Michael Shannon is a convincing and resourceful actor who is now too established and viable to settle for enigmatic roles in meaningless, throwaway movies with zero possibilities for commercial success like a thing called Frank & Lola.

In an age of zombies, werewolves and oversexed vampires, teens won't be shaking in their Uggs over ugly women with bad teeth flying around on brooms, and with its graphic depictions of tortures, mutilations, gang rapes and myriad examples of child abuse, it's no longer a fairy tale suitable for children.

The actual Chilean earthquake killed 300 people and turned thousands more homeless, but this movie distills everything for comic effect. Everyone gets robbed, raped, impaled, mutilated, decapitated or burned alive. But that’s not all. Crawling through the blood-drenched debris, here comes the tsunami!

For an old-fashioned crime thriller, you need real pros. Mr. Statham is to acting what Taco Bell is to nutrition.

Sightseers is a morose, unsettling blend of pathology for sport and murder for laughs.

Before the carnage ends, the entire cast has been tortured, mutilated and murdered by so many weapons it’s hard to keep them straight. When the shotguns, box cutters and machetes run out, it’s time to cue the flesh-eating attack dogs.

Who goes to the movies for 104 minutes of punishment? Where is John Wayne, now that we need him?

The Trollhunter writers either have an abundance of imagination or they've been smoking a controlled substance.

Bad movies waste time, but a contrived, empty-headed dinosaur movie called 65 wastes more of it than anything I’ve seen lately.

Call The Master whatever you want, but lobotomized catatonia from what I call the New Hacks can never take the place of well-made narrative films about real people that tell profound stories for a broader and more sophisticated audience. Fads come and go, but as Walter Kerr used to say, "I'll yell tripe whenever tripe is served."

Implausible even for an overly ambitious sci-fi monster flick, it also begs, borrows and steals every effect, idea and image from other people’s horror movies that were much better the first time around.

Contrived, pretentious and not worth seeing even for the perverse pleasure of watching first-rate talents make second-rate fools of themselves.

It’s fifty times more boring than the first one. It is also fifty shades dumber.

On a scale of one to four stars, any film with a bit part for Helen Mirren, no matter how small and insignificant, deserves at least one. But nothing else about Berlin, I Love You rates a single mention.

It’s hard to label a film this empty, but the word “worthless” comes to mind instantly.

What it turns out to be is a preposterous puzzle that fails every test under scrutiny, leaving the spectator with a “Huh?” that is meant to be uttered only while chewing gum.

The director is Joe Dante, a protégé of B-movie producer Roger Corman, who makes cheesy horror spoofs like "Gremlins" and "Piranha," along with a few good ones like "The Howling." This is not one of the good ones.

How many ways can a film go wrong? Too many to list, and Trespass finds them all.

Identity Thief is so bad it’s hard to believe it wasn’t directed by Judd Apatow or the Farrelly Brothers.

There is no hope on the horizon for movies as leaden as The Exploding Girl.

A number of questions await anyone who lasts the full 88 minutes. What just happened? Was the suicidal composer a lunatic devil worshiper who planned for his daughter to follow in his footsteps? Will anyone else ever hear the sonata of the damned? Does anyone care?

While diverting enough for its forgiving 98-minute runtime, Night Swim neither sinks nor floats. It just wades in the waters of “whatever.”

Shockingly un-cinematic and utterly devoid of dynamism, the film lacks anything resembling the well-researched insights or sharp-edged comedy that you have come to associate with the former host of The Daily Show.

The humans in the film are blandly generic. But the yetis, while individually distinct, all share a much larger, troubling problem: they don’t have noses.

It’s nice to see a movie about kids that extols the virtues of intelligence over sex, sports, bad music, ugly clothes and tattoos, but aside from some nice autumnal shots of Ivy League college campuses, there’s nothing in HairBrained to sustain much interest.

The film, poorly edited and weakly unfocused by Turkish writer-director Deniz Gamze Ergüven, is a real mess.

Looking lovely and catatonic, Angelina Jolie, who now calls herself Angelina Jolie Pitt, has come up with an exercise in self-indulgence for herself and husband Brad that is so boring it defies description. By the Sea is not only a dog; it’s a dog that’s got fleas.

It takes just under two hours of tedium before you find out what’s in the bag, and you might be sorry you waited.

A miserable hunk of depressing junk.

For an alleged psychological thriller, The Night Clerk has no thrills, suspense or tension.

The Road Within backfires by emphasizing the same quirks and imbalances it seeks to soften. Reducing it to the genre of idiot comedy doesn’t advance the cause, either.

Although it has a calm and intriguing noir-ish style (up to a point), there is nothing lucid enough to recommend about Manhattan Night, including the film itself.

For meat-headed incoherence, a badly written, poorly directed and confusingly acted muddle of global nonsense, The Gunman is another ill-conceived entry in the latest dopey trend of middle-aged men blowing up stuff.

