A high-toned revenge-of-nature horror picture, it's a little depressed, with only gross-out shocks (gushing jugulars, bodies run over by lawnmowers) to relieve the torpor.

Amusing and annoying in the wrong ratio, maybe 30/70.

Like Shelley’s much-adapted creature, The Bride! is a creation of enormous ambition. It’s also an incoherent disaster — and not of the noble folly variety. It leaves you with the sinking feeling of watching someone fight their way to the front of a crowd to speak, only to realize when the spotlight is finally on them that they’re not actually sure what to say.

A sad, bad, parade of uninspired cameos and listless violence.

Eventually, the oppressive sameness of everything becomes stultifying — which to me feels like a death blow for something so self-consciously experimental and wannabe visionary.

The Bricklayer isn’t worth seeking out — it’s ideally stumbled onto on cable TV on a hungover Saturday afternoon, when there’s plenty of time to reflect on how little time a slumming Tim Blake Nelson, playing the director of the CIA, must have spent on set.

From the look of this film, its prime appreciators will be heavy-metal futurist dweebs.

The catastrophe is so pulped and exaggerated that uninformed audiences will safely assume that global warming is just a Democratic scare tactic.

Stupidity is also an issue in the independent film The Real Blonde, in which everyone seems to have suffered an IQ slippage of some 40 points.

Boarding Gate was evidently made quickly and cheaply, and parts of it are fun. It’s too bad there’s no real viewer equivalent--that you can’t WATCH a film quickly and cheaply.

The notion of the self-doubting hero is nothing new. Still, it might have been interesting to pursue, had it been handled here with anything resembling wit, or intelligence, or depth.

Eddie Murphy and Robert De Niro have made any number of lame movies on their own, but there's a special wastefulness connected to their first co-starring vehicle, Showtime: It's lameness times two, and then some.

One reason Oculus feels so talky and monotonous in spite of its tricky syntax is that the space itself isn’t charged with malignancy. And the monster doesn’t compensate — it’s dumb, blockish, inert. The mirror doesn’t have two faces. It barely has one.

Sort of a Flatliners for the sensitive indie-actor set, The Lazarus Effect is a grimy, dopey, confused thriller that wastes a very likable cast.

For all of R’s allegedly humorous observations about the wasteland of the undead through which he walks, they feel tacked on — like somebody decided to turn this thing into a comedy at the last second.

I've never been sold on this anti-TV thesis. It's snooty. It assumes we in the audience have seen the light denied the lower orders. Invariably, the people in these movies who are rendered blotto by the tube are dingbat common folk. EDtv takes this notion to a new low.

The movie is endless even at less than 90 minutes. You could use it, "A Clockwork Orange" style, as aversion therapy for seemingly incorrigible con artists.

The real sin of The King’s Man is its near-total lack of fun.

Poor Things is ultimately ugly — spiritually and narratively, which curdles even its aesthetic splendor.

The result is a shallow picture book populated with cutouts where people should be.

Strip Star Wars of its often striking images and its highfalutin scientific jargon, and you get a story, characters, and dialogue of overwhelming banality, without even a “future” cast to them: Human beings, anthropoids, or robots, you could probably find them all, more or less like that, in downtown Los Angeles today. Certainly the mentality and values of the movie can be duplicated in third-rate non-science of any place or period.

I’m also guessing Kendrick did not want to come back. I’ve never seen her so flat-out bad — distracted, depressed, conviction-less. Anna, I still adore you, but you should have tried to make it work.

The leads set the tone for this unfortunate waste of time, heralding a series of issues that reflect poorly not only on this ugly retread but on much of Hollywood’s recent output as a whole.

Uninterested in competing on the bromance front, or even on the action-thriller front, this new Point Break often plays like an extreme-sports documentary with bits of narrative interstitials to carry us along.

Von Trier has said he wanted to make a genre horror picture, but he couldn’t even come up with a decent metaphor: The climax is out of a Grade C hack-’em-up with people chasing each other through the woods with axes and knives.

King Arthur is guilty of many blockbuster sins critics have taken it upon themselves to call out over the last decade. And yet, seeing a version of them this derivative and dumb, with neither CGI grandeur nor a sense of fun on its side, is like a splash of cold water in the face, a reminder of how bad things can be when nobody cares.

Were Shyamalan and Smith deliberately invoking the terror — now omnipresent in urban African-American communities — of lethal asthma attacks in children? I’m not sure how I feel about something so real and so wrenching in the context of a Grade D (unfit for human habitation) sci-fi picture like After Earth.

No matter where he (Von Trier) begins, his dramatic compass drifts toward the same pole: the sexual humiliation of his heroine (How could Daddy let you do this, Bryce?). But it's hard to get too worked up over racial injustice when a director has the temperament of a Klansman.

Movie has been upstaged by the sum of our fears. The staunch heroics, frantic presidential huddles, and hairbreadth rescues all seem tinny and escapist, too Cold Warrior–ish, for what's really going on now.

