If you like a little bit more in a movie — say, characters that are mildly interesting or a plot that's a wee bit logical — stay far away.

It doesn’t take long to suspect you are witnessing an epic fail of Alexander proportions — a visionary filmmaker pouring years of craft and ambition, not to mention millions of dollars and the talents of dozens of gung-ho actors, down the drain of a misconceived “statement.”

The goal here was to show the tragic downfall of a once-praised hero, similar to the actual poem written by Wilde with the same name. But because of the lack of depth in supporting characters and half-baked writing, this movie couldn't have ended fast enough.

It’s hard to get excited about any of the on-screen happenings, because director Justin Lin can’t seem to hit the right notes.

Long-winded, tiresome and free of any tension, The Company You Keep will ultimately be remembered as a Redford vanity project, in every sense of the word.

A mean-spirited little movie, investing its limited charms in all the wrong characters.

These supremely talented women are put through embarrassing paces by director and co-writer Bill Holderman. It’s meant to be a film about a reawakening of desire, and thus life. It turns out to be a wince-inducing mess.

While its audacity is laudable, the film ultimately has all the thrill of watching someone else play a first-person-shooter video game.

There are plot twists galore, but they unfold in ham-fisted fashion, as if the screenwriter (newbie Brian Tucker) didn't know how to layer the mystery. Instead, the movie simply drops these secrets out of nowhere, in clunky fashion.

While the film’s last 30 seconds are refreshing, they hardly redeem the previous 90 minutes of utter predictability.

It’s all predictable and, despite the best efforts of Turteltaub and screenwriter Dan Fogelman at something a little risky, it’s pretty lame.

If you have young kids and want to spend two hours out of the house in a cool, air-conditioned theater, then go see “Haunted Mansion.” But if you can hold out until it’s released on Disney+ all the better. It’s really not worth spending money on the ticket.

Journalists deserve to be heralded — just not in this holier-than-thou cinematic cri de coeur. So, on behalf of journalists everywhere, I have to tell Mr. Reiner thanks, but no thanks.

The movie... keeps things surface-level when it comes to Bieber’s life and doesn’t give fans any new insight into the pop star that they haven’t been able to glean from his social media posts.

The dialogue is agony.

Vincent Grashaw's film, although well-meaning (as a postscript reminds us), tries too hard, both in content and form.

It's all-around generic, made notable by its weirdly schizophrenic tone. Sometimes it strives to be a character-driven thriller in the Jason Bourne mold. In other moments, it goes for over-the-top action and violence. But it's never very exciting.

Overall the film is goofy, slight, without a truly deep thought in its pretty little head. And for a movie with vampires and werewolves, the only scary thing is in the title - "Part 1," which means "Part 2" is on its way. Shudder.

It comprises some 20 talking heads, each pretty much saying the same thing, interspersed with film of children dressed up as mythical heroes, enacting the stages of the "hero's journey."

Mean-spirited.

What a mess. Its meandering plot draws attention to the alarming lack of laughs — not what you look for in a supposed comedy.

In fairness, you can say that Mortal Kombat is pretty much exactly what you expect it to be. It’s clearly meant as the first film in a renewed franchise. But for me, it’s game over.

The purpose of San Andreas is not to make us think, but to make us gape, to pummel us with effect and effect until we finally give in. Fair enough. Uncle. I need a Tylenol anyway.

The Purge is one of those unimaginative horror flicks that depend on skreeky music and sudden appearances to startle, but never actually frighten, the audience. The characters are undeveloped, the twists clumsily telegraphed and unsurprising.

It fails to offer as single compelling character as a sacrifice to the angry volcano.

Josh C. Waller’s movie is just prurient nonsense, a film only a couple of notches up from the women-in-prison films that were popular years and years ago.

Jenkins is a fantastically adaptable talent. It helps that his character here is supposed to be innately likable (by everyone, evidently, but his girlfriend's family), since Jenkins is so likable as an actor. Good thing, because there is little else to like about Darling Companion.

Without Lohan, Falling for Christmas would be another of the near-anonymous morass of holiday movies so prevalent during the season. Even with her it’s not much more.

People who love thrillers without question may find a lot to enjoy here. For a political thriller, it's not one of the most cerebral out there. Those who simply love Curtis and Sumpter might also like the film. But other than those perks, audiences are better off saving their money.

In the end, if someone doesn't have the time to absorb Tartt's book, they'd be better serviced reading a Wikipedia synopsis than seeing this film.

There is one good thing you can say about Beastly: The title perfectly sums up what you'll see on screen.

If nothing else, it's consistent — consistently stupid, with things like character development and story advancement never getting in the way of another parkour stunt.

