Roger Moore

As a director, Roberts comes off as more of a producer. He can get a movie made, he’s just damned artless in making it.

This is a toothless satire, a sermon lacking the bite or broad wit of similar films.

Despite the locations and the informative narrative, almost every scene is missing that spark that would bring the characters to life and immediacy to the story.

Solo Mio is a mild-mannered comedy of the “Left at the Altar/Honeymoon Goes Wrong” school. It’s a little Runaway Bride, a lot of Honeymoon Crasher or Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but without any of the edge or many of the laughs of its predecessors.

A few cheap jolts is all director Tom Harper can manage in this minimal gloom.

But this clunky movie is more fun to play the “Wait, why?” game with than to actually watch.

Just about any other rendition of Dickens’ classic novella that you can hunt down is going to be better than this treacly humbug from Netflix.

The jeopardy is built-into the situation, but the frights feel low-stakes and simply don’t get the scary job done.

It’s an exceptionally good looking movie. But the performances have that hand-tied-behind-the-back quality that tales that operate by supernatural “rules” often exist under. Grace doesn’t get worked up, nor does anyone else, though Clarkson takes another run at “nasty” (check her out in “Sharp Objects”) and Mulvey is monstrous in that psychopathic way.

A cut-rate cast, green director and a script so bad it wouldn’t attract betters actors or directors is no way to rebuild public confidence in your business, or its “Netflix Original” movies.

There was a better movie in this story, this setting and this cast.

Here, he’s (Peña) bland, under-emoting in the face of terror and fronting a middling actioner that isn’t as thought-provoking as its creators expected, as surprising as they think it’s “twist” is and isn’t smart enough to get out of its own way.

The “battle of wits” is pretty one-sided. We end up investing in a slow-moving, low-heat thriller that never really comes to a boil.

For all the heists, chases and shoot-outs, it's a sluggish picture. Characters feel the need to stop the action to explain themselves. Thoroughly.

Cranking out two formulaic movies like this a year show the Atlanta mogul’s true ambition — replacing all those soap operas TV is canceling, two hours at a time.

The aliens are far more lifelike than they ever were in the Will Smith/Tommie Lee Jones “MIB” movies, but the shiny ray guns are as generic as ever and the shootouts surprisingly dull, if expensive looking.

Marsden is pretty much the only reminder of how campy and giddy this material once was and that the new film should have striven to be. Love him. Love Rudolph. Adore Amy Adams most of all. But Disenchanted plays like a contractual obligation, a paycheck, a nearly laughless show of loyalty to the folks who made you what you are.

It’s derivative, uneven, clumsy and absurdly sexist. But educators, stuck at home, will get a few laughs out of the differences and universalities of middle school, over here and over there.

Those Jackasses from "Jackass" aren't getting better, they're getting older.

The moment that first letter is opened and its trite, moony expressions of love and pointless (in a love letter) pages of exposition are narrated, the movie turns Sparks insipid.

It takes nothing away from the awful thing people who experience this go through in saying that movies about it all too often are all tropes that render it trite.

I won’t say it’s excruciating, but viewers of every age will be keenly aware of the passage of time and this colossal waste of it.

The score, by Alexis Maingaud, is horror strings on steroids and quite lovely. Director Andrew Desdmond and his production designer and cinematographer conjure up a properly spooky look and setting — overcast skies, dimly-lit chambers, a foggy forest. But the script delivers very little punch or pace to let that creepy vibe pay off.

Frozen, undercooked and sorely lacking much in the way of “all the trimmings,” this turkey isn’t ready to serve.

This dog never manages much more than a waddle.

Adds up to a lot of nothing at all. Nothing.

Outcast is what happens when stunt men direct. The fights are marvelously choreographed, the swordplay splendid and the bloody body count high in director Nicholas Powell’s Middle East/Far East quest tale. The script? Derivative, dim and dull. The performances? Not much, either.

A vintage Hill bit with a horse coming through glass doors and a couple of decent exchanges in an overall perfunctory big shootout finale arrive just in time to remind of us how great this filmmaker once was, and how sad it is that he has to hang up his spurs with Dead for a Dollar.

It’s all harmless, if almost charmless, rendered in different shades of “bland."

It’s more a time-killer than anything anybody, young or old, needs to see. But the animation’s quite good.

The entire affair feels malnourished, under-rehearsed and starved of energy.

Gold isn’t really bad. It’s just not enough to amount to anything, or anything much.

A thriller that misses the mark, and not by a little.

This is pretentious, chatty and maddeningly slow.

The overarching problem is pacing and dramatic tension.

None of the cast brings anything like genuine terror or urgency to the proceedings. Only Vincent D’Onofrio, making a third act appearance, acquits himself with honor.

The leads aren’t bad, but this script is fatally flawed and you’d hope they’d notice that before the camera rolls.

Christmas with the Campbells is a soft-and-squishy Christmas rom-com that tries ever-so-hard to be “edgy” when it oh-so-obviously isn’t.

The plot, for all its tried and true conventions, has eye-rolling leaps in logic and sort of lumbers between star cameos until we reach a far-fetched if generic conclusion.

