Stephanie Merry

Norwegian director Roar Uthaug has had past success with nail-biting suspense, as in his well-received 2015 disaster movie “The Wave.” He can’t quite replicate that same tension here, however. Watching a tiny-but-tough woman survive one danger after another tests not only our credulity, but our patience.

The romantic drama is painfully contrived and insistently predictable.

Watching “Transfomers” is like sitting in a car that’s revving its engine while stuck in the mud. It sounds like it’s getting somewhere, even though all it ever does is spin its wheels.

The big thrills and few laughs are no match for the cumbersome, convoluted story, not to mention the nonexistent chemistry between Cruise and Wallis.

If anything, Baywatch is a litmus test for how low Johnson can sink while still winning us over.

Morality is hardly the main concern of The Ottoman Lieutenant. Instead, it’s content with hackneyed romance and soaring strings.

The story takes a couple of sharp turns, ultimately revealing that it isn’t a romantic comedy after all, but a shambling drama with a few mildly amusing pratfalls.

The Bye Bye Man had a relatively modest budget, and it shows in the special effects, which tend to be more funny than scary.

The Duelist will leave viewers scratching their heads over any number of questions, but the most gnawing one might be: Why did everyone get so dressed up for a bloodbath?

Of course, action movies don’t have to be believable or poignant. They just have to get your adrenaline pumping. But the movie lacks inspiration in that department, too, owing to action sequences you’ve seen before, familiar music and dialogue so predictable you could make a game out of guessing the next line.

A few minutes of excitement can’t compensate for an hour and a half of unimaginative storytelling and dull characters.

The drama stars Edgar Ramírez as Roberto and Robert De Niro as his legendary coach. The two are exceptionally well cast, but they can’t save an unfocused jumble of a movie that doubles as a cautionary tale about the importance of film editing.

Lazy, scattershot and excruciatingly unfunny, the movie is a hazard to the very young, who might come away with the erroneous impression that movies don’t get any better than this.

It’s all so plodding and grim, echoed by the blandly percussive score by Ramin Djawadi.

Wondrous visuals only go so far, in a film that turns out to be lethally dull.

Somehow channeling the tone of both a Lifetime movie and an after-school special, Mothers and Daughters shambles into theaters oozing schlock and melodrama, just in time for Mother’s Day. This is no way to honor a beloved family member.

Dough never leaves any doubt about where it’s going or what it’s trying to say, serving up a recipe that we’ve not only had many times before, but we’ve had enough of.

On paper, this is an extraordinary story. But the careless production values blunt its impact. The score is obtrusive and generic; the sound editing makes a shootout sound reminiscent of an old Western; continuity errors abound.

With so many warmed-over jokes, you’d think that the delivery would at least be on point. But everything, including the timing, feels off.

The Bronze is just another movie about overcoming arrested development. It’s not as funny as it tries to be, but, for a few, fleeting minutes, it leaves an impression.

The Brothers Grimsby is fitfully, sometimes outrageously, funny. But Cohen’s shtick of showing the backwardness and stupidity of unprivileged characters is starting to feel lazy, not to mention classist itself.

London Has Fallen is remarkable only because of how much worse it is than its inane predecessor.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies delivers what its title promises: a little romance and some undead villains, plus a bit of comedy. But this overly busy riff on Austen’s winning formula doesn’t justify all the tinkering.

Monster Hunt has visual appeal to spare, but the allure ends there.

The plot is paint by numbers, which puts pressure on the comedy to deliver. But it doesn’t.

It takes a very special director to make scenes of sky-diving, free climbing, big-wave surfing and BASE jumping something to yawn at. Yet Ericson Core must be that kind of miracle worker, because Point Break, his update of the 1991 cult classic, is basically a cavalcade of extreme sports, but with less drama than a highlight reel.

As the movie wears on, the plot points become increasingly far-fetched, and what started out as a moody if by-the-book thriller becomes increasingly silly. All the while, Roberts gives her all.

By the Sea is dazzlingly gorgeous, as are its stars. But peeling back layer upon layer of exquisite ennui reveals nothing but emptiness, sprinkled with stilted sentiments.

Good camerawork only goes so far. Love drags on and on, alternating between arguments and intimacy, breakups and makeups. The movie never passes the authenticity test; if this is what sex feels like, we’ll all soon be extinct.

Pan doesn’t deliver on its own promise. The movie doesn’t so much enhance our understanding of the flying boy as it demonstrates how little thought went into crafting his back story.

Every Asian character is either a ruthless murderer or anonymous collateral damage. A lot of locals have to die, the film suggests, in order for one white family to survive.

The movie — which looks and sounds like a more brutal Bond knockoff — is at least consistently stylish, though its tone is less assured.

For the most part, Vacation is a sad, cynical rip-off of writer John Hughes’s source material. No one expects originality, but the new movie may end up making history: It’s already looking like the worst movie of the year.

