Simon Abrams

Corfixen celebrates her husband for being open in his work, but never shows us how his real-life concerns translate into commendable creative risk-taking.

Unfortunately, The Public Image is Rotten often feels like an illustrated airing of grievances that also happens to be an in-their-words history of Lydon's best band.

The British WWII drama “Munich - The Edge of War” starts off as a prim spy thriller and ends as an insufferable civics lesson.

I often wished there was more to Hatching than just a few weak digs at bad mothers who are a little too online. Maybe you have to be Finnish to see Hatching as a blistering and culturally specific satire. Or maybe there’s just not much to get about the movie.

It’s a character-driven drama populated by sketchy characters who are mostly compelling thanks to the movie’s strong ensemble cast and Haugerud’s typically sensitive direction. So unfortunately, the suggestive power of Johanne’s journey fades as the movie slowly heads to its inconclusive finale.

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

Writer/director Tomer Heymann's uneven doc Mr. Gaga offers a character study of Israeli dance choreographer Ohad Naharin, but the scope and power of Naharin's art only becomes clear when the dancers illustrate rather than comment on his distinctively twitchy, animalistic "gaga" style of movement.

Before its typically inoffensive and unmemorable finale, Four Samosas inevitably skids into a self-conscious Anderson parody that even the uninitiated will see coming from miles off.

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

Cocker's magnetic persona is a huge part of Pulp's identity, but it's not the band's greatest legacy. So don't be surprised when Cocker's gas-leak hiss of a voice is drowned out by smoke machine cannons, and fails to swell until it bursts at the end of "Common People."

Believer works best as a series of perpetually escalating confrontations.

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.

Neville briefly showcases individual musicians but never sticks with them long enough to highlight their skills.

Deepsea Challenge has too little interest in anything that's not Cameron's personal experience.

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.

An unconvincing sequel to the 1994 original that’s basically the Scandinavian answer to recent trauma-minded American horror legacy-quels like “Halloween Ends” and “Scream VI.”

[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.

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.

A genre movie that's at war with itself.

There's a lot of chutzpah on display throughout the film, even during essentially soggy, dialogue-intensive sequences, which are broken up by disorienting flashbacks. But Jung's biggest failing is his inability to make Sook-hee a heroine worth caring about.

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.

The film's retro, John Carpenter-esque synthesizer score, composed by Jeff Grace, further pushes viewers away.

Almost everything that’s enjoyable about Escape From Pretoria is a variation on stuff you’ve probably seen in superior prison movies, though Radcliffe’s haunted performance is exceptionally compelling.

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.

Puncture's story only moves forward thanks to Evans's charm. But a good lead performance can't single-handedly save thin material.

A lot of substantial or just different material might have enriched this documentary’s tidy fall-and-rise story.

Director Joshua Erkman shows promise throughout “A Desert,” his first feature, but his movie’s unyielding scenario, co-written with Bossi Baker, makes it hard to want to hang around while thinly drawn characters vaguely establish the movie’s themes.

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

Unfortunately, Afflicted is as emotionally involving as a really accomplished special-effects sizzle reel.

Francisco’s committed and surprisingly nuanced performance makes it easier to invest in the movie’s otherwise unexplained style of magical realism.

The film is, in that sense, the ultimate fan film since it monotonously aggregates previously existing scifi/fantasy tropes. Rejoice, Gen X viewers, for now you can uncritically enjoy your childhood's junk food culture just because you're looking at the past through the rose-colored lenses of the future.

Some genre-affirming twists and tropes throughout hint at a sharper genre parody that happens to be about a sympathetic young heroine. This isn’t that kind of movie. Sometimes, it just looks like something better.

Some people might enjoy a solitary clip from a Henry Rollins interview, as well as occasional anecdotes from “Rescue Dawn” star Christian Bale (another Batman!). Others might wonder why we’re watching a chaotic docu-salute to Herzog when we could be watching a Herzog movie instead.

Too bad writer-director Leena Yadav only infrequently uses innuendo-driven sex talk to break up a monotonous series of confrontations between misogynistic alpha males and their unhappy wives.

The atmospheric but threadbare male bonding horror flick The Ritual is so well-directed that you can't help but groan at its lightweight script's many little inadequacies.

