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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mean-spirited.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

¡He Matado a Mi Marido! seems to be inspired by the kind of bold comedies that Pedro Almodóvar specializes in, with divas at center stage and madcap situations. But writer-director Francisco Lupini-Basagoiti is no Almodóvar, mistaking stupidity for zaniness.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Written, produced and directed by Christopher Nolen, who gives himself a small role, the movie fails as both a comedy and morality tale.

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.

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.

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.