It’s not much to examine at length, much less remember, but if you’re in the mood for a Hallmark card to revive your faith in gooey rom-coms, Love Again is not the one.

The result, in the case of Moonrise Kingdom, is what I call transcendentally brainless - an after school special aimed at asinine adolescents over the age of 40.

Comprising three separate, unrelated and thoroughly inconsequential short stories about lonely, miserable women in the isolated landscape of Montana, Certain Women is the latest thumping bore from Kelly Reichardt, a writer-director-editor who makes bland, low-budget films about various hidden aspects of women’s lives they are reluctant to reveal, then take forever to do so.

He (Owen) doesn't fail the movie. The movie fails him. As his wife, the superb Carice van Houten has so little to do or say - so peripheral a relation to everything else in the movie - that she seems to be an intruder herself.

It’s a preposterous debacle that might work better as a Halloween skit on Saturday Night Live, but it takes itself seriously, which makes it seem even sillier. I found the result too sick and disgusting to describe, but not interesting enough to care.

Together, as a grotesque mother-daughter team kidnapped in Ecuador, they’re the most depressing Mother’s Day present since "Mommie Dearest," only not half as funny.

The result is a limp and minor effort both in front of the camera and behind it.

This disoriented drivel was written by — and marks the directing debut of — Geoffrey Fletcher, who won an Academy Award for writing "Precious." It’s weird, but not in a good way.

Jack Reacher is mostly grim, violent and stupid.

I guess I’ve seen worse teen sex comedies, but it’s rare to encounter one this stupid.

It’s lifeless as a stump, and destined for box-office doom.

A little of this corn goes a long way.

Movies like Sleeping Beauty are as sensual as cottage cheese, not to mention passé.

Forget all of it being true; I would have settled for some of it being interesting.

Logan is another heinous and sophomoric waste of Hugh Jackman ‘s time and considerable talent and another expensive throwaway aimed at milking money out of people who still read comic books. Color it stupid.

Only the great Piper Laurie delivers dollar value. Otherwise, Hesher is to movies what graffiti is to a rotting fence.

Rage is another formulaic re-tread that needs its brakes re-lined.

Ms. Cardellini plays it like a zombie, and she isn't helped by all the loitering camera angles and repetitive close-ups of her head framed against car windows. It's a worthy subject, ploddingly explored in a film that is too modest for its own good.

It’s not just emotion and creative innovation that feels MIA in this installment. The film acts as though it’s edgy, but lacks real bite.

The movie knocks itself unconscious trying to be offbeat, but instead of cinematic heart, the director self-indulges in cinematic art, drowning the whole thing in freeze frames, slow-motion and color-coding, owing everything he knows to the worst of Jean-Luc Godard and Wes Anderson.

All Nighter is an alleged comedy that doesn’t know how to be funny. But at 80 minutes long, it does know how to be merciful.

It’s a romantic piffle stuffed with so much candy that your skin could break out.

Boring, derivative, and infuriatingly illogical, Lavender is a ghost story with no thrills, no surprises, and no sense.

Even as a prime example of rotten summer silliness, this is a paralyzing experience.

The movie doesn’t know if it wants to be a comedy, a morality play or a cautionary tale about being careful what you wish for. I wish for fewer disasters in my future like A Long Way Down.

I admire Carrey for taking on a grim and sobering project made in Krakow, Poland, that requires a range he would never be asked to show in any American sitcom, but Dark Crimes is so lurid, irrelevant and unwatchable it makes you wonder if he ever read the script.

The nicest thing that can be said about this demure little Canadian trifle is that it’s a film that finally gives the gifted, self-assured and sadly underrated Alessandro Nivola a leading role.

Despite the sight of so much cheesecake romping naked through the woods like the girls have never heard of poison ivy, it’s the usual disreputable grindhouse schlock.

A sports anime focused around a group of orphans which makes the conscious decision to compete over basic necessities instead of participating in everyday society is the seed of a fruitful idea. But instead of playing to his strengths Araki has settled for lowest common denominator storytelling.

Ineffectual, irrelevant and amateurishly conceived from start to finish, this movie is so bad it could kill off Nancy Drew forever.

In a violent, stupid and nauseating creature feature called Ma, she (Spencer) plays a cruel, bloodthirsty monster who tortures and kills off half of a suburban town for fun. It’s a horrible disgrace, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

These days actors not only appear in bad movies, they are forced to produce their own flops themselves. Toni Collette and Gabriel Byrne co-executive produced Hereditary. They deserve what they get, in spades.

Instead of originality, The Romantics recycles the same material with a lot of noise masquerading as style, and no substance whatsoever, producing a grotesquerie of caricatures from central casting that are dead on arrival.

A vulgar, happy-as-cancer aberration that takes the dysfunctional family idea to a new low. Whimsical, yes. Happy, never.

As a self-serious horror drama that fictionalizes the real-life exploits of the late author and Catholic priest Father Gabriele Amorth into an absurdly plotted, blood-drenched haunted house movie, The Pope’s Exorcist arrives in theaters Friday the 14 with all the vitality and vivaciousness of a 15th century corpse.

