh-and-blood eccentricity in the age of blah digital cutes. May that battle continue.

Looking Glass ultimately feels trapped between leaning toward Lynchian identity weirdness and suggesting a classically character-driven slice of indie exploitation, despite a suitably retro Tangerine Dream-like score that vibrates suspensefully when needed.

The meager tension generated by characters discovering their survival instincts, and why you might not want to be next to them when they do, is quickly dissipated by the realization that, at a certain point, the movie is an assembly line of killing, and not a terribly exciting or entertaining one at that.

The only way to describe this movie's trio of party-throwing protagonists is numbingly predictable, as if writers Michael Bacall and Matt Drake had "Superbad" on a loop in the background.

Thin, neatly folded, paper-airplane of a movie threatens to nose dive into tweeville.

Stranded stops at being merely seriously dull and trite, rather than tipping into train-wreck silliness.

Moore is primarily known as an actor but this is the third feature he’s directed, and he proves surprisingly unable to get layered performances out of some great actors.

What you won't feel is genuine horror, because unlike John Carpenter -- whose original 1978 film is a sly game of nerve-racking peekaboo -- Zombie isn't out to engage fans of the genre with a slaughterhouse bonbon like "Halloween II."

The dull, hectoring financial melodrama Supercapitalist has all the spark of a high school assembly skit about not letting friends drive drunk.

The movie's early promise fades, however, as an Apatowian crassness descends upon the comic situations, churlishness gets mistaken for rawness, and sweetness starts to feel manipulative instead of natural.

A lumbering Frankenstein’s monster of a B movie.

Dagen Merrill’s thriller, made under the Syfy channel’s banner, is strictly cheap-TV genre fare that might have passed muster as an average episode of “The Outer Limits,” but over feature length simply feels slipshod and dull.

Apart from Farmer's effectively stricken portrayal of a singularly conflicted man, The Falls: Testament of Love is too earnest a slog to have any impact.

To say everyone plays like they're in separate movies is an understatement.

Beware any movie that talks about what it is before being what it is.

As long as there are enemies in Islamic lands, we'll probably have to endure risible time-wasters like London Has Fallen, designed to justify blinkered foreign policy attitudes and stoke jokey hatred.

Brings vampires, werewolves, zombies, detective noir and spoofy comedy together for a murky genre gumbo with barely any flavor.

Though the title hints at a tale of infatuation, Levy sheds little light on interpersonal conflict or why we're such an addictively self-documenting modern society.

That Les isn't one of LaBute's garden variety sadists is the best thing you can say about Dirty Weekend.

The movie — glibly admiring of its hero's awfulness — is tone-deaf about genuine satire, assuming anything ugly (insults, nihilism, bloody violence) qualifies as sharp cultural commentary as long as the unceasingly venal, knowing narration explains it all for us.

Burying the Ex is a genre-mashing low for Dante.

The characters, the dumb dialogue, and the story mechanics are the biggest problems with “Hot Summer Nights,” which never convinces, while it uses an annoying, legend-building voiceover narration from an unseen local to keep hawking the notion that we’re seeing life-changing, mythic events.

As it sputters toward its curtain-exposing conclusion, “Level 16” stays disappointingly thin, both as a dark-future cautionary saga and a genre exercise.

The message is lost in this laughably deck-stacked journey, a movie-long version of "They started it!"

The actors gamely strive for conversational naturalism, but what they say matters little because you never sense anything other than an environment rigged to explode, rather than nurtured into emotional relevance.

It’s an illogical, simple-minded mess in which Stevens is primarily a disembodied voice in a first-person-shooter-style video game movie.

Crushingly listless and at times as off-putting as a needle scratching vinyl, this corkscrew tale of questionable (and questioned) parenting, youthful misjudgments, grudges and disappointments doesn't even have the disciplined domestic-evil allure of a Lifetime movie.

Margolin says we should “fight with ideas,” but Jihadists misses an opportunity to make vivid how that method of struggle would look.

Cheap silliness abounds, including car chases that are more about loud crashes and CGI than the thrill of speed.

When we need the churning dread of an intimate tale of generational trauma, The Marsh King’s Daughter goes formulaic, and when we’re primed for exploitation sweats, it gets flabby.

The trouble is, director Wayne Blair’s perfunctorily handled adaptation of Dalia Sofer’s 2008 novel is long on cardboard characterizations and short on genuine tension.

Is 65 a hall-of-fame bad movie? No, and that may be its problem. It’s just pedestrian dumb and dull.

This hollow downer about deep wells of male anger, wallowing regret and mental disintegration is ultimately a thematic cop-out.

First-time feature filmmaker Dave Wilson and cinematographer Jacques Jouffret (“Mile 22”) can manipulate the speed of combat scenes all he wants (the stylistic crutch of a slo-mo point of contact is evergreen) but dull choreography, CGI overuse and Cuisinart editing are still the bane of today’s action sequences.

Bloated, inexplicably un-entertaining.

A true tale of high school football achievement becomes a strained, by-the-numbers grab bag of uplift in the Christian sports drama When the Game Stands Tall.

Fairbrass has a certain rugged sincerity and appealing sense of barely coiled rage, but it's mostly wasted in a screenplay (by director Brian A. Miller) of gaping plot holes, wan excitement and dumb action cliches.

Pali Road disappoints with ghost-romance squishiness and deadly dull pacing.

A structural, chronological mess of information and emotion, so chaotically shot and edited to move from stat to image to sound bite that it suffers from its own concentration issues.

In the wake of "Bridesmaids," Sandler's lipsticked tomfoolery - and inability to share the screen with genuinely funny women - feels particularly regressive and stale. Both movies have diarrhea gags, but only one feels defined by such humor.

It's called The November Man, but it's really just another forgettable August release.

The model here may be the florid, female-centered movies of Douglas Sirk, but the effect is as poetic and inspiring as a waiting-room pamphlet.