[An] earnest but terribly ham-fisted drama.

It’s a film that dares you to give it a bad review, simply so it can turn around and call you a bully who picks on the people who try. It invites you to giggle at Florence’s horrible singing and then promptly scolds you for laughing, creating a contradiction that goes unreconciled.

Poor Demi Moore — playing the self-centered CEO of a failing company — comes off as stiff and shrill, setting the tone for a movie that’s stilted from start to finish.

The ambitious but unwieldy screenplay suffers from a lack of cohesion and loses control of the nonlinear memories and fantasies of seven people, with some of the characters’ motivations also lost in the shuffle.

Strong lead performances by Aaron Paul and Emily Ratajkowski are squandered in Welcome Home, a low-tension suspense picture with pretensions of saying something profound about broken relationships.

It’s an eminently missable, cliché-ridden affair.

Chen's grand opus about the perils of the Internet already feels obsolete.

Directed by Eli Roth with the same knowing smirk that has informed his previous exercises in self-satisfied bloodletting ("Cabin Fever," "The Green Inferno," the "Hostel" movies), the movie is a slick, straightforward revenge thriller as well as a sham provocation, pandering shamelessly to the viewer's bloodlust while trying to pass as self-aware satire. Your time, to say nothing of your outrage, is much better spent elsewhere.

The teen-targeted fantasy-romance The School for Good and Evil is an exhaustingly long, overstuffed movie that probably would’ve worked better as a TV series.

Related to the 1953 Vincent Price film in name, embalming technique and Warner Bros. pedigree only, the new House of Wax is a dreary, predictable tale.

First-time Spanish director Jorge Dorado aims for Hitchcock and misses by a mile with Anna.

Too often we feel that left-out-in-the-cold draft that blows over the shoulder whenever actors appear to be having more fun than the audience.

The Last Witch Hunter is one of those artlessly restless, exposition-dialogue fantasy-action slogs that, thanks to Breck Eisner's untamed direction, never manages to corral all the potion talk, mythology rationale and leaps back and forth in time into anything remotely entertaining.

The inherent cinematic potential of one of nature's cutest animals rescues the film from being a total waste of time.

Most depressing is the spectacle of Debbie Reynolds in the de rigueur Betty White role - Hollywood having relegated seniors to the category of adorably "outrageous" while it caricatures single women as desperate updates on romance-novel heroines.

Healy is never able to find an absorbing middle ground in Mike Makowsky’s script, vacillating gratingly between shrill farce and murky thriller that flails its way toward an intended twist-ending that really shouldn’t surprise anyone.

After suffering through two screenings of Dr. Strangelove, I would sooner drink hemlock.... To me, Dr. Strangelove is an evil thing about an evil thing; you will have to make up your own mind about it.

The most shamelessly manipulative movie since they shot the dog in "The Biscuit Eater."

It’s a film that ultimately feels less like a celebration and more like further exploitation of the star, leaving us all with much more unsettling questions about Houston’s life and legacy. Sadly, the disappointing “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” doesn’t let Whitney rest in peace.

Except for a reliably flavorful turn by John Hawkes, compelling in a few key scenes as Henry's accomplice, The Pardon remains stubbornly uninvolving.

At every turn in Speed Kills, director Jodi Scurfield and a team of screenwriters sand the edges off a complicated, multi-decade saga, making a featureless knockoff of seemingly every sweeping true-crime movie of the past three decades.

Playing It Cool is a strained romantic comedy that seems to exist only to show how many talented, successful actors — first and foremost "Captain America" star Chris Evans — can be featured in one unworthy movie.

If the story isn’t quite incoherent, then De Souza’s klutzy direction renders it so.

An unpleasant exercise in self-indulgence

A campy, hopelessly amateurish vanity production.

They never generates any real fear until its last minutes, by which time it is too late to redeem the dull events that preceded them.

Unfortunately, despite the interesting history, the film itself is a dry, scattered slog, neutered of all the thorny, contradictory details of the real story.

A tedious experience.

This movie’s about as scary as a jackhammer.

Somehow, despite the sexist, foul-mouthed rancor, there are messages to be found about the false promises of toxic masculinity and learning to be the person you want to be without repeating the sins of your parents. Though it’s rough going to get there.

It’s as though we’re supposed to already know these people — as if The Crusades were a sequel to a movie we haven’t seen. There is some visual panache here, and scenes that show promise. But too much is missing.

It must be said that, stuck with a script full of plot holes, director David Price doesn't flinch. Both he and his key actors are clearly up to better material than Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice.

The movie has an absurd script, fueled by that current B-movie staple, the idiot plot--a plot that proceeds only because all, or most, of the characters, act like idiots.

Based on the quality of the screenplay alone, “Demon Knight” is strictly a direct-to-video affair; with “Tales From the Crypt” tacked to the title, the budget expands exponentially to accommodate state-of-the-art special effects--most of them featuring dismemberment, naturally.

