This silly extraterrestrial-invasion epic somehow manages the feat of making the destruction of La La Land seem tedious.

Richard Jeffries' script tosses together bits of plot borrowed from such "bad things happen when you leave the city" classics as "Straw Dogs" and "Deliverance" without any awareness of how or why genre conventions work.

Too unfocused to make any point worth taking with us into the 2004 presidential campaign.

The clichéd and predictable Suspect Zero is the latest evidence that Hollywood has run the serial-killer thriller into the ground through overuse - the same way it earlier exhausted, say, buddy action-comedies.

Allegiance works better as a way of reminding us who does the fighting in this age of outsourcing than it does as a human drama.

Michael Brandt's soporific thriller is making a token stop in theaters before its January DVD debut. Miss it if you can.

The innovation of Refn’s latest is mostly just in the way it manages to merge gory and boring. At least it’s created a new movie adjective for me: goring.

Cusack and Cage — who don’t have any scenes together until halfway through — do their best work in years, while erstwhile “High School Musical’’ star Hudgens shows off acting chops missing in “Spring Breakers.’’

Two stars for adults -- 3 stars for kids. The under-5 set should take to The Country Bears like bears to honey - even if anyone much older will find this broad-as-a-barn-door Disney musical bear-ly tolerable.

There is nothing to like or admire in this groaner galaxy. The movie has the unconfident, powder-sugar tone of a Disney direct-to-video release, like “The Lion King 1½,” paired with the overeager advertising of an internet pop-up.

Doesn't live up to the promise of its trailers.

With heavy emphasis on cliché and stereotype, has at least four false endings -- and drags on for nearly two hours -- before it finally contrives to reunite its sitcomish pals for a last drink together.

It's just another discordant note in this tone-deaf movie -- a trashy, exploitative, thoroughly unpleasant experience.

Cliched, amateurish and feeble.

This adventurously awful film is awful in many ways at once.

This jagged blob of a movie features a solo dance in the 1930s scored to the Sex Pistols' "Pretty Vacant," several scenes of a rich Manhattan woman chatting with the ghost of Wallis Simpson and a Sotheby's auction that draws a crowd reaction of the kind associated with "Family Feud." Yet I found the movie fascinating. Except for the boring bits.

Preposterous romantic melodrama, which uses a fractured narrative to cloud an absurd plot that would probably be laughed off the screen if it were presented in a straightforward manner.

A cute, often very funny romantic comedy and an effective vehicle for Matthew Perry.

For all his skill with a cue, the charisma-challenged Callahan is no Nia Vardalos in the acting department -- let alone a Paul Newman or Tom Cruise.

Vincent D'Onofrio does capture Hoffman's charisma and nuttiness - and he's the only reason to resist the temptation to skip this exasperating movie.

Works because they really are the focus - and they're excellently voiced .

The jaw-droppingly nasty second act is intriguing, but it veers into territory so dark that it sucks the air out of the bouncy chick flick that surrounds it, making for one confused -- and confusing -- comedy.

There’s a good cinephile heart beating under this fluffy story. But Lellouche, in making her homage to Allen, left out one of his essential qualities: bite. Paris-Manhattan drifts by and never leaves a single toothmark.

Starts off bad, then tapers off.

I don't think we're expected to take After.Life any more seriously than Ricci's last extended (near) nude role in the immortal "Black Snake Moan." That one was more fun.

Charmless and underdeveloped knockoff of "The Santa Clause."

Aeon Flux is by far the year's worst movie, a most dubious achievement.

It's very sad to watch Keaton here. In the most excruciating scene, she gets drunk in a bar, staggers up to a microphone and starts to sing, or rather squawk. For those of us who still revere Annie Hall and her blissfully unaffected rendition of "Seems Like Old Times," this is sacrilege.

Attempting to fill Dudley Moore's top hat in Arthur, Russell Brand rapidly descends the rungs of the comedy ladder from "unfunny" to "irritating" to "vulgar" to the bottom one - "Andy Dick."

The cast, so packed with talent that Jean Reno and Cherry Jones barely register, is stuck with stagey dialogue. Juliet Rylance, in the Nina part, has a particularly hard time. But there are good points, including Janney’s obvious pleasure in her part.

Ryan spends much of the grubby-looking boxing drama Against the Ropes with her face screwed up in distaste, as if a dirty sock is being waved under her nose. Perhaps it's because the movie she's in stinks.