CTRL is a slick and melodramatic Indian variation of the “runaway computer/evil AI” formula, a tale that begins jaunty and jokey and staggers into sinister in the most heavy-handed ways.

The Hunt is like sitting in a deer blind (Look it up, Hollywoodies) on the wrong corner of the pasture. Pointless.

The entire affair isn’t terrible, just a drag. Truth be told, they’ve taken this idea and pounded the cute right out of it. Time to put the pacifier in this boss baby and move on.

The sentiments and the story arc are perfectly supportable, the execution? Slow, slack, humorless and lifeless. The Outcasts stops dead in its tracks at the midway point and never recovers.

Hobo hits the screen as a grim, visually ugly, intermittently funny-occasionally preachy piece with only the estimable Mr. Hauer to recommend it.

The Feels is a slapdash lesbian entry in the field, a laugh-free roundup of seven friends for a bachelorette weekend in or around Healdsburg, in California’s Sonoma Valley wine country.

The stakes are higher, the cast has lost any pandemic-paunch/puffiness and everybody tries harder in Vacation Friends 2, which is something, I guess.

The lower-than-low stakes render this adaptation barely serviceable as a harmless kiddie time-killer. There’s just too little going on, and dance numbers with middling choreography and chattering digital critters don’t change that.

Until Lee finds himself a story editor and a more literate, genre-savvy group of readers to workshop his screenplays, until he figures out that hitching his wagon to a star who is more “available” than charismatic, these films are never going to hide their malnourished, rushed origins.

It’s altogether ridiculous, made all the sadder because we’ve seen this ridiculousness before.

"The War of the Rohirrim” is narrated to death because it has to be, otherwise it would be impossible to follow. And it’s dull and simplistic as narrative, more of a “comic book” take on Tolkien than an actual adaptation of anything Tolkien would have allowed to be published.

An indie comedy whose primary virtue is its cast, well-known actors who took small roles on a lark — a chance to play against “type.”

The Void devolves into a creature feature.

Visuals tell the “stories,” but not in any sort of brisk, engaging way. It’s a ponderous, dated and obscure male wish-fulfillment fantasy — women as objects in the sexual service of men, the ultimate “girl’s locker room” scene, assorted lesbian moments designed to titillate.

Jenkins is one of my favorite actors, but this strikes me as one he should have passed on. McGhie comes off better, but his character’s background is sloppily sketched-in.

I found this a perfectly handsome and literarily defensible mounting of a well-known tale that was far and away the most bloodless version of it. Ever.

Writer-director Christopher Landon is better at calling for cute camera angles and 360 degree pans and plotting — silly and farfetched as it is — than he is at jokes and zingers, which made the first film stand out.

Paul Weitz ("Cirque du Freak," "American Dreamz") takes over as director, and the film shows all the signs of re-shoots and re-edits designed to bring in more characters and perhaps find a few more laughs.

A workmanlike “true crime” thriller.

A couple of random laughs die of loneliness here. None of the romances are developed and have time to register, much less click. And here’s Dugan, squinting at the cue cards, energetically serving up the awful double-entendres as host of a show no one would watch unless creepy grandpa the host was a LOT creepier and funnier.

An Acceptable Risk is “Scandal” with less sex and fewer fireworks. Almost no fireworks, to be honest.

There’s paranoia and airborne suspense, tension and personal, in-your-face violence. But it’s glib as all get out, dumb when it isn’t being glib and not nearly as much fun as Gibson seems to think he’s made it out to be.

Great villains make good thrillers, Hitchcock said. But he had the good sense to cast empathetic and talented movie stars as his heroes and heroines, too.

The entire enterprise reeks not just of “privilege,” but of shallow, self-indulgent narcissistic entitlement.

About the best one can say about “TG2” is that in addition to never surprising and never moving us emotionally, it never offends.

Forget the logical lapses and the many ways Grant tries to differentiate the many Madelines. It just doesn’t play — not as funny, not as horrific and funny.

Films fail for a lot of reasons, almost all of them behind the camera — weak script, lackluster direction, poor pacing, etc. But every now and then, miscasting or an out-of-her-depth lead performance also takes some of the blame. Bailey isn’t up to carrying this off.

There’s little coherence to its style and subtexts even if its plot is penny plain.

Skin Trade, a project Lundgren co-wrote and has been trying to film for years, feels so dated and over-familiar that “half-decent” always seems just out of reach.

There’s just not enough heart or story to make up the shortfall that the viewer feels, first scene to last.

Hopkins makes an interesting, confused and increasingly dubious victim/hero/survivor. But the whole doesn’t answer any questions, not that it asks any interesting ones in the first place.

If Fuqua & Co. had taken a more askance view of this quintessentially goofy concept, they might have gotten an “Edge of Tomorrow” out of it, with Wahlberg and Ejiofor in on the joke. They didn’t, opting for “gonzo nonsense” that’s as watchable as it is forgettable.

So many movies about Mary Shelley and the writing of “Frankenstein,” and yet there’s always room for another bad one.

Nice period detail, a few cute situations, one half-interesting character and three laughs, that’s the pickle this picture puts itself in.