An hour and 20 minutes into this two-hour-and-11-minute endurance test, a hungry Kaiju attacks the city of Hong Kong and eats the neon signs of every Cantonese restaurant in Victoria Harbor. It’s sort of worth waiting around for.

A ludicrously pretentious train wreck masquerading as a movie.

Richard Brooks made a tougher and much better film about the tragedy of compulsive gambling in his 1985 film "Fever Pitch," and in 1949’s "The Lady Gambles," even Barbara Stanwyck made a more convincing fall from respectability into casino hell than Mark Wahlberg does here.

Staying awake during this ordeal of incompetent, incomprehensible stupidity is not difficult. It’s so noisy that you can hear it in the next town. Staying interested is something else entirely.

Unfortunately, with only the bare outline of a script, no acting is required. The structure of the film is 89 minutes of brutality with a college degree. This is a warning, not a recommendation.

The laughs are few and slow in coming, and you’re not five minutes into the film before you know why. Despite a lively performance by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Nina is a big bore with a small talent and a one-track mind.

As a memorable work of cinema, it misses every important mark by a mile.

Five Nights at Freddy’s takes a novel, off-the-wall premise and makes it feel rote. Even as someone who has no experience with the games, I felt as if I was on my third or fourth playthrough already.

The film is fine for the first 30 minutes and you almost wonder if it might not be as bad as everyone is imagining. But then it somehow gets worse and worse until you just feel embarrassed for the cast, who probably couldn’t tell you what Madame Web is about if asked.

It is really not about anything at all except the mistakes, pitfalls and dumb decisions that plague the career of talented but misguided Australian actor Guy Pearce in his attempts to become an American film star.

It's a stupid farrago of aborted ideas, misguided actors, lame direction, submental writing and follow-the-dots plotting that never comes anywhere within a 10-mile radius of what I used to call coherent filmmaking.

Like any good thriller, information is strategically withheld to build intrigue, but then it’s simply dropped in the audience’s lap with no impact at all. The characters are paper-thin, each reduced to essentially one trait that is explained by one underwhelming secret.

True to form for this trilogy—which supposedly concludes here—the brainless and disjointed Last Dance skates by on star Tom Hardy’s charm and a few good gags.

The latest example of the humiliations lovely seniors desperately seeking employment are forced to endure in order to call themselves working actors is a dismal comedy without a shred of wit, imagination or originality called The Fabulous Four.

Annihilation is a demented science-fiction comic book of a movie that makes less sense than a butterfly mating with a buffalo.

What passes for a plot has been done a thousand times before — in much better films than A Single Shot.

People who ask nothing more for their money than a lot of nerve-scrambling computerized special effects might get through Doctor Strange, another in a long line of lengthy, stupid and unbearable Marvel Studios comic books on film, with minimal brain damage.

All of which makes me sad about Denzel Washington's disillusioning participation. I forgive him if the money was irresistible enough to pay off a mortgage or put his kids through Harvard, but Safe House is total junk, and he is one of the producers.

It is an absurd premise, one made even more so by its execution, which at the hands of veteran Hollywood thriller director Martin Campbell (the one-time director of Bond films who has been in movie jail since 2011’s Green Lantern) is often lackluster and, on occasion, shockingly inept.

Unfortunately, Split is a preposterous bore that steals shamelessly from "The Search for Bridey Murphy," "The Three Faces of Eve," "Sybil" and Shirley Jackson’s novel "The Bird’s Nest," made by a man who has been spending entirely too much time watching "Law and Order: SVU."

The dialogue is witless and dull. The direction by Tony Dean Smith gives the actors nothing meaty to do beyond mouthing words designed to move the narrative forward.

"Enemy" and "Sicario" were unspeakable disasters, and Arrival, the director’s latest exercise in pretentious poopery, gives me every reason to believe I have parted company with Denis Villeneuve for good.

Lamely directed by Brian A. Miller, who co-wrote it with Mr. Fairbrass, this is the kind of curiosity that used to fill the bottom half of a double feature in the day when we still had drive-ins. The real outsider is the movie itself.

The original was a thriller. This one is a yawn a minute.

It’s a disaster.

The charm, versatility and charisma of Jason Bateman and the camera-ready good looks of Ryan Reynolds should add up to more than a piece of crummy, amateurish junk called The Change-Up.

The latest jacked up, action extravaganza from stunt man turned director David Leitch (his last film, the not-very-good Bullet Train, is still leagues ahead of this movie in terms of imagination and execution), teems with contempt for the audience it is desperate to win over.

Another ho-hum slacker heist flick.

The movie is sewer drainage, but it does give Melissa Leo a rare chance to quote lines by the Bard she would never otherwise be asked to deliver.

At a time when every penny counts, where do they come up with the money to finance a movie this boring?