Writer-director David Hayter revisits much-trod territory with wan results in Wolves, a werewolf tale that quickly loses its initial bite.

This is one more "yuppie-in-peril" movie, just as slick and empty, manipulative and crude, as most of the rest: all those paranoid pictures bent on scaring us with insane roommates, murderous baby-sitters and killer temps. [5 Apr 1993, p.F3]

The film is no more than a tedious, over-long Bollywood soap opera.

Meanwhile, Mirren, that grande dame of cinema, just seems tired. And who could blame her? She's in the midst of this disaster, literally and figuratively dying right in front of us. Made me want to cry, just not for Arthur.

It’s an overload of overkill, yet as tedious and empty as the last day of a 72-hour trip to Vegas when the novelty has worn off and you just want to go home and sleep.

Certainly, Malkovich's portrayal of mob lieutenant Teddy Deserve (!) and his lacquered swagger represent the only thing here that you haven't seen a hundred times before.

This is a film that’s better off unseen despite its lovely visuals.

A "Saw" knockoff without the torture porn.

It's too labored and ponderous to qualify as a so-bad-it's-good amusement. Original Sin is merely an old-fashioned bore.

A more pointed genre parody intent on proving there’s noir business like show business could’ve been ripping fun. But director Carl Reiner is more intent on offering Cliff’s Notes for VCR couch spuds than satire. It’s the kind of endlessly referential, toothless spoof that sticks an elbow in your side every 20 seconds or so: “Now we’re doing the ‘Body of Evidence’ candle wax scene! Recognize the funny-hats montage from ‘Sleeping With the Enemy’? Get it?”

Oliver Parker’s Swimming with Men is a lazily formulaic male-bonding comedy.

The jokes are often juvenile and gross, unsophisticated and insensitive, but one does not wish to strike juvenility or grossness or even insensitivity outright from the comic tool kit; these just aren't all that good.

Jean-Luc Godard’s “King Lear” is his most off-putting picture since his unwatchable political films of the ‘70s.

First-time director Daniel Duran, working from a screenplay by Oscar Torres that abounds in the maudlin and risible, isn't able to lift the ham-handed material to a place where it might ring true.

Goes into a tailspin after its impressive setup. Its dramatic tactics become so tangled and diffuse that, by the end, you get the feeling that everything gets tied up too hastily.

You have to be a bit of an arrested adolescent to think "Larry" is funny.

We're more than 45 years out from Roman Polanski's director-controlled masterpiece in gestating terror, and yet no gimmick in Devil's Due — no point-of-view shock cut or shaky-cam "realism" — is as dread-inducing as tracking the grim revelations on Mia Farrow's face.

Addicted doesn’t know whether it wants to be a modern-day bodice-ripper, a morality-tinged cautionary tale or a serious snapshot of sexual compulsion. Whatever the case, it fails on all fronts.

Any movie whose computer-generated effects are more believable than its actors is asking for trouble. A frustrating combination of the magical and the mundane, Dragonheart has less difficulty creating a creditable dragon than a recognizable human being. [31 May 1996, p.F1]

A flavorless snack, time filler until "Saw III" and "Hostel 2" are served up.

Jack’s Apocalypse is unable to convey any realistic stakes or authenticity in its story line.

It's not often that you see talented, well-meaning people joined together like cultists in the snare of a group delusion, but that's what makes this film fascinating, the proverbial accident you can't take your eyes off.

Goofy and gee-whiz when it isn't being post-apocalyptic glum, it is such an earnest hodgepodge that only by imagining "Mad Max" directed by Frank Capra can you get even an inkling of what it's like.

The nonstop adversity lacks any real sense of danger. Or, for that matter, emotional punch. Why these two long-distance runners keep each other alive should be of front-and-center concern. Instead, My Way is mostly an endurance test.

A depressingly slick and empty house of cards that collapses under the weight of its muddled intentions.

This dingy, drab, pointless little movie -- a would-be shamrock shocker about four teen-agers menaced by the Irish super-scamp while renovating a North Dakota farmhouse -- is made without flair or imagination, seemingly enervated by its own bad taste and low intentions. [11 Jan 1993, p.F3]

To his credit, director Andy Fickman (“The Game Plan,” “Parental Guidance”) keeps the inanity moving apace and there are a few chuckles to be had courtesy of the supporting cast. But, as is so often the case with big, star-driven studio laffers, “Cop 2” needed several more spins in the comedy punch-up machine before cameras rolled.

Ready for a singing and dancing "Reservoir Dogs"?

Part road movie and part coming-of-age story but mostly plays like some creepy-perv fantasia looking for mileage from the mature-beyond-her-years presence of young star Chloë Grace Moretz.

It ends on a rather strange and unsettling note. Framed in a different context, this story could almost be a horror film.

The movie knocks your eyes out, at the same time it dulls the mind’s eye. Ultimately, it’s one more stop in the arcade, beckoning, waiting to soak up time and money.

