This dark lark is like walking around Times Square looking at the flashy logos and lights and thinking you see the message behind the medium.

What’s more depressing: that John Cusack chose the junky, un-exciting serial killer drama The Frozen Ground as his latest step away from John Cusack-y roles, or that Nicolas Cage chose to, at long last, be as un-Cage-like as possible?

A tacky 'Fatal Attraction' for the lesbian set.

The real culprit is first-time director Marcel Langenegger, who seems to have studied for his debut by watching nothing but Cinemax. The score hints at ominous activities that never happen, a rain machine provides the only atmosphere and the actors have to suffer through the silliest sex scenes in recent memory.

As clichés trot through their sessions - it's like "In Treatment" as bedroom farce - we check out. Huppert, though, is as fearless as ever.

The movie is played fast but lacks wit. The script, written by Kristin Gore — daughter of Al, and author of the book on which it’s based — mistakes frantic for funny.

Hugh Jackman doesn't play Wolverine in Eddie the Eagle, which is too bad. The film deserves to be slashed to bits.

It all goes nowhere slowly, with only a few visual jokes to break the monotony.

The atonal script is credited to first-timer Michael Brown, but there’s still no explaining Shapeero’s lump-of-coal debut.

The danger in writing, directing, producing and casting yourself in the same movie is that there’s no one to pull you back from the cliff. Simon Helberg (“The Big Bang Theory”) did co-direct this grating vanity affair with his wife, Jocelyn Towne, but neither seems to realize how misguided it is at every step.

If there were a Lifetime Channel for Men, Emilio Aragón’s unabashedly sentimental take on old age would surely wind up there.

How does a comedy troupe even get from the frat-humor antics of "Beerfest" to the middle-class suburbanality of Babymakers? Well, everybody gets old eventually. Growing up, on the other hand, is optional.

The end result is like Quentin Tarantino reworking a Charles Bukowski story.

Problem is, this movie is all surface - to quote one character, it has hidden shallows.

This is one of those films in which almost every element is done in such an embarrassingly amateurish way, you want to put it out of its misery.

It's an unfunny Spanish movie that worked best as a two-minute trailer.

The folksy shenanigans are well-intentioned but frankly interminable, with Kline's wry efficiency the best relief from all the yowling and whining.

Forgive us for being demanding, but shouldn't an animated kids movie like this one be, at the very least, fun? Cute? Watchable?

Any humor, though, is buried deep in bad writing. So the joke’s on us. Writer-director Mary Agnes Donoghue is surely well-intentioned, but her tin ear and very-special-episode worldview miss the mark.

Savannah should win some sort of award for most amount of times you’ll ask, “They roped that guy into this turkey, too?”

Ellis' stamp is immediately apparent, from the absurdly vapid characters to the undercurrent of barely repressed anger.

Skip the movie and go buy yourself a drink instead.

The concept itself is bafflingly empty. We’re never given any reason to respect Teddy or his work — which is built on tired, self-help clichés — so we hardly believe in his rapturous fans.

Who could have predicted that one day we would long for the relative subtlety of “Twilight”? Richard LaGravenese’s Beautiful Creatures is so outrageously florid, Bella and Edward’s baroque courtship looks understated by comparison.

Does Hollywood have so little to offer women that well-regarded actresses feel obliged to accept demeaning indies like this flatly unfunny, morally vacant comedy?

Act of Valor is like watching the wrestlers in dramas produced by the WWE: They're great at what they do, but being in front of the camera isn't part of that.

The Last Exorcism trods on previously stomped ground and has almost no good jump-outta-your-seat moments.

Statham brings so little energy that the fight scenes are hardly more vivid than the gambling ones. His one-liners have no heart; his cynicism is no longer sharp.

As Corporate promotional videos go, this one snaps together right out of the box. As a movie, it can be as annoying as stepping on a stray LEGO brick with your socks off.

Ultimately, even more than 2007’s “Live Free or Die Hard,” “Good Day” never lets McClane be McClane. Gone is his taunting snark and quick-witted preparedness; instead he seems like a jerk with a thing for guns.

