Stephen Holden

It is so vague, cliché-ridden and devoid of surprise and suspense that once you grasp its premise, watching it is like leafing through a design magazine kept in a refrigerator.

The spectacle of actors of the quality of Russell Crowe, Aaron Paul, Janet McTeer, Octavia Spencer and Jane Fonda earnestly struggling to wring eye moisture from hammy, flat-footed dialogue (credited to Brad Desch, an unknown), while maintaining some dignity, is depressing proof that an actor is only as good as his or her material.

Unlike the juicy, overripe prose in the novel from which it was adapted, Mr. DeCubellis’s screenplay is utterly lacking in style. Mr. Brody captures his character’s attitude, but the colorless screenplay robs the character of literary imagination.

A low point in the director’s career, this sleek chilly film isn’t acted so much as posed.

Mr. Gyllenhaal’s strong performance still doesn’t add enough substance to a film that is hollow at the center. It’s mostly the fault of Mr. Sipe, who seems to believe that saying nothing is saying something.

Zoolander 2 has enough plots for several movies. They are so jammed together that they more or less cancel each other out.

This clumsy, poorly written action thriller is such a complete catastrophe that you wonder how actors with the stature of Mr. Hopkins and Mr. Pacino were bamboozled into appearing in it.

Daddy’s Home is an ugly psychological cockfight posing as a family-friendly comedy. Laugh-free — except for some farcical, life-threatening stunts at the expense of Will Ferrell’s character, Brad — it is best avoided unless a movie that has the attitude and mind-set of a schoolyard bully happens to be your thing.

Sad to say: There is far more crackle in an average episode of “Law & Order.”

The movie never bothers to show you life inside a shelter dormitory or tries to convey a broader vision of the city’s street culture. It is too busy showcasing its star Jennifer Connelly (Mr. Bettany’s wife) in degrading situations.

Trash is a shameless bid to recycle the mystique of “Slumdog Millionaire,” its likable, overrated prototype.

One of the worst films to sport the label “romantic comedy.”

Bravetown, directed by Daniel Duran from a screenplay by Oscar Orlando Torres, can sometimes drown in its own tears.

Just Before I Go, the directorial debut of Courteney Cox, lurches along a wobbly line between salacious comic nastiness and nauseating sentimentality. The two strains are so poorly integrated that the screenplay (by David Flebotte) feels like pieces from two different projects mashed together with little oversight.

The steady performances of Tom Wilkinson, playing a kindly priest, and Emily Watson, an angelic mother, in Alejandro Monteverde’s Little Boy do little to offset the cloying sweetness of a movie that has the haranguing inspirational tone of a marathon Sunday-school lesson.

What a frantically dull spectacle this vanity project is.

After the Fall belongs to a type of movie that is too lazy to connect the dots and fill in the blanks between its supposedly teachable moments.

What Horrible Bosses 2 lacks in nasty repartee, it tries to make up for in poorly staged comedy chases and break-ins. It is the Hollywood equivalent of a rambunctious little boy pointing to the toilet and squealing, “Mommy, look what I made!”

This is a movie that runs on magical thinking.

Mr. Leguizamo, 50, still has charisma, but with his maniacal stage persona barely seen and the themes recycled from earlier projects, Fugly! is a dud.

The screenplay is so haphazardly constructed that when the movie seems to be ending, it refuels with preposterous new developments.

Rudderless, the misbegotten directorial debut of William H. Macy, is so dishonest, manipulative and ultimately infuriating that it never recovers after its bombshell revelation two-thirds of the way into the movie.

Wish I Was Here is so eager to please that you are never allowed to feel uncomfortable for more than a minute or two before a reassuringly stale joke rushes in to pat you on the head.

If there is any humor to be gleaned from this concept, it is nowhere to be found in a movie so shoddily made that there is little continuity between scenes and not a laugh or even a titter.

The storytelling is infuriatingly coy, as if Mr. Haggis were trying to fool you (and himself) into thinking that he has something to say. Third Person finds Mr. Haggis, like Mr. Neeson’s screen alter ego, running on empty.

Lullaby, the directorial debut of Andrew Levitas, a jack of all artistic trades, is the kind of manipulative, cliché-infested hokum that alienates moviegoers by its insistence on hogging all the tears.

As this strained, foul-mouthed exercise in gallows humor proceeds, God’s Pocket sustains a facade of meanspirited deadpan comedy. But there are no laughs, not even smirks to be had.

This female revenge comedy is so dumb, lazy, clumsily assembled and unoriginal, it could crush any actor forced to execute its leaden slapstick gags and mouth its crude, humorless dialogue.

At least Mr. De Niro, who disappears from the movie until the end, seems to be enjoying himself. The force of his bonhomie gives this murky-looking, empty conceit of a film a desperately needed lift of facetious humor.

The movie acts like screwball comedy, but there are no laughs as Daisy and Jay’s connection lurches toward implausible romance.

