Todd McCarthy

Every conceivable button is pushed to achieve rote satisfaction in young viewers, while any notion of creating tension and suspense is dutifully ignored. Not for a moment is actual peril considered as something worthy of a dramatic climax.

A lifeless, tone-deaf variation on Invasion of the Body Snatchers. ... There’s just nothing going on here with which to engage your interest, nor is there a single moment to even slightly increase the viewer’s pulse rate.

It’s a film that wants to be visionary but isn’t.

There’s no denying that The Tomorrow Man has a knockout ending. But is it worth sitting through the mundane, relatively uneventful film that precedes it? Few will think so.

Like a long fishing day without a bite, Serenity invites impatience rather than excited anticipation, and the eventual payoff provokes a big “huh?”

Mendelsohn's villain is boringly one-note, Eve Hewson's Marion uses an incongruous Yank accent and always looks as though she's just stepped out of the makeup trailer, F. Murray Abraham swans around in fancy cardinal's vestments looking sinister and Foxx seems pissed off that he's not somewhere, perhaps anywhere, else. As for Egerton, he's a boy doing a man's job.

Venom feels like a throwback, a poor second cousin to the all-stars that have reliably dominated the box-office charts for most of this century. Partly, this is due to the fact that, as an origin story, this one seems rote and unimaginative. On top of that, the writing and filmmaking are blah in every respect; the film looks like an imitator, a wannabe, not the real deal.

Blandly internationalized, generically derivative, drained of any personality, edited as if by computer and bleached of the slightest hint of emotion other than a holiday card-like sympathy for children and allegedly cute animals, The Meg is a one hundred percent inorganic meal, something made from pre-tasted and then regurgitated ingredients.

Garishly unattractive to look at and lacking the spirit that made Wonder Woman, which came out five months ago, the most engaging of Warner Bros.' DC Comics-derived extravaganzas to date, this hodgepodge throws a bunch of superheroes into a mix that neither congeals nor particularly makes you want to see more of them in future. Plainly put, it's simply not fun.

At no point along the way does the film provide a reason to invest your interest in any of this.

Misguided, diminished and dismally done in every way, this late-summer afterthought will richly earn the distinction of becoming the first Ben-Hur in any form to flop.

Shallow is a mild word for it. Others would be silly, miscalculated, unconvincing, artless, pandering, hokey, ridiculous. Or just plain awful.

What fun there is falls to Jackman, who gives the grand old man of pirate characters plenty of fresh and unusual wrinkles and emerges better than the others simply by virtue of playing a two-dimensional, rather than one-dimensional, figure.

So comprehensively does the film fail to represent the labyrinthian literary wonders of Amis’ book that it scarcely seems worthwhile to detail its universal shortcomings.

A sense of heaviness, gloom and complete disappointment settles in during the second half, as the mundane set-up results in no dramatic or sensory dividends whatsoever.

Action scenes are accumulated as if mandated by a stop-watch and almost invariably seem like warmed-over versions of stuff we've seen before, in Terminator entries and elsewhere.

Gus Van Sant’s sticky, gooey side — previously on display in the likes of Finding Forrester and especially in the 2011 Restless — oozes out once more in the woefully sentimental and maudlin The Sea of Trees.

The film is essentially nothing but little and ineffectual bits of recycled shtick with no sense of freshness of invention. And the women never bond in even the most rote or superficial way that's expected in this sort of claptrap.

Just as the basic plot points are hard to swallow, even the most rudimentary aspects of the characters' interactions feel forced, artificial and unspontaneous.

With unappealing one-note characters, retread concepts and implausible motivations, Chappie is a further downward step for director Neill Blomkamp.

Has there ever been a Hollywood adaptation of a major novel as faithful and yet so misguided and downright strange as the three-part version of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged that now comes to a conclusion with the third installment?

Sex Tape is sexcruciating.

It’s a waste of a good cast as well as a serious trip-wire for McCarthy, who may know what’s best for her talents but, on the evidence, needs a deft-handed outsider to make sure she’s maximizing them.

Aspiring transcendent love stories don't come much more claptrappy and unconvincing than Winter's Tale.

If The Legend of Hercules were just a little more inept or over-the-top, it might have been ridiculous fun. As it is, unfortunately, Harlin embraces the mediocrity of the screenplay with a dour straight face, draining it of any enjoyably camp possibilities.

Homefront is sufficiently silly and low-down to be entertaining on a certain marginal level, but it wouldn't appear that those involved, with the possible exception of Franco, approached this with the idea that they might be making good trash; it looks too elaborate and costly for that and the script exhibits no self-aware humor.

An admirable idea in theory proves to be a real slog to sit through in Everyday.

