With its muddy timeline, kaleidoscope of fantasies, flashbacks and hallucinations, broad characterizations and sitcom slickness, the film never settles down long enough to congeal, much less feel remotely connected to reality.

This movie’s about as scary as a jackhammer.

Unfortunately, the climactic table-turning here feels more mechanical than cathartic and does little to elevate the film’s undistinguished narrative.

The story of The David Dance might have seemed more timely and vital when first presented as a play in 2003. Today, however, the delayed film version (it was shot in 2009) feels remarkably dated. It’s also logy, stagey and overlong.

Contract to Kill looks remarkably cheap for a film whose characters wear Rolexes and take private planes. The money also wasn’t spent on the script from writer-director Keoni Waxman, which confuses a stream of expletives for wit.

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

Flaming out from the get-go, Trash Fire represents another soggy batch of Southern Gothic horror-comedy from writer-director Richard Bates Jr. that spews out pitch black smoke with little combustible substance.

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

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

Pretty but oh-so-dumb, Sugar Mountain is the cinematic equivalent of a himbo.

While the cast is talented and the tone is classy, The Charnel House never develops any momentum. The movie puts fright on the back burner to tease out a mystery that proves to be too profoundly idiotic to be worth all the bother.

In his first feature outing, director Soham Mehta overplays the significance of virtually every aspect of Rajiv Shah’s script, no matter how minor, with painfully slow pans and needlessly lingering establishing shots.

This isn’t meant to be a polished, restrained indie drama, but its flaws don’t solely reside in writer-director Alberto’s avant-garde approach. Instead, its biggest misstep is the two central characters who are so unlikable as to be unwatchable.

Lopez’s first feature comes across as fragmented and overwrought, with characters and performances that seem to have been egged on by the score’s achingly purposeful piano.

It’s too scattershot to be persuasive, even if occasionally it sparks thought about issues of cultural tradition, unfair international agreements, and nationalistic defensiveness.

The borrowed concept is all it has going for it, and at nearly two hours it stretches the conceit and the performers far beyond their range. It’s a minor effort overly indebted to its references.

By the end of the film, you're left with the unshakable feeling that everyone involved, from actors to filmmakers to the audience, is, and should have been, better than material like this.

Director Akan Satayev’s hacker thriller looks gorgeous, featuring locations around the world shot with crisp cinematography by Pasha Patriki. However, the script from Sanzhar Sultan is poorly structured and silly, revealing the emptiness beneath the shiny facade.

The “pranks” just aren’t funny. The whole premise isn’t funny.

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.

Cinematic life...is in short supply in this ambitious but leaden cautionary tale, which tries to pep things up with energetic fight scenes in the avatar worlds, but can’t escape the wooden acting and zipless storytelling.

Moore is primarily known as an actor but this is the third feature he’s directed, and he proves surprisingly unable to get layered performances out of some great actors.

A seemingly tourist-bureau-sanctioned travelogue posing as a romantic drama.

What's offensive about A Bad Moms Christmas (and “Bad Moms”) is just how shoddily made it is.

The story might have had some thematic heft if we knew or cared anything about the characters. But all we can glean about the disastrous Kostis is that he’s had hard times, while Anna is a total cipher.

“Spark” should earn points for originality, but it never invests in establishing its world or its characters in a way that engages viewers.

While there’s no shortage of comedy talent on screen in The House, there’s a dire lack of actual laughs to be found in this strange shell of a movie.

Uncertain whether to be a cheerfully weightless killing spree, an earnest odd-couple comedy or, most hilariously, a straight-faced Eastern European political thriller, Tom O’Connor’s screenplay falls back on shopworn snark and half-baked bromantic attitudes.

Even a cast with this many award wins and nominations can't salvage a script that will have viewers audibly sighing, rather than laughing.

Director/co-writer Glenn Douglas Packard tries to bring a little style and color to the film by relying on off-kilter camera angles and cartoonish supporting characters. But he mostly stays within the narrow parameters of the “knocking off generically attractive youngsters one-by-one” movie, never getting campy enough, bizarre enough or satirical enough.

A generic coming-of-age comedy that feels inextricably stuck in the ’90s, Hickey serves as the feature debut of TV commercial director Alex Grossman and plays like a never aired UPN series pilot.

Writer-director C.A. Cooper’s The Snare is admirably artful and oblique in putting its own twist on the haunted-house story, but it’s derivative of much better psychological suspense films and is obnoxiously unpleasant to boot.

