Sara Stewart

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

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.

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

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”).

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.

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

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.

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

This female revenge thriller starts out promisingly, but squanders its girl-power capital quicker than you can say "Rihanna."

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

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.”

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.

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”).

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

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

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).

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.”

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I’ll say one thing for The Call: Its ending is actually a bit of a surprise. Just when you think it couldn’t get any stupider, pow! I’ll be damned, Hollywood, you still have the power to blindside.

You'd hope a political-insider indie reuniting "West Wing" stars Rob Lowe and Richard Schiff, and informed by the experiences of an actual former spin doctor, would be a small delight. You would be wrong.

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

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

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.