Robert Abele

With its flat location visuals, B-movie gore (snakes pulled from mouths) and colorless score, The Carpenter’s Son is the uninspired origin story you never prayed for.

Stuckmann grabbing aimlessly in the last third for the kind of sickly visual elegance that is Flanagan’s deliberative style. But it only ever feels like homage, not anything organic — Stuckmann doesn’t have his mentor’s storytelling smarts, nor his flair for the underpinnings of normality that ground horror.

Everything about the story, from opening to closing dance party, feels like it was made up on an especially unimaginative playdate by bored kids who’d rather be watching TV.

It won’t slam the door on Tesfaye’s movie ambitions, but as a bid to conquer the big screen, it’s an off-putting, see-what-sticks wallow that treats the power of cinema like a midconcert costume change.

Every awkwardly declarative, stagy scene in “Bonhoeffer” is just a right-against-wrong equation to be answered by the title character’s virtue.

A childish slog of hero worship.

Despite the high body count, consider this a murder of The Crow.

If kids can grow out of their pretend pals, so too can horror audiences of cynical snoozes like this.

The overall flavor profile indicates that Waititi, whose own cartoonish appearance as a priest feels like an afterthought, has become bored with his signature brand of goofy uplift. Going by the unfunny self-referential gags (“The Karate Kid,” “The Matrix,” “Taken”), you’d swear the Oscar-winning filmmaker was struggling with the impulse to go full parody.

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.

If anything, the new stuff’s brazenness is truer in tone to what this “Cat Person” clearly wants to be: a slick, snarky, pulverizing horror-comedy rather than the compressed, low-key Mary Gaitskill-meets-Eliza Hittman cringefest that Roupenian’s delicate storytelling conjured with every peek into Margot’s drifting psyche.

It’s a rom-com both com-less and rom-less.

A lumbering Frankenstein’s monster of a B movie.

Millepied’s debut . . . is a woefully pretentious and uninvolving slog, an arthouse screen-saver only sporadically ignited by its two best components: composer Nicholas Britell and Almodovar regular Rossy de Palma as a flamboyant nightclub owner-performer.

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

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.

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.

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.

Maybe if you hate movies, LaBute’s attempt to bore us to death with classic noir material is a nifty prank. For anyone else, you’re better off revisiting Garfield and Turner, or Stanwyck and MacMurray, or Hurt and Turner — or even “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.”

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.

It’s so talky and un-visual that despite it taking place in multiple locations, including the California coastline, it feels like a play barely opened up for the cameras.

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.

The kind of low-wattage, paint-by-numbers thriller that usually signifies a perilous turn toward the action purgatory that is cheap, direct-to-nowhere fare.

A Wikipedia entry fed into what can only be called The Sorkinator, but missing the wit module, Being the Ricardos is cultural-television-marital history flattened into a babbling stream of airless, horribly shot scenes that never come close to the glorious timing of a single comic exchange on “I Love Lucy.”

A mishmash of star power, bleakness, CGI and the cutes, it will on the one hand remind you of how charmingly adaptive Hanks can be, while the same time proving just how problematic the end of the world is as a scenario for schematic heart-tugging.

A crisis scenario striving for issue-driven importance that should have paid more attention to its dull suspense mechanics, slapdash style, and implausibility.

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

The veneer of historical reality is thin on the baldly nativist and manipulative Serbian World War II movie Dara of Jasenovac, a slickly made extermination camp drama about child peril that will test the patience of even the most rigorous students of cultural representations of genocide.

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.

Tom Hooper’s jarring fever dream of a spectacle is like something that escaped from Dr. Moreau’s creature laboratory instead of a poet’s and a composer’s feline (uni)verse, an un-catty valley hybrid of physical and digital that unsettles and crashes way more often than it enchants.

As dramatized, “The Warrior Queen” takes all the biopic shortcuts (narration, sped-up timeline, ham-fisted exposition) only to get to a depiction of the drumbeat to conflict that traffics in platitudes and clichés.

