The finest 1947 boxing picture of 2015 is here: Southpaw, a film that’s gruntingly insistent on its clichés.

Really, though, it is just another tiresome and impenetrably brooding Gerard Butler movie in which no event seems to matter any more than the next one — and grimaces are mistaken for drama.

It feels as shopworn as a dusty VHS tape of "Less Than Zero."

So moron-friendly they should have called it "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Checkers." The skill level in the script is elementary school, my dear Watson.

The preachy “Showman” argues that Barnum should be celebrated for bringing “freaks” like the bearded lady and others out of the shadows and into his shows, but those characters are sketchily drawn.

Nicely photographed and has impressive sets; too bad there's so little going on that it seems long even at 78 minutes.

The film mangles its twist and fails to deliver an interesting coup de grace or a sharp line of dialogue.

Such a comedy cannot depend solely on its supporting cast, especially when they’re tasked with lifting up subpar material.

Rappaport does a yeoman's job in this tonally confused oddity. The wonder is that Hal Haberman and Jeremy Passmore's Special is making it off the festival circuit and into theaters at all, however briefly.

A sincere but underwhelming dramatization of one of the biggest news stories of 1956.

It's supposed to be about a Kafkaesque experience. Instead, it IS a Kafkaesque experience. Why are we here? Is everything absurd? Is anyone in charge?

This pursuit farce is harmless (if stale) entertainment, but the sledge-hammer attempt to appeal to the country's fastest-growing movie-going demographic makes for a clunky narrative and one-note characters.

Overall, the rambling Jayne Mansfield’s Car is almost as big a wreck as its namesake.

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."

Disappointingly, Bourne never resurfaces in this less-than-satisfying series reboot. The film is more a talky, convoluted, action-starved two-hour subplot.

The teen movie The Spectacular Now begins like “Say Anything” but soon turns into “Drink Anything.”

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.

It contains no poetry. It simply conjures up a horrible feeling -- and then sits back awaiting congratulation.

For most adults, and kids raised on "South Park," the painfully earnest story won't hold much interest. And the comedy is tame.

There’s a fine horror film inside Tusk, but it’s only 20 minutes long. The rest is just blubber.

The animated, Hanukkah-themed musical is, in fact, 75 minutes worth of belching, barfing and poo-jokes braided into a Grinch-meets-Scrooge-meets-"It's a Wonderful Life" storyline that's as stale as last year's potato latkes.

Their misadventures in the Big Apple, including Giamatti’s involvement with a Russian house sitter (a bizarrely cast Sally Hawkins) are neither funny nor touching, just tedious.

Follows a narrative arc as choppy as a messy windswell, and the result is a dog's dinner of profiles, repetitive narration, safety tips and banal "insights" into the joys and dangers of cresting waves that sometimes reach 70 feet.

It raises tangled questions about whether it is better to live humiliated or arm yourself, yet for the most part it's dramatically inert, talky and directionless, and it ends quietly without saying much of anything.

The inferior second part, short but not nearly short enough, proves just how ill-prepared its creators were for the original’s success.

As Franco dilutes the drama with first-year-film-student gimmicks, like split screens and slow motion, it just seems like a dull collection of pointless monologues from actors who can’t even be bothered to match up their accents. Franco is a dilettante, and it shows.

Dumb Money, with a predictable script by Lauren Schuker Blum, Rebecca Angelo and Ben Mezrich, rambles on and on with an unwaveringly lethargic tone and zero buildup of energy or anticipation. All the while, the audience has little investment in this dud about investing.

With “M3GAN 2.0,” the filmmakers have employed a bold strategy: Take a $180-million formula, shred it and forget it.