Simon Abrams

Each gun- or fist-fight features a few cool individual images, but these standalone elements never exceed the Russos’ blurry presentation. That’s especially deadly in an action movie that’s constantly trying to give viewers the impression of speed and scope.

Beyond isolated moments of dickish charm — and his climactic four-way fight involving a sword, a crucifix, and two steel pipes — Chapman just comes across like another pseudo-heroic American behaving badly abroad.

The Cellar doesn't even need to be a smarter or even more faithful homage. All it needs to be is a little more of something—energetic, gross, thoughtful ... something!—to make it compelling enough to withstand comparisons to its many generic precedents.

Really, whatever you do, don't watch "The Last Key" without the emotional support of a buddy who can confirm that you're not just imagining this: these movies are still getting incrementally better.

Infectious horror-comedy Cooties is an energizing juggernaut until its seemingly inexhaustible ensemble cast members are outpaced by their respective characters' quirks.

You could get mad at Seifert for being so bad at being so nakedly manipulative. Or you could just give up all hope, and counter-intuitively root for Monsanto. This is a David-vs.-Goliath movie, but David's aim is so spotty that Goliath has nothing to fear.

[Thérèse] is not the nuanced period drama it should be but is rather more like a banal, pseudo-thoughtful and monotonous episode of Masterpiece Theater.

Canadian filmmaker Denis Côté holds up a shallow mirror to the world of bodybuilding in the underwhelming experimental documentary A Skin So Soft.

This one stands out not only because it’s the fittingly agonizing climax to Wang’s trilogy but also for its sheer wealth of heartbreaking and totally convincing details.

Army of Thieves, a by-the-numbers heist movie and prequel to Zack Snyder’s gloomy zombie caper “Army of the Dead,” traces over that previous movie without ever improving or even just replicating its lighter elements, especially its chases and safecracking shenanigans.

Once Haunter's story snaps into focus, and its creators pull you towards its inevitable conclusion, the film's flaws become that much more apparent.

Human error—or uncertainty—is the biggest source of tension in this movie, and it goes a long way towards making this sequel (a little) more than the sum of its flashy parts. You may not need another Escape Room, but this new one is good enough to leave you wanting more.

Fairrie’s unfocused examination of anti-Semitism illuminates little.

For the most part, Buffalo Boys is a decent folk tale, despite Lee and Wiluan's periodic application of "Game of Thrones"-style sensationalism.

Too bad that Ardor's arrhythmic editing and glacial pacing make it impossible to get lost in its jungles — or to invest in its pseudo-mystical ambiance.

Ravager does have an internal logic that makes its time and subplot-jumping story easy to follow. But this new Phantasm will not be of interest to anyone who doesn't already know who the Tall Man is, or why he needs to be stopped.

Dashcam succeeds as a barrage of icky stimuli that may go great with a rowdy audience.

The Take is just really lousy.

While Thrash resembles a general-audience survival horror drama, its forgettable protagonists also frequently stop to reassure viewers—mostly through profanity-laced dialogue and occasional bursts of gore—that it’s okay to scoff at whatever they’re looking at.

A sometimes diverting, but overly familiar series of set pieces in search of a good melodrama.

When a movie doesn’t quite come together, it’s often tempting to say that something essential is missing. I’m not so sure that that’s true of “Hypochondriac,” a rather good psychodrama about repressed childhood trauma that’s also an underwhelming horror movie about mental illness.

The messy but charming concert doc Straight Into a Storm works best if you treat unfocused on-camera interviews with the members of Rhode Island–based folk/grunge-rock group Deer Tick like an unintrospective but affectionate video memoir of the group’s rise to alt-rock prominence.

This is a comedy that encourages viewers to be impulsive, and pointedly seek love and acceptance outside of "normal" social institutions, especially when it comes to family and romance.

Kampai! feels like a manic ensemble drama that should have been a tight three-man show.

There’s nothing wrong, in other words, with the idea of setting an all-ages haunted house-style chase movie in a corny bulk retail store. The main thing holding back Spirit Halloween: The Movie is that its young stars never get to convincingly act their age.

The limitations of Palansky and co-writer Mike Vukadinovich's shared vision are, realistically, the biggest problem with Rememory.

It’s nice to see that the Muscles from Brussels is not only self-aware, but also sharp enough whenever he has to take a baby step or two beyond his own shadow.

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 film is an 80-minute shaggy-dog story about the seductive power of storytelling and the weird places it can transport us; too bad writer- director Todd Rohal doesn't take us any place worth going.

If Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is like any of the director’s previous work, it’s most like Evil Dead Rises, since it’s also programmatically upsetting yet narratively threadbare to the point of distraction. And while this movie’s relentless, reflex-testing shock scares suggest that the filmmaker has a sense of humor, the audience is never really encouraged to laugh along with them.

Never feels as momentous or as angsty as a good story about moody teenagers should, and that's mostly because the film lacks a menacing parental adversary.

Memories of the Sword stands apart from other action films because Park wisely imagines violence as an elemental clash of dispositions.

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

Funny Bunny may be effectively alienating, but never in a commendable way.

Alumbrones's creators talk up their work's restorative value, but never go into great detail about the world beyond their canvases. Donnelly's vague, circuitous questioning is to blame.

Throughout the film, Mindless Behavior's four interchangeable members only project youthful enthusiasm and PR-friendly love for their fans.

Sure, Mortal Kombat II has enough fight scenes and gore to deliver exactly what fans of the games expect from these movies. Then again, the makers of this new franchise-booster don’t seem to know how to fill the rest of their movie’s 116-minute runtime. They tie up loose ends from the last movie whenever they’re not nudging their new protagonists through the motions of another patchwork action-fantasy that’s too hip to be sincere and too hacky to be moving.

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.

Project Almanac could have been fun, but its creators don't seem to know what fun looks like.

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

Writer/director Barnaby Clay successfully keeps viewers on our toes, even if a lot of his movie feels like a series of programmatic jabs at our complacence.

Unfortunately, Lau just isn't charming enough to carry the utterly forgettable The Adventurers, a tepid remake of John Woo's already lame heist flick "Once a Thief."

It’s schtickier and less assured than the first “Shazam!” but these leftovers still reheat well enough.

The movie is so consistently moody, and so focused on driving you towards a gut-punch finale, that even valid complaints seem negligible in retrospect.

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.

Watching The Apology, one gets the sense that Locke and her team got to tell the exact story they wanted to and on their terms. Their drama has unusual integrity since it's (mostly) not about canned answers to complex questions.

It’s hard to get lost in Cameron’s images or Joy’s workmanlike direction given how often they’re overwhelmed by her flashy dialogue.

This may be Goro Miyazaki’s most eccentric feature yet, but it’s also his least engaging. Earwig and the Witch doesn’t move the way it should, and that’s lethal when your last name is Miyazaki.

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

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.

While many of the jokes in Hotel Transylvania: Transformania probably won’t linger in your mind, they are still fairly well-executed.

Until tepid animal-attack flick Stung, I had never thought to wish for a horror movie protagonist to not be rewarded with a make-out session at film's end.

The Burning Sea may ultimately be too uptight for its own good, but there’s enough here to satisfy disaster aficionados who’ve already been here before and only really want to root for more of the same.

Lacks sufficient inspiration and follow-through to be truly exciting.

While The Tomorrow War isn’t exactly good, it is often promising enough to convince you that at some point, it will reward your time and patience.

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

Green, who plays a snotty version of himself, doesn't follow through on any of the ideas that make his film stand out. As a result, Digging Up the Marrow just uselessly lies there, like a cat during a heat wave.

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.

Blood Glacier is too sleepy to do anything with its guano-stirring premise. Yes, there are crazy-go-nutty monsters in the film, but you seldom get to see them as they sadly are not the focus of Blood Glacier.

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.

Disappointing because its creators don't do anything interesting with a fairly novel theme: a mother's possessive love for her estranged daughter.

Only really comes alive when cars are being used as battering rams and computer-generated explosions proliferate like fireworks.

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

An ambitious black comedy that never goes far enough.

Wolf Warrior 2 lectures you, pummels you, and then expects you to cheer.

The grisly post-torture-porn horror flick Incident in a Ghostland serves as an effectively punishing critique of the relentless misogyny that has become a staple of every stupid Texas Chain Saw Massacre knockoff that pits sexually active women against emotionally disturbed serial killers.

The just-shy-of-great teen comedy Dear Dictator is the rare high-concept coming-of-age story with enough warmth and smart-ass charm to (hopefully!) make it accessible for a fairly wide cross-section of moviegoers.

First, and foremost: Zombeavers is exactly what it sounds like, a stoner-friendly horror-comedy about undead beavers. This needs over-stating since high-concept humor doesn't get higher than this.

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.