A confusing mishmash.

There are a few good jolts - and a moderate amount of spurting blood - but things pretty much proceed exactly as you think they will.

More "the mild one" than "The Wild One."

Holland lets things peter out midway, but it's notably better acted -- and far less crass -- than some other recent efforts in the burgeoning genre of films about black urban professionals.

Soporific, shamelessly derivative and barely coherent by American standards.

An old-fashioned soaper that will please or not, depending on a viewer's tolerance for schmaltz.

Violent and unoriginal actioner.

Hossein Amini’s script leaves good actors like John Cusack, Ken Watanabe and Chow Yun-Fat flailing.

A thoroughly amateurish effort at capturing clued-in and smartass teens.

Kirschner's excruciatingly earnest coming-of-age comedy, is about as fresh as year-old matzoh and plays like the unholy spawn of "Brighton Beach Memoirs" and "Fiddler on the Roof."

We keep waiting for a story, or at least some comedy, but none ever materializes. The dialogue makes Algebra II seem fascinating by comparison.

For short stretches, the movie has a touch of surreal "Office Space" brilliance, but it's broadly acted, its characters are thin, and the production values are ragged. Still, it's hard to resist its goofy hostility: "You're like the drummer from REO Speedwagon. Nobody knows who you are."

The film is amateurishly directed and sluggishly paced with an anorexic plot. Even the photography, sound and costumes are substandard.

Paul Schrader’s The Canyons is not the worst movie of 2013 — it's marginally better than "InAPPpropriate Comedy" and "Scary Movie 5," two even worse bombs that Lindsay Lohan also lent her rapidly diminishing talents to — but it is surely the most boring I’ve seen.

Over its interminable, nearly two-hour runtime, the film repeatedly mocks its very existence.

Dirk Shafer's feature doesn't offer much in terms of plot or acting. But it does have oodles of hunky male bodies. The choice is yours.

Loud and unfunny, this cheesy-looking farce is mostly an excuse for a series of plugs.

Its bawdy honesty eventually gives way to convention, sentimentality and a frustratingly silly ending.

Beautiful Brit actress Sophia Myles ("From Hell") is so arch, canny and amusing as the posh, pink-obsessed spy Lady Penelope, it's as if she is acting in the movie this should have been.

By going exactly where you think it’s going, Victor Frankenstein doesn’t so much invent a fresh origins story as it essentially repeats, with a few uninteresting new details, all the same stuff we’ve seen in the other 457 Frankenstein movies.

There is nothing startlingly new in Resident Evil: Apocalpyse, but it is delivered with some panache and humor.

Turn off your frontal lobe, and you just might enjoy it.

Profoundly disturbing, blood-chilling suspenser.

Plays like an unwieldy mishmash of "Big Momma's House," "An Unmarried Woman" and "The Burning Bed," with lots of gospel music thrown in.

While the latest installment avoids the nonstop parade of potty jokes, it never rises much past the level of mediocrity.

I went in expecting to be disappointed, but even so, I was disappointed.

Lou Diamond Phillips is let down by an uninspired supporting cast, including Bruce Weitz as a crippled con artist and Tracy Middendorf as the requisite femme fatale, a clichéd script, and flat direction by Stephen Purvis.

Ineptly written and directed, the nihilistic The Son of No One flaunts an attitude best summed up by a cynical Pacino -- "A man has to live with s--t.'' Maybe so, Al, but audiences have the option of skipping this bomb.

Underworld Evolution has antecedents in literature ("Dracula"), film ("The Matrix") and song ("Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue"). How does it rip off so much, yet learn so little?

There's still no good reason to suffer through a half-baked little movie that proves indies can be every bit as boringly formulaic and artistically bankrupt as their big-budget brethren.

For a story whose appeal hinges on the saving grace of getting a "purpose-driven life," this one's got remarkably little of it.

An ultra-stylized, empty mess.

With so many worthwhile movies out there just waiting for a release, it's a shame that this tired drama is getting a run.

It's not surprising that This Thing of Ours -- the title refers to the literal translation of La Cosa Nostra -- rings with authenticity and solid acting.

Anybody involved in the underground scene might get a kick out of Maestro -- but others will likely be bored stiff.