The film’s stumbling unoriginality, cliched characters and intended jokes that land like flops from a constipated greenhouse gassy cow, however earn every ounce of ire I can summon.

It is as slow, slick and superficial as the director of “21″ and “Killers” can make it.

The cast does what it can with the material, but their big speeches rarely add up to a “big moment.”

For a 76 minute thriller, it wastes a helluva lot of time.

This cut-and-paste cliche collection could have been written by a machine.

As with any movie, this kids' film is only as good as its writing - the jokes, the cute bits, the heart. And that's where Alpha and Omega comes up short.

Desperation loses out to resignation in The Lovebirds, a flailing couple-on-the-lam comedy that pairs up Issa Rae and Kumail Nanjiani, with indifferent results.

The cast is game, but plainly not in a position to add laughs to a script that feels more workshop-ready than “locked.”

Unlike “The Matrix,” there’s too little to hang onto thanks to a flimsy story that dives into future-tech and glib heaven-or-hell discourses, and characters who keep us at arm’s length.

So yes, there’s the whiff of Stephen King’s story “The Body” to this, with emotional BFF bonding and the like. But barely a note of this contrived, Nutrasweetened melodrama engages, even on those rare instances in which something rings true.

It’s never wholly fair to dismiss a movie just because it’s unpleasant to sit through. But that’s a good place to start with We Need to Do Something.

“January release” or not, it’s still a shame that all this talent, an epic fight in a fish market and some cool shootouts and chases were wasted this way.

What we’re left with is a fumbling, groping and almost wholly-unsatisfying thriller set in a towering old house near the water’s edge, where the wind howls and there’s a shock, fright or laugh behind every tree.

For a “sweet nothing” of a movie, you kind of wish “nothing” wasn’t the most accurate description.

"The Fire Saga Story” has barely enough sparks for a sketch, much less a “saga.”

It’s harmless enough. Still, the only reason to watch it is if you and/or the kids need to brush up on your Spanish.

When your set pieces fail to surprise, your dialogue fails to deliver even one decent one-liner and your villain looks like he’s dealing with dysentery on location, maybe 17-18 years isn’t long enough between reboots.

It’s lovely to look at. But that leaden, endless time-suck of an opening act is a fatal flaw that “Kingdom” never overcomes. And two and a half hours is a helluva long time to take to get to a point, not that they ever do.

The O’Hair virtues depicted here are that she was brave, defiant and when the need arose, articulate. And if history has taught us nothing, it’s that she was ahead of her times and probably right most of the time. One has to see through a pretty ugly movie to glean that, though. This is an ugly portrait, perhaps unfairly so.

By the time we reach the third act, which is where the trial we’ve been teased plays out (at great, boring length), The Citizen has exhausted its supply of immigration cliches and our patience.

Rondini does her best to give the picture “local color” — an octopus fished out of Homer’s “wine dark sea,” a town square that feels utterly Mediterranean. But there’s not enough “color,” jokes, romance, surprises or incidents — just the occasional accident — to animate this still-life.

There’s a lot here anybody who’s had a comparative religion course will recognize — a plea for selflessness, self-reflection, non-violence and being considerate of others. But what makes The Divine Protector flirt with being campy fun is the scary lady’s walk-on music.

The shifts in tone, stakes and genre are abrupt and so clumsily-handled you’re allowed to wonder “What just happened?” And the heist is such a non-starter as to leave one at a loss as to what the Oscar winning actor, one of my favorites, ever saw in this.

This script, this leaden direction ensures that even as the teen wish-fulfillment fantasy, complete with young women playing dress-up, Monte Carlo fails.

King’s Man doesn’t send up the tragic comedy of the start of The Great War, doesn’t rewrite history in any particularly interesting, illuminating or entertaining way. It just gets stuck in the mud, like the millions whose lives were squandered in it.

The resolution to this puzzle is so botched it’s insulting, as if they’re daring us to laugh at the notion that this is merely “the beginning.”

Everything about this movie feels familiar, like we’ve seen it multiple times before, not necessarily always starring Gerry Butler. Yes he’s a credible, charismatic action star who always delivers the goods, even in middling fare like this.

The viewer is both miles ahead of the characters in guessing where this is going, and befuddled at the clumsy ways it gets there, or avoids letting us think we know how it’s getting there.

There’s a lighter, funnier, sexier movie in this material. But it was probably the one already made in Argentina, without the cool dance numbers.

Any 100 minute movie with 40 minutes of story, one that blows the romance pretty much entirely and takes a dive in its big moment, is something even teens will outgrow before the closing credits.

The performances are uneven, with a few players having experience on obscure, equally malnourished and overreaching indie film sets, and others outright amateurs. There are continuity errors, with shots not quite matching up.

When “Covenant” is not head-slappingly obvious and perfunctory, it’s just laugh-out-loud ludicrous.

Falcone’s latest, Life of the Party, is death itself...There’s nobody there to push her, nobody on set with the power and emotional remove to tell McCarthy that they need another take, they need funnier lines, or that her halting line-readings do no make the unfunny script funny.

Neeson is the rock anchoring all this, making the incredible at least passably credible as he lurches into the frame with his limping boxer’s gait. But you get the sense that he is no more “Taken” with this than we are.