Mr. Franco must have had a very boring adolescence, because Palo Alto is a very boring movie.

This movie goes downhill so fast it turns inadvertently from horror to comedy, but when they see the box-office grosses, I don’t think director Brad Anderson or screenwriter Will Honley will be the ones who laugh.

The entire enterprise is so muffled and dull you can’t believe what you’re watching.

Plotless and leaden as a rusty drainpipe.

Everything is tenuous, including a performance by Keanu Reeves that borders on catatonia. Just because he stopped shaving doesn’t mean he can suddenly act.

A trite little comedy so jumbled, disconnected and bad you can’t believe it doesn’t star James Franco. Instead, it fritters away the talents of the charming Justin Long, a seasoned and resourceful actor who deserves much better.

This contrived, pointless, blindingly boring vehicle is a pathetic, desperate attempt to keep Halle Berry and Mark Wahlberg’s careers alive.

Aside from bad filmmaking, I don’t know what any of this means. I do know Harris Dickinson is the chief attraction as well as the only reason to suffer through a revolting score of punk rock songs and an interminable series of fuzzy, flashing camera angles advertising neon signs for sex clubs and gay bath houses.

Another anemic and pointless stringing together of stories that are not worth telling, Untogether follows the truncated lives of a group of lost souls in Los Angeles with an overdose of paralyzing cinematic anesthesia.

No Time to Die may not be the worst James Bond movie ever made, but it’s in heavy competition as the dullest one since Octopussy.

Ho-hum. Running with the Devil is yet another generic drug trade thriller that defies coherence, embraces clichés, and wastes the time and talent of Nicolas Cage.

The prevailing mood of Child of God, published in 1973, is filth, alienation and inertia. You can have it.

As a movie, it's so tightly framed you gasp from claustrophobia. As a film of cryptic boredom, I cannot believe the actors were able to say their lines without cue cards.

A first-rate cast enriches the otherwise dismal Boundaries, a misguided combination road movie and domestic comedy-drama that otherwise qualifies as a box office also-ran.

Watching The Lost City is the cinematic equivalent of slogging your way through monkey poop.

Halfheartedly, I give The Dark Knight Rises - the third and final Batflick in the Nolan trilogy - one star for eardrum-busting sound effects and glaucoma-inducing computerized images in blinding Imax, but talk about stretching things.

Director Lloyd leaves it all to the imagination, but in a movie this slow and indecisive, the imagination is no longer enough when we've seen stronger stuff elsewhere.

What to say about an uphill slog called Crazy, Stupid, Love? It's not nearly crazy enough to clear the clogged arteries of summer comedies, and when the love appears, it's in all the wrong places. Oh well, at least they nailed the stupid part.

Congenial is the word for Larry Crowne, but it's as flat as an ironing board.

The script, by Melissa James Gibson, is as scintillating as a dead rodent.

There are some pretty shots of nature and a few stabs at humor, but don’t be mistaken—this movie is background noise at best.

The script is breezy, but neither of the two leads have the heft or charm to carry an entire feature-length film - separately or together.

Artificial, irresponsible, filthy and forgettable, it knocks itself cross-eyed trying to make you roar with laughter at chemotherapy, with the nauseating Seth Rogen milking most of the yuks. But a stoner comedy about cancer? I don't think so.

Actor-turned-director Don Cheadle trashes the historic career of Miles Davis in Miles Ahead, named after one of the greatest albums ever made by one of the most influential musicians of all time.

The more I try to find some kind of justifiable meaning and relevance, the more I find The Shape of Water a loopy, lunkheaded load of drivel. Not as stupid and pointless as that other critically overrated piece of junk "Get Out," but determined to go down trying. I call this one "Maudie Meets the Creature From the Black Lagoon."

A Swedish-German co-production in English, Euphoria should be called Dyspepsia. It lulls you into a disagreeable stupor clearly labeled “who cares?”

Not only is Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire a pale imitation of the George Lucas and Akira Kurosawa films that inspired it, but it’s a structurally unsound mess that fails to inspire any excitement for its planned second half, let alone the trilogy that’s supposed to follow. It’s a blunder of Hobbit proportions.

Rest assured, Anthony Perkins would have demanded a re-write.

It falls flat as a musical, as a courtroom drama, as a romance, and as a character piece. It’s the rare film that is both weird and boring, to a degree that it’s hard to imagine anyone enjoying it.

Mr. Right isn’t a bad movie as much as it is two-and-a-half, maybe three bad movies playing all at the same time.

There’s nothing remarkable or even remotely intriguing about the dyspeptic gang of submental sad sacks in this dull, flat fiasco.

I'd like to tell you just how bad Inception really is, but since it is barely even remotely lucid, no sane description is possible.

A tedious exercise in tedium.

The fight choreography is often impressive. But the script is pockmarked with cliches, tropes and never-ending predictability.

It’s just tired, desperate and preposterous.