There’s more focus on the dull mystery and predictable story twists, and not nearly enough choreographic ecstasy on-screen.

The Trouble With Terkel feels painfully outdated and stale, with rudimentary computer-generated visuals and characters that are potty-mouthed only for the sake of provocation.

Director Gustavo Ron and co-writer Francisco Zegers fill the movie to bursting with plot, turning what might have been a delightfully airy cream puff of a film into a soggy disaster.

While the fake news angle is admittedly a timely one, the film’s ultimate dubious achievement is its remarkable ability to make “Dude, Where’s My Car?” feel like vintage Kubrick.

My Father Die is all provocation and no substance, and therefore completely meaningless.

Just when you think the film has gratefully escaped its most inevitable turn, it goes there, adding one final kernel of corn to this ho-hum horse tale.

With Eloise, Legato and company take a prime location, rich in history, and make it look like a soundstage.

The Adventure Club is a remarkably dull Canadian tween caper about a sought-after magical ancient box with wish-making powers.

Writer-director Park Kwang-hyun certainly keeps the visual energy aloft with its frantic genre-splicing, but the over-the-top approach ultimately plays out like several years’ worth of Super Bowl commercials strung out end to end.

Dagen Merrill’s thriller, made under the Syfy channel’s banner, is strictly cheap-TV genre fare that might have passed muster as an average episode of “The Outer Limits,” but over feature length simply feels slipshod and dull.

With wooden performances and a lack of character development, Below Her Mouth is more X-rated, late-night cable skin flick than trenchant exploration of female sexuality.

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.

Howell’s inept pileup of would-be signifiers — a misty quarry, a family crypt, a philosophical beekeeper — gives way to frisson-free horror and unconvincing romance.

Two tedious hours later, the sensation of doing time is all too tangible.

From the homophobic slurs to the lowest common denominator body humor to the stale gender politics, Pitching Tents is all cutesy retro raunchiness without any innovation or comedic payoff. It might have been excusable back in the day, but now it’s just boring.

The film’s narrative engine remains too choppy and clunky, and the characters too cursorily developed, to hold attention.

The cast is game and the pace blessedly zippy, but everything about this film feels too fake to generate any real suspense.

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.

Action movies don’t necessarily need logic, but in the absence of entertainment value, tracking what doesn’t make sense is often the only fun.

It’s an illogical, simple-minded mess in which Stevens is primarily a disembodied voice in a first-person-shooter-style video game movie.

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

With its gauzily surreal touches, Woodshock reflects the Mulleavys’ romantic flair for texture and embellishment. But as Theresa’s guilt and self-medication mount, along with the film’s profoundly muddled ideas about assisted suicide, the curated trance grows mind-numbing. It’s a death trip with pretty lingerie.

Despite Donahue’s best efforts in a grand finale sleep session with life-or-death stakes, the premise never lives up to its promise.

Jacobs simply can’t make any of it work.

The Bodyguard isn't a good movie, but it's often enjoyably bad, and that's no small achievement. So many talented people had a hand in it, starting with director Mick Jackson and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, that you stare at the screen in a state of rapt bewilderment. Just about everything that can go wrong with this film does, and yet it's compulsively watchable. (So is a train wreck.) [25 Nov 1992, p.F1]

But rarely has so much animated opulence been wasted on such a thin, badly told story.

Every character states their inner motivation out loud, often without prompting, making for a film that loses its intrigue almost immediately.

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.

It commits the worst comedy crime of all — there’s no punchline.

The Gracefield Incident sports some impressive special effects in key scenes, but remains yet another found-footage thriller where the dialogue feels phony, the nonscary action is tedious and the images are artless. The angle may be different, but we’ve seen this before.

Battle Scars is an uneasy mix of military drama and low-rent crime thriller whose seamy elements, under-examined characters and forced plot turns undercut its attempted messaging about war-induced post-traumatic stress disorder.

This picture, which looks far, far better than it is, is so clunky that you can't be sure just how funny writer John Esposito, in adapting an early King short story, and director Ralph S. Singleton intended it to be.

The special effects tricks are often nifty, but where's the wit? Memoirs of an Invisible Man doesn't earn its seriousness. It fades into invisibility while you're watching it.

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.

It's an ultra-slick, ultra-flat movie that cuts like a cellophane knife. No edge, no blood.

Proud Mary isn't a retro action thriller at all, but a staid family drama, and an incredibly boring one at that.

This feels like two movies for the price of one, but the audience isn’t getting a deal.