God help me, I laughed a few times. And God bless Foxx for luring Cameron Diaz back on screen, and for his recovery. They’re damned cute together, even if their movie isn’t all that in concept, writing and any scene that involves “inaction.”

It’s a goof that isn’t goofy enough, a romp that doesn’t, and a tone-deaf riff on a show that was already a parody, in and of itself.

Boseman carries himself with confidence in every role, but the rat hole this picture twists into must have left even him shaken.

A Million Little Pieces is little more than a million little melodrama rehab cliches.

The acting isn’t bad, but like the fight choreography, it’s of uneven quality.

Walker has few “big” scenes, no memorable dialogue and plays up the exhaustion, which tamps down the emotions of his performance. So even an action packed finale can’t rescue this dramatically thin exercise in one-man showmanship.

In that climate, the desultory 6 Days can be appreciated for at least having the guts to show us what can go wrong.

The tamest movie ever made about dabbling in LSD and Riot Grrrl culture has to be Acid Test, a non-prescription sleep aid of a movie.

You can see, hear and feel the strain in the Brazilian comedy “Cheers to Life (Vida a Vida),” the great effort expended to achieve “cute.”

Does all that add up to a movie? Not for anybody over oh, six. It’s not awful, and as I said, the conceit is a good building block for a film. Just not this one.

Autumn Lights has a hint of Ingmar Bergman about it in intent, setting and title (he made “Autumn Sonata”). But in execution, we can’t tell if this was meant to be an homage or a parody.

There’s nothing here but a cute kid finding another cute kid and considering a romance while she waits for that DNA test, or her mother, to come back.

No More Bets is a heavy-handed Chinese thriller about the evils of gambling, the perils of emigrating and the righteousness of Chinese policing as it pertains to international online scamming conspiracies.

For all the seriousness of the subtexts Three Birthdays feels shallow, lightweight and less serious than it should, with a cast “acting as” rather than inhabiting characters from that strangest setting of all — the distant-enough but not-terribly-distant past.

Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway is a curiously perfunctory affair, a laughless comedy based on the Beatrix Potter animal darlings of scores of dainty little books created when the world was less cynical.

It’s the dullest movie about Tinseltown in decades, an irritating film full of irritating turns.

Aquaman has that usual DC bloat about it, too much attempted, a movie not trimmed (in the script stage) into its best, most coherent story, sharpest jokes and most important confrontations.

The Choice is another endless, nearly-sinless-in-the-sun Sparks melodrama, one that benefits from a couple of charming leads and some folksy, down home humor. But that title frames it in tragedy. And that “choice” leaves this tepid romance mired in the maudlin.

Whatever potential it had, the film just isn’t very good, with or without fact checking.

There are enough fun bits here to stream The Gray Man, maybe as background noise, only worth your attention now and again. And there are so very many head-slapping moments that one can’t help but think, “It must be time to pause (or cancel) Netflix again.”

Veteran second unit director Vaughn Stein (“World War Z,” “Sherlock Holmes”) had access to talent and to people who could finance a film, and proves adept at managing a cohesive, distinct look and feel. But his inept story and fumbling efforts to connect the disparate threads of a tale no one cares about make his actors look bad.

Cop Out is still funnier than the dreadful later Eddie Murphy cop pictures. But it feels like an homage to a period best forgotten.

It’s still a mess of a movie, with no flow to its long, meandering narrative (I see why they chopped it, but they should have done a better job of it.). And “Man of God” never wants to let us connect with a character we’d root for.

Director and co-writer Jérémie Guez shows more flashes of competence than inspiration here. His film is slow and clunky, beginning with promise, ending with the last of a string of third act let-downs.

The Erik Patterson and Jessica Scott script is laughably generic, and even the potentially alarming moments are given a cut-rate handling by director Spencer Squire, who hopefully resented the fact that the production didn’t even have money for spectral effects.

The performances are semi-serious, at best, and longtime producer turned director/co-writer Steve Barnett’s first feature directing job staggers right up to the DMZ between awful and “OK, at least that’s over with.”

It’s the very embodiment of The Wrong Stuff.

The virtues of God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness, are few. So let’s get them out of the way right out of the gate. It’s replaced the generally hostile, defensive and political tone of the first two films with a veneer of “We have to learn to get along.” It’s still toxic, only less so.

Whatever “charms” it reached for vanish for the attempted over-the-top finale, which left me cold and didn’t come close to making the sale about the “Embrace your inner rage” spin this is allegedly about.

Dancing Queens kind of has it all. And by “all” I mean nothing much.

Its few novel touches aren’t enough to lift Aaron’s Blood into the realm of vampire-movie-worth-seeing.

Almost Cops winds up as almost a buddy comedy, and certainly not one that works.

There’s barely a hint of fun and nary a drop of pathos in any of this.

This stuff doesn’t write itself, but it does seem as if Perry’s put the whole enterprise on autopilot, and his supporting “family” can’t riff or improvise much that’s funny into the worn out formula.

