Robert Abele

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.

The Identical is ultimately too schematically sentimental, even with Liotta playing against type, to have much of an impact.

Jaglom is too spiritually and cinematically lazy to do anything but evoke glib, artless solidarity, and let us know he's heard of Twitter and Facebook.

One can't help experiencing the same dread about the exhausting flood of lackluster horror films that swamp our screens and, as Case 39 unfolds, realizing we're enduring one more.

No image or moment is grounded – every shot is augmented with restless animation, smart-ass narration or video game sounds. The artificiality of it all is smothering.

All cartoon and no charm.

Rarely do you sense that any key performer was ever in the vicinity of a real animal.

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.

A busy but witless and stale comedy that rehashes every raunchy gag we expect from R-rated comedies, it also wears its hackneyed sentimentality and cookie-cutter underdog story beats as proudly as adhesive nametags.

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.

This “Mummy” is rags that produce no riches.

After the quiet, dread-filled punch of the first half-hour — when it seems vampire culture is going to get turned on its head — Iwai's character study mostly descends into a pretentious slog.

Stay past the credits, though, and you'll find a tongue-in-cheek rap video recap with the cast - and directed by star Dustin Milligan - that carries the kind of spoofy insouciance missing from the main attraction.

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.

The clichés alone doom the movie.

Cinematic life...is in short supply in this ambitious but leaden cautionary tale, which tries to pep things up with energetic fight scenes in the avatar worlds, but can’t escape the wooden acting and zipless storytelling.

What’s left is a visually unappetizing Animal Farm that plays as if someone sloppily traced over a masterpiece. And Serkis (who also voices a rooster) doesn’t so much direct it as twist some grand knob with settings like “Louder,” “Faster,” “Jokier,” “Bigger.”

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

For Sedaris fans, C.O.G. is a regrettably patronizing washout.

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.

Writer-director Abe Sylvia slathers on the cartoonish characterization and neon-colored '80s pop - Benatar! Joan Jett! The Outfield! - for an easy-bake mood-setting, which is tedious enough. But his attempts at situational humor on the road - including a stripping scene for Dozier as coming-out metaphor - fall embarrassingly flat.

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.

Writer Eddie Guzelian's grindhouse-meets-"Groundhog Day" scenario is not without its clever plot turns, but his terrible faux-noir dialogue is mostly crass, witless snark, and the fresh-faced, hollow actors don't have the scuzzy charm or fatalistic comic rhythms needed to make this material disreputably fun.

Even without the queasy racial stereotypes, Walk of Shame feels perfunctorily assembled, its obstacles straining even screwball logic.

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.

Seeking existential, noirish heft, Amoedo coyly avoids articulating what Martin is. (He calls himself "sick.") But it only comes across like an amateur play at gravitas, one unsupported by dully weighted scenes and clunky dialogue, delivered mostly by English-speaking actors straining to hide Latin accents.

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.

Like so many movie stars, Bigfoot has been sold out by movie opportunists, in this case as ho-hum fright bait in the aggressively unimaginative Exists.

For all the ways Dickerson vigorously dramatizes the stages of solitary confinement — nervous humor, fear, rages, survival ingenuity (including a nifty breathing apparatus) — it's never enough to explain why this particular individual's story is worth telling.

The scenarios in Ass Backwards, which director Chris Nelson contributed to by filming in focus, feel arbitrary rather than organic, as if the creators' list of humor targets — lesbian bikers, trailer trash, drug-addicted reality TV stars, pageant world denizens — were picked out of a hat.

Strict adherence to the playbook may work in sports, but My All American shows the pitfalls of that approach with movies.

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.

It's all simplistic sermonizing in director and co-writer Alejandro Monteverde's hands, devoid of any thoughtful messiness about wartime mind-sets or family despair, and quick to sand any edges with postcard-pretty coastal town vistas and cutesy music cues.

Feels precision-engineered for a morally torn fanboy who likes the idea of female empowerment but needs it served with a heavy dose of torture porn and glistening flesh.

If you've seen most any rom-com you know where this one's headed. Unfortunately, under director Sheree Folkson's unsteady hand, getting there is more frustrating than fun.

It’s an off-putting mix of matters whimsical and disturbing, more obvious and ludicrous than chilling.

The ghost scenario that this boring, CW-ready, "Scooby-Doo" gang uncovers isn't nearly as shocking as the blasé attitude they have toward friends dying off.

If Michael Mann, Luc Besson and Quentin Tarantino all ate the same bad sushi together, the unfortunate end result might just resemble the pre-digested pap that is the French thriller Paris Countdown.