Nothing feels believable in “Big Stone Gap,” a bungled, charm-free look at small-town life in the South in the late '70s.

It's definitely not taking advantage of a talented supporting cast, as Greg Kinnear, Kelsey Grammer, Seth Meyers and Christina Hendricks are among those wasted.

If there’s any social commentary being made here, it doesn’t come through in performances so wooden you can’t tell if the actors are that bad or the characters that vapid.

There is very little on the screen to capture your attention.

The script, written by the actress, is downright wretched at times.

When an inane ending appears out of nowhere and purports to add depth to a movie which has little? That's just maddening. And the twist in Serenity leaves you feeling both cheated and annoyed, which surely isn't the filmmaker's intention.

There is something admirable about Fun Size. Not in how it succeeds, because it doesn't. Whoo, boy, it doesn't. Rather, in how bad it is on so many levels, in how it will offend and disappoint different segments of its audience for different reasons. It's an equal-opportunity bad movie. Something to hate for everyone! [25 Oct 2012]

It’s not that overwrought violence and human depravity are unfit grist for art, but without a compelling plot and a modicum of character development, all this film has to offer is a repugnant prurience and heavy-handed atmospherics.

There is nothing brave about Bravetown, a film so paint-by-the-numbers bland that its efforts to piggyback the sacrifice of American servicemen and women for emotional depth is downright craven.

Paul Schrader, the once-brilliant screenwriter of such films as “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull,” has fashioned a movie that seems to exist to be repugnant. Maybe that’s the point; it was written by Bret Easton Ellis. Nearly every character in this movie is unlikable.

For a movie filled with amateur porn, sex toys, cocaine and Cameron Diaz's butt, "Sex Tape" is awfully tame. You're in greater danger of taking a nap than needing a safe word.

Another entry in a long line of good video games adapted into terrible movies, Assassin’s Creed is ragingly stupid. That its incoherent plotline is treated with the utmost reverence by skilled thespians only brings its idiocy into sharper relief.

There's just not a lot to like here, with the exception of what may be one of the all-time best bad movie lines, one Conan utters to Tamara as a kind of personal credo: "I live. I love. I slay. I am content."

Director and co-writer Jeremy Garelick doesn't even reach high enough to pick the low-hanging fruit, opting instead to gather half-rotted, fly-infested jokes off the ground and expect Kevin Hart to make them funny by virtue of being Kevin Hart. Only grudgingly will I acknowledge that he sometimes does.

The Dark Tower is a near-total whiff, a mess of a movie that took forever to get made and by the look of things should have taken about twice that long. Or maybe just never have been made at all.

The movie is plagued with long stretches of dialogue-free contemplation and static shots of nature happening. At only 83 minutes, the film is too slight to feel so padded.

It’s not clear that the movie has anything to say, new or otherwise. . . . Other than that it’s just blood and guts, and lots of it.

Jonah Hex somehow manages to waste the talents of Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Michael Fassbender, Will Arnett, Aidan Quinn and Jeffrey Dean Morgan in a story that combines vengeance, the occult and an Old West war on terror (really).

The whole thing is sentimental corn, which isn’t bad if it’s handled with conviction and sincerity. But the direction by John Stephenson (better known for special effects than directing) is resolutely stiff and hollow. That’s murder for a movie dealing with miracles.

This is a horrible movie. Which makes it not a lot different from the first film.

The script to this flop doesn't even have enough laughs to amuse someone in the most boring of orthodontist waiting rooms.

It's big, it's loud and it's all over the place, never really making a lick of sense. To his credit, sort of, director Michael Bay tries to insert a little story into the film early on, even a little humor, but that's overrun at some point by explosions and plot digressions.

Director Michael Goi is big on jump shocks that get increasingly tiresome.

Johnson and Dornan retain the chemistry of two mannequins knocked into each other in a department-store storage closet; the actual sex scenes play more like aerobics videos than anything actually steamy.

Aside from the waste of talent, the frustrating thing about The Lazarus Effect is how it cheats. Good horror movies work on internal logic.

Yes, it recalls “Turner and Hooch,” a movie Show Dogs references so many times you start to feel nostalgic for it. And when you find yourself longing for “Turner and Hooch,” things are very bleak indeed.

This is one of those movies you feel stupider just for having sat through. I think I'm already worse at math.

Could be fun, you might think. No. Bad acting and worse dialogue quickly put an end to that notion.

Director Jessie Nelson shoots it all like a Hallmark card that comes to life, which sounds like a cliche, which it is, which is the point.

A relentlessly unfunny comedy, it wastes the talents of Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara as egregiously as one could possibly imagine, resorting to lame jokes, cliches and incompetent storytelling to pass the time.

