Simon Abrams

This might have been a better movie if its creators embraced their fitful bloodthirst. Instead, they seem to hope that you like these stock characters enough that you’ll gasp when their friends and enemies inevitably bite the dust. A machine to kill vague people, “Whistle” never delivers on its frightful promise.

Nothing in “Shelter” develops beyond the suggestion of an idea. A sleepy vehicle for action star Jason Statham, “Shelter” piles on cliches and expects viewers to supply enough goodwill to compensate for its shortcomings.

This new holiday chiller mostly idles when it should charge at its most unsound ideas.

Kermani deserves credit for expanding on Hill’s story, which has a great premise, but not much else going for it.

It’s hard enough to watch performers struggle to pump up thin material, even though the main cast’s members all seem capable of the physical business required of their roles. It’s harder to watch as the makers of this scrappy, low-budget production give away too much whenever they rely on effects-driven action or drama.

Only Cage’s most diehard cultists will want to go to bat for this performance, and they could easily struggle to accentuate the positive. It’s manic, confounding, and gaspingly funny, too (for a moment), but boy, howdy, so what?

It’s hard to imagine who might enjoy this deliberately slow and often punishingly slack historical drama.

Sony’s latest Spidey yarn is a charmless stinker that’s only well-polished enough to make you resent the stench.

A tepid situation comedy in indie drama drag, "The Black Sea" lacks a sense of urgency beyond a few moments of canned tension between Khalid and Georgi (Stoyo Mirkov), a haughty Bulgarian fisherman.

The makers of “Boy Kills World” don’t trust their audience enough to let us just feel a feeling, nor do they encourage their enthusiastic cast members enough to deliver fully-developed performances.

More is often less in “Rebel Moon—Part 2: The Scargiver,” not only when it comes to the movie’s sweaty, vein-activating performances, but also its over-exaggerated and under-choreographed action scenes.

Besson’s extra-schlocky sensibilities seem ideally suited to his star, but he never gives Jones anything worth showing off.

A couple of pedal-to-the-floor melodramatic twists suggest that “Founders Days” might’ve been a bolder or just meaner genre movie, but its toothless satire, like its timid horror drama, sadly doesn’t cut it.

“Rebel Moon” often looks more like an animated pitch for a movie than an actual movie with human characters, urgent drama, emotional stakes, and so forth.

There’s not enough cold sweat ambience here, and that makes it even harder to root for a modestly budgeted chiller whose creators clearly started their project from a place of cinephilic affection. Even sympathetic genre fans will have trouble finding something new about such old hat material.

If you’re looking for meaning, humor, or comfort, you’d best not look for it here.

Night of the Hunted might have been a productively grim exercise if it didn’t feel like Alice’s dilemma wasn’t just a pretext for more ostensibly shocking talking points.

Whatever promise the “V/H/S” horror anthology franchise started with is barely present in V/H/S/85, a low-energy potboiler that promises to transport genre fans back to the analog past for some reason.

Eventually, the lack of werewolf-related carnage is the least concerning thing about My Animal.

The Icelandic/German conspiracy thriller Operation Napoleon would be as comforting as its airport thriller plot if it weren’t also baggy, joyless, and spiritually depleting.

Fear the Night often feels like it was made by artists who understand the type of movie that they’re making but maybe don’t really care enough about making it, either as a by-the-numbers genre exercise or a repudiation of its fans and their need for pseudo-enlightened catharsis.

Some of the familiar and faithfully recreated twists and turns of the original “One Cut of the Dead” still land here, but not enough to make this leaden remake seem endearing or zany enough to pick through.

Rather than dig into what’s specifically changing about their relationship, Duplass and Eslyn focus on armchair psychology and black-box speeches to explain away what’s really going on with these two men.

There are hints of a deeper movie here, but the one on-screen sticks too closely to stories and ideas we already know.

Killing bigots is a fine enough pretext for this sort of watered-down post-grindhouse entertainment, but if you’re honestly going to go there, you can’t stop til you’re past the point of apology.

Between underwhelming action scenes and draining expository dialogue, Assassin Club often leaves its cast out to dry.