The characters could have embodied traits of typical office drones and managers, turning the film into a savage black comedy. But those elements aren't developed beyond a point, making the movie's only selling point its excessive gore and violence.

Barely Lethal's combination of bawdy humor and earnest affection for its high-school-aged protagonists is surprisingly well-balanced.

By preferring to keep viewers in suspense until the film's finale, Pastoll makes it harder to recommend a movie that has many good ideas, but no clue what to do with them.

Wolf Creek 2 isn't much different than "Wolf Creek," but it is markedly worse.

An uneven but satisfying hostage crisis thriller that is also a perfect example of the type of late-period films martial arts star Jackie Chan has decided to make after entering middle age.

The film's short-comings are especially upsetting since Schwarzenegger is actually rather good in the film, and proves once again that, despite a severely limited range, he knows how to brood.

Fistful of Vengeance is a movie in duration only; it’s pretty slapdash in terms of its execution, even during its glossy-looking action set pieces.

The problem with The Drowning isn't that the characters are insubstantial, but rather that they don't dry up and disappear fast enough.

There are a lot of promising ideas here, but none are developed so much that this remake feels essential.

Bleeding Steel is also unfortunately just one film in a string of lackluster globe-trotting action films that struggle to confirm Chan's decades-old self-image as a pop cultural ambassador.

So while Clover may not be original, it is pretty watchable.

More inarticulate than outright bad, I Can Only Imagine 2 re-packages a heap of barely legible dramatic and comedic shorthand as an uplifting testament to “the goodness of God.” It’s mostly inoffensive, but also doesn’t really have anything to say.

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.

Into the Grizzly Maze is bad where it counts, and tedious throughout.

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.

Boss is that rare Bollywood action film whose stars are worthy of the pedestal they're put on.

The spectacularly dumb, and weirdly entertaining bad-taste thriller Bad Samaritan is the kind of movie that many will assume can only be enjoyed ironically, or just with some sort of emotional detachment.

The Great Wall has significant problems — namely with Damon and sidekick Pedro Pascal's lack of bromantic chemistry — but chief among its rewards is its ability to marry its Eastern and Western sensibilities.

Guns Akimbo may be too mild to be memorable, but it is a mostly satisfying time-waster.

Is it good? Uh, well, kind of. Does it make sense? Hmm, er, ask me another. Is it worth seeing? Oh, absolutely.

This is not the stuff of stirring humanist drama, but rather a bland scenario about boring people that want to mature but have no idea how.

Flawed but genuinely creepy ghost story The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death is disappointing, but only because it comes close to greatness.

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

The bad guy likes opera in the mostly forgettable heist/hostage thriller The Doorman, a movie that’s well-versed in clichés and basically watchable, but never really good.

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.

Thankfully, there’s enough affection and charm in the movie’s first half to keep Teenage Badass running on fumes most of the way home.

The action filmmaking, from interstitial chases to fight choreography, looks good, and so does the monster and its practically-effected victims.

That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime: Scarlet Bond mostly lacks the animating unpredictability and sugar-rush energy of its source material.

Like bad houseguests, the creators of Hell Baby overstay their welcome.

By emphasizing the uglier aspects of his most complex character, Lee turns an otherwise down-to-earth slice-of-life drama into an unconvincing morality play.

This bloated, unfocused follow-up—which was tellingly crowd-funded by fans and then released by Fox Searchlight—takes all of the charming goofiness of the first film, and runs it deep into the ground with gags that either over- or under-think these stock characters' original appeal.

The Forgiven consequently only succeeds as an ugly, empty-headed provocation.

The best that can be said about teen sex comedy Staten Island Summer is that it goes down easy.

Khumba is disastrously uninspired. Not even a galaxy of stars, united in their willingness to take a check, can save Khumba from being the boringest plucky outsider of all.

[Tony Girardin] ultimately focuses on Marinoni as a cranky workaholic driven to break a racing world record, but still paints a frustratingly vague portrait of the craftsman, husband and athlete.

Hover may sometimes be unbelievably generic, but Osterman, adapting Coleman’s clever scenario, nails a universal power dynamic.

Ultimately, Beneath is better than your average Roger Corman clone because it is more serious than trivial.

Little more than an ugly collection of tropes stolen from "The Exorcist" and "Seven."

This big, splashy blockbuster is perplexing because it's full of loosely-connected incidents that are rarely character-driven, or even narratively intelligible beyond a point.

A puzzle movie with too many unnecessary pieces and not enough essential ones, but it's superior to its predecessor in a few basic ways.

