Unfortunately, most of the budget seems to have been spent on the first half, a murky slog through the depths of the meg-infested abyssal depths of the titular Trench where the characters are puddle-deep and the villains so cardboard that their biggest danger isn't being chum but dissolving in water.

They are all part of a great American tradition. Hate them if you want to, but you might as well hate gated communities, "The Real World," and the war on terror while you're at it.

The kind of film that will be suitable for all-ages entertainment once the family runs out of conversation after devouring all the turkey, but it's unlikely to expand its audience beyond these captives.

From the start, Need for Speed smells like a movie in search of a franchise. On that count, it’s somewhat fast but seldom furious.

There actually is some clever dialogue in the film, especially early on between Roadblock and Duke (Tatum). But this fades over the course of the film, and too much of what the characters say sounds as though it’s been lifted verbatim from 1930s and 1940s serials.

Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey isn't much of a trip. In a word...NOT!!!

Little more than paint-by-numbers filmmaking, and it fails in the most important charge of any children's movie: to transport its young and impressionable audience to a world where anything is possible, rather than to one where everything’s been thought of already.

Apart from a few moments of fleeting suspense, Fifty Shades Darker resembles a Facebook feed of someone you kind of knew in high school who maybe went on to have a glamorous future, but everything seems a little bit off and contrived.

By the time the chorus of churchgoers end the film with a spirited rendition of Stevie Wonder’s rousing “As” following a demonstration of the healing power of forgiveness, you’re ready for a closing number. Hallelujah.

Like "Reservoir Dogs" by way of Ned Flanders, Mercy Streets is as earnest as Vacation Bible School and somewhat more cinematic.

The comedy is often harsh and cruel.

A character-driven piece with a character who seems somewhat hollow.

You don’t have to be a cynic to find Radio naive for suggesting that high school is a good place for emotionally fragile misfits, that racism is not a problem, that caring for someone is all it takes.

I've always said, "If you've seen one god, you've seen them all," and Wrath of the Titans only serves to underscore my point.

Collins and crew follow the well-worn tracks entertainingly enough, running up and down stairs and catching figures just at the corner of the shot and arguing about whether they should keep filming or not, but there’s nothing new.

Come True aims to explore the layers of the dreamworld, and the terrifying monsters that lurk in the depths of our minds. Yet the unconscious world writer/director Anthony Scott Burns dissects appears to evade him as well, with layers that lead to empty answers and a leading woman who is paper thin.

The worst thing about Bounce isn't that it's bad but that it just isn't interesting.

Lin’s F&F films are operatically dumb, which was what makes them so much fun; maybe if Star Trek Beyond were stupider it wouldn’t feel like such a chore.

The end result never really achieves much more than being exactly what it is: another horseshoes and hand grenades attempt to tell version ad infinitum of the legend of Bruce Lee.

On the not-much-of-a-plus side, at over two hours long, sitting through The Book Thief engenders in the viewer some serious sympathy for the interminable plight of poor, sickly Max, concealed below stairs in a dank, dark corner of the house on Himmelstrasse.

A godforsaken (possibly literally) mess.

The Happening is both too incoherenly weird and too narratively ambitious for its own good.

Ends up as little more than a recursive footnote to the infinitely better up-all-night teen comedies of, you guessed it, John Hughes.

The creature’s big reveal is masterfully handled and a final revelation is exceptionally memorable, but the characters, unsurprisingly, remain interchangeable with those of any number of other teens-in-peril pics.

If sex, gangsters, and killing Nazis are three of the most enlivening topics in the movies, then let us count friendship as one of the most tiresome, right up there with grooming horses and sharing for sheer thrills.

It’s not a movie. It’s a two-hour infomercial for biodiesel.

Crucial to the nature of the disaster film -- and something that Irwin Allen knew so very well -- is that films of this sort depend on an emotional hook, a peg of normalcy to hang the chaos from. Volcano offers no such hook, and as a result it plays like some La Brea dinosaur risen from the tar, all effects and no heart.

The script by S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock (Ghost Dad) is so jumbled and the direction so chaotic that it's often hard to tell what's going on -- where, when, and why.