The acting is stiff, the pacing sluggish, the framing uncertain, the music an intrusive mush and the scenario schematic. But it’s an interesting schematic, at least, complete with thoughtful/exhaustive discussion of the difference between justice, revenge and forgiveness.

Naturally, not everything is what it seems; there are a couple of necessary untruths even in this plot synopsis. But the part where it seems like some excellent actors have been roped into propping up a hopelessly by-the-numbers horror movie? That’s totally on the level.

While writer-director Jim Hosking’s commitment to weirdness (also seen in his previous outing, The Greasy Strangler) warrants appreciation, especially when so many others play it safe, his latest, comedy An Evening With Beverly Luff Linn, is a chore to get through.

Mathew Cullen’s calamitous film adaptation of Martin Amis’ London Fields plays like the hazy recollection of someone who hated the book, an incomprehensible jumble of misogynistic claptrap. It dashes joylessly through dense material, too quickly for individual moments to register, much less resonate.

There’s something oddly fascinating (and — dare I say it! — watchable) about a movie being this defiantly dumb. I never thought I’d say this, but this guy could give Tommy Wiseau a run for his money in the best worst filmmaker department.

The Crash-meets–Collateral Beauty false-gravitas joke of the year.

For a movie that literally says it's full of "a bunch of degenerate maniacs," humdrum Black Site Delta bombs.

A manifesto in the form of an enormously budgeted quasi-sci-fi epic, Cloud Atlas is evidently personal, defiantly sincere, totally lacking in self-awareness, and borderline offensive in its gleeful endorsement of revenge violence against anyone who gets in the way of a good person's self-actualization. The rest of the time, it's just insipid, TV-esque in its limited visual imagination, and dramatically incoherent.

Cage's avenger is named Milton; this reference to the author of Paradise Lost is the sole hint that Old World culture ever existed in Drive Angry's convoy of hyperbolized-unto-parody Americana: bad drawls, obese gawkers, roadhouse demonology, coochie-cutter shorts, and engines revving under guitar stomp.

Ultimately, the plot-point overload dilutes any palpable sense of dread, excitement or empathy, and it doesn't help that all the dialogue acts in service to either patronizing exposition or turgid interpersonal drama.

Built-to-shock anthology film.

Country Strong is sillier - and more tone-deaf - than Paltrow's advice website, GOOP.

It's basically the stuff of a Bill Maher monologue, knocked down a few reading levels and spun into a low-budg gonzo smorgasbord of brashly tacky styles.

Every gag is smothered by the prevailing tone of labored zaniness and generic, plucky "mischief music" alerting discerning viewers to abandon all hope of laughter.

All might be good for a flask-to-the-theater laugh, if not for the unconscionable price gouging.

A dreadfully unfunny slog through contemporary dysfunctional family indie cliché.

Has there ever been a more inept trio of big-city caseworkers? Go ahead, Lilith. Unleash the hounds.

What follows is one set piece after another in which the women make fools of themselves as the script herds them toward a happy ending of hugs and tears.

This is a shameless mélange of plot elements from already generic Disney knockoffs.

Smart money says Friedberg and Seltzer never sit through these movies in entirety.

Blakeson's feature-length calling card has storyboarded austerity and sadomasochistic promise but in the end lets the game play out in a familiar flurry of double-crossings, two-timings and false deaths, content to only fetishize itself.

Meant to take the scrappy and often ingeniously choreographed dance sequences to the next level, the result is stalled between floors: Some sick moves get even sicker; some become distorted and freakishly distracting.

About as unremarkable as a film about talking animals organized into competing intelligence agencies can be.

This is one muddled attempt at franchise making: confusing, drab, sluggish. (Ugly, too, if you're forced to see it in 3-D.)

Bracingly inept.

Dreary romcom-with-guns.

The script has all the spunk of Ikea-bookcase assembly instructions.

A movie that’s full of sound, fury and unintentional camp -- and is still bafflingly inert.

In keeping with the film’s giddy superficiality, what’s revealed is a series of sexy poses passed off as character depth. All the backstabbing, shifting alliances and dark motives are held together by adolescent, innuendo-laden dialogue and thick Sapphic overtones.

Tim Allen returns to lowest-common-denominator comedy as the star of his own ill-advised, irritating directorial debut.

With stronger actors and real writers, this might’ve been a vintage comedy you could sink your...nope, not going there.

The slathered-on visual textures aren’t quite enough, however, to distract us from the glib, leftie posturing, the lazy writing and the drug-deep existential platitudes.

Drawn from two Earhart bios, Mira Nair’s dull hagiography comes in about 111 minutes too long.

Taken just as an objet d’art, Saw VI — gray, grisly, solemn, stupid — would be about the most dismal thing I’ve ever laid eyes on, the argument against film preservation. But it vaults into the realm of real detestability through pretensions of relevance.

The movie’s cumulative idea is that, forgetting the delusions of midlife panic, this is all there is, you’re already living the best possible life -- a message of sedentary wisdom betrayed when the actual film is as undeniably dreary as a plate of gummy Chicken Parmesan Tanglers.

