Sara Stewart

Most damning of all, the dark mystery hinted at throughout is revealed so lazily it lands with zero impact. It’s long been clear that Cage has opted for quantity in his movie roles, but maybe a little quality control wouldn’t hurt.

There is a limit to the redemption Nicolas Cage can grant a terrible movie, and Primal is it.

It’s clear why this indie was shelved for so long: It’s a mess.

In reality, it’s a tiresome parade of gory and sexist cliches that are, frankly, insulting to a cast that includes Laurence Fishburne, Barry Pepper, Adam Goldberg, Leslie Bibb and Clifton Collins Jr.

This is the kind of movie that gives art-house movies a bad name. Seeing as it’s about lobotomies in the 1950s, it is also ripe for “ice-pick- through-the-eye” jokes about the pain of watching it. But I would never stoop so low.

Even with a title this generic, there’s less to Murder Mystery than meets the eye.

Domino, though, is the dregs: This thriller may be randomly set one year in the future, yet it’s hopelessly regressive — a parade of lame stereotypes that feels directed by an out-of-touch Old Hollywood old guy (De Palma is 78).

The movie’s one saving grace — so to speak — is Raymond Cruz (Tuco from “Better Call Saul”) as a priest turned shaman. He, at least, injects a little wry humor into a film that otherwise bored me to tears.

There isn’t a moment of I’m Not Here that didn’t have me fervently wishing I wasn’t here.

If you’re looking for a poverty-porn fix, Donnybrook ought to hit the spot. If not, you’ll likely find this a pointless exercise in gratuitous violence that imagines itself deep because it’s got an opera-heavy score.

The film tries to be clever by going meta: Once again, it’s rooted in Mr. Glass’ conviction that superheroes are real, and it repeatedly name-checks comic-book tropes that are reflected, languidly, in the movie’s own plot. But in the end, all it really reveals is a onetime visionary’s glass now half — no, let’s go with mostly — empty.

Most of Mortal Engines is a wearying blast of CGI and genre-cribbing (most egregiously, director Christian Rivers hired composer Junkie XL to seemingly lift, wholesale, his soundtrack from “Mad Max: Fury Road”).

There’s no better time than summer for a fun, brainless thriller. All you need is three key ingredients: a charismatic hero, a hateable villain and a snappy screenplay...Skyscraper, regrettably, cuts likable star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson off at the knees by failing to deliver on the other two.

With seemingly no understanding of how tone-deaf it might be to cast a straight, white, able-bodied blonde like Schumer as victimized by society’s judgment, the lazily written I Feel Pretty takes a talented comic and casts her in the worst possible light (and I don’t mean that literally — she looks fine).

“Do you know how long it takes to peel the skin from a human body?” a torture-happy Russian goon asks in Red Sparrow. I imagine it feels about as long as sitting through this atrocious spy thriller.

Compelling drama it is not.

It’s macho eye-candy of the cheapest kind, endless scenes of gunfire and explosions and rugged, handsome actors running while shooting and yelling.

Justice League is a pointless flail of expensive (yet, somehow, cheap-looking) CGI that no amount of tacked-on quips, or even Gadot’s luminescent star power, can rescue.

This adaptation is so sloggy it feels like wading through thigh-deep snowfall, stained scarlet from all the gratuitous gore.

Given its obvious parallels with modern-day events, it’s a shame Felt’s ensuing story is so wanly told.

Interspersed with the gore is banter between the leads, who fall into a predictable odd-couple pairing of fussy (Reynolds) and gonzo (Jackson). Their rapport is amusing, but entirely, clumsily incongruous with the thuggish mayhem all around them.

If you’re going to call your sci-fi movie Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, you’d better be sure Valerian (Dane DeHaan) is a guy your audience can get behind. Director Luc Besson styles him as a cocky space rogue, but Valerian is weak sauce. And so is this movie.

It’s a little less cute these days to watch his Jack Sparrow swish about drunkenly, knowing the actor’s an abusive lush. Equally wearisome is the spectacle of a once-entertaining franchise staggering around, devoid of purpose.

It’s a heavy lift to find any single thing that happens here remotely plausible, and ultimately it almost seems a horror movie misinterpreted as a romance. File this one under “The Fault in Our Screenplay.”

It was supposed to be a lark. And then, almost immediately, it went off the rails. I’m not referring to the mother-daughter vacation gone wrong in Snatched, but rather the experience of watching it.

Note to Greek chorus of execs: Turning a space psychodrama into a “He went to Jared” commercial is pretty low, even for you.

As might be obvious, I’m not a gamer, so perhaps all of this will be thrilling for fans who’ve played it. The rest of us, I imagine, may come out of this film invigorated with a creed of our own: Avoid movies based on video games.

This flaccid comedy tries to spark your interest by undressing two of its four stars down to their underwear for significant periods of time. More outrageously, neither of those people is Jon Hamm.