It’s a gritty and lowdown “showcase” in slumming, an attempt at a sort of Riley Keough re-invention for the well-heeled/married-well “Bates Motel” alumna.

And nothing in this raunchy romp through excess registers or delivers a laugh. Shore is still annoying, but funny never figures into it.

There are laughs aplenty in the dialogue, which has several characters spout nonsensical lines — “You told me the title was clear.”

It’s a boorish “sex” comedy without a line or situation that amuses, an all-star all-in-one-house holiday romp that never romps and a Britcom-ish farce that would never make it to British TV, even boiled down to a half hour of its “best” bits.

What a waste of a half-interesting idea, and of Ireland as a location.

Some of the effects are OK, and the night shots around the lake show some sophistication. But the script is utter crap, the performances pro forma and the “threat” even sillier, if bloodier, than it was last time around.

Whatever Agladze was getting at about the difference between sight and “seeing,” plumbing the obscurant Other Me to discern it isn’t worth the trouble.

Hardy, perfecting the “meek” American shlub “type” he tackled in “The Drop” years ago, soldiers through this and has as much fun with the synthesized voice of Venom as he can.

A bit of action mayhem at the midway mark plays. Brosnan and Barkin are as amusing as the script allows them to be and Devine works himself up to “maybe I don’t need to gouge my eyes/ears out every time he appears.”

There’s a generous sampling of horror “mystery” cliches in this script, plenty of this or that death/disappearance “doesn’t make any sense.”

“Jane the Virgin” alumna Rodriguez has the timing and bubbly energy to make her character tolerable in a slick movie that’s unoriginal, trite and cliched. She gives it her all, but this was never more than a feeble excuse for a Valentine’s Day romantic comedy.

The script is a cut-and-paste job — lazy plotting, dull dialogue, no twists at all.

It’s a movie of pointless scenes.

Office Invasion, an English-language romp, wouldn’t romp in any language.

As a “faith-based” film spoof, this one is basically a 90 minute swing-and-a-miss.

Throughout Death of a Nation, which has the usual attacks on Clintons and George Soros and the third act “patriotic performances by D’Souza approved singers, even an African American choir, the man finds himself coddling Nazis.

Dullness “Incarnate,” in other words.

None of the care taken with the visuals and potential poster shots of all the over-styled “stars” trickled down to the screenplay, with only the occasional snappy come-back making us forget the lack of a plot, logic, character motivation (in most cases) or sense that any of this means a damned thing.

Aimed at kids who’ll giggle at the adorably retro robots and snicker at the profanity, “Electric State” creates cringes you didn’t know you’d cringe about.

Don’t Sleep is heartless, fright-free and, yes — sleep-inducing.

Hangman is ridiculous from the start.

The action is wan, the laughs hard to come by.

There’s no subtext to any of this, no commentary on culture, society or politics, government, anti-vax cranks or human failings. And thanks to Viktor Csák and Krisztián Illés, who scripted this, there’s not much of a “text” either.

The fights are OK, the shootouts nothing to remember, the chases are passable and the killings themselves perfunctory.

The more voice-over narration that winds through the soundtrack, the more I hated this facile, lazy exercise in excess.

It’s a joyless relaunch/re-imaging.

Between Worlds is a down and dirty supernatural thriller with the faintest veneer of substance covering the sordid.

It’s a film of limp police procedures — stake outs that aren’t really clandestine, generic prison scenes, interrogations by underlines that suggest the leading players weren’t available on set for the entire day.

There’s a fascinating satire of America’s unholy alliance of heartless corporations and the religious dupes who worship them just sitting here. But it’ll take a wit far cleverer than action hack Paul W.S. Anderson to work that out.

The Giant is a colossal waste of time, 100 minutes of underlit scenes filled with (mostly) high school characters whispering every single profundity that writer/director David Raboy can think of putting in their mouths in a story that never engages us or even tries to.

There isn’t a laugh or light moment in this unwieldy beast of a movie. As a political allegory, it doesn’t play. As Marvel action pic, it’s sorely lacking. At least they spared no expense in the cherry blossoms dept.

The cast is game, which always counts for something. It wasn’t a hard movie to watch, as blandly predictable as it is

It’s a road trip romance that doesn’t so much charmingly play out as dully pass by through a VW camper’s windows.

The worst movie of the summer, arriving on the last weekend of the summer.

These days, Adam Sandler is a bottle of beer that’s lost all its bubbles — cheap, mass produced domestic beer. So let’s focus on what works in his latest, Blended, because he sure doesn’t.

Zero to Hero barely gets past “zero” and never comes close to “hero.”

With no real suspense and little empathy, Friend Request devolves into your standard horror cast-killer time-killer. There are more frights in the trailers for upcoming Halloween horror films preceding this — “Jigsaw” and “Happy Death Day” among them.

Apache Junction is another static, artless and pokey Western with an aimless, scattershot script, a few horses, a little gunplay and nothing that does any credit to the acting profession. At all.

A movie with dull leads, scripted by a veteran of second tier sitcoms and helmed by an even less promising director, it started life flavorless and nobody added even a hint of spice along the way.

Suffice it to say, every clumsy bit of mugging, every tin-eared line, every new scene is its own reason to groan.