Gone is the scrappy, brutal wit of the original - nothing more than an unfettered showcase for Jaa's talents - and in its place is more of the overwrought myth making that sunk "Ong Bak 2: The Beginning."

To borrow a hamburger chain's refrain, not lovin' it.

A movie lovely to look at but on-the-nose and crushingly dull, a pair of qualities a ghost yarn can't live on.

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

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.

[A] thoroughly routine, straight-to-video-reminiscent action thriller set in Louisiana.

Writer-director Leone Marucci has a scratch-worthy itch for plump visuals and flashy camera moves, but a limp way with dialogue and story, and — despite his cast — no grip on directing actors.

If La Bare had snarky voice-over narration, it could be a segment on "The Colbert Report."

Breathless, uninspired January junk that feels like the iffiest bits of a Lifetime movie and late-night cable schlock slapped together. (And not erotically.)

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.

The celebrity soup that is Love the Coopers is, indeed, a mess, the kind in which the screenplay by Steven Rogers...is made more chaotic by Jessie Nelson's tonally smeary direction.

An action fan could be forgiven for the medicinal taste that this slick but dissipating exercise leaves behind.

Roth, who is no Michael Haneke (or even Adrian Lyne), seems unconcerned with creating genuine tension or digging into an allegory of moral consequence.

A kitchen-sink mess with no discernible narrative drive or thematic resonance beyond uninspired batches of bad behavior, gunplay, eccentricity and weak uplift.

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.

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.

It’s too scattershot to be persuasive, even if occasionally it sparks thought about issues of cultural tradition, unfair international agreements, and nationalistic defensiveness.

If only 11-11-11 had arrived a little closer to Thanksgiving - the turkey connection would have been entirely appropriate.

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.

Too often, Carter sacrifices characterization for one more flickery effect or carefully composed shot of moody elegance, then overdoes unlighted interiors to an almost absurd degree.

It's a junky, unscary genre piece with a misleading title, because director and co-writer John Pogue jacks up the decibels so often to manufacture frights that you fear a punctured eardrum more than anything else.

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.

The young man is inspiring all on his own, never more so than when he's being social or making music with others. It's only the movie around him that is so artless in its uplift.

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.

The trouble is that it's hard to care about poor Wayne when he seems so empty-headed and naïve - civic unrest in Peru on the eve of its first democratic elections in 1980 is the setting - and when the movie itself seems so unfocused.

Revenge is a dish served lumpy and tasteless in the tonally muddled Return to Sender.

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.

In its stylistically flailing stab at authenticity, CBGB ends up merely a mess of caricatures.

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

In writer-director Gilles Paquet-Brenner's hands, it's a convoluted, airless procedural that generates practically no suspense and little that's thematically resonant about lost souls and poisoned memories.

Frankly, it's hard to imagine even George Clooney making such ill-used screen minutes interesting. But the movie around those moments is even worse.

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.

Weaver's last ditch attempt to upend rom-com convention and rewrite the movie as a skeevy lout's comeuppance hardly makes up for the clichéd slog that comes before.

This visually restless and ultimately ludicrous Chinese horror film from director Yip Wai Man (a.k.a. Raymond Yip) is unlikely to either shorten your breath or curl your toes.

Bourek is well-meaning but woefully lacking in dimension or urgency, the movie equivalent of a scenic tourist trap.

The title's promise of violence is dutifully met in gory, sonically squishy close-quarter melees shot in Confuse-o-vision, as if the camera had been strapped to a whirring blender before the footage was edited with the puree button.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

The truest test for unrepentant treacle like this is to imagine how invested one would be if Lewis weren’t headlining his first movie in 20 years.... The answer is, barely invested at all, considering how simplified and pandering is Noah’s approach to issues of grief, aging, and family dynamics.

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

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

The pretentious, preposterous, dueling-dialect flameout called Killing Season has to stand as one of the biggest missed opportunities in iconic matchups.

Vaguely misogynistic and defiantly paternalistic, the movie fails at nearly everything.

There's certainly no moviegoing reanimation in director Stuart Beattie's adaptation of Kevin Grevioux's graphic novel.

Any movie that leeches the perverse fun out of illicit voyeurism, then tosses in a grim gotcha of an ending to make everyone feel worse, when the kids’ actions are distasteful enough, is worth avoiding.

There's simply nobody to care about in Among Ravens, even as a case study in unhappiness and delusion.