Lazy humor and familiar plotting aside, Pixels at least gets a little mileage out of its affection for the 1980s.

In the end, Davis ends up a wasted resource. She does her best to elevate the material, but the story fails to live up to her considerable talents.

The movie winks and nudges its way through a lighter, modernized variation of the classic, proud of its own cleverness every time Gemma’s life mirrors Madame B’s. But imitation for the sake of itself isn’t brilliant, especially when the elements most worthy of copying — Flaubert’s precise narration and telling details — don’t make the cut.

In the world of Freedom, slaves and the people who help them are Christians, and the bad guys don’t believe in God.

Director James McTeigue frequently collaborates with the visionary Wachowski siblings, and he directed V for Vendetta. How the man who blew up Parliament in such memorably spectacular fashion can’t add some originality to Philip Shelby’s script is the movie’s only real mystery.

People don’t go to Sparks movies for subtlety; they go to warm their hearts by bearing witness to true love. Of course, that requires a story that rings true. In The Longest Ride, authenticity is in short supply.

Cooper and Lawrence do their best, but the material consistently works against them, from the overwrought dialogue to the never-ending plot twists in place of character development.

You can make a movie that’s both sweet and crass; just look at Judd Apatow’s comedies. But the mix doesn’t work here, maybe because both the vulgarity and the cheesiness are so amped up.

It seems that Andy and Lana Wachowski have never lost that childlike ability to dream. But they also haven’t mastered the grown-up power to rein it in. The story they tell in Jupiter Ascending could probably occupy an entire television season. There’s way too much here for one movie to hold.

Mortdecai succeeds more as a talky farce than an action-packed adventure. But it would be even better if Mortdecai weren’t about Mortdecai at all.

It’s John Goodman who steals every scene. As a scary loan shark who might cough up cash to get Jim out of his pickle, Goodman elevates the material, showcasing the dark humor that Wyatt was clearly going for. But, overall, that comedy just doesn’t land.

This biblical action drama that feels excessive in every way imaginable, from running time (nearly 2 1/2  hours) to melodramatic acting to the conspicuous amount of computer generation.

Even as characters are tweaked and actors bring a slightly different energy than his other movies, The Best of Me is still the same mushy Nicholas Sparks adaptation with drama so overwrought audience members can’t help but laugh — at least until they’re sniffling during the closing credits.

Ultimately the movie feels like an empty exercise. Sure, it’s a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of fame. But when the one figure most worthy of our sympathy is nothing more than a beautiful blonde robot, what’s the point?

The movie’s action sequences are both thrilling and idiotic.

For all the movie’s grandiose annihilation, there also is action so absurd and emotion so saccharine that the likelihood of involuntary laughter is high.

The film is artfully shot with eye candy galore: sumptuous dresses, beautiful people and scenes from Pierre and Yves’s time in Morocco. But for all its visual stimulation, the story does little to awaken emotions.

The movie’s transition from surfer flick to a story about faith is swift and not particularly smooth.

The problem is quantity. There are so many action sequences related to so many story lines that midway through an epic fight, you might find yourself wondering what exactly started this particular battle and what the objective is other than destruction for the sake of it.

Definitely exceeds expectations, but in the worst way possible.

Some of the dancing really is spectacular. Scenes from the competing clubs include impressive choreography and gravity-defying moves. If only the poorly delivered, trite dialogue and predictable plot aimed as high.

For all its intimations about finding one’s true self and the complicated setups for a big misidentification, The Pretty One is just another romantic dramedy.

Paul W.S. Anderson, best known for the “Resident Evil” franchise and 2011’s “The Three Musketeers,” creates harrowing simulations of the disaster. It’s enough to make you want him to ditch the story altogether.

The movie feels like Nicholas Sparks fan fiction.

The only thing that distinguishes this teen-magnet wannabe from its predecessors is how lazily it appears to have been slapped together.

The only thing epic about The Legend of Hercules is what a failure it is.

The movie’s editing mishaps, unbelievable scenarios, overuse of music and computer-generated fakery distract from what should be a great ad­ven­ture.

Along the way there’s a sprinkling of humanizing moments.

Like an elaborately decorated wedding cake, the kid-friendly Walking With Dinosaurs 3D may leave you wondering how something so stunning could end up being so bland.

All of The Last Days on Mars feels like it’s been done before.

Diana isn’t just an egregious case of rewriting history, but one of oversimplifying it.

The intentions for I’m in Love With a Church Girl may have been noble, but nearly every part of the delivery turns out to be flawed.

Just a series of familiar scenes unfurling toward an inevitable conclusion.

While some of the stories are interesting, the film is much longer than it needs to be. For his part, Salerno tries to get creative with solutions for the lack of visual stimuli, but most attempts fail.

After the movie limps along for an hour and a half, Besson suddenly switches gears and does what he does best.

The whole movie becomes such a pileup of detritus, whether it’s cop cars or plot points, that even something as important as rationale becomes an afterthought.