Ponderously telling some parts of its sketch-of-a-story from multiple points of view, it’s an excruciating exercise in self-indulgence, packed with flashbacks and those big speeches/big scenes that draw names like Oscar winner Jeff Bridges, Dakota Johnson and Jon Hamm to its cast. It adds up to nothing more than two hours and 21 minutes of tedium, with the odd spasm of violence, back-story or musical interlude.

Big moments drown in a soundmix of sappy muzak. Good actors are wasted, left and right. Classic Montiel.

Movies that dabble in homelessness, even movies about cute filmmakers who want to film and flirt with the homeless, require more commitment than this. No number of scenes featuring a nubile nude can countermand that.

There are maybe 20 minutes worth of jokes, sight-gags, slapstick bits and innuendo in those 85 minutes.

Alfre Woodard, Diane Keaton, Eugene Levy, Kathy Bates and Dennis Haysbert burn through some of their supply of good will on “Summer Camp,” an all-star comedy with AARP casting appeal and nothing else going for it.

Worst of all is this 85-minute-story-in-a-two-hour-movie’s lack of urgency.

It’s a case study in the difference between smart writing with pathos and wit, and witless imitation, between “barely adequate” child actors and ones with charisma that the camera catches.

Endless, dizzying 360 degree pans, hand-held on-his-way-to-the-stage snippets and jolting, beads-of-sweat/strings-of-spit closeups and a cranked up score can’t hide the vacuity of it all.

Freeman has a few moments, and Hauser has aged into a fine dad-bodied man-of-action. It’s a pity they’re stuck in messes like this, without even an on-location Roman vacation to show for it.

The choreography is elaborate, but gives itself away, lower level pro wrestling style. They’re not fights, they’re half-speed dances with big sweeping kicks and punches ducked in close-up. So that we can see, you know, how fake it all is.

There are few things worse than disguises that don’t amuse, bungled arrests that don’t amount to much more than a forced smile and cricket jokes that, to use a baseball analogy, are never more than “a swing and a miss.”

Gibson shows up just to add a splash of color and swagger to what seems like an endless wait between action beats.

It all adds up to tinselled treacle, inoffensive enough to be shown at Christmas Eve church services, but barely tolerable — dramatically and aesthetically — in any other setting.

The Hellboy reboot is a a fecal matter weather event film fiasco, a gory ill-conceived debacle that drives a stake through the heart of the franchise, no matter how many post-credits “teases” the producers tack on.

Director Darrell Roodt does nothing to build suspense and little to build empathy for the character.

Bruce Willis, looking decrepit and acting like he gave his last damn a dozen years ago, stars in what plays like an old man’s movie for angry, emasculated and frightened old men.

What a dreadful bore The Sleep Experiment turns out to be.

Isn’t scary and isn’t worth the nearly two hours it eats up.

There’s just nothing here. Even as comfort food for true believers, Overcomer cannot overcome its myriad shortcomings.

Warhunt is never wholly incompetent, never “so bad it’s good” or anything of the sort. Even by the lowered standards of “a C-movie starring Mickey Rourke,” it’s never more than a waste of 90 minutes

Fronteras is a stunningly stupid, talky, meandering Border Patrol thriller.

“Last Blood?” Let’s hope so.

Relationship Goals is as generic as a self-help book cover, and doomed to be forgotten as quickly as the book it’s based on will be.

As Accused wallows deeper and deeper into melodrama, with one-note performances almost making every character a caricature, the inescapable conclusion one leaps to is that this film’s late-to-the-game subject matter and quaint treatment of it was made by some seriously unsophisticated filmmakers.

I laughed a few times, but this pile of cluttered, poorly organized exposition interrupted by CGI brawls isn’t going to headline screenwriter Jeremy Slater’s resume.

A musical mashup of Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis biography and myth, The Identical plays like a failed faith-based “Inside Llewyn Davis.” And that’s the closest thing to a compliment it will get.

Netflix wasted a lot of Polish Zlotys on a terrible movie that had apparently no one in the U.S. company bothered to read and approve, or even have translated so that they could see and hear how bad it was doomed to be.

A humorless mashup of "White Chicks" and "Glee."

Good production values and a solid supporting cast don’t hide the fact that it’s a tepid thriller that barely works up a decent fright or two.

The best you can say about this hooey is that at least he had the King of the Bs, Ron Perlman, along for a few sidekick laughs.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime fiasco, an epic fail like none we have seen this year, a bad idea by a very bad director and a career-crippling credit for all concerned. You don't want to miss it.

A Father’s Miracle is so corny and klunky that one wonders if any of the other versions have been the least bit believable. We know they were crowd pleasers, and this one might have an audience, too. One wonders just who might buy into something so tooth-achingly sweet yet darkly dopey at the same time.

The acting isn’t awful and the production values are passable. McDonough makes a much better villain than anybody shoved into that sort of role here. This is an origin story that lacks anything in the way of a “hook” to whet the viewer ‘s appetite for a series. Even the “Christianity” angle is soft-peddled.

