Tasha Robinson

The pacing is leaden, the visuals are murky, and there’s pretty much no reason to care about anyone on the screen, except to idly wonder how they’re going to die, and what their innards will look like when they do.

It comes across more like a showreel than a stand-alone film, like, a confusingly edited sizzle teaser for a much more in-depth Doors drama series.

It’s the rare romantic comedy that doesn’t underline viewers’ needy true-love fantasies by saying “This couple was destined to get together,” so much as it says “Eh, this could happen, I guess. Whatever.”

Unlike the first two films in the series, Cloverfield Paradox doesn’t stand on its own as a horror movie, or even as a standalone story. There’s no central idea, no governing principle, and more to the point, virtually nothing frightening about it. No one involved in creating this movie seemed to have any clue what kind of tale it’s telling from one minute to the next.

Every retread of a familiar story has to bring something new to the table, if it’s going to justify its existence. Instead, this is yet another cinematic Frankenstein’s monster, stitched together out of scavenged parts, and shocked back to life for no clear or compelling reason.

King Arthur has a vulnerable heart beating somewhere under all the grimy, sweaty muscles lovingly displayed for the camera. It’s just buried too often under narrative chaos, and the inexplicable ideal that if a story runs at double speed and triple energy, the gaping holes in the story will outpace anyone’s notice.

It’s largely a frustrating clone of the original movie — same songs, same script, often even the exact same shot choices — but it replaces every moment of authentic or moving emotion with bombast and hyperbolic overemphasis.

Rings is a phenomenally distracted film, and it can’t focus on any one concept for too long.

For all its visual flourishes and fair-to-decent acting, Passengers is a failure of a movie full of missed opportunities.

There’s a hint of Aja’s old love of shock-value horror in this film, but it’s blunted by syrupy fake sentiment, mismanaged twists, and half-baked plotlines.

This is a familiar tale: man creates monster, monster runs amuck, man regrets playing God. It's just never remotely clear what Scott and Owen found so compelling about this story that they wanted to tell it again, without meaningful variations, and in the immediate wake of better, smarter, more thrilling versions.

Batman v Superman addresses Man Of Steel's problems in words without learning anything from it in tone. Instead, the new film doubles down on the grimness, the ugliness, and the indifference to human life.

The action is frequently too chaotic to register, and the performances are monotonal. There's no personality in this story, or the way it's told.

Joy has neither comedy nor nuance going for it. Every character feels like a half-sketched first draft, awaiting development that never comes.

Even when the film isn’t dealing with women, it’s contemptuous of the world in a way that rapidly becomes one-note and tiresome.

Mostly the problem is that every aspect of The Giver feels both painfully familiar and like an awkward, unsupportable stretch. For a film about the deep, hidden dangers of enforced sameness, that’s almost hilariously ironic.

Even at 86 minutes, with plenty of chases and action sequences thrown in, The Nut Job feels overstretched and arbitrary.

There are no casual conversations in The Citizen, and no idle moments. It’s pushing its agenda at every moment, first gently, then relentlessly.

The problem with Smurfs 2 isn’t the message, it’s the way the film repeats it so baldly and emphatically that even the youngest kids can get it. Also, the way it surrounds that message with groin-smashing and farting.

The focus is much more on Sarah, Frank, and their repetitive, ugly dynamic than on the giddy elements that made the first film trashy fun.

Moment for moment, Upside Down is the most embarrassing, hilarious, obliviously stupid movie since M. Night Shyamalan’s "The Happening," and its constant pursuit of a striking image over any other consideration undermines it at every turn.

Beautiful Creatures is an oddball creation: a morality play with no basic understanding of morality.

For the much-cheaper-looking sequel, Piranha 3DD, director John Gulager mostly seems to be trying to see how much he can degrade the old "Jaws" formula and still have it interpreted as parody rather than apathy.

While the ending is wretchedly fakey and predictable, Murphy in subdued mode gives it a little authentic sweetness.

Watching the film is strangely like looking at the same three still frames of supernatural battles over and over for 90 minutes.

Shark Night 3D barely bothered to show up, let alone deliver the minimal goods.

Actual kids may find this fun, but for adults, watching The Smurfs may feel a little too much like trying to wrangle an overcrowded kiddie birthday party.

A grating muddle.

In every aspect, from story to tone to characterization to visual aesthetic, it's laughably perfunctory, as though everyone involved were too embarrassed to give it more than a half-ironic token effort.