At first, Lucy seems so manic and crazed that the viewer might suspect this will turn into a slasher movie. Later, when it becomes clear just how annoying and unlikable each character is, you’ll pray that it turns into a slasher movie.

Call me the sarcastic sister, but the only things screaming in any convincing way here are the cheap look, epileptic direction and off-key, “edgy” humor. It’s all so ‘80s, I could die.

Has so many dead moments that singing spots by Gladys Knight, Pastor Marvin Winans and Mary J. Blige simply highlight, rather than alleviate, the inertia.

This time, Zombie doesn’t appear to have many deep thoughts, so Michael doesn’t just stab his victims, he slices and chomps them into gooey pulp — an overkill motif that actually feels false to the character and quickly becomes a depressing bore.

After a first hour that plays like a bad TV show, Sommers hits his groove with an over-the-top Paris chase sequence that, in turn, leads to an underwater finale that’s absurdly overproduced, momentarily diverting, and then instantly forgettable.

Cheap, shoddy, crass and depressing fun for the whole family -- by which I mean 8-year-old boys.

Unbearably painful from shrugging start to outtakes-laden finish, Harold Ramis’ half-assed, hare-brained return to writing and directing makes Mel Brooks’ equally muddled, soporific "History of the World, Part 1" look downright majestic by comparison.

Feels like a movie made by men whose world views were shaped, primarily, by "Porky's" and "American Pie."

The diminishing returns of shock value are the movie's built-in joke, and it would be a lot funnier without the directors' unforgivably bratty postsexist/postracist/posthuman showboating.

In 2009, its hilarious ineptitude makes it border on becoming a cult classic for the ages ... and we're not talking religious cult.

All might have been forgiven were it not for a needlessly Shyamalanized ending that deserves to earn Wyatt at least 25 years for grand-theft cinema.

What would a Christian Apocalypse movie look like with a big budget, a talented director, and star power of higher wattage than a discount Baldwin brother? Here comes the answer: like a glum hybrid of the "Final Destination" movies, an Irwin Allen disaster bash, and the kitschiest parts of Darren Aronofsky's "The Fountain."

Director John Maybury showed a defter hand with the artist biopic in his 1998 Francis Bacon film, "Love Is the Devil." Here he repeatedly falls into the genre’s traps, creating an inert, claustrophobic movie.

Only a moron would expect a dude road-trip-sex comedy to be more than an aggressive expression of male sexual anxiety. But really, when did women become such vile creatures.

The movie layers its fatalistic drama with absurdist horseplay and a few moments of Lynch-ian mysticism, but it's an awkward mix at best; even when The Perfect Sleep is trying to be funny, it's far too self-conscious to really be much fun.

Given the passivity of computer use, the "hacker thriller" is film history's great running joke, but special attention should go to Echelon Conspiracy's authors for conceiving a climax that tries to juice tension out of someone using a search engine and staring at a download countdown.

Idiot plotting and dialogue are what you'd expect from a genre that typically rewards narrative development with a skip function. But the rote fight scenes are a disappointment.

It plays like a disastrous Sci-Fi Channel castoff, thanks in no small part to Myrick's odd decision to include incessant voice-over narration by Ball, which plays like a really terrible in-character DVD commentary track.

There's no excitement or terror in watching the 3-D execution of 2-D actors giving 1-D performances, just the steadily diminishing returns of the same eye gouge delivered ad infinitum.

From Freestyle Releasing, the self-service distributor that brought you "D-War" and "In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale," comes a movie even worse than those two combined.

A kind of declawed, inside-out "Final Destination" -- with none of the sense of showmanship, and all the looming malice of a mawkish condolence card.

The role requires Wahlberg to run the gamut of emotions from A to A.

Mostly, Lafferty is all about expletives and sexual innuendo of the frankest kind, some of it so raunchy (and unfunny) as to make one wonder if the parents of the film's many child actors bothered to read the script.

Astonishingly inept alleged satire.

So bad it's scary.

Tank's whole shtick is taking advantage of stupid women's desire to live in banal romantic comedies, but the film he's in is just as bad as any other Hudson movie.

Another of those dopey crime thrillers where the hardcore, bad-ass antihero inexplicably decides one day to lower his guard and open his heart, causing all kinds of hell to break loose.

Lacking even the train-wreck appeal of a brainless stoner comedy like "Half-Baked," Surfer, Dude is a numbing experience at just 89 minutes.

This carpet-fouling mongrel of a movie no more deserves release than do anthrax spores.

Film critics never come home stinking of their honest labor, but the nearest equivalent is reviewing something like College, which leaves its stain on one's very humanity.

With its inexplicably watchable shotgun-riding bimbos, unconscious homoeroticism and "Shawshank Redemption" ending, The Fast and the Frivolous here is almost so bad it's good. Almost...

One graphic that I.O.U.S.A. doesn't include is a national balance sheet of our assets and liabilities, which would illustrate that the former is more than double the latter. We're in the black, and a film this deep in the red isn't something to be scared of at all -- or taken seriously.

It's a mystery why Sutherland attached himself to this dour, muddled thriller.