You never have to wonder or try to understand what the characters are feeling because they never stop telling you how to feel. The answer, invariably, is sad and fearful, but From Black is neither, really.

Some high-concept set pieces rise above shoddy execution and creative mismanagement, particularly any wire stunts involving helicopters, byplanes, or rocket-powered jet packs.

It’s a plodding, vague fantasy about the way things could be that gets interrupted by a rote chase/body count pic.

Meet Me in the Bathroom is an impressionistic blur, more about what it felt like to be at the head of a scene than the actual scene’s character or identity.

The Loneliest Boy in the World mostly bobs along without incident, never challenging viewers’ assumptions nor giving us much to sink our teeth into.

There’s a definite beginning, a doughy middle, and a gaping end to “Project Wolf Hunting,” but they somehow don’t cohere into a feature-length spectacle.

Medieval is a bleak and visually oversaturated allegory about the 15th century revolutionary Czech soldier turned military leader Jan Žižka (Ben Foster). There's blood and chainmail, yes, but it's also a self-serious allegory about duty and faith during miserable times.

The best thing that can be said about Who Invited Them is that Birmingham and his game ensemble cast do sometimes exhibit a sense of humor.

Unfortunately, the movie’s unexpected plot twist violently re-directs its treacly uplift narrative for the sake of a Hail Mary conclusion that’s almost ridiculous enough to be campy fun. It’s not though, since the twist in question feels like a last-ditch effort to convince viewers that the movie’s otherwise plain story, credited to Vera Herbert (series writer on “This Is Us”), has more depth than it does.

For better and worse, Gone in the Night feels like the directorial debut of a podcaster, somebody who knows the value of storytelling novelty and has a gift for narrative economy, but also suggests more by the grace of good casting than their own singular talents.

While Sniper: The White Raven sometimes delivers solid meat-and-potatoes action movie violence, the rest of the film only confirms the hellish nature of war, which we’ve all seen before.

Poser might have been more satisfying if its gauzy night-club aesthetic and bold, underlined dialogue didn’t smother viewers with trite observations about hipster artistes.

This sleepy and visually murky black-and-white drama belabors the same banal truisms about memory and role-playing during wartime –basically, it’s impossible to maintain your autonomy when you’re only a pawn in a complicated game — and tends to be more interesting to think about than to watch.

Watching Smith's buddies pay him heartfelt tribute is one thing, but that doesn’t make spending so much time (115 minutes???) with his fawning co-conspirators feel much less oppressive.

I wanted to root for and care about the world of “Night Raiders,” but I never felt like Niska and her daughter said more about themselves than their predictable behavior advertised.

It takes some chutzpah to name your siege thriller Dangerous, and unfortunately, there’s not enough of it in the Scott Eastwood actioner of that name.

Maybe this is a product of the movie’s nature as an adaptation, but there’s never really a moment in There’s Someone Inside Your House that suggests its protagonists are real enough to be worth rooting for.

Wan’s never been the most technically adept or sophisticated storyteller, but his weaknesses as a filmmaker are especially apparent throughout.

There’s a lot of walking and talking, but this thing never really moves fast enough, not even during its action scenes.

The canned British character study Mogul Mowgli disappoints on a few levels, especially given its admirable focus on authenticity and cultural identity in a kitchen-sink drama about Zed (Riz Ahmed), an aspiring British Pakistani rapper.

What’s really wrong with Richard is that he’s a boring monster.

The uniquely underwhelming sci-fi lawyer drama Naked Singularity is a weird mashup of ill-fitting genre tropes and quarter-cooked ideas about social justice and alternate realities.

More often than not, Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins is a dire checklist of clichés that were already gathering moss back in the 1980s, when G.I. Joe was a popular children’s cartoon.

If you enjoy watching barrel-penned fish get got with a BB gun, you're bound to love Vicious Fun. Vicious Fun courts that kind of glib dismissal since so much of the movie reassures viewers that its creators are also addicted to the formulaic slasher movies that they kind of, sort of mock.

There are a lot of fragmentary ideas in The Real Thing, but they’re not cohesive or worthwhile as they’re loosely formed into one grey 232-minute lump.

The action in Funhouse is consistently cheap and generally silly. That’s sort of the movie’s point, but it’s also sort of hard to care when everything else is so tacky.

