Equally hobbled by an amateurish script and vaguely defined characters, the movie's long list of mediocrities have an anonymous quality, as though the director has been completely reborn as a hack.

Guided by an over-the-top Nazi hunter played by Judd Hirsch (clearly enjoying himself), Cheyenne begins a road trip through Middle American that goes nowhere, and Penn's mopey has-been routine starts to feel like a bad joke that just keeps getting worse.

This miserable chimera — skinned with Black’s wicked sense of humor, but too underdeveloped to survive on its wits alone — should never have been let out of the lab, as it poses a serious threat of boring people to death.

Of course, I’m fully aware that The Family Plan 2 wasn’t made for the critics. Not because it’s bad (which it is), but rather because it was only intended to be watched by people who don’t care if it’s good. This movie often feels like it was made by them too, which should be comforting to anyone who considers themselves a fan of the franchise.

The Ward succeeds mainly as a checklist that keeps it consistent with Carpenter's nearly forty years of work. It has none of the smart genre appeal that put him on the map, instead resembling a desperate knock-off by someone with far less talent. Carpenter either lost his groove or the will to use it.

It is in the third act that Immaculate delivers a gonzo, rock-smashing, fiery, crucifix-stabbing and all-out bloody good time. Unfortunately, by that point, it’s too late to save the soul of this movie, which is condemned not to go to hell, but remain in dull horror movie purgatory.

The War With Grandpa is a sluggish hodgepodge of slapstick humor that barely holds together its illogically motivated plot.

Told with the gravitas of a comedy sketch and the edginess of the funny pages, Elvis & Nixon at least has the good sense to appreciate that its namesakes were larger than life, each walled off from the world in their own way.

Even at a slim 95 minutes, Endless grinds on endlessly.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 goes for the cheap laughs and the tacky attempts at pulling heartstrings.

Instead of commenting on the vapidity of the film industry, Paul Schrader's miscast, poorly executed and utterly soulless drama is an example of the failing art form it seeks to indict. Though it has real ideas, Schrader and his team never manage to put them into action.

A downcast and thoroughly dreadful supernatural drama that somehow fails to mine even a moment of fun out of a cautionary tale premised on the idea that your smartphone might literally be a portal to hell.

This runaway train of a biopic renders an iconoclast in the most generic of terms, straining Mapplethorpe’s brief life into a series of bullet-points that feed into each other with all the drama of a Wikipedia page, and a fraction of the context.

The poorly wrapped The Christmas Chronicles 2 feels like a last-minute gift that someone bought at a gas station on December 24. By the time a bunch of Pikmin-like elves get sloshed on spiked cocoa and start singing “Who Let the Dogs Out,” it’s clear that children will only remember Columbus’ latest out of resentment at how soulless Christmas movies have become, if they remember it at all.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is miscalculated as a romance and a fantasy, and while I’m loath to blame a craftsman as intelligent as Kogonada entirely for the outcome, he did, after all, agree to direct this lousy script. A big, bold, beautiful bore indeed.

The more this film begs to be told from the inside out, the more Zandvliet shoots it from the outside in. It’s enough to make you wish he hadn’t shot it at all.

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.