The truth is still out there, like an unsold lawn chair at a garage sale, in this just plain lousy second big-screen outing for erstwhile FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.

The animation, incidentally, is half-a--ed, like they ran out of the $292.96 budget halfway through. Rip-off indeed.

Miss Conception's dim view of women soon transcends unexamined and goes straight to offensive.

As a satire of France's recent turn to the right, Frontier(s) is both hysterical and muddled; as straight-up splatter -- a Grand Guignol concerto of scalding steam, slashed tendons and table saw, with a solo for exploding head -- it's as relentless as it is hateful, hammily directed and derivative of the dreariest slop in contemporary American horror cinema.

McCormick and screenwriter J.S. Cardone don’t have one original thought between them, but they do appear to share an obsession with characters opening hotel-room closets in which the steel hangers gleam ominously.

Is Meet Bill the worst movie ever? Probably not, but it's certainly incoherent enough to give "Gigli" a run for its money.

Predictable, flat, full of name-dropping, tragically unhip, and likely to make a decent amount of cash.

Still, it’s hard to despise the movie, especially when Peter Stormare shows up over-enunciating the most brilliantly awful English accent of all time.

The entire movie is an object lesson in diminishing returns: of nagging shock cuts and blaring sound cues used as indiscriminately as joy buzzers; of “look out behind you!” scares that wouldn’t make a Cub Scout flinch; of a blurry visual scheme that was far more terrifying in "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," where it sought empathy rather than empty sensation.

No snob to low-brow ridiculousness when it’s actually unexpected, I’ll admit to being amused exactly once, when Zahn gets deep-throated by a gigantic prop turkey who, despite the mouthful, keeps on flapping.

Meet the Spartans is a mild improvement over their "Epic Movie," which is like saying that a debilitating fever is more fun than appendicitis, but what’s shocking is how lazy it is, which is a shame for former UK child star/pop singer Sean Maguire, whose Gerard Butler impersonation is spot-on.

As numbing and depressing to watch as suits hammering out a film-packaging deal one venal clause at a time.

If your cell phone vibrates while you’re watching One Missed Call, go ahead and answer, because even a wrong number will be more exciting than what’s happening onscreen.

Director Rob Reiner’s atrocious cancer “comedy” marks a new low in Hollywood’s self-flagellating “things to be thankful for” tradition.

Harold’s glum overplotting squashes the sick humor and the innate fear of hospitals that gives the premise what kick it has; not even Craig McKay’s clever editing can defibrillate the preposterous ending.

While Gens can splatter gore with the best of them -- early in the film, a human body packed with C4 goes off in graphic detail -- he fails to stage so much as a single rousing action scene, even when he has four double-fisted swordsmen facing off inside an abandoned subway car. Game over. The audience loses.

Isn’t as obnoxiously awful as, say, "Epic Movie"; it’s simply not funny in the least.

Inane uplift tale for teens.

This one’s for connoisseurs of the “totally preposterous crap” school of fantasy cinema.

Moving McAllister is a perfect storm of low-budget indie conventionality: a witless road comedy suffused with tons of phony Americana and forced romance featuring sheltered young white people whose minuscule worries about jobs and relationships are as inconsequential as the film’s negligible worldview.

There is nothing sadder, either in real life or on the movie screen, than an unlikable idiot, and what we have with this dreadful comedy -- the longest 90 minutes of the film year -- is the sight of not one but two charm-free fools.

The only things anyone’s likely to remember, besides Bacon’s crazy-eyes act, are John Goodman’s soon-to-be-legendary turn as a bilious bug-eyed gun dealer and a hellacious back-alley/parking-garage chase shot from a careening fender-level camera. Like much of the movie, it’s as hammily dynamic as it is impossible to swallow.

1. Balls of Fury is a movie about: a. A former table-tennis prodigy enlisted by the FBI to infiltrate the underground pingpong tournament of a legendary Chinese criminal. b. Suppository jokes.c. Little worth discussing and even less worth seeing.

What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Offering neither the enjoyably preposterous auto-heroics of the Transporter movies nor the lithe, legible athleticism of even second-tier Hong Kong thrillers.

Is there a Razzie Award for worst casting? If so, it’s one of several that can be reserved early for this fourth, spectacularly lousy screen version of Jack Finney’s 1954 novella "The Body Snatchers," which some bright light envisioned as the ideal starring vehicle for the Cold Mountain herself, Nicole Kidman, and for Daniel Craig, last seen as the most poker-faced James Bond on record.

Depressingly shrill.

No, it’s not Caddyshack -- just swap Jews (Rodney Dangerfield) for blacks (Big Boi) and you’ve got Who’s Your Caddy?. The movie, of course, is terrible.

Now, Soderbergh has made a movie so cool it's practically comatose. Sputtering along from one half-cocked gag line and self-satisfied in-joke to the next, Ocean's Thirteen is as slapdash and slipshod a three-quel as any in this summer's box-office sweepstakes.

Monumentally terrible but far too bizarre to be boring.

An amateurish mashup of "The Butterfly Effect" and "The Family Man" (talk about unholy hybrids!) that strains patience from the get-go.