Maybe it’s just the gruesome, excruciating detail of the dismemberments, with an illogically sick “love story” glibly grafted on it, but this thing seems to go on forever. Again, not my genre. I thought it was dead, and in the #MeToo era, it ought to be.

Director Vaughn Stein takes forever to get this movie on its feet, and the slower he goes, the more Collins stands out as inadequate as his lead.

Tedious courtroom scenes, flat acting, sermonizing speeches, under-explained “explanations” of the technology needed — nobody is likely to stick with this to the end.

Inane snippets of conversation, an over-sharing reverie by a French-American (male) nurse, brittle, off-putting and stiff performances seemingly molded from single-use plastic, a story that goes nowhere and does so at an excruciating pace — Elyse is a quiet, shiny and empty catastrophe.

The first act is mythic and mysterious enough to lure us in, before the cannibals show up, the implausibilities pile up and the holes in the plot turn out to be a lot bigger than anything a katana sword would make.

The acting is wildly uneven here, with some players either amatuerish or uncomfortable enough acting in English as to stand apart from the rest.

The car and foot chases sparkle, even if the blur of edits undercut every other action beat, never letting the eye settle on an actor, an action or an emotion.

With Halloween II, Zombie shows conclusively that he's not interested in growing, getting better or ever becoming an original. He's just a hack with a made-up name, a cult following and a wife who can't act.

“Wolf Creek” director Greg McLean efficiently runs through the deaths, but where’s the terror, puzzle-solving logic or anything else to hold our interest? It’s just unpleasant, nothing more.

Time and again, the screenwriters and director give us a hint that “reality” doesn’t figure into this school or its Shakespeare-quoting/street bike wheely-popping coeds, and that maybe they don’t know how steroids work and how long it takes for “roid rage” to kick in either.

The Perfect Family is so tone-deaf and wrong-footed that you’d feel annoyed at the filmmakers, if you weren’t already busy pitying them.

After a couple of opening shoot-outs, this straight-up C-movie — directed by Jon Keeyes, scripted by Matthew Rogers — flops into lots and lots of cliche-riddled conversation, some time line stumbles (“Five years earlier,” or is it?) and finishes with a whole lot of gunfire, most of it by The Character Who Never Reloads.

Filmmakers Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon pound their points home like Madison Avenue vets, worried if they don’t use a ham for a cudgel, their audience might miss the point.

Darkness Falls fails all up and down the line.

It’s a staged reading of a horror movie, not a compelling, chilling or even that interesting thriller.

Hellfire is exactly the sort of movie you’d expect Dolph Lundgren to wind down his career with. Keitel and Lang deserve better.

Lacking that skepticism, with filmmakers hellbent on creating something “sensational” (meh) that fellow believers will want to see, “The House in Between” is never more than an endlessly-hyped collection “Didjoo SEE that? (We see nothing), “Hear THAT?” (maybe a thumb) moments.

When the surprises aren’t very surprising except in ways that betray the picture’s tone and every illogical thing we can’t help but notice gives away those surprises, the only conclusion is that this “Astronaut” doesn’t have the right stuff even if Mara does.

365 Days is slick, shiny and insanely silly softcore, with a situation that beggars belief at most every turn.

It's a humorless movie of morphing zombies (they take on beastly attributes), phoned-in performances and trite dialogue.

Realistic mid-life concerns and life reassessments earn a drab and generally colorless going over in Blue Eyed Girl, a dramedy with little real drama and even less comedy.

Black Christmas has a female empowerment “woke/revenge” subtext, making it a slap in the face to the “torture porn” decade of horror. Sorority girls, hunted on a college campus where this sort of thing may have been going on through time immemorial, turn the tables on their tormentors...Great...If only they’d get around to that a tad earlier. But no, we’ve got to have an hour of summary slaughter, a collection of the dullest, least sympathetic and most poorly set-up murders in the history of Dead Teenager Movies.

Stay through the charming closing credits — the only place “charm” figures into this — to see who Hayes is.

While one doffs one’s (not coonskin) hat at anyone trying to make a frontier thriller on an indie budget, this “Ballad” borders on abominable.

Every wrinkle in the plot is nakedly contrived, an obvious screenplay convenience. Every gag is given away. Every one-liner vanishes into the void. Kids may love projectile poop gags, but even they should be able to smell the odor Playing with Fire puts out there.

It’s not convincing, not impressive, and after “Jumanji,” Johnson’s agents will probably never let him within a city block of Brad Peyton.

As pretty as everything and everyone are in this vapid film, there’s nothing to disentangle here, no empathetic performance to cling no matter what sympathies we bring to someone going through this.

This isn’t a bad cast, but Confession is a bad script. The “twists” barely merit that label, the story leading up to those twists barely holds one’s interest. The entire affair is contrived and melodramatic in the extreme.

The script is slapdash and daft, and not in a good way. And you almost feel sorry for Swardson being forced to carry it and set the “teabagging” tone. But the viewer is the victim here.

The best you can say about this Yogi Bear is that he's harmless. No animal was harmed in the making of this picture except the one Hanna-Barbera made a bundle on almost 50 years ago.