There are a lot of parallels with “Breaking Bad” here: the Southwestern setting, the dorky husband turned criminal, the blond wife and the scene in the carwash. But if you can avoid dwelling on its derivative qualities, After the Fall has its own case to make about how far the middle class has fallen — and continues to slide.

This joyless, 10-megaton bomb fails in just about every imaginable way, as well as some you couldn’t possibly imagine.

Parental Guidance kicks off with a mean-spirited joke about an overweight woman and heads downhill from there.

Still, Poms mostly patronizes older people as it turns them into punchlines. Be regressive! B.E. R.E.G.R.E.S.S.I.V.E!

Solid cast notwithstanding, 10th and Wolf is a generic, direct-to-video-grade gangster movie.

Lifetime movies have their pleasures, and so does this film. Chief among them is the cast, a group of over-45 actresses who really are better than ever; in the cases of Brooke Shields and Daryl Hannah, remarkably better.

A slow-moving, ridiculous police thriller that would have been shipped straight to the remainder bin at Blockbuster if it starred anyone else.

More prettily photographed pretentious rubbish from the ridiculous Peter Greenaway.

Would be a perfectly decent B-action movie if it weren't shipwrecked in the last act by laughably ridiculous plotting and a lazily executed climax.

Watching I'm Reed Fish is like being forced to read the diary of a dull-witted teen who is breathlessly beginning a lifelong fascination with himself.

The animation IS great and absolutely so fantastic you'll want to reach out and touch the creatures - or swat them off your uncomfortable 3-D glasses.

While sporadically funny, the sophomoric My Name Is Bruce is no "Bubba Ho-Tep," the movie where Campbell unforgettably played Elvis Presley as a nursing home patient battling a mummy with the help of John F. Kennedy. But Campbell's fans can feel free to add a star or two.

So dull, the kids in my audience didn’t laugh until 45 minutes in — And that was at a coconut head-bonk, a gag so timeless it almost doesn’t count.

As might be obvious, I’m not a gamer, so perhaps all of this will be thrilling for fans who’ve played it. The rest of us, I imagine, may come out of this film invigorated with a creed of our own: Avoid movies based on video games.

It has a certain commitment to its cause, and by that I mean it supplies the necessary flayings, slayings, beheadings and, um, a be-nose-ing, all of it dancing to the tune of those amusingly stilted He-Man declaratives - King James Bible cadences applied to comic-book visions. It knows it's a B movie, and gets on with it.

A charmless, unscary, fatuous and largely incoherent fairy tale.

That Awkward Moment is a rom-com for dudes that seeks to outdo the ladies by being even more insipid, formulaic and contrived than anything Katherine Heigl has ever done.

A very belated and very silly follow-up to "Death Wish."

Any way you slice it, A Tale of Two Pizzas is so ineptly written and directed that it's pretty soggy entertainment.

The choppily edited and thoroughly wooden Serena utterly fails to catch fire, even when everything literally goes up in flames. So despite its big stars, it’s getting only a token theatrical release.

First-time writer-director Mark Hanlon lands only glancing blows in this grim black comedy.

Much of the resulting material is very funny, though there are a few times when the filmmakers patronize or mock their subjects in a way that makes you uncomfortable.

Devotes most of its energy to its costumes and makeup, which are fabulous. But that and a tabloid-worthy star just aren't enough to revisit this sordid tale as a kind of twisted comedy.

We began this dismal movie season with one lethally bad World War II romance -- "Pearl Harbor" -- and now we're wrapping up with another howling dog.

It's almost worth the price of admission to see Allen paying homage to "Singin' in the Rain" in the final sequence. Almost.

Remember the old Ben Affleck, the one who made 28 consecutive bad movies before he turned out to be a pretty good director? He’s back! Behold, the second coming of . . . Badfleck.

Gets sillier and sillier as it goes along.

Despite a script that occasionally calls for some embarrassingly awkward lines, Kollek's cast generally acquits itself well.

The majority of Dickie Roberts winds up looking like a tame episode of the "Brady Bunch" -- spiked with Spade-esque crudity.

An interesting addition to a genre that tends too often to disregard artistic technique.

Portman is always consummately watchable, and she tries her best to telegraph the utter existential confusion engulfing Lucy at work and in love. But the film around her is simply not up to her level.

The danger of dreaming up a predictable adventure for a group of nobodies you hold in contempt is that the audience will see your indifference and raise you.