This new movie suggests that Berger isn’t capable of rising above his source material or, in this case, even meeting it.

The dance he (Wang) ended up with is on the wrong lap.

City of Bones isn’t the worst of its kind, but crap served with flair is still basically crap.

Klaatu is a dream role for the beautifully blank Reeves, since he doesn’t even have to pretend to emote.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters when it could be spending it with, you know, the giant shark.

Maybe, in another time and place, and with different actors and a better director, it might have worked. But this thing collapses right from the get-go.

Everything dissipates in such a spectacularly unsatisfying fashion that you might wonder if you dreamed the whole thing.

The role plays all too easily into De Niro's worst current habits. He's dulled himself out in the service of a phony kitchen-sink pseudo-realism. For De Niro, less has become less.

The whole film feels slightly grubby and low-res, like it’s been languishing in private mode on the filmmakers’ pre-HD YouTube page since 2008.

This kind of reverence kills what it seeks to preserve. The movie is embalmed.

Mostly stiff acting and intentionally flat, banal dialogue.

The only reason to check out Big Bad Love is Debra Winger, last seen onscreen in 1995.

Skarsgård and Twigs have a total absence of chemistry, and while she’s adequate in what’s still basically a dead-wife role, he’s shockingly inert for someone with a career built almost entirely on characters at the intersection of creepy and hottie.

This is peak TV in a feature-film package, a faux-deep, workmanlike script splashed with some strikingly moody sci-fi imagery tailor-made for a YouTube trailer. It aspires to eerie and constantly ends up at belabored and literal.

I Am Sam is about as connected to the real world as Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham, from which its title is derived -- in fact, in the realism department, Seuss may have the edge.

It’s all so glancing and superficial that the movie doesn’t seem to have a present tense. It goes by like coming attractions. It is, however, a treasury of bad biopic dialogue.

But a star — even a great star — can only do so much when the film around her is a haphazard mess on nearly every level, only able to work in fits and starts.

Whatever its politics, Gimme Shelter fails on multiple levels.

Villeneuve is trying like hell to elevate what turns out to be a dumb genre picture.

If the series was conceived as a way to hold on to the fans of the original books and movies who are now grown, what’s clear in practice is it’s a children’s story staggering to support a few ambitious and deeply underdeveloped themes.

No Strings Attached is so palpably calculated that you know if the camera had pulled back a foot from the bed in which Portman and Kutcher were pretending to have sex, you'd have seen their agents standing by beaming: proud parents, proud pimps.

Östlund’s slog of a film is exceptional in the distance it creates between the viewer and its characters and in how comfortable its attempts at causticity actually feel. It comes complete with an ending that should be bitterly dark and instead just comes across as a moue of indifference.

It’s certainly not good. But it’s not entirely dire.

Sam Rockwell strips himself down to pure appetite and has a buoyant spirit. But the film sure doesn't. It's bizarrely flat--it has no affect.

If the woman’s love is obsessive and needy, the story becomes stupid and painful, and that is what happens in The Object of My Affection, the Stephen McCauley novel that has been adapted for the movies with disastrous panache by playwright Wendy Wasserstein and director Nicholas Hytner.

It’s hard to guess whether the story was mangled by studio reedits or just didn’t have much to say to begin with — both seem possible. The bigger question is why so many strong actors signed on for this misfire.

This is a wan, shapeless, and amazingly conventional piece of work .

It’s enough to make me wonder if this series might still have a few decent tricks left up its sleeve. We’ll see. This movie’s a bust, but I’ll let myself remain hopeful.

You wonder what he has up his sleeve in The Hateful Eight, but gorgeous as that sleeve might be, what’s up it is crap. The movie is a lot of gore over a lot of nothing. I hope that won’t be Tarantino’s epitaph.

Careens helplessly between the garish and the generic.

You would have to have been born yesterday to miss the switcheroos and reeking red herrings planted in this pulp.

A story this dense with incident, character, and history needs to breathe a little — think "The Lives of Others," or "Zodiac" — but Child 44 has no rhythm. It’s blunt, rushed, and scattershot. You're exhausted, bored, and confused by it at the same time.

There are a few funny sequences . . . But the film is otherwise so sloppily assembled, and so lazy, that it frequently ends up feeling like an inadvertent parody of the underdog-sports genre it belongs to.

The movie spreads bad vibes like a virus.

American Hangman, a bar thought experiment turned into a film every bit as simple and bad-taste-leaving as that would imply, only has use for humans as sock puppets.

There’s plenty of talent involved here, but the film fails to cohere on a basic level. Yes, it’s a legacyquel, says so right there in the title, but did it have to be so lazy? Especially in a world where Cobra Kai exists?

Probably the most garishly masochistic star turn since Mel Gibson's "The Man Without a Face." It could also be the most baroque chick flick ever made, the freakazoid spawn of "An Affair to Remember" and "The Matrix."

The Super Mario Bros. Movie, an almost impressively generic kiddie movie re-skinned with characters and concepts from one of the most famous video game franchises in the world, might as well have been assembled by a focus group.

