Sara Stewart

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.

The bloodshed is artful, at least.

For connoisseurs of the “Grudge” series, the brief prelude of this fourth installation links it to the ones that came before. Everybody else, good luck making that connection.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Aside from these curious role reversals, though, Alex Cross is a mess. Drawing on every conceivable '80s B-movie action cliché and treating its beleaguered female characters like pieces of meat (literally, in one scene of butchery), director Rob Cohen squanders a surprisingly recognizable cast on a half-baked plot adapted from James Patterson's series of novels.

Pineda is lovely, but I stopped believin’ in this documentary long before it was over.

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.