This is the kind of movie that leaves you with the impression that more thought was put into catchphrases and fan service than into a compelling plot, thoughtful characterizations or imaginative action choreography.

Leatherface tries to show us what made the man we know the legend he is now. Sadly, the makers of Leatherface didn't put enough thought into a sleepy story that could easily be titled "I Was a Teenage Leatherface."

The good news barely outweighs the bad in Dracula Untold, a lightweight war-adventure that is ultimately stranger and more enticing when it remembers it's also a horror film.

While I can't exactly recommend seeing Jigsaw, I can tell you that it's fun to watch. I just don't think it's the kind of fun the filmmakers' planned.

Any movie is improved at least 10 percent by the presence of Scottish actor Brian Cox, even mushy sports drama Believe.

The awkward transitions and clichéd merrymaking that define Lisa’s story will likewise be either more feature than bug for genre fans or just one more thing that makes Azuelos and Fierro’s narrative seem lazy and confused.

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.

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

While Les eventually becomes more tolerable, LaBute's cloying dialogue makes it impossible to appreciate what turns out to be a bracingly pragmatic sense of optimism.

Nothing in Moonwalkers matches Perlman's performance, but he frequently elevates desperate-to-please gags to stoner-comedy greatness.

Novel enough to be worth the price of admission, but you'll think twice before getting back in line for a second visit.

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.

Stage Fright's lopsided tone wouldn't be so confounding if the horror elements worked or if writer-director Jerome Sable's music, co-composed with Eli Batalion, weren't so forgettable.

This movie's makers haven't met a formula cliché that they don't like.

This sequel is sluggish and rote where its predecessor was aggressively perky and desperate to please...Tai Chi Hero is more Tai Chi Business as Usual.

Sleepy domestic-abuse/coming-of-age melodrama Phantom Halo never goes anywhere memorable because its two main characters don't consistently act like they're afraid of their big bad dad.

Like Vikander, you deserve better than Submergence.

The Green Inferno is not exactly a feel-good film, but it gets a very particular job done.

Just another unimaginative rip-off.

Thankfully, some climactic fight scenes, featuring strong action choreography and a clear overall presentation, give “One Spoon of Chocolate” the great emotional release it needs after so much dramatic buildup.

First-time director Stiles White's effective use of long takes and director of photography David Emmerichs's wide-angle digital cinematography make an otherwise generic teen ghost story unexpectedly atmospheric.

Kwek's refreshing focus on his terrorized protagonists' pre-abduction lives keeps Unlucky Plaza afloat once it invests in generic ticking-clock thrills.

Wiig really shines in the film, proving that her finely honed comic timing can make a character work even when the film ultimately doesn't.

It's an anti-romantic biography about a great artist, one whose central themes are basic, but whose energy and execution is irresistible.

Each propulsive segment features a handful of disturbing sequences... But such pleasures barely compensate for the vapidity of V/H/S: Viral's sketches.

The Lodgers needs to be better than a great mood in need of a decent story and stronger characters.

Extraterrestrial never settles into a groove, and therefore never becomes more than a collection of effectively icky scenes.

Love may not always be enjoyable, but it leaves an abiding mark.

I Did It My Way exemplifies the current state of mass-oriented Hong Kong genre cinema, leaning hard on its seasoned cast to both remind viewers of better movies and carry this one around the bases fast enough that you still get your money’s worth.

The Face of an Angel may not be like any other whodunit you've seen, but it's also only superficially smarter than the genre it defines itself against.

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.

You've seen neo-noirs like this before, but you probably haven't had this much fun with a modern B movie in a while.

Wolves is consequently too violent to be a "Twilight" knockoff, and too cuddly to be an effectively freaky tale of a boy who, to paraphrase "Werewolf Bar Mitzvah," becomes a man while also becoming a wolf.

Lifeless bromantic comedy Flock of Dudes has all the celebrity cameos and latent sexism of Judd Apatow's adult coming-of-age stories but none of the lowbrow wit and sensitivity.

Cusack's low-simmering performance keeps the drama at a tediously low boil.

Unlike the actual video game, Assassin's Creed isn't ridiculous and fun, but rather ridiculous and turgid.

What’s mostly lacking is a matter of character-enhancing detail, the kind that would better integrate the movie’s high-concept thrills with its heartstring-tugging melodrama. Soapy’s not bad, but “This is Not a Test” lacks the sensationalism or sensitivity to make it more than a wan misfire.

