Baby Invasion in a theater is akin to watching someone play a video game in the middle of a rave being thrown on a truck driven at high speed down winding streets. If anything, it’d be weird not to end up nauseated.

In Arthur, the spectacularly grating remake of Steve Gordon's 1981 P. G. Wodehouse simulation (this time, Peter Baynham miswrote, Jason Winer misdirected), Russell Brand gives a career-killing performance.

The Canyons isn’t just bad, it’s rank — and it takes a peculiar sort of integrity to denude the frame of life to the point where it smells to heaven.

Like most corporate cinematic endeavors, Space Jam: A New Legacy tries to have it both ways, proclaiming to be on the side of the angels while doing the work of the Devil. It criticizes shameless, money-grubbing attempts to synergize and update beloved classics (as LeBron himself puts it, “This idea is just straight-up bad”) … all the while shamelessly synergizing and updating beloved classics.

A catastrophic miscalculation of a movie, Victor Frankenstein is a perfect example of a Hollywood revision that, in trying to outsmart an original, reveals what worked about said original in the first place.

You’re left with no real catharsis — religious or emotional. And without that, Captive winds up building to a big nothing.

At heart, it’s about as naughty as an old Disney movie with Dean Jones, Suzanne Pleshette, and an unruly Great Dane. I liked its gung-ho slapstick spirit, though. No one’s slacking off.

Believe it or not, the delicate-featured, whisper-thin actress manages to (mostly) pull it off, but the abysmal movie around her lets her down.

Careens helplessly between the garish and the generic.

What's odd about Lady in the Water is that for all Shyamalan's histrionics, he's overcontrolled.

This is a film full of unremarkable compromises — the kind that result in a bland film rather than a bad one.

Based on an interminable 1994 international bestseller by Louis de Bernières that I found impossible to make my way through. The movie duplicates exactly my experience with the book, although I must say I was thankful to be spared serial outbreaks of hearty Greek dancing.

Ben Affleck makes for a pretty good jerk, but he can’t pull off outright villainy. That’s probably the main problem with the crime thriller Runner Runner.

The kind of movie you keep wishing would just cut loose and go off the deep end. Nobody goes to these "Fatal Attraction" retreads anymore for serious drama. But this one is a movie torn — too grim and self-important to go truly nuts, but too silly and slipshod to work on a more somber level.

Veering between tonal and narrative extremes, it's the kind of film that makes you long for the grim pomposity of something like "Signs."

I have to tip my cap to such a bold attempt to induce in the audience his heroine’s inner flux and fragmentation. The double-entendre title tells you to expect a trip, and you get one.

Yes, it all gets kind of old, and yes, it's all over the place, but you'll probably find yourself laughing at least some of the time. Dick jokes, after all, can be pretty funny.

There's only one surgery scene, but it's the heart (and kidneys) of Turistas. The rest -- especially the incoherent action -- falls well below the mark set by the last Americans Abroad torture-porn picture, "Hostel."

The agreeable looseness edges into a less agreeable limpness.

Before I go into the grinding awfulness of Dumb and Dumber To, let’s get one damn thing straight: The original Dumb and Dumber is a clasick.

The result is maybe more interesting than we might have expected, but it’s not particularly funny.

The scenery in My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3, largely shot in Corfu and Athens, is gorgeous but everything else about the film’s construction is an absolute mess.

Mute is pretty meh but gets points for randomness.

Much of the picture falls flat, but the Eddie/Venom dynamic is aces and lives up to the Zombieland legacy.

Jumper is so in sync with the language of modern action movies that it’s possible to look past its soullessness and go with the quantum flow.

The more turns Jason Fuchs’s script takes, the more monotonous everything feels. And because Vaughn never drops his fantastical, cartoonish style, “reality” ceases to have any true meaning within the context of the film; he keeps trying to up the stakes even as what we’re watching becomes less and less consequential.

The film never quite reconciles the banality of this love triangle with its far more interesting depiction of the rest of these characters’ lives.

Beresford, can't bring this saga to life because Alma herself never fully comes to life; her contradictoriness, like the way she embraces Mahler only to rail against his "Jewish music," doesn't add up to a whole and complex human being.