The movie’s principal saving grace is Ms. Winslet’s convincing portrayal of Adele, a despairing woman of low self-esteem just a twitch away from a nervous breakdown. In almost every other respect, this overbaked romantic hokum is preposterous.

A vile, witless sex comedy.

Unlike such forerunners as “Clueless” and “Mean Girls,” however, this movie, doesn’t have a believable moment in it.

Picturesque seascapes are about the only thing to recommend in Summer in February.

The movie is so incoherent that its screenplay, by Mr. Drolet and Mr. Richards, might as well have been scrawled between takes as it was being filmed.

[An] overlong, drab, not-so-funny sports comedy.

After barely stirring to life, Night Train to Lisbon mercifully expires.

This catastrophe of a movie zigzags drunkenly between action-adventure and surreal comedy with some magical realism slopped over it like ketchup.

The Book Thief is a shameless piece of Oscar-seeking Holocaust kitsch.

This dull, dawdling film, adapted from Françoise Dorner’s novel “La Douceur Assassine,” eventually succumbs to sentimentality.

Its indictment of capitalism is so shrill and one-note that it may just as easily set off fits of giggling, because its characters are so ridiculously evil.

All too soon, Machete Kills collapses into a deranged, directionless splatter comedy that exhausts its bag of tricks, many of them recycled from this grindhouse auteur’s 2010 spoof.

The movie plays like a made-for-television quickie.

The glimmers of wit and carnival humor in the “Fast & Furious” franchise are nowhere to be found in Getaway.

An awkward, long-winded mash-up of therapy session, horror movie and survival tale with pretensions of psychological depth.

The movie’s only fresh element is the wintry setting, which shrouds everything in a mood of weary fatalism. Otherwise, it’s the same old, same old, efficiently discharged and utterly disposable.

Mr. Oldman and Mr. Ford are the only actors in the film, directed by Robert Luketic (“Legally Blonde”), skillful enough to navigate the yards of jargon-packed boilerplate in Jason Hall and Barry L. Levy’s thudding screenplay.

The movie is so devoid of emotion that its ritualized gore acts as a narcotic. Filmed in shades of red, with a minimal screenplay, Only God Forgives looks like a ghoulish fashion shoot in hell. Three words should suffice: pretentious macho nonsense.

"Hee Haw” meets “Pulp Fiction” at the meth lab: That describes the style of Pawn Shop Chronicles, a hillbilly grindhouse yawp of a movie that belches in your face and leaves a sour stink.

Its narrative continuity is so sketchy and the screenplay so haphazard that the movie doesn’t add up to more than trash, seasoned with pretentious religiosity.

Just when its parts should come together, As Cool as I Am crumbles to bits.

The Hangover Part III, directed by Todd Phillips from a screenplay he wrote with Craig Mazin, is a dull, lazy walkthrough that along with "The Big Wedding" has a claim to be the year's worst star-driven movie.

What does it add up to? Um ... I have no idea and don’t really care. Just because the characters waste their time doesn’t mean you should waste yours watching them circle the drain.

If 1st Night had a glint of social satire, it might have amounted to something more than a frivolous fatuity. But it plays as an arch, hammily acted farce.

The glum, episodic and unbelievable Arthur Newman is the film equivalent of a dysfunctional computer sloppily assembled from discarded parts of other machines.

To say that Justin Zackham’s farce The Big Wedding takes the low road doesn’t begin to do justice to the sheer awfulness of this star-stuffed, potty-mouthed fiasco.

Love Sick Love deteriorates into a series of pranks that are not funny enough to register as comedy or brutal enough to qualify as horror.

Mental wildly overplays the kookiness and quirk.

Starbuck is up to its eyeballs in mush.

Did I mention that Upside Down is simply awful?

A comedy that is so scatterbrained and long-winded that much of it feels invented on the spot. (It’s also a half-hour too long.)

The weakest parts of Safe Haven are its action sequences, in which the illusion of reality is shattered by ham-handed editing, garish special effects and comic-book dialogue.

For all its visual pizazz A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III has the jerky momentum of a collection of disconnected skits loosely thrown together with only the vaguest notion of where it’s heading or what it all means. At best it is a mildly diverting goof with a charmless lead performance. Its underlying misogyny leaves a sour taste.

The kindest thing to be said of Movie 43, a star-saturated collection of crude one-joke vignettes made with big-time directors, is that most of the participants seem to relish being naughty.

The tone of Knife Fight is mean until the movie flips a switch and turns pious and mawkish as Paul tries to make amends for past sins. Whether playing it sleazy or noble, Mr. Lowe brings little emotional weight to his role.

Ms. O'Neal's Grace is a fluttery Blanche DuBois type who transforms into a ranting madwoman wreaking havoc. Instead of an ax, she wields scissors. From here on, the movie is a grotesquely overacted, ineptly staged screamfest.

Its tepid satire of art world pretensions culminates with a visual dirty joke that is mildly amusing but still not worth the wait.