Despite its scaldingly hot cast and formidable writer/director combination, The Counselor is simply not a very likable or gratifying film. In fact, it's a bummer.

They just don't make 'em like this anymore, and it's a good thing, too.

What's actually up onscreen in this vaguely ambitious but tawdry melodrama falls into an in-between no-man's-land that endows it with no distinction whatsoever, a work lacking both style and insight into the netherworld it seeks to reveal.

Far from the renegade, boundary-pushing, sexually explicit sensation that its makers have been suggesting, The Canyons is a lame, one-dimensional and ultimately dreary look at peripheral Hollywood types not worth anyone's time either onscreen or in real life.

This is a second-rate special effects-dominated 3D entry that will join several prominent would-be blockbusters that need not be mentioned on the summer junk heap.

It’s impossible to buy into the film’s plea to be taken seriously at the end, just as the upbeat finale feels false.

The ‘70s recreation is reasonable -- there are plenty of vintage cars and pop tunes of the moment -- but the characters never register beyond the surfaces of the scenes despite being equipped with long-festering resentments and grudges.

The story is told in a hammer-on-anvil manner that evinces no gift for social satire or sharp cultural insight.

Basically the film consists of a bunch of techies in white shirts and glasses laboriously discussing their views, exchanges you get the feeling the filmmaker thought would come off as humorous.

Crude, repetitive and rigorously single-minded, the popular actor’s writing and directing debut lays it all on a bit thick, as the few points the film has to make are underscored time and time again.

A film that seems drained of life and ideas rather than sustained by them.

Unfortunately, John Moore has directed these sequences in a way that makes the incidents look so far-fetched and essentially unsurvivable that you can only laugh.

This lushly and pretentiously made drama about a young American whose worst instincts are unleashed during a stay in Paris endeavors to entice with details of the seedy underworld of La Pigalle but is a turn-off in almost every respect.

Embalming the simple and simplistic yarn in an amber glow that is all but suffocating and banishing from it any traces of humor and spontaneity, director Scott Hicks serves up this treacly tale with absolutely no trace of self-consciousness about the material's cliches or simple-mindedness.

A creaky haunted house that, once the big twist is revealed, makes very little sense at all.

Despite a couple of unconvincingly upbeat tacked-on moments at the end, Project X basically reads as nihilistic, as not believing in or standing for anything. Not even fun.

This perfectly dreadful romantic action comedy manages to embarrass its three eminently attractive leading players in every scene, making this an automatic candidate for whatever raspberries or golden turkeys or other dubious awards may be given in future for the films of 2012.

It's something you'd think only the crassest of Hollywood producers would come up with - injecting sex appeal into an event as ghastly at the Nanjing massacre - but it's an element central to The Flowers of War, a contrived and unpersuasive look at an oft-dramatized historical moment.

The most banal and indulgent of Gus Van Sant's periodic studies of troubled kids, this agonizingly treacly tale comes off like an indie version of "Love Story" except with worse music.

Arriving eight years after the lame third installment in Dimension's profitable series, this seems like far too little way too late.

Supplied with uniformly vapid dialogue, the characters come off like a bunch of twits.

One of the most obnoxious and least necessary animated films of the century thus far.

This low-rent, R-rated "Rush Hour"-ish comic caper could have been several notches better with more charismatic leads and some dialogue upgrades but still would have felt like a genre hand-me-down.

As it thuds along from one wolf attack to the next, Catherine Hardwicke's first film since taking leave of Bella and her toothy friends adamantly refuses to provide any wit, humor or fun.

Staggeringly misjudged in virtually every department, from the wannabe effervescent script to Johnny Depp's dopey hairdo.

Goes down like sour eggnog on Christmas Eve.

Director Jon Turteltaub's insistence upon hammering every point home with giant closeups and relentless musical underlining makes this insufferably cloying and sickly sweet.

Roman Coppola's first film has sympathetic aims but is distressingly lacking in flair, style, wit or fun.

Guy Ritchie shoots a blank with Revolver, which replays the low-life criminal shtick from his first two features with an ill-advised overlay of pretension. The action, attitude and wise-guy talk all feel moldy this time around.

This overwrought and egregiously self-serious thriller about the poisonous fruit borne of child abuse grows more ridiculous by the quarter-hour and is poised for a theatrical life span scarcely longer than that of its eponymous insect.

Rarely has a picture been so self-consciously designed to be a culturally meaningful touchstone, and fallen so woefully short, as Southland Tales.

The director doesn't display the spirit of a natural entertainer; while intellectual notions abound, he never grabs the audience by the hand to pull them into the tale emotionally.

Some of the filmmaker's keen intelligence remains on display, but only in fractured and often obscure form, and pic overall gives the impression of a giant expurgation of negative feelings about things in general rather than a carefully articulated brief on recognizable subjects.

