Simon Abrams

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."

Ray and his co-stars’ easy chemistry makes you want to hang out with Will, if only to see where the plot twist takes him. “Destroy All Neighbors” wouldn’t really work without that essential playfulness; the fact that it works at all suggests that Ms. Lee and her team are the movie’s real MVPs.

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.

Chinese blockbuster Monster Hunt is a sappy, crowd-pleasing, tonally wonky fantasy-adventure/comedy that pits dorky-looking monsters against over-acting cornball comedians/monster-hunters.

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.

Judgmental and ungenerous, Alex’s story gives you enough answers to either tsk-tsk or nod sadly in response. The rest’s up to you, the viewer, which feels like a bit of a cop-out.

Finley deserves credit for adding extra wrinkles to Anderson’s story, but Landscape with Invisible Hand doesn’t cut deep enough to leave a mark.

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

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

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.

At some point, queasy horror-comedy Another Evil stops being about one man's comically vain attempts at exorcising his home, and starts being a weird character study about a laughably desperate wannabe exorcist.

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.

It's a confrontational fever dream film told from constantly shifting perspectives, and a chilly, dizzying trip into a genre defined by violently conflicting emotions.

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.

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

Dog Eat Dog may be successfully alienating, but that doesn't mean it's entertaining, thoughtful or even successfully provocative.

Hypnotic may not be clever or energetic enough to keep your mind from wandering, but it is charming in its own stumbling way.

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

There may be nothing new about America Underdog, but it’s still good enough, as far as non-perishable comfort food goes.

How badly do you want to see rabid computer-generated zombie-monkeys die violently? Because there's not much else worth recommending in [Rec] 4: Apocalypse.

It's uneven, and more than a little mystifying, but Rigor Mortis is also a bittersweet coda to a deliriously silly series of films.

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

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.

Christina Ricci does most, if not all, of the emotional lifting in the lightweight horror drama Monstrous, a period piece about a single mom and her son who, in 1955, run away from home and re-settle in an isolated lakeside house.

With “The 4:30 Movie,” a lightly likable coming-of-age story and romantic-comedy, writer/director Kevin Smith (“Clerks III,” “Jay and Silent Reboot”) offers low-stakes nostalgia and very little else.

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.

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.

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