At a certain point this would-be shocker suddenly jerks into high gear and becomes a blatant, incompetent rip-off of "Psycho."

A catastrophe worth noting only for the presence of its name cast.

Beyond its eye candy, this wisp of a movie, inspired by Arthur Schnitzler's play "La Ronde," offers only hints of the complicated personalities behind the characters' sleek, well-toned surfaces.

Virginia is a wildly unpredictable piece of work. Playing the kind of role that is often associated with Laura Dern, Ms. Connelly gives a brave, full-tilt performance that is true to the character but can't hold the movie together.

Long before it ends Dark Tide capsizes and sinks with a sickening glug.

Rarely has a film exhibited a bigger disconnect between urban realism and utter ludicrousness.

A depressing two-hour infomercial pitching Times Square as the only place in the universe you want to be when the ball drops at midnight on Dec. 31. (Believe me, it's not.)

When a sheriff's deputy (Carla Gugino) visits the house, I Melt With You turns into a ludicrous, cheap horror thriller that sheds any claims to integrity. By the end, you feel nothing, not even contempt.

The Son of No One self-destructs in a ludicrous, ineptly directed anticlimactic rooftop showdown in which bodies pile up, and nothing makes a shred of sense.

What does it add up to? Nothing much. A tense, paranoid nightmare with a chilly metaphysical overview has been trampled into a blustering, bad cartoon.

The campy new screen adaptation of The Three Musketeers has all the reality and visceral excitement of a $75 million literary theme park dotted with fancy villages heavily patrolled by security.

So why? Why would stars of the magnitude of Mr. Cage and Ms. Kidman sign on to a project whose screenplay is so inept that the movie, even if profitable, will stand as a career-impeding setback? Can't they read?

The screenplay, by Mr. Cooper and Jonathan D. Krane, is so sketchy that it feels like a hastily executed first draft.

If nothing else the ramshackle, scatterbrained rom-com What's Your Number? confirms the arrival, heralded by "Bridesmaids," of a new subgenre, the smutty chick flick, into the Hollywood mainstream.

A sloppy, exploitative act of star worship created (if that's the right word for cynical hackwork) around Mr. Lautner, the pouty 19-year-old heartthrob of the "Twilight" franchise.

A stultifying hybrid of athletic instruction film and Christian sermon.

The only reason I can think of to watch Vivi Friedman's flat, satirical farce The Family Tree - and it's not a good enough reason - is the opportunity to play a game of spot the semi-star.

The body-swapping premise, which is stale to begin with, isn't explored with any depth, unless you find meaningful Freudian subtext in the movie's relentless anal fixation. But the premise at least sets up a farce that surpasses "The Hangover" in gleeful crudeness and profanity.

The Ledge, it should be noted, is not dumb. What undoes it is its mechanical structure: a stale dramatic formula of the sort taught in elementary playwriting classes.

Like Warwick himself, the movie begins to run amok after a taut and tantalizing first act. Not even Mr. Hyde Pierce's best efforts can make sense of a character who by the end of the film seems to be a completely different person with the same name.

You see, this character, who is given no back story, is Life with a capital L. He is the Forneys' guardian angel who rouses them out of their funk. Given the movie's U-turn into allegory, maybe he's supposed to be a punk Jesus. Not even Mr. Gordon-Levitt's unremittingly savage performance can begin to salvage such hokum.

With its red lighting and Hades-like smoke and fog, the lurid look of The Big Bang suggests a tacky disco inferno. I have a mental picture of the film's creators, stoned out of their minds on who knows what, cackling crazily as they outline a movie that would have more appropriately been titled "The Big Goof."

Beyond the lugubrious pageantry, there is no sign of emotional or spiritual life in the film, only windy posturing.

You might reasonably assume that any movie starring Mr. Rourke and Mr. Murray would have to have something to recommend it. But aside from a haunting musical interlude, in which Mr. Rourke, with pathetic ineptitude, mimes playing a trumpet, Passion Play is barely palatable.

Short-circuits the novel's quirky charms and period atmosphere by its squeamish attitude toward gritty circus life and smothers the drama under James Newton Howard's insufferable wall-to-wall musical soup.

An incoherent hybrid of buddy movie, "Girls Gone Wild" episode and James Bond spoof that employs cheap cinematic tricks like multiple split screens for no apparent purpose.

It is no wonder that the insufferable romantic comedy Happythankyoumoreplease, set in New York, looks and sounds like a flop pilot for a television sitcom.

Comic mishap, whose satire already feels out of date.

For all the cinematic crimes against him, there has been no book-to-screen translation of his work quite as atrocious as Hemingway's Garden of Eden.

Filmed in Rwanda, Shake Hands With the Devil is certainly panoramic. But the best that can be said of the film is that it is an honorable dud.

Inhale is a creepy medical thriller in the tradition of "Coma" that amps up the tension and suspense by slicing up time.