When Commitment isn't a perfectly forgettable action film, it's either an oil-thin melodrama or a charbroiled treat for meatheads.

By widening the scope of their based-on-a-true story, the makers of Revenge of the Green Dragon make their subjects look like the products of unimaginative cultural assimilation.

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.

Unfortunately, more bland than broad humor otherwise stands in for Polsky and Herzog’s personalities.

A genre movie that's at war with itself.

Beyond some effectively icky make-up effects, Contracted: Phase II sells nothing that viewers absolutely must buy.

You might come to Camera Obscura expecting nothing more than a kite-high concept like "camera that photographs future murders." But you too will be disappointed if you expect anything more from the film since its creators do not offer satisfying cheap thrills and/or thoughtful consideration of a veteran/artist's tortured post-war psyche.

The film makes one damning if unoriginal observation—the "reality" presented on reality TV is manufactured—and then does nothing to expand on it.

With its gleefuly nihilistic and destructive ending, What Lies Below ends on such a flat note that it makes everything before it seem like an inconsequential and/or needlessly convoluted set-up.

A surprisingly effective new horror flick.

When the creators of The Last Exorcism Part II swapped pseudo-verité realism for psychological realism, they made it a lot harder to take their franchise seriously.

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

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.

While most other films sprint through expository dialogue, and bluster their way through action scenes, The Last Witch Hunter is measured enough to make you want to suspend your disbelief.

The Color of Time has considerable ambition, but no inner life.

Watching Douglas behave like a narcissistic scumbag is an absolute pleasure, one in which viewers of action-adventure Beyond the Reach can happily indulge.

The movie’s off-putting and constantly foregrounded political agenda wouldn’t be so unpleasant if the action scenes were more plentiful and/or thrilling. They aren’t.

Despairingly bland.

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

Jellyfish Eyes may be blessedly unpretentious, but it's also immediately unmoving and relentlessly boring.

There is, in other words, nothing new in Hellions that you can't get already in earlier, more ambitious horror films. But McDonald delivers an effective thrice-told tale, and he does it with enough avant garde flair to show viewers that temper their expectations a good time.

Gans’ sequel delivers more of the same, so it likely won’t impress anyone who doesn’t already enjoy getting lost in the fog.

A cross between "Ocean's 11" and "The Expendables." American Renegades is also not nearly as fun as that sounds.

Five Nights at Freddy’s has most of the right elements for a good post-Amblin kiddy fright-fest, except maybe good dialogue and distinct characters. Watching the movie, one gets the sense that the games’ morbid personality has been sanded down to its most generic jump-scares and banal revelations.

Out of the Dark never leaves much of an impression despite character actor Stephen Rea's endearingly cocky performance, and an exotic—though largely under-utilized—South American setting.

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.

These kids have to contrive magical pretexts just to lay hands on each other, and boy, are their excuses rotten.

[A] grim, film-school-sloppy horror-thriller.

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.”

Leading man Richard Dreyfuss is so irrepressibly charming that he almost saves Jason Priestley's dismal buddy comedy Cas & Dylan from its awkward humor and trite sentimentality.

Sinister 2 may be ambitious, but its best ideas are, as they're expressed, dumb, unmoving, and repetitive.

While The Stranger is bad, the fact that it makes you wait and wait for its excessively dismal perspective to be justified by a measly little twist is even worse.

it's overstuffed, undercooked, and needlessly complicated.

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.

“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.

Death may not be the end in The Lazarus Effect, but it should be.

If nothing else, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reminds us that nostalgia is often used as a mandate for spectacularly lazy filmmaking.

Even if you can accept that there's nothing inherently wrong with being a little misanthropic in the right context, you'll probably find that Murder of a Cat's mean streak isn't wide enough.

The Curse of Downers Grove coasts on pulpy fumes thanks to its creators' effective emphasis on circumstantial peril over character-driven drama.

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

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

Indie sci-fi film Kill Switch is the worst kind of science-fiction film: the kind that coasts on a central gimmick instead of delivering either visceral or intellectual thrills.

Jeff Bridges's abysmally campy performance may be the worst thing about disposable sword-and-sorcery fantasy Seventh Son, but it's also the only memorable thing.

More enervating than it is ambitious, Jake Squared is partly a romantic comedy and mostly a pseudo-philosophical apology for self-absorption.

Coelho's writing may be "more [widely] translated than [Shakespeare's]," as the coda claims, but Paulo Coelho's Best Story never successfully pins down its subject's genius.