It’s just that mutual admirers Adam Carolla and Dennis Prager, two smug, smirking jerks having a conservative ‘free speech” circle smirk, aren’t the guys to host such a debate and give it a high-minded fair hearing in this most divisive of eras.

The situation has suspense built into it, but there is none. The premise is predicated on urgency. We never feel it.

Curse of Downer’s Grove is so awful it’s no fair to lay it all at the feet of the co-writer, who didn’t direct or cast this disaster, after all.

Skyline plays like an effects guru's resume reel, not a movie.

This is tedium itself.

It's an ugly movie to look at and a faintly nauseating one to sit through, truth be told.

It’s misshapen and clumsy, start to finish.

File Natty Knocks under that broad horror film rubric “I’ve seen worse.”

These movies are rarely much more than background noise for holiday decorating/entertaining/cooking, or TV babysitting for parents trying to manage all that grownup stuff. Candy Cane Lane doesn’t offer much even for those being baby-sat, either.

What a bowser.

By the time the credits roll, it’s succeeded in creating zero interest in investing any more time in this universe or this story.

I love the genre and appreciate any effort in this cinematic field. But you’ve got to do something with the cliches, realize what you can cut out (83 minutes of movie in a two-hour+ picture?), figure out what you can show visually instead of having characters explain and for the Love of God don’t cut to an extra falling three feet when we’ve just seen him tumble off a ten foot wall.

The plot is cut-and-pasted from a thousand better thrillers, only dumber, with scenes that serve zero purpose and jokes nobody would find funny.

The lack of urgency lowers the stakes, and the “explanations” are less interesting than the mystery they purport to “solve.” The performances never rise above adequate into compelling territory. But at least the setting is a dazzler.

Double Down South is a languid, drawling bore that’s about as interesting as the games that are its centerpiece.

The killings aren’t particularly gripping, there’s little suspense in the earliest ones and the menace is pretty watered down for much of the movie.

Because we know this screenplay is going to tell us a lot more “why” than we need to know or care to know. And that’s a sign they didn’t pay attention to more important things, like scripting more interesting characters, more terrifying situations and pithier lines, or getting the actors to buy in and give the viewer something to grab hold of.

The cut-and-paste writing and lackluster direction are the main failings. There’s little to this that you’d call a “story,” even less “story” that makes sense.

The Secret Between Us is a static, turgid and low-stakes tale about lives disrupted by “secrets” plural, any and all of which have been potboiled to death on daytime soap operas going back decades.

This Dinner with Vampires is a few courses short of being a meal.

Stalker is a ridiculously-chatty bore of a thriller, a stunning waste of viewing time about an actress and a second unit photographer stuck in an elevator.

Cars 3 surpasses “Monster University” as the dullest, dimmest Pixar movie ever.

What all involved, including cinematographer-turned-director Pasha Patriki, settle for is easier, dumber and far less interesting, a movie that lives down to its vague, murky title with endless shootouts through sets that don’t remotely resemble what this prison is supposed to be.

When any of these movies get to the sequel stage, original thought goes out the window and it’s all about the colorful, clever ways they find to stick a knife into a B-list actor or actress. “Prey at Night” can’t even manage that.

It’s a Wonderful Knife doesn’t just slash through our expectations about what we’re going to see. It stumbles in managing the basics, starting with “Must make some kind of sense, surreal or otherwise.

A throw-away movie, and an utter waste of time, another make-work project for Sandler’s less and less funny stable of pals.

About 70 minutes of this 92 minute comedy is a pretty good actress (Nascimento starred in “A Wolf at the Door”) cussing out the influencer, her “misogynistic idiot” boss, her best friend (Patricia Ramos) and on down the line.

Nostalgia only gets you so far, and whatever “feels” folks cling to from the original “upset the uptight golf world” original, it’s not enough to float this bloated corpse of a comedy.

The foreshadowing is too too obvious, the assorted set pieces have no punch and little logic.

It isn’t all that much fun. The odd chuckle doesn’t atone for the scads of laughs that just don’t land in a story that spins its wheels on the snowy streets of NYC. Except when the crooks drive a Rivian.

It’s borderline abusive in the way it wastes screen time and the viewer’s time.

The few laughs kind of die of loneliness, in what is allegedly a children’s animated comedy. And without laughs, all this ill-conceived animated replacement for one of the most infamous live-action flops of the ’90s has to offer is nostalgia for a simple game of a simpler time. The eight-and-unders this is aimed at are way too young to get that.

There’s just nothing to this — nothing funny, at least. It’s too long...has some bizarre violence...and is built around another inept-and-doesn’t-care-that-he-is turn by Sandler.

It’s just something some gullible, poorly-read studio exec heard and thought, “I think I’ll spend Jeff Bezos’s millions on THAT.” The fool.

D’Souza, naif to American history that he is, could have done a real service instead of being another right wing Pied Piper leading the lemmings off a cliff. He could have asked “What happened to Our/My Republican Party?” and giving blunt, truth-spoken-to-power answers. He’d rather trash the America that GOP policies in large part created.

All the Devil’s Men kills off its most interesting character too soon and traipses past story beats so familiar that taking notes on the film (as I always do) seems superfluous. It’s not a good B-actioner. It’s routine in the extreme.