It would be easy to say that the final minutes of this mixed-up thriller make everything before it meaningless, but that would indicate the odd conclusion has meaning, too.

The father is the only one who can leave the house to go to his factory job, and that seems like a paradise for viewers trapped watching this clinically shot claptrap.

The drug that Ma-Ma trafficks in, Slo-Mo, slows its user's brain to 1% of its normal speed. Dredd unfortunately makes you feel as if you, too, have partaken.

Purists will be – happy? Relieved? – to know that the "ch-ch-chhh" music survived, and the body count still totals 13.

Unfinished Business squanders almost every opportunity provided by its potentially funny premise. Instead, it becomes yet another blotch on star Vince Vaughn’s résumé.

Even if you've got a soft spot for silly rom-coms, know that this one is as empty-headed as it gets.

This insipid mashup of history lesson and monster flick takes itself semi-seriously, which is truly deadly.

Tis embalmed drama is a ghost from the '80s, a decade that regularly produced surprise-free, caramelized biopics. The airless Amelia is missing practically everything.

It only comes alive when the star briefly shows the casual looseness that once was his calling card.

Viva needed to be shaved down to about 70 minutes, the better to really let loose and jettison some over-the-top jokiness.

An overstuffed failure that mistakes sleight storytelling for dazzling entertainment.

Some of the locations and scenes of indigenous musicians make this trip a tiny bit worthwhile. But only a bit.

Motherhood's litany of complaints and trite comedy-drama comes off as thin, and targeted, as a flyer for The Children's Place.

This eye-rollingly bad movie is silly, sluggish and miscast.

Fatigue is all we get from Run All Night.

I checked my watch over and over — and I wasn’t even wearing one. The only death the movie really supplies is one from boredom.

Laudable as its world-building is, the film drags not just in its interminable middle hour, but also during the redundant monster-on-mechawarrior smackdowns.

Shallow and frustratingly misguided drama.

San Andreas is a disaster — literally. That’s not to take a piece out of Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson. His charm and family-man-style fearlessness as the movie’s star is the only saving grace in this thuddingly repetitive, badly written crash-a-thon.

A ghost-busting drama set in a world of mystics, mind-benders and various and sundry fake-psychic gobbledygook. But the weirdest thing is how all the fun gets lost in a bottom-drawer "X Files" story.

Surely an Oscar-nominated filmmaker like Atom Egoyan (“The Sweet Hereafter”) can do better than this nasty and unconvincing thriller.

Any way you slice it, writer-director Spencer Susser's movie is bad company, full of wanna-be-outrageous anecdotes from the fringe.

Phil Alden Robinson’s overheated dramedy feels disconnected from reality in every emotional way.

Both written and played in broad strokes, each character quickly devolves into the most simplistic of symbols. The results comes across more as an agenda than art.

"War" is depressingly mean-spirited.

A dark comedy that isn't funny and a marriage satire that doesn't break new ground.

The holes in the plot, not in Eddie’s diet, are the real joke.

Polanski views things so mischievously that the naughtiness is neutered long before sniveling Thomas is tied to a pole. He’s a captive not only to Vanda, but also to all the dull, reductive mind games.

A children's comedy about talking animals that feels as if it were written by children or, perhaps, by talking animals.

John Peaslee's Screenwriting 101-style script has merely left everyone floating on their own.

The movie doesn't try for "Airplane!" or even "Scary Movie"-type ribbing, but its adherence to the genre isn't quite pure, either. Despite McCormack's good-natured efforts, this is "MADtv"-quality satire.

The latest indignity.

With no heat at all and a woefully disjointed cast, De Palma’s danse macabre never catches fire.

If Meghan's misadventures were funny, or creatively told, or even just mildly entertaining, perhaps Brill ("Little Nicky") could get away with such lazy filmmaking. Instead he wastes all of his resources, including two top-flight comic actors, shamelessly.

The Expendables 3 lets down its cast with a film that’s about as thrilling as the arrival of a monthly Social Security check.

There is no reason a film with an agenda can’t also be engaging or thought-provoking. But what we have here is not so much a movie as a blunt Sunday sermon.