The film is based on a popular series of young-adult books (big surprise), but one figures only die-hard fans will enjoy the result. The movie is slow-witted and moves at a glacial pace.

Not even the snickering juvenile who lives in the deepest gutters of your brain will get a cheap thrill out of these antics.

Dumb, lazy, obvious and largely pointless.

By far the scariest thing about director Stuart Beattie’s I, Frankenstein, a terrible would-be horror story that somehow roped in a couple of really good actors, is that the ending seems to suggest the possibility of a sequel. Now that’s horror.

I predict that within a decade, Mother’s and Daughters will be mandatory viewing at film schools across the country. There are precious few such perfect examples of how not to make a film.

You know it's not working when you don't care about any of them. Sadly, that's the case with Answers to Nothing, Matthew Leutwyler's dud about a revolving cast of characters in Los Angeles.

Hot Tub Time Machine 2 is a movie that didn't need to be made, and certainly doesn't need to be seen — not when you can rent the original and still feel good about yourself afterward.

A brittle, pompous drama.

You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll be swept away — about as much as you would be by artificial roses. Movies like this may look like the real thing, but they're not.

Agonizingly stupid and painfully illogical.

The title Acts of Violence has less to do with the storyline of the movie it graces and more about what’s perpetrated against the audience watching it.

CHIPS is a miserable movie, an exercise in stupidity that takes whatever nostalgia one had for the late-1970s television series – this assumes anyone actually had nostalgia for it — and beats it to death on a bed of idiocy. The action scenes, though, are pretty well-directed.

Landais certainly brought little cinematic verve to The Aspern Papers, telling the story largely in turgid literary voiceover lifted directly from the original source material.

There is nothing about the movie that isn’t utterly predictable. You meet a character, and it’s immediately obvious what’s going to happen to him (or her). And then it happens. Maybe it’s meant to make you feel good about your deductive reasoning skills or something. But mostly it just makes you want to see something else.

A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III is a curious mess, a movie that doesn’t really seem to have any reason to exist, other than maybe to give writer and director Roman Coppola and star Charlie Sheen something to do for a few weeks.

The acting is so poor and the story so badly told that the viewer's feelings about Rand's novel - an epic ode to free-market fundamentalism - are almost immaterial.

It's bigger and louder and, if not longer (checking in at a mere two hours and 28 minutes), certainly stupider than ever before.

Simply put, it's a mess.

Strangely, almost everyone must have been in the middle of some weird creative dry spell. Some stories are pretentious, some are annoyingly whimsical and some are just out-and-out obnoxious.

It strains both credulity and patience in its attempt to be different, and it leaves you feeling creeped out as well.

Olivier Megaton (he helmed "Taken 2") starts things off at a sluggish pace and never picks up speed. Even the action scenes, which often are filmed in jittery fashion, don't generate thrills.

Elvis Presley made some bad movies, but let's give the King his due: He never made anything as outright awful as The Identical.

It's an unpleasant way to pass a couple summer hours.

It just feels desperate.

A by-the-numbers thriller that wouldn’t even have made for a particularly good hourlong episode of a weekly crime procedural, never mind an honest-to-God feature-length movie.

Maybe your kids will insist that you see Furry Vengeance. Then again, wouldn't this be the perfect time to let them test their independence and sit through it alone? Otherwise, good luck. You have my condolences.

This wildly distasteful premise is meant to be cute and enlightening, like a modern Frank Capra flick, but this is hardly "It's a Wonderful Life." Instead, the movie keeps tripping over itself.

The Snowman is like if aliens studied humanity and tried to make their own movie in an attempt to communicate with us. This simulacrum contains all the requisite pieces of a movie, but humanity got lost in translation.

There is no substance, legal or otherwise, that can make this tolerable.

The whole thing is a total bore; even the supporting players aren’t motivated enough to attract attention. That’s good news for Lutz; he can’t be blamed for torpedoing the project, because everyone is doing subpar work here.

Gomez plays ... well, that’s one of the problems. Her character is so underdeveloped in director Courtney Solomon’s movie that she doesn’t actually have a name.

It’s a spectacularly wrong-headed, chemistry-free romance, and too dumb to know how sexist it is.

General Education is kind of like a science-fair project slapped together at the last minute -- a sad, withered potato pierced with copper wires, rotting on the counter next to a resplendent baking-soda volcano. You can't help but feel a little sorry for the poor spud.

Life Itself is one of the worst kind of bad movies, because it achieves nothing that it sets out to do.

It means to be an interconnected story, in which one coupling leads to another in increasingly ridiculous fashion, until you're not only no longer interested, you're grinding your teeth, hoping it will end.

While the special effects are impressive enough, M. Night Shyamalan's film doesn't make a lick of sense.