Sara Stewart

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

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

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 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).

Parental Guidance kicks off with a mean-spirited joke about an overweight woman and heads downhill from there.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Dreadful, misogynist slog of a film.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.”

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

There is no way you could make this movie stupider or more pointlessly noisy than it already is.

“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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Tedious, amateurish and hilariously ill-timed film.

This is nothing but nasty, misogynist torture porn.

Would you rather . . . watch this movie, or spend an hour and a half having your arm hairs plucked out with a rusty pair of tweezers? I’d have chosen the latter if it’d been on offer.