So dull, the kids in my audience didn’t laugh until 45 minutes in — And that was at a coconut head-bonk, a gag so timeless it almost doesn’t count.

A vague, syrupy soundtrack plays across scenes both current and past, making the whole thing feel like a bad soap opera.

Janet McTeer, Octavia Spencer, Diane Kruger and Jane Fonda brighten the screen momentarily, all in too-small roles.

Tarzan does little to adapt to modern times. Perhaps most punishingly of all for Skarsgard’s “True Blood” fans, it fails to ever put our hero in a skimpy loincloth.

It’s too bad there’s already a movie out this week called “The Shallows”; it would work so perfectly for the new film from Nicholas Winding Refn (“Drive”).

The considerable comic talents of Alison Brie (“Community”) are squandered by this exhaustingly quirky indie romance.

Unfortunately, his machine fails en route; way more unfortunately, he comes up very short compared to Mark Watney, the red planet-stranded astronaut played with such humor and energy by Matt Damon in last year’s “The Martian.”

The cinematic equivalent of a paper plate with macaroni and glitter haphazardly glued onto it, Mother’s Day is a film only its creators could love (and even they must be having some misgivings).

The whole endeavor seems like a bad idea badly executed, and one can only imagine that Simone, a fierce advocate of black pride and empowerment, would be aghast at this cheesy rendition of the later years of her life.

This incoherent screenplay seems to have been written by a roomful of the gorilla-like trolls who show up in the movie at one point.

Turn off your frontal lobe, and you just might enjoy it.

It will probably not surprise you to learn that this film, generically directed by Christian Ditter (“Love, Rosie”), was written by the people behind 2009’s “He’s Just Not That Into You.” Seven years later, guess what? He’s still not that into you! And I wouldn’t be, either, not with this lot.

If I wasn't already convinced of this movie's obnoxiousness, its rendering of Graham's character sealed the deal.

This reverential documentary, crammed with insidery art-world anecdotes, seems unlikely to convince the average viewer why it was so important that several male artists ventured out of New York at that time to push dirt around with shovels and bulldozers.

I’ve never seen a restaurant documentary that seemed less interested in showing the joy of food.

Seeing as Krampus is about the Alpine demon who punishes Christmas a-holes, this is a promising start — but alas, it’s all downhill from there, making a murky and humorless hash out of a pretty great piece of

James Purefoy (“The Following”) makes a pretty decent bad guy. Olga Kurylenko (“The Water Diviner”) is passable as an action heroine. Neither of those facts makes Momentum any fun to sit through, crammed as it is with leaden dialogue and predictable plot turns.

For a story whose appeal hinges on the saving grace of getting a "purpose-driven life," this one's got remarkably little of it.

Burying the Ex is missing the key ingredient every good zombie movie needs: brains.

Tedious, amateurish and hilariously ill-timed film.

The film alternates between shoving its confusing plot forward and dropping dialogue bombs that fizzle.

The awkwardly titled Unfreedom clearly waves the flag for acceptance and nonviolence — but it would be more effective if it invested as much in some cinematic nuance.

Aloft is less like a story than a dream, populated with gorgeous people and symbolism you can interpret any way you like.

Ultimately, though, Saint Laurent is beautifully dressed with little substance, which doesn’t do much to subvert a prevailing stereotype about the industry as a whole.

Is it never funny? No, it’s not never funny. It’s just not funny nearly often enough.

The bloodshed is artful, at least.

This ponderous drama from director Kazuaki Kiriya quickly gets weighed down by its own blood-drenched armor.

Dreadful, misogynist slog of a film.

This is nothing but nasty, misogynist torture porn.

The Wedding Ringer is not so much a rom-com as an anatomy lesson. And the lesson is this: Men have balls. They must have them, or grow them, otherwise they are not men. They are little girls.

Yes, it’s gross, and no, it’s not remotely original.

This crowd-funded — and overcrowded — collection of interwoven stories, directed by John Herzfeld, plays like an amateur-acting exercise in which each participant picks a name and a couple of defining props.

From its uninspired, sitcom-y look to its phoned-in dialogue (“I love you plus infinity”; “I love you plus double infinity”) to its creaky plot, Hit by Lightning is anything but electrifying.

First-time feature director Jeff Preiss has a top-notch duo in John Hawkes, as the affable but troubled Joe, and Elle Fanning as his teen daughter, Amy, but neither can really get out from under the film’s heavy-handed tone, a one-note trip down a bleak memory lane.

It’s not great art (in fact, it’s pretty low-rent CGI), but it’s passably entertaining.

As it stands, there’s little to explain the existence of this confoundingly unfunny film. It’s as if a talented cast (Wilson, Zach Galifianakis, Amy Poehler) assembled to make a comedy and at the last minute was told to play everything straight.