The Gallows is only good enough to make you wish its creators did something novel with its formulaic style, plot, and characterizations.

It's monumentally terrible. "Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son" now has competition for worst picture of the year.

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.

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.

Chander Pahar is an unfocused adventure-cum-travelogue.

To put in Clichénese, the only language Battle of the Year knows: the creator's hearts just weren't in this thing.

In spite of its enjoyable, easy-to-exploit aspects, 47 Ronin is a big budget spectacle hamstrung by its need to be at once flippant and respectful of its honor-driven source material.

Co-writer/co-director duo Harpo and Lenny Guit’s apparent disregard for their viewers’ comfort can sometimes be quite funny, depending on your tolerance for messy, meandering absurdist comedy.

The film rarely comes to life because Rollins, the only compelling actor in the otherwise amateurish cast, is underutilized, and virtually everything else underdeveloped.

This isn't a knowing parody of a beloved show, a la the 2012 reboot/parody "21 Jump Street"; it's a sample of the brain-dead entertainment against which its creators are supposedly reacting.

What Winchester lacks in originality its creators amply make up for in execution.

What “How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies” lacks in subtlety, it more than compensates for in its range of feeling and the surprising depth of its feel-good reassurances.

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.

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.

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

Ultimately, Devries seems to want to impress viewers with his anger.

I want to recommend Don't Sleep because it is, intellectually, more compelling than many of the indie horror films I tend to watch. But I can't recommend this movie, mostly because it's not smart enough to deserve that praise.

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

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 not only has a more involved story, but also features more engaged filmmaking throughout, with more camera setups and visual brio.

Unfortunately, Archambault’s churlishly over-the-top performance makes it impossible to take 14 Cameras seriously, no matter how you interpret Gerald’s actions.

Extraction constantly tries to score a flashy TKO — but never lands a decent body blow.

When Cage works with a less decisive director—or just one that's content to let Cage do whatever he wants—he seems to forget what acting is and desperately bellows for attention, like a neophyte actor whose intensity is his fallback pose.

The Loft's boorish leads aren't sensible enough to be worth caring about, making the film's character-driven conclusion feel like a self-defeating cop-out.

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).

Though it starts off as a cautiously optimistic conversion narrative, the pseudo-progressive, banned-in-India LGBT drama Unfreedom quickly devolves into an absurdly pessimistic provocation.

This is the horror movie equivalent of canned Spam: you could have it so much better if you tried harder (or at all).

Yoga Hosers is tiring, and not because it's dumb or inherently obnoxious. No, as RogerEbert.com's resident Kevin Smith apologist, it pains me to say this, but: this movie should have been made by someone with more discipline.

While the first Children of the Corn was made on a reported budget of $800,000, it somehow doesn’t look as cheap as this new Children of the Corn, which eventually delivers just enough formulaic violence.

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?

It's refreshing to see Shark Night 3D director David R. Ellis try to pull off a semi-sincere second-generation "Jaws" rip-off, even if he doesn't quite succeed.

Backgammon may not be effectively provocative, but it is sometimes dumb enough to be offensive.

Almost nothing makes sense in Brush With Danger, a bewilderingly incompetent and inexplicably racist Indonesian action film.

Writer/director John Herzfeld (15 Minutes, Two of a Kind) earnestly tries and spectacularly fails to dilute the acrid pretentiousness of Reach Me, a tone-deaf everything-is-connected melodrama, by cutting his characters' pseudo-enlightened philosophizing with goony broad humor.

The makers of this high-concept comedy lack the courage of their gross-out convictions. Being loud, and tasteless can also be funny, but if all you've got to offer is bad racial humor, and dopey sex jokes, then you are the F@4k-You Man Eddie Murphy jokes about in "Raw," the guy who cluelessly tries to make people laugh by cursing a lot. Ghost Team One also panders to viewers, and does a lousy job of it, too.

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?

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.

Smart and scary horror films about faith, and loneliness are rare, and for the most part, "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" is pretty exciting.

A trite, and slavishly inoffensive romantic drama.

Van Damme and Lundgren have worked together five times now since 1992, when the two '80s icons traded blows and bullets in the first "Universal Soldier" film. Not much has changed in 26 years since Lundgren, playing a berserk cyborg antagonist, stole that earlier film, too.

The film's nature as a work of propaganda would be more deplorable—or at least eyeroll-inducing—if it weren't so poorly blocked, scripted, performed, and choreographed. There is no joy in Seagal-ville, dear rubber-neckers, because pretty much everybody here has struck out.