Defiantly uncommunicative picture.

On a moment to moment basis, however, picture continuously skirts very close to the ludicrous in its advanced-stage grimness and outre forms of torture foreplay.

In outer space, no one can hear you scream -- of boredom.

Awful scripting and an unimaginative approach to re-imagining material's potential have left Universal with a theatrical in-and-outer on its hands.

Arid, self-consciously arty and emotionally uninvolving.

Debuting writer-directors Larry and Andy Wachowski come off like Coen brothers wannabes with no sense of humor.

Passably interesting psychological study of emotionally wounded characters until it commits dramatic suicide by showing its true colors as a tricked-up "Fatal Attraction" wannabe.

Conservatives score a few political points but aren't very funny in An American Carol, a cheesy spitball directed at the very large target of a Michael Moore-like filmmaker.

A white-trash black comedy, a caustic working-class whodunit in which the solution to the murder mystery takes a distant back seat to countless barbs and jibes tossed in the direction of the mostly imbecilic cast of characters.

Strictly a minor-league late fall entry.

This mangy, dimwitted gender switch on "The Last Detail" won't even have the benefit of trial before being sentenced to the video brig, since it's virtually there already.

With a far-fetched script that might barely have passed muster at the B units in the old studio days, this Dimension release will command a certain up-front attention due to cast topliners.

A series that's provided a successful, moderately enjoyable ride up to now blows its tires, gasket and transmission on its way to flaming out in Fast & Furious.

Being Human never comes alive. This stillborn series of little fables is so flat and ill-conceived that it could convince the uninitiated that neither Robin Williams nor the highly idiosyncratic Scottish writer-director Bill Forsyth had any talent.

Speak a great deal, but they don't have much to say. A dull ensembler.

A shamelessly manipulative commercial on behalf of national health insurance.

A muted coming-of-age piece that more often reflects rusty movie conventions than it freshly observes real-life struggles.

Star-driven, high-minded claptrap that, fatally, can't even rig a rooting interest in its central love story.

Banal and trite where it could have been insightful and emotionally truthful, this Fox release is also notable for featuring the first disappointing performance by teen star Natalie Portman.

A dreadfully dull, completely conventional story of a young wife's recuperation from being unceremoniously dumped, this is a by-the-numbers bit of emotional calculation without a single fresh, original or offbeat move in its system, apart from a nifty opening sequence.

Ludicrous in the extreme, the picture easily snatches from "Revolution" the prize as Al Pacino's career worst.

Silk is a snooze. Vacuous, arid and terminally dull, this adaptation of Alessandro Baricco's freak bestseller hasn't a trace of real life or energy to it, and is hamstrung by a lethargic lead performance by Michael Pitt.

Dismally unfunny...It's clear from the first few minutes that the performers are fighting an uphill battle against lame material, and the situation never improves as pic labors on.

The dramatic trajectory is frightfully obvious, the characters tediously one-dimensional, the dialogue banal.

Nine very good actors are wasted, if not embarrassed, by the thoroughly unconvincing shenanigans perpetrated by first-time writer-director Michael Clancy, while a tenth -- Zooey Deschanel -- somehow manages to float ethereally above it all with her dignity intact.

More than an embarrassment, it's an insult.

Dreary, lachrymose and incredibly poky tear-jerker that makes its audience wait and wait and wait until nearly the last second for its jerking.

A thick slice of bogus inspirational cheese that only makes itself look bad by recycling so many golden movie memories.

Much of the confusion, as well as the lack of dramatic rhythm or character development, results directly from Bay's cutting style, which resembles a machine gun stuck in the firing position for 2 and a half hours.

An endlessly sentimental fable about sacrifice and redemption that aims only at the heart at the expense of the head. Intricately constructed so as to infuriate anyone predominantly guided by rationality and intellect.

An indigestible gumbo of Southern Gothic ingredients seasoned with snake oil, biblical hash and thoroughly unpalatable spice.

A romantic comedy as lamely generic as its title.

A stillborn would-be comedy.

Sure to turn off general viewers due to its emotional inaccessibility, multitude of narrative problems and preoccupation with a torture Web site.

The effects are snazzy, even if they pass by quite quickly, and there's enough going on to keep audiences watching, if not entirely happy. Smith, Theron and Bateman capably handle the main roles, but such is the skimpiness of the scenario that no further characters make any impact.

Evinces no interest in such niceties as credible dialogue, character motivation or forward momentum.

Blandness and lack of daring characterize nearly every minute of the very long two hours, which are marked by a high degree of professionalism at the service of little content.

Senselessly long at two-and-three-quarters hours and with a protracted climax that eradicates any goodwill established in the fastidious first couple of reels.