Tunick’s clearly budget-conscious choice to shoot largely inside the couple’s nicely appointed home compounds this routinely shot and edited film’s stagy, static quality.

Bell jettisons any possibility for radical ideals or emotional poignancy in favor of a hackneyed rom-com ending tacked onto a movie that’s both stale and unpleasantly madcap.

Weet tries to invest a common horror premise with some original mythology, but unlike films that risk disturbing audiences by tying ghosts to abuse, Darkness Rising treats Madison’s past more as a puzzle to be solved, which drains it of some primal power.

Rising Sun has gotten everything backward. Mystifying when it should be clear and clear when it should be mystifying, it is the murkiest, most unsatisfying of thrillers. And the biggest mystery of all is how a project that appeared to have so much going for it could have gone so determinedly astray.

While writer-director Tudley James has a disarmingly light touch and some stylistic flair, this “Granny” ultimately isn’t clever or funny enough.

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.

The movie...resembles a sloppily tended garden plot where crude sight gags and violent set-pieces flourish like weeds, but anything resembling actual humor or delight refuses to take root.

’Til Death Do Us Part takes on the admirable task of depicting life with an abuser and the very real obstacles to starting over. But its stereotypical writing, which errs on the side of cheesy and hackneyed, rather than deep and psychologically rich, dooms “’Til Death.”

The historical saga can feel cursory, at times unconvincingly rendered given how many events and far-flung locales this overly ambitious film strains to cover on a seemingly limited budget.

The Conway Curve wants to be a world of colorful characters, wacky high jinks and happy endings, but it’s just so stilted and blandly unfunny that it can’t support its own frantic antics.

For all of the manic anti-authoritarian energy that Knoxville and pals generate in Action Point, it’s not directed at anything, which renders it meaningless and leaves the film to fizzle out like a deflated balloon.

Liza, Liza, Skies Are Grey lacks a sense of what is essential to its story. It dwells on insignificant moments and inserts transition shots without logic, but skips over scenes or dialogue that could support Liza and Brett’s characters, their relationship and the choices they make.

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.

While its DIY spirit is admirable, this tedious shocker feels like it was cobbled together from a kit.

The only thing about The Naked Gun that won't make you laugh is the film itself...To mix a metaphor in appropriate style, the filmmakers have really beaten a dead horse into the ground with this one.

Not since The Heretic tried to follow up The Exorcist has there been so dismal a sequel as Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment.

Any hope of prestige is dashed by the heavy-handed, cliché-ridden direction of former stuntman Johnny Martin and his star’s detached portrayal of a guy whose mind is permanently elsewhere.

The audience will likely spend most of the film squirming and grimacing in recognition at Aaron’s awfulness — especially when the film rewards him with an ending that is far kinder than the character deserves.

Scrape away the soggy one-liners, generic CGI and cheesy musical numbers and what remains has all the briny allure of reheated fry oil.

These vignettes are only sporadically entertaining, and sap a lot of the narrative momentum before the extended climax — which itself is largely a retread of the first film’s big finish.

A plucky ensemble fails to elevate Crash Pad, a forced, formulaic revenge comedy about an obnoxious slacker whose new housemate turns out to be the husband of his older ex-mistress.

Dufils vividly captures the locale’s seedy, swampy vibe, with its dive bars, shabby homes, ubiquitous convenience stores and underground fight spots. If only there were a more compelling, engaging narrative to match.

While Vikander and McAvoy are two undeniably photogenic actors who also radiate considerable intelligence, their best efforts are lost in the claustrophobic environment.

London is adequate (if not exactly magnetic) as the lead, and director Patricio Valladares gives the film a rich, shadowy look that almost compensates for the turgid pace and distractingly incessant score.

The movie attempts to comment on reality-show culture, but it offers little insight beyond its ill-conceived premise. With suicide at its center, The Show is both tone-deaf and a tonal mess.

Infinity Chamber (renamed from the original “Somnio”) may accurately convey the oppressive perpetuity of its title, but all that repetition in the absence of more inspired plotting results in a payoff that feels inescapably contrived.

The script blunts its own emotional impact with coincidences, odd choices and an ending that feels too neat, even for an inspirational film of this nature.

Even with a solid cast at his disposal, Bieber can’t make Don’t Sleep anything more than a disconnected compendium of time-tested shock tactics.

First-time feature writer-director Morgan Dameron attempts to craft a love letter to her native heartland and to sisterhood, but falls short on both fronts, rarely digging beneath the surface of small-town bonhomie and what makes Millie and Emma tick.