Zariwny's conflicted retread is both too harsh and too judgmental.

Please take me away from this horrible movie.

Anti–romantic comedy Some Kind of Beautiful starts with a dialogue scene that baldly explains to viewers what kind of casually chauvinistic narrative it's not going to be. That promise is gracelessly and repeatedly broken thanks to neophyte screenwriter Matthew Newman's clichéd characterizations and helmer Tom Vaughan's incompetent direction.

A cynical, and consistently unpleasant film with creators who try very, very hard to push as many of your buttons as they can.

Even the most masochistic filmgoers should avoid Waxman and Seagal's latest collaboration, a boring vanity project that doesn't even competently flatter its star.

With no slick moves and no brains backing its skuzzy narrative, Neon Flesh is just a proudly tacky film about unconscionably tawdry people.

The film is superficially tense throughout, but director Pandey doesn't know what to emphasize when.

The worst thing about Doctor Bello's tacky, pseudo-spiritual proceedings isn't how bad the soap opera melodramatics are (Tyler Perry would blush!), but rather how lazily sketched out its story of one man's road to self-actualization is.

When choosing to unleash seemingly any desperate comedian they could find willing to work for scale, the creators of White T ensured that almost nothing about White T would make sense.

Attacks doesn't establish the severity of a real-life tragedy, it only crassly devalues the loss of human life.

As a filmmaker, Drasnin should not have relied so singularly on Rittenberg's testimony.

The pseudo-progressivism inherent in Himmatwala, an action-comedy remake of the 1983 Bollywood action-drama of the same name, makes toxic camp of otherwise meaningless kitsch.

Chashme Baddoor's modest charms dissipate quickly, but they're certainly real.

Nautanki Saala's creators spend so much time disinterestedly transitioning from one plot point to the next that they only effectively establish the haphazard nature of RP and Nandini's romance.

Dumb as they're written, even Holla II's characters are smart enough to want to exit this clunker as fast as they can.

No amount of hyper-stylized, Guy Ritchie–inspired posturing can save a film whose lead antihero is so unrepentantly vile.

Most jokes don't translate very well in Go Goa Gone, a Bollywood horror comedy influenced by Shaun of the Dead.

The most compelling thing about Friend 2 is its trifurcated plot, a structural gimmick borrowed from The Godfather Part II.

Chinese comedian Huang Bo justifies his status as a record-breaking mega-star in Breakup Buddies, a tone-deaf buddy comedy that's like 10 by way of Due Date.

Were it not for Partridge's and Mishra's performances, the generic plot -- Ray becomes inspired after bonding with Ashok, a down-on-his-luck Bollywood singer -- would be completely unmoving and unenlightening.

Immoral Tales works best when its creator is focused on surprising viewers with his perverse imagination, and not his misguided cynicism.

Because atrocious backstage drama 1915 is meant to address a great global tragedy -- the Turkish government–mandated extermination of 1.5 million Armenians -- the film's creators smother its putting-on-a-show narrative with ponderous diatribes about "denial," "ghosts," and "acting."

Absolution is an unconvincing showcase for Byron Mann, a new action star to whom Steven Seagal halfheartedly tries to pass a torch.

Redeemer may not be as good as its star, but it does give Zaror enough room to shine.

Amateurish direction and generic characterization make a light premise — serial killers slaughter a rural carnival's haunted-house patrons while pretending to be carnies — feel like a slog.

Dany's mystery may ultimately go one twist too far. But until then, viewers can easily lose themselves while daydreaming about a French dame in distress with bad luck and an alluring look.

I want to defend this movie, but it's so bad that I must warn you: if you watch this film knowing that it is Steven-Seagal-wearing-a-du-rag-and-glowering-impassively-at-attractive-young-women bad, you will get what you pay for. That's both an endorsement and a warning.

Co-writer/director Martin Owen downplays his conceit's most intriguing aspects — where are these kids' parents? — and instead focuses on monotonous chase scenes.

Summer of 8 may be as sincere as a Hughes movie, but it's as shallow as a kiddy pool.

German Concentration Camps Factual Survey may not teach us today much that Schindler's List, your local rabbi, or a quick Google search can't, but it remains a vital artifact of a time when Dachau and Auschwitz were not synonymous with "genocide."

Indian melodrama Rangoon somehow manages to be emotionally resonant despite being overstuffed. This is no small feat given how many different genres, tones, and characters this film juggles.