The camera loves Channing Tatum, and that makes up for a lot in Dog, a corny road movie that mostly panders to fans of Tatum and/or dogs, as well as any moviegoer who still thinks that making a big show of supporting the troops (any troops) makes them more human than, uh, most everyone else.

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.

Even with so many talented actors involved, there’s nothing really galvanizing or particularly provocative about Redford’s latest.

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.

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.

Maslany and Cullen's characters seem intended to be psychologically realistic, but they're only as complex as The Other Half's surface-deep style.

The scattershot new media satire Vengeance might have been merely a toothless provocation replete with both-sides false equivalences were it not so well-scripted and well-directed on a scene-to-scene basis.

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.

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

By inexpertly filtering her art through her travails, Wood and Altunaga reimagine Parra's suicide as an explicable conclusion to her turbulent life.

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.

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.

Sam's racist behavior may be intended to make him a menacing sign of our times, but such unbelievable mustache-twirling makes him as threatening as a C-grade Freddy Krueger knockoff.

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

Pattinson and Wasikowska deserve better material than the Zellners’ head-scratchingly lazy jokes.

The maddeningly unfocused Israeli documentary West of the Jordan River doesn’t reveal anything insightful about Gaza settlers’ reasons for either supporting or rejecting a two-state solution.

The consistently disjointed ensemble dramedy She Came to Me never settles on a sensible tone to match its anxious, but well-meaning characters, most of whom are neither so ridiculous nor so tragic to be either laugh aloud funny or convincingly dramatic.

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.

The wispy depression drama A Mouthful of Air floats more weighty ideas about mental illness and suicidal ideation than its episodic narrative can accommodate.

[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.

Recreated footage of the rovers flying to, landing on, and carefully exploring the red planet tend to be the most engrossing material in White’s scattershot documentary, which too often tries to humanize the rovers’ handlers by playing up their emotions instead of their accomplishments.

While zombie drama Maggie seems intended as a showcase for Arnold Schwarzenegger's acting range, the star's performance is smothered by the film's deeply affected style.

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.

Vonnegut’s family members and biographers provide the most intriguing material in Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time, but their interviews are too brief to enhance viewers’ appreciation of his work.

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

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

If anything unites On Any Sunday: The Next Chapter's cyclists, it's Brown and Rousseau's inability to highlight their subjects' most singular qualities.

A gonzo ten-minute standoff between Adrien Brody and a man-eating pitbull single-handedly justifies the existence of the otherwise uninspired heist thriller Bullet Head.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Unexpected isn't about, but rather a product of, class-based condescension in America.

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

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.

There’s a chintzy silver lining tacked onto every potentially dark cloud in the cloying French World War II drama A Bag of Marbles, a pseudo-inspiring adaptation of Jewish World War II survivor Joseph Joffo’s partly fictionalized memoir.

Hokey and unconvincing, “Tetris” skims the surface of a genuinely curious “true story” thriller, which too often plays out like a Disney-ified version of “The Social Network.”

A largely genial but frequently wearying feature-length toy ad.

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.

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

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

Rock-dumb Hong Kong thriller That Demon Within is exhausting, and only sometimes batshit enough to be engaging.

Most of the gags in this pandering spoof are about their own schematic nature — they’re jokes about how you’re smarter than the jokes.

Mistaken for Strangers doesn't reveal anything about Tom but his own insecurity.

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 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.

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

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.

Point and Shoot consequently feels like a film made by a storyteller — not a journalist — who doesn't know he can ask follow-up questions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

Lowe's attempts at getting into anti-heroine Ruth's head are largely unsuccessful, though her performance is sometimes effectively hysterical.

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

A coming-of-age drama that's also Southern Gothic ghost story, is an unusual, ambitious failure, mostly because the film's hyper-naturalistic style is meant to evoke a supernatural mood.

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

Amateurish horror-comedy.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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

Writer/director Sam Hoffman's trite dramedy about personal redemption delivers mediocre performances.

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.

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.

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.

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

Worse still: because The Emperor's New Clothes is often beholden to the whims of Brand (star of "Get Him to the Greek," and that tedious "Arthur" remake nobody saw), it too often feels like "Button-Pushing Encounters with Russell Brand."

