Even when The Tax Collector finds a steadier purpose as a taut revenge thriller, it’s mostly just a slog of vulgar threats and violent outbursts, trading substance for anger until the credits bring some measure of peace.

It is surely a failure, but it has twice the soul and passion of many technically successful pictures from lesser artists. If only that were enough.

Song reference or not, the title alone should be a major red flag, but there’s no way to fully prepare yourself for the navel-gazing narcissism to come during the film itself.

The maddening frustration of her first unambiguous misfire — which is worse than bad because it could have been good — is that it feels so much, but conveys so little.

Suicide Squad never has the courage of its convictions — it doesn’t own anything. At best, Ayer rents some pre-existing pop iconography and charges us $15 to watch him take it around the block for a spin. Forget the “Worst. Heroes. Ever.” These guys don’t even know how to be bad.

If "Extremely Loud" came out in the weeks or months following 9/11, more audiences (and critics) might find an excuse to appreciate the way its soul-searching protagonist works through his grief. Ten years later, his struggle actually feels outrageously old-fashioned.

Domestic violence is one of the primary engines of tension, yet the film doesn’t know how to tell the truth about abuse without making light of it or mining it for artistic effect.

Sud’s film is a master class in bad decision-making, improbable choices, and overwrought acting.

Don’t be fooled by the lack of spandex: The Legend of Tarzan turns the Lord of the Apes into just another superhero, the newest movie about fiction’s greatest wild man memorable only for the dull irony of how housebroken it feels.

And that, perhaps, is the easiest way to explain its overarching failure: In a film built on a bestselling eight-book series, filled with all manner of magical beings (including Colin Farrell), and rich in fairy tale history, the best scene is one in which its grating narrator farts on a passerby. You didn’t see that in the “Harry Potter” films, and for good reason.

What’s most deadly about Taylor’s latest isn’t a miscast Swank or her character’s demented arc, or even the uncomfortable Ealy and his character’s insane idiocy, it’s the sense that this sub-genre should still be able to have plenty of naughty fun doing very bad things. Just not this kind of bad.

Awaken was reportedly shot over the course of five years and across 30 countries, yet all that time and globe-trotting effort yielded little more than a dense clip reel of sumptuous time-lapse photography strewn about 70-odd minutes in search of a single unifying idea to justify the journey.

Like any office Christmas party you’ve ever been forced to attend, it kind of feels a little bit too much like work to be fun, and — like any office Christmas party you’ve ever been forced to attend — it’s just a tiny bit too diverting for you to storm out before the whole thing crawls to its sad conclusion.

Rather than going out with a bang, however, the final installment in the franchise hinges its loose plot around the marital infidelities of younger, humorless characters so thinly sketched that it is impossible to care about them.

It’s almost impressive that Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World is so dull.

No, most audiences who tune into 365 Days: This Day are likely not seeking out female empowerment tales or coherent plots, but the disdain with which the film treats both its viewers and its star can’t help but grate.

Apatow gets a lot of shit for making scattershot comedies that run the length of David Lean epics, but the patchwork of scenes that comprise his latest have less in common with “Funny People” than they do “Movie 43,” and might just be aimless enough to make the director’s critics appreciate the flow of his earlier work.

The movie is weighed down by too many secondary characters, which only serve to dissipate their flickering charms. No one in the film, even our heroine, gets more than a hint of backstory as the single-minded plot careens toward its predictable conclusion.

On the surface, Last Blood may be a mess of B-movie contrivances, but like its world-weary namesake, it’s also a timely window into the vanity of violent solutions, and why brutality is only viable when fighting for a lost cause.

Life might be messy and weird and scary, but it possesses more honesty than this cinematic misery.

There’s too much effort, too much time, and too much sincerity apparent behind this film to dismiss it outright. That’s what makes it frustrating, and maybe even tragic.

The real crime of “Lift,” however, is not that its poised as an “Ocean’s” movie lacking all of the glamour. No, it’s that director F. Gary Gray has made some incredible films in the past and “Lift” simply isn’t one of them. This is the filmmaker behind Oscar-nominated “Straight Outta Compton.” This is the director who helmed the American remake of “The Italian Job.”

For a movie with so much stuff to look at, the only things you really see during The Nutcracker and the Four Realms are all of the recent movies that it’s flagrantly trying to recycle.

The problem isn’t that Johnson can’t act — he definitely can! — the problem is that he doesn’t want to. He still wants the simple idolatry that a kid might have for their favorite athlete. He wants to be larger than life. But even the biggest of movie stars need to be a little smaller than that in order to give people something to watch, and not just look up to.

Never quite sure where to put his cameras, Creevy attempts to compensate by placing them everywhere, and cutting between them as if at random.

It’s like cinema made by Mad Libs, but worse, because we do realize actual people made this, not just randomized choices in a studio head’s office somewhere.

Like a Boss may preach friendship above all else, but sitting through it together would test even the strongest of ties.

This low-rent, no-energy, seen-it-all-before genre wank left me absolutely terrified of returning to an era when micro-blogged cries for help could last for half a year and run the length of a novella.