There’s a secret at play in After, which director Pieter Gaspersz communicates via many side-long glances. I won’t give it away, but it’s a fairly far-fetched twist that feels out of place in this realism-based drama.

This cynical rom-com subgenre has been done to death.

If Think Like a Man Too was a man, he would be the world’s worst date: humorless, shrill, speaking primarily in clichés (“what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas!”) and absolutely terrified of women.

Like the reanimated corpse of a teen queen, this would-be cult movie looks the part, but has little going on inside.

The jovial, hyperverbal comic has played against type before, but his presence feels like epic miscasting in this underwritten dramedy.

It makes so little sense on-screen that all you can do is nod along vaguely sympathetically at its sheer creative bravado.

Playing like a script that’s been moldering since Diane Keaton turned it down in 1983, The Other Woman is a weak adultery rom-com in which the most authentic performance comes from a non-housebroken Great Dane.

The dancing’s fine here, but there’s little else to distinguish Make Your Move, an entirely generic drama.

This retrograde sex comedy is embarrassing for just about everyone involved, but I do think a special endurance shout-out should go to Reid Ewing (“Modern Family”).

Rockwell is incapable of being boring, so there’s some small entertainment to be found in watching his buttoned-up beta male blossom into full Sam Rockwell.

There is virtually nothing in Mac Carter’s horror flick that deviates from the standard haunted house plot (or, in this case, plod).

Yelchin is an immensely likable actor who does what he can, but his charm isn’t enough to save this awkwardly worded — and paced — wannabe thriller.

This blathery, misogynist indie from first-time director David Grovic — which seems to be aiming for “Pulp Fiction” territory with its blend of crime, banter and the mysterious contents of a bag — falls far short, rife as it is with noir and gender clichés.

With any luck, this’ll be the death knell of the idiot-savant rom-com.

No amount of actorly dedication can change the pointlessness of watching unpleasant things happening to uniformly unpleasant people.

The dialogue is so vague, and the plot so minimal, it all feels like a rather pointless exercise.

A clunky movie that feels as if it’s underwritten by the Roman Catholic Church.

Ultimately, though, the lack of story and relentless suffering make Raze appealing for hard-core genre fans only.

Shooting in South Africa and Botswana, director Kamaleshwar Mukherjee never lacks for atmosphere, but his film is painfully awkward in execution, from the stiff dialogue to the time-padding slo-mo sequences and glaring CGI.

Minus its smirky twist ending, it’d make perfect material for New York’s new “That’s Abuse” domestic violence awareness campaign.

A forgettable — and occasionally borderline offensive — animated tale of turkeys trying to take back Thanksgiving.

This overlong drama plays like a threefold infomercial: for Christianity, the cheesy resort chain Sandals and Jeff “Ja Rule” Atkins, the rapper-turned-actor playing drug kingpin Miles Montego.

Director Anthony Leonardi, in his feature debut, litters the film with inconsistencies.

At the start of Insidious 2, a young woman opens her mouth to speak and someone else’s voice comes out of her. Demonic possession? Nope, just some inexplicable dubbing to kick off this clunker of a horror sequel.

It often seems like an acting workshop: Behave as if you are the parent of a dead child.

Nothing in this movie would actually happen, so what’s irritating is that it presents itself as a savvy, “Am I right, ladies?” dating commentary.

Like some hybrid beast out of Greek mythology, this young-adult sequel has the body of a “Harry Potter,” the head of a “Twilight,” the feet of a “Hunger Games” and the tail, oddly, of a “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

The innovation of Refn’s latest is mostly just in the way it manages to merge gory and boring. At least it’s created a new movie adjective for me: goring.

I only laughed once, and it was when Whit Stillman made a cameo to be snubbed by the newly self-actualized Imogene. But it was mostly in disbelief; pretentious or not, Stillman represents a caliber of smart writing that’s wholly absent from Girl Most Likely.

With the exception of “Tape 49” — the Simon Barrett-directed segment about the PI — the films are ridiculously shaky, their camerawork so determinedly guerrilla-style that it’s difficult not to look away, sometimes at crucial moments. Found footage is all well and good, but if it’s unwatchable, it might as well have stayed lost.

The movie lurches from one gross-out scene to another, flipping the bird at continuity and logic. It honestly seems as if Sandler and his team descended on a random suburb, halfheartedly improvising and moving on when they got bored.

Predicated almost entirely on the repeated juxtaposition of innocent girlishness and mindless violence, Violet & Daisy could still have been campy fun — instead, it wilts for lack of wit.

None of these seemingly plot-rich questions are explored; instead, we’re stuck with a greasy-haired Mark Ruffalo, as his detective character flounders along in their wake, muttering that he doesn’t have time for this magic crap.

There are a lot of casualties in this stylish, unoriginal thriller, but James McAvoy’s knee was the only one that moved me.