It’s easy to roll your eyes at this slapdash film-school reject — though director Leah Meyerhoff can be forgiven a bit. She’s still in film school.

Before you spend good money to see the purported comedy, Blended, watch the trailer. The entire movie is packed into those 152 seconds.

Carpenter's economical but mundane chiller is possessed more by previous ghoul-friend flicks than it is by his better work.

Shabby on the surface and indulgent at its core.

At least "Witch" offers Perlman's easy, early-hominid charm, and a semi-suspenseful rickety-bridge scene.

This is what happens when the Norwegians try to make their own "Blair Witch Project": We get three-headed trolls that hate Vitamin D and references to "Deliverance."

Ultimately, Paradise is a tiny version of a saint’s journey among sinners, an immature conception. Peramb-you-later, Lamb.

Still, in movie terms, Warrior's Heart makes curling look like gladiatorial combat.

As awful as most of That's My Boy is, it's sort of mesmerizing to see how Sandler - in a script credited to David Caspe - keeps his touchstones in place.

The story feels like quicksand. Riddick, which couldn’t even qualify for proper summer movie placement, moves like Martian molasses and can’t present an action scene to save its life. You’ll wish you had Uncle Martin’s ability to speed people — not to mention awful movies — up.

These actors know how to liven up a room, yet here they're forced to perform in Miller's Theater for the Overwritten.

Director Alex Proyas’ movie feels like a bad video game.

From an artistic perspective, Ron Krauss’ heavy-handed drama, Gimme Shelter, fails almost entirely. But if the director set out to combine the stilted falsity of 1980s after-school specials with leaden political dogma, he’s certainly achieved his goals.

Robert Luketic's bland action comedy focuses on the uninteresting relationship between its two bland main characters, and that's the deadliest thing in sight.

The only saving grace is Green, the reigning witch-queen of cinema. The smoky-eyed French actress, best known for “Casino Royale,” “The Golden Compass” and “Dark Shadows,” throws her all into the performance, going bare-chested at times, bared-teeth at others. She’s like Elizabeth Taylor’s "Cleopatra" possessed by a succubus — which is a good thing. Without her, 300: Rise of an Empire would be bloodless and brainless.

Charmless and derivative.

When people complain about movies glutting the market, this moronic “Black Swan”-meets-“Phone Booth” thriller is what they mean.

A kids' adventure movie can be a lot of things -- wild and woolly, loosey-goosey, full of foolishness -- but they should never be shabby. And that's the best word for Inkheart.

This movie is so dumb for most of its running time, you walk away wishing there was less plot and pointless posing and more of the fuel-injected coolness that brought you to the multiplex in the first place.

The missed opportunities in Austenland are more numerous than dowry-less sourpusses at a ball in a Jane Austen novel.

The always beguiling Radha Mitchell can’t save this stunted procedural-horror combo.

A chatty little bore.

A movie without a moment of truth to be found.

Director James Keach's movie is so annoyingly dipsy-doodle that TV veteran Bilson, trying hard to look haunted and angsty, is boxed in.

The eerie wood was exquisitely designed. Disastrously, what goes on there suggests a Californian mall during spring break.

As generic and forgettable as its title, this half-hearted attempt at a teen comedy feels like a term paper you might buy online: poorly written and cribbed from a million other sources.

This is a washout lacking jokes or scares.

Likely to draw a range of responses. Many will be transported by its gorgeous construction and breathless emotion. Others will find it patently ridiculous.

Unfortunately, Vardalos has no one else to blame for a shockingly amateurish effort that goes from bad (her oddly insincere performance) to worse (consistently sloppy camera work) to make-it-stop (it would be an insult to television to call the script sitcomish).

Who let an unfunny, irritatingly acted two-hour commercial for Google onto multiplex screens?

Bening and Dillon are equally misused, and the rest of the cast is frankly just annoying. Like Imogene’s early promise, Girl Most Likely is likely to be forgotten quickly. The sooner the better.

Got your holiday turkey yet? Well, don't worry, Diane Keaton and John Goodman have one waiting for you at the movie theater.