Unfortunately, to fit what are seen to be the particular requirements of its director/co-star Burt Reynolds, Stick has been rendered jokey, flaccid and, the worst crime of all, deadly slow. All this in spite of the fact that Leonard was the original screenwriter. [26 Apr 1985, p.6]

Turns out to be a tedious and under-inspired comedy.

For a film about one of the fastest guns in the West, the dramatically lightweight Hickok is mighty slow on the draw.

This evangelical "Dear America: Letters Home From Vietnam" by way of "The Dukes of Hazzard" takes a mighty ridiculous route to righteousness.

Misfires badly as both an entertainment and a message movie.

A proverbial whimper of a finale, Freddy's Dead, the sixth in the series, feels like the product of people who have no vested interest in keeping their franchise alive...You notice almost immediately how underpopulated the movie feels--by ideas, by special effects, even by phobic young cast members waiting to fall asleep and be slaughtered.

For the sake of the children, The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure should be allowed to quietly float away.

Chief Zabu may have been buried for the past three decades, but this tiresomely talky would-be satire is no treasure.

Though there's a thin noir line between lust and hate, Lansdown delivers nothing to stir the passions of filmgoers one way or the other.

There's certainly no energy surge in writer-director Jameel Khan's effort, which is a collection of lazy, look-who's-stupid-or-pathetic vignettes so loosely assembled and laugh-deficient they play as if you're thumbing through a sketch reject pile.

Some movies are so interminable that it seems they might never end, while others are assembled with such indifference that you are essentially left waiting for them to start. Pixels somehow manages both.

Although it aspires to be a kind of latter-day “Love Story,” the rote, overly earnest drama New Life exists largely on the surface.

Consider Twelve its own memory-retarding narcotic.

A bust. As murky as its release print, it is a stale, incoherent spy caper.

This film from writer Kenny Golde and director Mark Schmidt slaps a clichéd war-movie dressing over everything so that what should have felt heart-poundingly incredible comes off as heavy-handed, ludicrous and unintentionally queasy.

The overall vibe here ends up being less “good dirty fun” than “foul-mouthed teenager trying to look cool.”

the first techno-misfire from Walt Disney Pictures, an over-elaborate film that leaves you feeling harangued, harassed and assaulted.

Primal ends up being more exhausting than awesome.

If the first film seemed indicative of much of what is wrong with movies in the streaming era, feeling inessential and disposable, a cog in a machine rather than something unique, “Extraction 2” is a snapshot of a sequel in this moment, bigger, expanded and even less necessary.

Jacobs simply can’t make any of it work.

The 1974 film was a nightmare that felt too close to reality, but this is merely unpleasant — and not in a good way.

Adams tries, as always, to make intelligent choices, to underplay the intensity and avoid the obvious. She works against the freneticism of the filmmaking, emphasizing Anna’s moments of groundedness and lucidity as well as the instinctive empathy that likely made her a good psychologist to begin with. By rights she should be the centerpiece of a great and genuinely Hitchcockian thriller. This one is for the birds.

A leaden murder mystery with a clunky structure that swings back and forth between 1958 and 2008, Stolen wastes the talents of a reasonably good cast.

When Rebecca De Mornay shows up as the criminals' fiercely doting matriarch, the ready crackle of her studiously demonic performance brings welcome distraction from this otherwise crude litany of torture and wretched death.

Whatever magic the first two movies may have had -- and it wasn't always that apparent to anyone over the age of 10 -- has long since congealed, like stale pizza. Or mock turtle soup. [22 Mar 1993, p.F9]

Realistically depicting full-scale domestic terrorism is one thing, but directors Cary Murnion and Jonathan Milott seem unaware of how their long-take gimmick — the cuts are easily determined — destroys logic, emboldens the use of stereotypes, and kills suspense.

Lowell, a sitcom actor ("Enlisted") and photographer, lards his "The Big Chill" ripoff with plenty of arty touches... He assumes this will lend the needed heft to paper-thin characters, witless exchanges and emotional recriminations you can see coming a mile away.

The result is a film that's main crime is inducing stupefying boredom with little payoff in the end.

Little parallelism or consequence can be gleaned from Kwak's narrative that crosscuts points between 1963 and 2010. Seeing as his surrogate in the first film is absent in the sequel, the shared cultural memory has also given way to genre exercise.

When a director merely goes through the motions, even Chekhov can be reduced to daytime soap.

Not even a brief appearance by Quentin Tarantino and a ton of references to other movies enlivens the proceedings much.

With a dirge-like pace that provides ample opportunity to figure it all out well ahead of the protagonists, you keep wishing somebody would buy a vowel to hurry things along.

Utterly dull thriller Drone tries to raise ethical and moral questions about modern warfare, but the audience can only dwell on the illogical plot and unsympathetic characters — if they can engage at all.