Old is asinine.

Add to the long-winded title of this film, “…and completely unnecessary.”

The fun wears out fast and so does the “gotcha” factor.

Directed by Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain) with an impressive cast that includes Will Smith and Clive Owen, the sci-fi action thriller Gemini Man should be better than the ossified bore it is. Instead, it substitutes the gimmicks technology-freaks might call “innovative” for anything that remotely resembles any element of plot, character development, or entertainment value.

The film has a restless, nomadic quality similar to Kerouac’s lifestyle, but there’s no there there.

In a bargain-basement bomb called Inherit the Viper, three siblings survive one gruesome moment after another without any of them adding up to anything significant or life-affirming. Despite a running time of only 85 minutes, it feels like days of mean-spirited self-indulgence.

Simmons silently mopes and boozes with conviction, but everyone with dialogue comes off like planks of plywood, thanks to the flat, one-dimensional screenplay by the director and her writing partner, Tony Cummings. You wait for some revelation that might make you feel you haven’t spent these 81 minutes in vain. It’s no use. By the ambiguous ending, like Steve’s answerphone, you’re not here. You left a long time ago.

A nasty piece of work that's been hanging around for two years looking for an audience.

This one is no scarier than running out of ink in the middle of a midterm exam.

This movie is so staggeringly violent and stomach-souring disgusting that when it screens, it is occasionally greeted with boos and almost always accompanied by massive audience walkouts. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Nothing makes much sense here, including the title. There are no poison roses, although The Poison Rose would have been aided immensely by even one poison daffodil.

Half modern western, half thriller, an unspeakable waste of time called Bad Times at the El Royale is depraved, self-indulgent trash that is a narrative mess and, at nearly two-and-a-half hours in length, seems to go on forever.

The actors are all completely wasted in this dumb travesty of fumbling, unfocused, oversexed numbskulls who work in the movie business. Everyone connected with Nobody Walks should have done just that-early and quickly.

As a nauseating variation on the home-invasion theme, The Purge is as sickening as it is dreary.

Haywire makes no sense whatsoever, which should come as no surprise. It's the latest brainless exercise in self-indulgence from Steven Soderbergh, whose films rarely make any sense anyway.

Like all Wes Anderson movies, it is enigmatic, artificial, infuriatingly self-indulgent and irrevocably pointless.

Well photographed, lurid enough to cause concern for the teen market it aims to captivate, and with enough blood to refurbish an abattoir, Kiss of the Damned creates an eerie, foreboding anxiety that comes uneasily close to terror. Too bad they seem to be making it up as they go along.

A quirky re-boot of the old Burt Reynolds hashtag "Heat," this modest character vehicle for the lifeless, balding and incomprehensibly inarticulate Jason Statham is so bleak and moody it won’t be much of a lure to action fans.

Next Goal Wins is an empty quasi-comedy, filled with cliche jokes and tired bits.

The truth is, the film represents a troubling trend in films today, where production and marketing types think they can get by providing shallow examples of things that are popular in the social justice zeitgeist — women being tough-as-nails lead characters, for example — and act like that’s enough. It’s not. Give us real characters; give us good writing; give us a compelling story. Otherwise, don’t bother.

This is bargain-basement moviemaking, and looks it. Here's wishing Mr. Pierce a vigorous movie career, and better luck next time.

Rarely has Mr. Gere walked through any movie with so little energy and so much indifference. I've seen more fervor on the face of a man parking a car.

B-movie director Rob Cohen (The Fast and the Furious) hasn’t got a clue what to do with so much preposterous pulp fiction, so he wafts between sexy potboiler and psychological thriller with an uneasy lack of grace that brings out the worst in everybody.

Depraved, delirious, and downright stupid, Last Night in Soho is two hours of amateurish drivel by B-movie director Edgar Wright (Baby Driver, Shaun of the Dead) that pretends to be half-retro Swingin’ Sixties comedy and half-horror thriller.

It just seems exaggerated and silly. Maybe there’s an idea rattling around in here somewhere, but I’d like to see it in a better movie than Bushwick.

Even Helen Mirren on a bad day is better than nine out of ten American film queens polluting movie screens on any given Sunday, but really, this is one time she should have stayed in bed.

The movie has nary a thought in its red-hooded head, only a lot of blood.

The One I Love, Charlie McDowell’s debut feature, can’t decide what kind of film it wants to be. Atonal and aimless, it zigzags clumsily from mood to mood, without any clear direction.

This is an unfortunate next step for Mr. Cooper, while Ms. Lawrence, who co-starred with him memorably in "Silver Linings Playbook" and "American Hustle," finds the third time far from a charm, more like a curse.

Stephen Dorff, a good actor who seems to have temporarily run out of luck, is back in a loopy and desultory “psychological thriller” without a single thrill and the psychology of a paperback called "Psychology for Morons."

The only reason to suffer through a grim wack job called McCanick is to see the late Cory Monteith in his last film role.

