It recycles the same tired battle-of-the-sexes premise employed by every third romantic comedy that gets made.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle is a movie in search of a reason to exist. Despite a needlessly excessive running time, it never finds one.

Scoob! is a poorly written, nonsensical animated update of the Scooby gang.

It's all just empty calories and little more than an excuse to watch Zac Efron play with puppies. It's nice, but for anyone who's too mature for Tiger Beat, it's not enough.

Yes, there are sex scenes in the film, quite a few. But for a movie where people are naked for a large chunk of time and play at bondage and dominance (without ever really seeming all that committed to it), it sure is boring.

Bad Samaritan is a horrible little movie with two things going for it: one wigged-out performance and one genuinely terrific line that's so great, you want to be able to say that it saves the film.

Add romantic chemistry to the list of things that fall flat in the film, alongside dialogue and acting.

Laughably bad dialogue and wooden acting.

Director Adam Wingard knows how to make a movie, as seen with 2014's "The Guest," and the visuals are well done in this film, the CGI looks nice, the shots and angles are good. What's lost here is the plot.

Jolie Pitt is going for a European cinema vibe here, but all the smoking, drinking and speaking in French can’t disguise the fact that there isn’t a lot going on here. Filmmakers reserve every right to demand patience from their audiences, but they have to provide a worthwhile payoff in the end. By the Sea simply doesn’t.

Costner works hard, and it shows. That's even more true of Leary. Garner's stuck in a thankless role. Only Langella seems to be having unencumbered fun.

You'd expect the sequel to be an improvement based on production values alone, and you would be right, but not by much.

What we’re left with are a few PG-13 murders, uninspired performances, some not-so-scary urban legends and a couple of actresses who must be wondering how they got here.

The Gunman is a predictable slog through action-movie tropes, and Penn's intensity isn't a good fit.

Live by Night is a mess. It’s got some interesting elements that Affleck, who wrote the script based on a Dennis Lehane novel, surprisingly can’t pull together. And, it must be said, his performance in the lead role isn’t up to snuff.

Too bad. You sense that someone could have made a good movie with this material. Unfortunately, Leth didn't.

While Below Her Mouth is no doubt some classy-looking porn, it’s a pretty lousy movie, because all that sex leaves precious little time to develop character, plot or thematic depth.

Blackhat is a mess of a movie from Michael Mann, a would-be cyberthriller slowed by stupidity and sabotaged by a stunningly silly subplot.

On the Map is more like a sleepy lecture during the last week of high school: You may hear some worthwhile information, but it's not going to stick.

The utter lack of surprises and waste of a first-rate cast — Anthony Hopkins as Alfred "Freddy" Heineken; Jim Sturgess and Sam Worthington as kidnappers — make for a tremendous letdown.

The film is cinematically brilliant but morally obtuse.

The imagery is romantically period, with textured scenes staged in handsomely lit smoke-filled rooms, its newsreels and baseball stadiums suffused with charming Americana. But you can’t root for set design or feel empathy for colored filters. You need human beings for that, and The Catcher Was a Spy keeps its heart under lock and key.

With bright colors and jokes that are delivered quicker than you can process them, kids will enjoy this. Even though there are overwhelming changes in animation style, it's never boring to look at.

The problem is that almost everything in the film feels either forced or false, so the tears aren't earned.

Bitter Harvest, bless its low-budget heart, means well. But George Mendeluk’s film, about the Holodomor, the forced famine and starvation that killed between 7 and 10 million Ukrainians, falls well short of its ambitions.

There’s a prayer repeated throughout the film: “blessed be the goddess of all worlds that has not made me a man.” Well, blessed be the goddess of all worlds that has let me survive this film.

The movie is content to simply mimic the old Stooges, bringing nothing new to the table.

In Chernobyl Diaries, directed by Bradley Parker, stupidity is taken to extremes.