Too bad The Djinn is often as plodding as it is impersonal. This movie crawls whenever it needs to sprint.

You can either be sentimental or bitter about the movies, but you can rarely charm people by being both at once. Unfortunately, the people behind the Indian moviemaking comedy RK/RKAY took that risk, and wound up making a mawkish, inert fantasy about a filmmaker whose protagonist escapes his movie within the movie.

And when the movie’s over, nothing is resolved that the filmmakers didn’t side-step or reduce to a few unconvincing symbols of hope for a more equitable future. You might like Enforcement if that’s a line you already want to buy; there’s otherwise not much here to change your mind.

What makes The Vigil so frustrating is that it feels like a product and not a reflection of its subject’s identity crisis.

Hovannisian's documentary would be much more convincing if he picked a single aspect of Tankian’s activism—or composing, or personality—and considered it in greater detail.

The ensemble cast members all dutifully perform their roles, but there’s not much for them to sink their teeth into.

Psycho Goreman isn’t clever or lively enough to be more than fitfully fun, especially given how much time is spent mocking generic, but painstakingly recreated plot contrivances.

Jiu Jitsu is too disjointed and tame to be worth an impulse-rent; it's also too silly to be enjoyed with a straight face, and too lazy to be endearingly dopey.

In this context, Farnworth’s appropriately broad performance is exceptional. She doesn’t have much dialogue that’s worthy of her playful, all-in line readings, but Farnworth deserves all due praise.

Based solely on its own merits, Shortcut is both an amateurish production and a mindless genre exercise.

Emperor is lousy in the same way that many other mediocre slave narratives are: it re-presents a dark period in American history without being inspired or insightful enough to be worth your curiosity or emotional investment.

If Retaliation were a friend, you’d eventually avoid them.

There aren’t many surprises here, because the bread crumbs that lead to the movie’s big finish are plentiful and very stale. Seriously, the plot twists in this movie are so obvious and unappetizing that you couldn’t miss them if you tried.

Unlike “Stranger Things,” The Wretched is a little too cute about teen angst, and not light enough on its feet to make you want to root for its ostensibly typical adolescent.

Vivarium isn’t a fun watch, and not just because it’s generally claustrophobic and insistently bleak.

Pegg and Temple’s responsive, well-attuned performances are actually the most frustrating things about Lost Transmissions since they’re good enough to make you want to care, even when their characters don’t seem to be worth caring about.

Sonic the Hedgehog is the worst kind of bad movie: it's too inoffensive to be hated and too wretched to be enjoyable.

The Nowhere Inn . . . is a collection of comedic and musical sketches that are not funny, weird or thoughtful enough to sell its creators’ insistent, but mostly trite and undeveloped, ideas about the performative nature of self-fashioning and creative authenticity.

There’s ultimately too much strained seriousness in The Song of Names' dramatically flimsy and symbolically heavy episodic narrative, making Girard and Caine’s already dated feel-good historical drama seem especially tacky.

The predictably loud and shockingly boring action caper 6 Underground is one-man-brand director Michael Bay’s answer to the “Fast & Furious” series.

Warrior Queen is not the first movie about this subject to be helmed by a woman — “Manikarnika” was co-directed by star Kangana Ranaut — nor does it feature a stand-out performance like those other movies do (Ranaut is very good in “Manikarnika”). So while I suppose you could do worse than The Warrior Queen of Jhansi, I know you could do better.

Granted, the movie does feature a few endearingly goofy scenes where Cage acts like Humphrey Bogart, with sweat on his brow, a stogie in his mouth, and a haughty putdown for anybody who makes eye contact with him. But he basically already did that in Paul Schrader’s underwhelming 2016 Ed Bunker adaptation “Dog Eat Dog.”

Gender inequality may be a potentially complicating factor when it comes to sexual trauma (i.e., men can also be abused by women), but that provocative conceit isn’t considered with much care or intelligence.

A spectacularly disjointed comedy that’s only superficially about two foul-mouthed, but well-meaning dopes who light and pass the proverbial torch to the next generation of slackers. “Reboot” is more of an ego trip for Smith, an amiable, creatively frustrated pop artist who survived a major health crisis — one that even he knows he can’t shut up about.