What’s especially pitiful about this installment, which has been given a perfunctory dark-action look by cinematographer Brendan Galvin (“Self/less”), is how often Stallone tries to give psychic heft to the wounded-warrior part of his creation, as if he were Ethan Edwards in “The Searchers” and not just a monosyllabic killing machine easily triggered.

A brainless, exploitative folly which gives John Travolta free rein to mine the history of cringe-worthy autism portrayals for an offensively garish Frankenstein pantomime of unhinged obsession.

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.

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.

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.

One of the more plastic molds of troubled heartthrob storytelling in recent memory...is the kind of dispiriting effort that thinks it’s scratching an itch for masochistic young girls, but primarily suggests that romance, desire and sexuality aren’t worth genuinely exploring.

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

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.

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

Too bad the only thrill you get from all the bloodletting is that you know each cartoony death brings you that much closer to the end credits.

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

The fights are leaden, so when a movie’s bid for historical verisimilitude has already stopped at backlot-acceptable, and the character development is constrained by dumb dialogue, such meager tending-to of an Asian action flick’s primary draw is nigh unforgivable.

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

As Nomis steps up the pace like a runner losing balance and falling forward, the clichés pile up and plot points fly at us more like insecure stabs at holding our interest than naturally edgy developments.

If all you need from a love story are two people smiling at each other and a narrator saying they’re in love, then Life Itself is for you. If all you require to show the passage of years is a CG montage or some cheap makeup, then Life Itself is for you. If the only way you’ll know things are tough is if everyone dies, then Life Itself is for you.

Peter Berg’s Mile 22 is an angry, hyperviolent downer of an action flick that is the August blowout-sale of its ilk: loud and desperate.

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.

Families with canines are better off staying home and having an old-fashioned backyard frolic than trotting out to see Show Dogs, a panting, poorly trained entry in the live-action/talking animal genre that for once makes viewers long for the candy-colored, half-witted professionalism of third-tier Pixar-knockoff animation.

Whatever Life of the Party needs its star to be, it gives us — frumpy, hot, weird, normal, kind, mean, humiliated, heroic, limber, uncoordinated, sexy, unsexy — in the desperate hope that you’ll latch on to some nugget of McCarthy-patented brazenness and you’ll laugh, as if story and cohesion meant nothing.

The dissipating focus and the turgidly explanatory dialogue ultimately affects the legitimately surprising twist at the end, one in keeping with espionage's great theme — the intertwining of loyalty and betrayal — but that lacks oomph after so awkwardly uninvolving a buildup.

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.

A few minutes of thriller-like tension early on gives way to a lot of tediously scripted scenes of whisper-acting that rarely breathe life and humanity into what should be a potent turning point story in a religion's history.

The movie has too much on its plate in selling its paint-by-numbers uplift.

This wildly uneven mix of nasty and nervy...is primarily a time-waster, trotting out clichéd misadventure tropes and predictable zigzags in a manner neither terribly funny nor suspenseful.

As soon as Willis deploys his trademark smirk, and the comfortable vengeance of tracking down his wife’s killers while avoiding detection takes over, it just becomes a million other B-movies about lowlifes getting what they deserve.

The many ridiculous tragedies are just there to slather showy woundedness on a weak, annoying character, leaving The Vanishing of Sidney Hall a mystery-free mystery with an inexhaustible supply of eye-rolling postures.

It’s legitimately difficult, from scene to scene, to determine what exactly about the increasingly lurid and far-fetched “Mute” made it necessary to be told.

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

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

This is a visually inept, nonexciting slog, from the dialogue scenes in which the image shakes because one assumes the camera operators were laughing, to the action shots that you would have re-staged if you were just filming your pets at home.