The film looks dispiritingly cheap and, as if in response, most of his cast seems half-committed at best, as if they're counting the moments until they can move on to a bigger picture.

Nutcracker In 3D doesn't just compound past errors in re-imagining the story. Thanks to a big budget, huge staging, massive overacting, and the non-wonders of post-production 3-D conversion, it adds a wide bevy of new errors.

From the maudlin musical cues to a senseless romantic subplot that's only barely tacked on, every aspect of Evelyn stabs blindly and insistently at emotional buttons -- Beresford has made the feel-manipulated movie of the year.

Sometimes the actors lip-sync, but more often, they're singing along with the original vocal tracks, trying to out-belt Elvis Presley and Bruce Springsteen, like a cadre of enthusiastic shower singers joining in with the radio. The resulting cacophony is generally harsh and sloppy, and the film follows suit.

The result is a numbing void, and a long, frustrating wait for something to happen.

A plodding, bloated, long-shelved adaptation/expansion of Ray Bradbury's classic short story about the dangers of time travel.

It's a shallow, treacly movie for children too little to question its many pointless puerilities. But do kids that young really belong in a theater? Keep 'em at home and wait for this to hit cable.

Clumsy, ephemeral, and wholly unnecessary.

The overall experience is manic, juvenile, and hit-or-miss, as if the auteurs behind "Epic Movie" were trying to remake "Wag The Dog." It's too soon to laugh about Iraq, and it'll never be time to laugh about it with this kind of maladroit humor.

Opaque acting, excruciating dialogue, and flat, affectless direction certainly don't help, but even in brilliant hands, Flannel Pajamas would still be a movie about two horrible, unsympathetic people doing dreadful things to each other, and learning nothing in the process. Why should anyone else have to endure it too?

Even the animation is imitative rather than inventive.

Shrek The Third instead goes for less: fewer jokes, less energy, and toned-down characters.

By the time Olyphant leaves an enemy in the most ridiculous deathtrap since the '60s "Batman," just because it looks kinda neat, the whole project has started to feel like "Ultraviolet 2: The Further Stupidening."

Audience members are likely to feel like they're right there in the picture, suffering for no reason and trying to pretend it's funny.

Underdeveloped antagonist Nick Chinlund sums up the entire film during one of his rants about Jovovich's latest casual, offhand slaughter: "One woman against 14 men! It's ridiculous!" Well, yeah.

The film still suffers from cheap plasticky design, a klutzy overall look, dim preschooler humor, and a nearly impact-free story that thinks it's clever when it steals cues from 2001.

It's almost charming in its sheer lack of ambition, but the lack of creativity in its by-the-numbers shocks is harder to excuse.

It’s the kind of wretched embarrassment that may leave viewers trying to suspend the belief that they’re still sitting in the theater watching it.

Doesn't have much to offer viewers who aren't still eagerly awaiting their first adult tooth.

A cartoonishly grim supernatural thriller that could stand a lot less talk and a lot more thrills.

All the thought seems to have gone into the marketing, and none into the unfathomably terrible script.

When it comes to time-wasting memory games, crossword puzzles are more fun than this movie.

The 11th Hour is slick and passionate, but neither persuasive nor helpful; it's a headache of a film directed like an Errol Morris project, but with half the substance. It's clearly preaching to the choir, but even they may find it off-key.

Final score: Book 1, Movie 0.

There may be nothing new under the sun, but there are at least films that dress up old tropes in new ways. This isn't one of them.

Perelman's follow-up, The Life Before Her Eyes, finds him clumsily trying to outdo M. Night Shyamalan.

With so many plot hooks and so many story demands, it's incomprehensible that Kaena spends so much time on meaningless action.

Impossibly dull form of niche-marketed entertainment.

Writer-director-producer-actor-composer-singer Soling claims to have spent a year researching the war on drugs before deciding to make a satire instead of a documentary, but he apparently threw most of his facts out the window in favor of absurdism, exaggeration, slander, and self-congratulatory humor.

Turns a cultishly creepy classic into a dull and windy farce.

The whole movie is just one increasingly dull roll downhill. The same could be said for this once-fresh franchise.

At least when they're singing, they aren't sniping and griping at each other. That original title really would have worked a lot better.

Deadly dull.

So sanctimonious and sincere in its pandering.

Looking cheap, rushed, and often apathetically thrown together, except for the lovingly shot scenes involving gratuitous nudity or sudden violence