It’s familiar, it’s generic, and it feels like a test of how far we’ll lower our standards.

Love Hurts feels like it might have once been something, but in its current iteration it exists basically as a series of fight scenes stitched together with the thinnest of narratives. That wouldn’t be such a bad thing — indeed, it could have been a great thing — if the action was in any way inventive or engaging.

Zwigoff doesn't get the tone right, and the picture goes from reasonably amusing (if crude) to puzzling to boring to (when a campus strangler enters the picture) hateful.

What’s ultimately so disappointing about Cha Cha Real Smooth is its shallow vision of growing up, which might explain why the protagonist does so little of it.

A noir written and directed by Paul Schrader that's so listless and numbing we need not wonder why it went directly to cable.

The best way to kill the spirit of the sixties is to sanitize it with preachiness, which is what happens here. That rock-cock collection might as well be a box of baseball cards.

Hitman: Agent 47, much like its anonymous title, is a film pretending to be an action movie instead of the real thing. It might as well be a commercial. Or, hell, a video game.

There are a bunch of other clunky immigrant subplots (the Jews get a comic one, the Turks a scary one), but it isn't until the massacre–cum–civics tutorial in the liquor store that Crossing Over crosses into the mythic realm of camp. What a waste. I still say it's better than "Crash," though.

The look of Ruby Gillman has a TV-cartoon cheapness, but its frames are cluttered with all manner of objects and elements of odd design, almost as if the filmmakers hope we won’t notice how basic and uninspired everything looks.

This is a low-stakes, no-frills, point-A-to-point-B crime thriller, taking inspiration from every parent’s worst nightmare, and pretty much nothing else.

Is Death of a President plausible? As political prognostication, perhaps. As a TV documentary, no way in hell. What's missing is shapeliness, suspense, narrative cunning, visual flair--in short, art. Are we really to believe that a network of the future would broadcast such a barbiturate?

His performance feels so disingenuous, so forced, that an otherwise perfectly acceptable high-concept comedy comes crashing down around him.

If the similarly situated "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" took itself too seriously, the problem with Hansel & Gretel is that it doesn't quite take itself seriously enough - which sounds insane, but it's not too much to ask that the movie go beyond its one and only joke. Instead, amid all the fake Sturm und Drang, all we hear is the movie giggling to itself.

It’s a good family movie the way Hooters is a good family restaurant.

It’s stuffed to the gills with effects executed by the highest-paid artists and technicians in the business. But it’s still a sorry spectacle.

Dimly lit and slackly made.

The problem here isn’t the writer-director’s politics, but his stifling lack of imagination, his complete refusal to even attempt narrative dexterity.

The Transformers movies are a favorite object of critical scorn, and narratively, The Last Knight remains barely coherent. But it’s more fun than "Age of Extinction," though both movies are so drunk on money and effects they accidentally go weird.

The gags are mostly puerile and uninspired — like the film was dreamed up by a bunch of tired, wired 13-year-olds; it has their insistence but little of their invention.

My loathing of Split goes beyond its derivative ideas and second-hand parts.

Clarke is so insistent on becoming the new adorkable life force that she’s excruciating to watch. The movie makes you admire all the more her restrained power in Game of Thrones, in which her eyebrows are largely stationary.

What a whorish film this is: Even the serial killer lectures the detective.

At this point, what could have been a passably entertaining diversion, the kind of film best enjoyed overcoming a hangover or while folding laundry, falls flat on Diesel’s lips. He lacks the gravitas of delivery, disinterested in his lines even before he finishes saying them.

Consumed by its own chilliness, The Aftermath is an emotionally constipated movie about emotional constipation. That may come off as a glib way to describe something that purports to explore the paralyzing nature of grief, but James Kent’s romantic historical drama falls so flat that any sense of tragedy is lost; it’s all surface, and stasis.

A musical, theoretically, could reveal something under the surface, whatever thoughts her character isn’t able to articulate in dialogue. But there’s nothing under the surface here, just a girl trying to sell you a dress.

There's less here than meets the eye or ear: We're a long way from Jonathan Swift, and any old episode of "Cops" is bound to be more engrossing, not to mention "real."

Sordid Thelma & Louise-ish spree, which also has certain affinities with Breathless but would be better termed Affectless.

Eckhart plays Frankenstein’s monster in a monotonous, teeth-gritting mode, as if someone had one gun on him and another on his family.

The problem with Capone isn’t that it’s an unconventional biography or a challenge to the image of a famous figure. It’s that it’s not bold enough on either of those fronts.

The visuals in the final battle have some charm: They reminded me of early Tsui Hark Hong Kong extravaganzas like Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain and A Chinese Ghost Story (which he produced). But there was passion in those HK pictures, along with acrobatic wire-work. Promiscuous CGI makes even the miraculous seem ho-hum.

The kaiju of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire don’t stand for anything but themselves. They’re just giant monsters that occasionally fight one another, which would be forgivable if the fighting in the movie weren’t so torpid.