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The Good Doctor isn't a ponderous bore because Blake isn't a strictly good or bad character: It sucks because he isn't even a compelling character.

Director Jackie Earle Haley's Criminal Activities is the worst kind of Tarantino clone, one with no gas in the tank, and no clue about how to pull off Tarantino's swagger.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sleazy Australian kidnapping drama Hounds of Love will make you wish you were watching a more traditionally nihilistic horror film.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The film's rote right-makes-might fantasy wouldn't be so obnoxious if pandering to the lowest common denominator wasn't its default mode.

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.

Gibney may encourage viewers to condemn the police, but his self-righteous editorializing doesn’t make up for the lack of convincing evidence.

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.

The three lead actors are limited by their characters' kiddy-pool-shallow behavior.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Tepid ghost story Insidious: Chapter 3 tries and fails to emphasize character-driven drama over cheap, jump-scare-intensive thrills.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Barker's tactlessness wouldn't be so bad if he weren't too high on his own patchwork rhetoric to ask his subjects what specifically motivates them.

There doesn’t seem to be a romantic-comedy cliché missing from the bland French domestic Back to Burgundy, a wholly contrived post-adolescent coming-of-age yarn.

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

Amateurishly realized sensationalism trumps character-driven drama throughout Killers.

Like Vikander, you deserve better than Submergence.

Plays like a sampler of Dreamworks Animation's worst creative impulses: sugar-rush pacing, pandering meta-gags, and a slick, flavorless animation style.

Chander Pahar is an unfocused adventure-cum-travelogue.

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.

Trash's creators never say anything thoughtful or useful about the extreme violence they liberally — and irresponsibly — use to characterize third-world adolescence.

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.

Most of the documents that Lapa quotes from are, as presented, unrevealing — even offensive.

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

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.

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

The arbitrary value of life in I Am Not a Serial Killer makes its nature as an ostensibly character-driven mystery that much harder to swallow. Don't bother with this nonsensical time-waster.

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.

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.

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

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.

Viewers are not privileged with a more thoughtful, specific view of the institutionalized problems that Sudanese natives face because Sauper's not interested in making that kind of film.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

A spectacularly miscalculated historical epic.

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.

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 biggest difference between the two films is that "Unfriended" is dynamic and cruel while Unfriended: Dark Web is unbelievably stupid and sadistic. Neither movie is especially smart or incisive about the Way We Live Now, but they don't really have to be.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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."

The Take is just really lousy.

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.

Kung Fu Yoga doesn't feel like a young man's film. Normally that would be a cause for celebration, but in this case, Chan's latest doesn't just address, but rather shows his age.

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.

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

But all the charm in the world wouldn't make Ra.One's sanctimoniousness seem any more genuine.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

The Conjuring is as toothless as it is because it's two different kinds of boring. The film's plot is explained exhaustively whenever loud noises aren't blaring, and random objects aren't teasingly leaping out at you from the corner of your eye.

If you're wondering where the Jim Carrey of "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" and "Dumb and Dumber" fame went, don't look to Mr. Popper's Penguins for answers.

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

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

Generally speaking, the museum seems like a modest, but vividly-detailed freak show.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

There's nothing specific, thoughtful or emotionally involving about Election Night beyond a basic need to push buttons, and get a rise out of viewers. The good guys are actually bad, and the bad guys are too indistinct to be hateful. Vote with your wallets, and go see something else.

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.

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

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

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.

Oppressively bleak mood piece Alléluia is a horror film for people who like to be scared by a grim, joyless and thoroughly depressing character study.

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

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!).

The turgid revenge thriller The Foreigner is an all-around lousy movie.

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.

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.

The Christmas-themed home-invasion movie Better Watch Out starts out as one kind of unpleasant, then switches gears to a higher level of unearned nastiness.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

The kind of childish genre movie that gives genre movies a bad reputation.

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.

The main distinguishing feature of this film is its almost-novel nesting-doll plot structure, and passing thematic interest in its narrative's formulaic nature.

“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.

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

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

Pseudo-sensitive bro-dude rom-com Date and Switch comes out today, and it already feels dated.

A tone-deaf celebration of Manhattan’s ritzy Carlyle Hotel.

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."

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.