"Bloodline” director Hèctor Hernández Vicens and screenwriters Mark Tonderai and Lars Jacobson, on the other hand, are less stewards of it than schlockmeisters, treating any possible resonance as stale oil in which to fry the usual junk food of gory, hyperkinetic kills. Their side orders are thin characters with dumb dialogue and even dumber behavior.

Watching Father Figures is like finding a piece of food in the back of your fridge that you barely recognize, but know right away it’s not worth eating.

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

Its empty, loud breathlessness is the real bunk to behold: think trailer for a movie more than movie itself. Or more accurately, think teaser to the trailer to the movie. It’s a broken record of ersatz positivity and empowerment, practically shout-singing at you to be all you can be while it mostly just is what it is, plastic flash without any enduring oomph.

While your brain tries to wrap around that element of the fantasy, Basir flubs his big point about fate, choices and paths — that no matter our lives, we face the chance to change for good or bad — by embracing all the clichés he can find, then filming them without nuance or style.

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.

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

The inconvenient truth about Geostorm is that it’s dumber than a box of asteroid-sized hail. But to take it seriously for just a second, it misses an opportunity to turn idealism about the world coming together to solve its biggest problem and instead turns it into more of cinema’s biggest problem: empty-headed spectacle.

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.

Choked with clichés, joyless, and with a suspense meter on empty, this France-set caper about classic-car-thieving half brothers (Scott Eastwood and Freddie Thorp) mixed up with a pair of violent, automobile-collecting crime lords (Simon Abkarian and Clemens Schick) is only for those who think the “Fast and the Furious” movies aren’t white and charmless enough.

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

Bloated, inexplicably un-entertaining.

There are occasionally atmospheric shots of depopulated boardwalks and streets, but the strain to give the visuals meaning becomes its own clue in the worst crime committed here: the killing of good storytelling.

Rebel in the Rye is the most dispiritingly presentational of biopics, on a tight schedule to hit its marks and compartmentalize its subject’s life.

Does Tulip Fever feel like a precious bulb poorly nurtured? Primarily it comes across as something laboriously over-handled, and any flower so treated is bound to lose its luster. After waiting so long, the strongest fragrance on display is one of sweat and mediocrity.

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.

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

Unfortunately, to follow these characters around is to experience not great theater, nor rich cinema, nor architectural wonder, but rather the itch of the restless spectator.

A stroll along the Venice boardwalk is likely to elicit more laughs, and probably even thrills, than Once Upon a Time in Venice.

The dramatized movie we’ve gotten, All Eyez On Me, is a hagiographic dud that unfolds like a depth-free magazine listicle.

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

Action movies don’t necessarily need logic, but in the absence of entertainment value, tracking what doesn’t make sense is often the only fun.

This “Mummy” is rags that produce no riches.

Patagonian landscapes in 16 mm and Hollywood real estate shot in 35 mm provide a visually sleek backdrop for mighty uninteresting relationships in the pretentious indie Somewhere Beautiful.

There’s simply no time for the impact of anything that happens to get its reflective due, because the movie is too busy reverting to the up-and-down status of Michael’s and Ana’s increasingly inconsequential relationship while lining up its next large-scale set piece.

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.

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.

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.

The Most Hated Woman in America is ultimately a simplistic approach to a fascinating figure, more Lifetime than a woman’s life and times.

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.

Fist Fight is so ineptly assembled, shoddy-looking and devoid of comic tension or creative lunacy — like a movie comprised of outtakes — that you half-expect the filmmakers not even to deliver a fist fight.

Horror films that backstory the audience to death lose all hope of mining what’s eerie and unsettling about the unknown, and Rings is a perfect example: it doesn’t so much spread its familiar myth as dilute it.

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.

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.

Like a fog that corrupts your ability to be entertained, Top Coat Cash is genre amateurishness that neither thrills nor makes sense.

Title’s command of the material is haphazard, her direction not artful enough to know when expository clunkiness is undercutting the chance to dig into the meat of personalities in deterioration.