"Unnecessary Roughness” is a more apt title for the scuzzy serial killer procedural Night Hunter.

Most of the jokes in Tone-Deaf are variations on this gag: Harvey is a sentient fossil while Olive is an entitled brat. “Fine People On Both Sides” might have been a more apt title for this dud.

The sleepy, dopey action bonanza Angel Has Fallen is disappointing, and not just for the reasons you might expect.

The Divine Fury does sound like fun, especially given that, in the film, demons tend to catch fire as they’re exorcised. There’s also a climactic fight scene involving a scaly demon-man. And a ton of dead air, boring asides, tedious backstory, and other unnecessary narrative padding.

Please take me away from this horrible movie.

Trespassers is fairly timid, as far as home-invasion thrillers go: it’s got some machete - and gun-related violence, a couple of leering masked killers, and a little rough sex, but that’s about it.

Killers Anonymous just doesn't make sense as a throwback to MTV-friendly sensibilities. It's also not inventive, funny, or energetic enough to warrant its creators' vague ideas about deceiving looks, moral relativism, and, uh, girl power?

An unbearably preachy post-financial-crisis civics lesson in heist movie drag.

A machine to deliver gore and violence, Brightburn also features some of the most improbably and even hatefully dumb salt-of-the-Earth type characters in a recent American horror movie. But even if you watch Brightburn knowing that it doesn't have much going for it beyond a few disturbing kill scenes, you will still be disappointed.

Still: the cold half (ie: the important half) of Lords of Chaos is so ugly and mean-spirited that I couldn't really enjoy the other parts of the film that work, not even Rory Culkin's fantastic lead performance, or the on-screen chemistry that he shares with supporting actress Sky Ferreira (as photographer/love interest Ann-Marit).

The Prodigy doesn't work because Buhler's scenario is too predictable to be involving and McCarthy's direction is too indecisive to be gripping. One of these two problems might have been surmountable, but both, at the same time, is lethal.

Piercing, the latest horror film by music video helmer turned feature horror writer/director Nicolas Pesce, is more frustrating than it is actually bad. Because Piercing, an adaptation of Ryu Murakami's novel of the same name, succeeds as a darkly comic provocation. I think. Sort of?

This movie doesn’t work well as an edifying documentary, but it might go over well with anyone who wants to follow its unconvincing conspiracy-theory-like logic (apparently, genetic research is bad because it's "playing God" and is partly underfunded and overseen by the Chinese government and cocky American scientists!).

Between Worlds is also, unfortunately, a weird "Twin Peaks" homage, complete with industrial band ohGr's not-so-industrial, "Twin Peaks"-y score and "Twin Peaks"-like theme during the opening credits sequence (performed by "Twin Peaks" composer Angelo Badalamenti, no less).

There's not only nothing new here, there's nothing convincing either. And if I'm supposed to judge Bumblebee based on how well it succeeds at what it tries to do (rather than what came before it), it's still not very good.

The film's Gerber-bland back half is plenty bad, but the first half of Speed Kills features some of the year's worst filmmaking.

This thematic concern with disingenuous allies isn't subtly expressed, but it is compelling for a while, especially given the movie's high-concept premise.

Unfortunately, director Johnny Kevorkian and screenwriter Gavin Williams not only put their Beanstalk-high concept to ill use, but also fail to keep their drama compelling on a scene-to-scene basis.

There's a morbidly hilarious dark comedy buried not-so-deep inside the lousy revenge thriller Peppermint. It's just probably not the movie that director Pierre Morel ("Taken," "District B13") and screenwriter Chad St. John intended to make.

Arizona might have worked better as a smart-ass social commentary if its tsk-tsking of consumerist myopia wasn't so consistently on the nose and its plot didn't swiftly devolve into slasher movie cliches.

While it has a couple of appreciably goofy flourishes, the proudly crass horror-comedy Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich is sadly more boring than offensive despite its superficially controversial high-concept premise.

So often bogged down by pseudo-naturalistic long takes and generic cop/robber power dynamics that it makes one wonder what the point of watching such a film is.