Lopez is a middling ringmaster of doom at best. But there's so little context to the litany of ugliness — some played for laughs, some meant to shock — that it's hard to discern where the entertainment value lies in any of this.

Gray and listless, the Anthony Hopkins/Ray Liotta-starrer Blackway is a vengeance tale set in a cold, foggy Pacific Northwest logging town where clichés are as prevalent as trees.

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.

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

This is Nancy Meyers territory, but leaden with passé observations about lovelorn women...and hardly ebullient as either oddball-pair comedy or housewife-revenge fantasy.

Like getting a half-dozen undercooked after-school specials at once, Quentin Lee's White Frog serves up a medley of messages and themes while generating no discernible dramatic heft.

The Hollow Point is all hollow, no point.

The scenario makes for an inept, lazy R-rated movie whose sole purpose is as a glossary of euphemisms for genitalia and sexual acts.

Between plot and character, there are definitely 18 holes in The Squeeze.

Perhaps aware of how little its audience might pay attention to anything not running, fired off or blown up, the movie's characters explain themselves regularly. Willis, meanwhile, mutters his executive-suite-villain lines as if he's afraid of waking you.

Built on a shaky comic premise based on a real Craigslist ad posted by a pair of party animals — and smacked to life with relentlessly feeble, dopey improvisation and unoriginal crudity — “Mike and Dave” is more likely to tarnish its cast’s comedy-chops goodwill than to foster a desire to see any more raunch-till-you-drop yukfests.

An abject filmmaking lesson in the many ways to irk moviegoers: cardboard characters, dippy plotting, sentimental overkill and tortuous logic.

What unfolds instead is a deadly dull trial and boatloads of speechifying about religious dignity, hate crimes and prejudice.

The patriot-packaged Last Ounce of Courage has been made with the conviction of true zealots, but also the competence of amateurs.

The movie doesn't even need five minutes to signal that it's already a goner.

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

Emilio Mauro's screenplay is all rancid machismo, tedious yelling and turgid plotting, while director James Mottern exhibits a pathological love for repetitive close-ups and terrible acting that instantly brings each endlessly talky scene to a dead stop within seconds.

So unless you're a fan of yawn-worthy shootouts and showdowns, The Prince is a "Taken" retread hardly indicative of any special set of skills.

Screenwriter Max Enscoe and director Basel Owies — enamored of twists at the expense of logic and character — might as well have made a clip reel of their favorite cat-and-mouse movies, because their fever-pitch story is as tension-free, transparently obvious and ludicrous as they come.

Leachman's facility with the wackadoodle senior is ever-admirable, but even she can't save the low-energy, charm-free thud that is This Is Happening.

The ludicrous and bloody New Orleans melodrama Repentance offers the despairing sight of talented actors in full flounder.

There's so little urgency, cleverness or romantic comedy zing to this effort from four credited screenwriters (including Oscar winner Ron Bass) that the whole effort seems to run solely on the smiles of its photogenic leads.

The stars' banter is insipid and unfunny, the wacky shocks short out and, most unforgivably, the car chases are a snooze, filmed as a series of stationary close-ups and diced in the editing room until they suggest anything but movement.

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.

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.

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.

Little more than an 88-minute "it has a mind of its own" gag, Bad Johnson should have kept its premise in its pants.

Co-writer and director David Aarniokoski's clunky, crude blotch of prurience and bloodletting is too self-satisfied with its wink-wink naughtiness to be either fun-dumb or scary-sexy.

The dreary, loud, amateurish horror-comedy A Fantastic Fear of Everything...isn’t terribly interested in logic. Or continuity. Or filmmaking acumen. Or, most glaringly, laughs.

There's no ignoring the aggressive stupidity and crassness behind the whole enterprise.

Dark Tide, directed with hopelessly flagging energy by John Stockwell, barely musters up enough interest to be thuddingly bad.

None of it works, really, as either musical satire or genre Chex mix.

Without a human dimension to ground its construct, The Brass Teapot ultimately feels like an interminably stretched-out skit rather than a storybook lesson stained with blood and hurt.

6 Souls is regrettably sick with that familiar disease afflicting movies of this ilk: ostentatious, hollow moodiness that spreads like an unwelcome rash.

The FP so desperately wants to be cultishly admired for its bad-taste rollout of wacko characters, ugly costumes and vulgar slang that it forgets to be genuinely offbeat or funny.

A predictable hodgepodge of uninteresting psychological cat-and-mouse, dimly lighted action.

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.