Slogging along from one slaughter to the next, a benign narrative unfolds about a family of savages hell-bent on their own self-destruction, with no redeeming qualities.

More visualized Wikipedia article than movie, Back to Black covers a wide swath of Amy Winehouse’s life and career without any real depth.

An unrecognizable Michael Keaton seems to have aged 40 years since the last time he appeared on the screen, but he’s still the best (i.e., only) reason to suffer through a miserable load of deranged, deluded crap masquerading as a black comedy called Birdman.

Even the film’s title lacks a much-needed punch. Ridley is a strong action heroine, but she deserves better material than this.

The bottom line is, whether you worship God, Satan, Xenu or Ron Paul, The Rite gets it wrong.

This anemic little so-called thriller is the next best thing to a prescription for 30 mg Dalmane.

Made and marketed for the sole purpose of shock and schlock. It succeeds as both, but the result seems psychologically bewildering and pointless.

It simply turns into another slash-and-dice horror flick, replete with enough screams for three more installments of the "Nightmare on Elm Street" franchise.

Despite the cast and the director’s best efforts, this is a movie that so desperately wants to be edgy that it somehow becomes completely dull.

I certainly wish Ms. Johansson hadn’t shown up at all. She’s never less than interesting to watch, but Under the Skin is a big waste of her time.

Red Lights goes astray on so many levels that I gave up trying to figure it out before the end of the second reel.

Mr. Christensen the director betrays Mr. Christensen the actor too many times to count, but it’s worth noting that his eclectic tastes in source music includes Beethoven’s “Fur Elise,” Bizet’s “Habanera” from Carmen, and Billie Holiday.

Though the film has minor charms (the highly regarded actress can sing, and co-stars Tyne Daly and Scott Bakula are seasoned Broadway musical veterans) Basmati Blues is the kind of easily forgiven early career move that is best released on home video and forgotten.

These are neither good people nor interesting savages, and they're not worth caring about. Neither is the movie.

This lumbering trilogy of trash based on the books by E. L. James has so run out of blood and oxygen that it has varicose veins.

The original western won John Wayne a puzzling and undeserved Oscar for finally falling off his horse. Don't expect the same miracle for Jeff Bridges. In the numbing hands of pretentious filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, history does not repeat itself in any way whatsoever.

Even for a third-rate farce with two stars who appear together onscreen for no more than a total of five minutes, it’s derivative and preposterous—worse than a rejected TV pilot, and about as romantic and funny as a root canal.

A pointless, pathetic and profoundly boring send-up of universally acknowledged anti-social author Philip Roth, Listen Up Philip is a juvenile experiment in pretentious idiosyncrasy by amateurish writer-director Alex Ross Perry. He calls his miserable protagonist Philip Friedman, but who’s kidding who?

I guess it claims to demonstrate how repetitive and routine the lives of professional assassins can be (yawn), but in my opinion, movies about them have an obligation to be juicier and more consistently fascinating than American Star.

This one is so bad it’s hilarious. Sheri Moon Zombie is no Mia Farrow, Rob Zombie is no Roman Polanski, and The Lords of Salem seems to have been made by people on the rubber bus headed for a rubber room with bars on the windows.

A filthy, pretentious, brutally violent and utterly pointless load of rubbish called Killing Them Softly.

Thanks to sluggish direction by Rachel Lambert and a screenplay by three entire people who fail to display the focused writing talent of even one, this is a slogfest from beginning to end.

The Moment is another in a long string of thrill-free psychological “thrillers” that fail from start to finish.

Unknown makes no sense at all, so you not only worry about Liam Neeson's judgment in movies, but you begin to wonder if he's forgotten how to read.

You anticipate every scene before it happens and figure out every secret before it's revealed.

Written and directed by Garth Davis from a 2018 novel I never want to read by Iain Reid, Foe is not just a bad dream. It’s a colossal nightmare.

Instead of the feel-good comedy they intended, you are left with the suspicion that the movie is really about a man suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness for which there is no cure.

Clarkson has given many memorable, invigorating performances in the past, but in Out of Blue she goes through the motions of a hard-boiled cop with charmless brunette hair, off-the-rack clothes and convincing detachment like someone who is constantly being rudely interrupted from a long nap.

Deadpool & Wolverine is every inch a post-peak Marvel movie, a parade of crowd pleasing pops with practically no substance, guaranteeing a billion dollar return and a shelf life of about five minutes.

Inheritance has not one iota of the thematic intensity of Bong’s film, nor any of the dynamic relationships that make Succession’s twists and turns impactful. Instead, there is nothing much on Inheritance’s mind, and the relationships end up as underdeveloped as the film’s cliché-ridden dialogue.

It’s annoyingly lumpy, shockingly pedestrian, and instantly forgettable.

Honey Boy is a dolorous example of an alarming trend in modern movies — the miraculous ability of an infinitesimal talent to raise money for an obnoxious, self-indulgent film about his own life designed to appeal to absolutely nobody except the arrogant subject himself. In this instance, the jerky centerpiece in love with himself to the detriment of everyone in the audience is Shia LaBeouf.