It's loud, it's gory, and there are musical numbers. Behold, the first great summer film is here, and it's a three-hour-long action-adventure about a leader whose heroic deeds make Conan the Barbarian look like a wimp.

You may think that you, the viewer, have it bad by the sixty minute mark, at which point you probably won't care who is inevitably going to backstab who. But just think of the poor subtitle translator who had to agonize over dialogue so leaden that it took the joy out of a word that's as joyfully outdated as "swindler."

Amateurish horror-comedy.

Retrograde, bloated, and formulaic. It's also consistently sincere, energizing, and charming.

Oh, The Humanity Bureau! How could a low-budget science-fiction thriller starring Nicolas Cage go wrong? Let me count the ways.

Because Silence’s might doesn’t eventually set things right for Snow Hill’s residents, The Great Silence goes out with a devastating bang.

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.

This is a corny, civic-minded "Stand and Deliver" clone that stars martial artist Donnie Yen as Mr. Chen, a generically tough-but-fair teacher who gives hope to a classroom full of would-be high school drop-outs.

The best thing about Welcome to Mercy is that its creators don't go for cheap thrills ... not many, anyway.

Castañeda and Van Damme's scene-stealing performances don't significantly improve writer/director Lior Geller's frequent reliance on racial stereotypes and gangster movie cliches.

The Wandering Soap Opera also sometimes feels like it was made by a filmmaker who doesn't understand where he is anymore. That mixture of excitement, confusion, and terror defines all six of the movie's vignettes.

The Hong Kong Triad mob thriller The White Storm 2: Drug Lords is a cynic’s delight, though often not in the ways you might expect. As a message movie, The White Storm 2 is pretty toothless.

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.

Impressive sound design, which makes every carabiner clink and boulder impact seem monumental, and Lee’s skilled use of close-up photography (combined with fast-cut montage editing) make “The Climbers” worth seeing on a big screen.

I’m still shocked that Followed is as funny as it is given that Mike is as obnoxious as you might expect given his very online, anything-for-the-lulz persona. He’s a cartoonishly loud, entitled millennial who never stops reminding us that he only cares about the sound of his own voice. He’s also sometimes unintentionally hysterical?

There’s something eerie, and sometimes even dreadful at the heart of The Soul Collector, a new South African horror movie about the damage done by hungry ghosts and their ignorant descendants. Mostly because The Soul Collector often suggests more than its streamlined plot and mythology can express.

Watching Harlow struggle with the simultaneously impersonal and obviously prejudiced nature of his imprisonment is often enough to make Caged seem like more than the sum of its parts.

Unfortunately, the quality of storytelling here often isn’t strong enough to hold one’s interest throughout such a diminutive runtime. Still, you might enjoy yourself if you don’t expect much character development, but do look forward to some creative uses of improvised weapons, like a hammer and a septic tank lid.

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.

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.

There are a lot of ideas swimming around in “The Pit,” but most of them aren’t arranged well enough to demand your attention.

Fans of cheap thrills and cheesy B-movies are sure to be frustrated by The Requin, a new shark pic that waits about an hour before introducing major carnivorous fish action. That alone might turn off viewers since The Requin only lasts about 89 minutes, and most of the movie plays out like a soapy two-hander about survivor’s guilt.

Unlike a lot of recent indie horror movies, An Unquiet Grave doesn’t feel bogged down by the last few decades’ worth of American horror. It’s a spare, dread-filled mood piece whose just-so dialogue, too-tight close-ups, and deceptively subdued pacing all tease out small, but essential details from both of these elusive central characters.

The new New York Ninja often feels like a pre-fab midnight movie that was made with apparent love and care but without much urgency or creativity.

I’m not sure where this particular wannabe franchise is going or if anybody but initiated viewers will care to find out, but I could watch another one.

The artful parallels that director Chan Tze Woon draws between contemporary and now middle-aged pro-democratic Hong Kong protesters often seem insubstantial given the movie’s thinly drawn narrative of historic events.

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.

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

Yen doesn’t exactly swing for the fences here, but Sakra still lands exactly where its multi-hyphenate star needs it to.

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

Ratnam and his collaborators stick the landing on their gargantuan pot-boiler, and while Krishnamurthy’s world may not look as grand as it seemed, either in the moviemakers’ heads or on the page, it is big enough to get lost in.

Eventually, this outstanding reboot’s most generic elements appear subordinate to the title character’s deranged, boyish, and sometimes romantic subjective reality.

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.