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

Enthusiasm isn't exactly a replacement for good sense or basic skills, and the film's truest mystery is why no one pulled Metcalf aside and suggested he keep all this to himself.

It's dispiriting enough that we're still getting movies about the cute side of mental illness, but to turn someone rendered childlike by abusive trauma into desirable girlfriend material — and sporting cast-off stripper attire to boot — is more than a little creepy.

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.

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.

Pulpy dross of surpassing dumbness, Charlie Countryman takes the blender approach to mixing dark adventure, doofus comedy and pie-eyed romance, but forgets to put the lid on when pulsed.

Joyless and repetitive, Extraterrestrial is like getting cornered by a madman. You keep wondering, why is this movie shouting at me?

If ever a movie signaled that the Quentin Tarantino copycat age of empty-headed wink-wink genre rehashing is still with us, Rushlights is that movie.

In the regrettably amateurish hands of writer-director Thomas Verrette, Ethan's journey toward the truth feels more like watching someone wandering through one of those pharmaceutical commercials with a laundry list of side effects.

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.

The true mistreatment is directed toward the moviegoer, who has to endure enough stale pseudo-shocks, empty atmospherics, explanatory mumbo-jumbo and personality-free acting that it's hard not to think of viewing Dark Summer as running-time served.

With no names given to the characters, you never have to remember them. But it's really best to forget about all of Amnesiac.

The self-serious POV visual style has none of Brian DePalma's cheeky, unnerving and self-implicating virtuosity — it just reinforces how sick and dumb this whole feel-bad exercise in misogyny and dimestore pathology is.

It's rare to find a movie protagonist who singularly fails on every count to be a compelling, sympathetic or even understandable figure.

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.

Occasionally Norm and everyone around him will break out into a dance, and you have to wonder if these numbers were scheduled as bathroom breaks.

Named as if it knew its destiny, The Disappointments Room brings together those horror movie standbys that just can’t quit each other — a creepy old home and a troubled family — for some truly convoluted, non-scary, and execrable psychological mishegoss surrounding a hidden chamber and the noxious historical shame it holds.

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.

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.

[Antoine Fuqua] gives in to terrible instincts here, flirting with overwrought patriotism, one too many laugh lines amid numerous characters being shot in the head, and a general chaos-inspired editing technique all too rampant in today's action cinema.

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

Inexplicably filmed in a handful of styles - including, bizarrely, obviously processed shots - by cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Passion Play would be midnight-movie fodder if it weren't so drearily wrapped up in its wounded-male aesthetic and a clumsy approach to art-movie moodiness that was abandoned in the '80s.

An entertainment-free sinkhole of Dramamine-worthy nonsense.

[A] slack, dumb prequel.

The repetitively fetishistic camera work and lunatic-asylum sound cues are meant to signify a nod to something psychological and pointed, but all it is is bilious, empty-calorie extremism, and it only ever drags you where you expect.

A thuddingly unfunny vigilante satire.

Assassin's Bullet is strictly '90s-era pay-cable genre-rip-off nostalgia, ripe for ridicule.

A childish slog of hero worship.

What galls is that for all the perspiration in jazzing up an old yarn, there's not a whiff of originality in how Wirkola engages with the perverse pleasures enshrined by the Grimm brothers, two of their era's shrewdest storytellers.

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.

Depending on what you need from horror like this – shock followed by relief, or a brutalization fix – Martyrs is bait-and-switch, or it’s a drawn-out tease that makes good. Either way, it’s a sop to vile tastes.

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.

Movies with no redeeming qualities are rare, but the execrable Found comes pretty close.

"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.

Abandoned Mine is all that its title promises: something generic and empty, with the sense that much has been left behind.

A near complete exercise in mirthlessness and atonal satire, Cellmates is a sentence, all right.

As horror, it's frightless and boring. As comedy, it's desperate and laughless. As exploitation, it's exceedingly dull. Even excrement was once something of substance. The Human Centipede III: Final Sequence is just rancid air. It too shall pass.

Not Cool is the Internet culture of artlessness, excess, empty popularity, whining and sex-fueled hatred writ large.

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

Cloying and smug when it's not being unfunny and crass, the high school reunion comedy Back in the Day hits lows with a frequency that suggests a world-class sharp shooter or free-throw king.

A thoroughly amateurish un-comedy about show business.

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.

I Melt With You assuredly marks itself as one of 2011's most ludicrous releases.

Six-year-olds at recess could come up with a wittier script and more charming performances, since they probably wouldn't be hampered by lame pop culture references, laziness disguised as parody, and gore disguised as slapstick.