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

Recent complaints about action flicks with no action can be ameliorated by Primal, a white-knuckle thriller with a thrill a minute. Nicolas Cage delivers his best performance in years.

The 11th Hour is a bona fide stinker, only worse. To borrow one of Mel Brooks’ favorite lines, it stinks on ice.

Sliding down the James Franco hole is not an attractive career goal, but in his (Jonas) new movie Careful What You Wish For, there is evidence that he is at least learning how to act.

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 is the most idiotic excess of sex and bloodshed since "Only God Forgives."

Nothing about I Still See You attempts to succeed on any level of logic, including the script, peppered with pseudo comic book mumbo-jumbo.

At the movies, bad things happen to good people all the time. But it’s especially lamentable to see two sterling silver talents of the caliber of Gary Oldman and Emily Mortimer trapped in a mindless trifle like Mary. It’s a watery tale of supernatural nonsense at sea as lost and immobile as a beached mackerel.

The cinematography is beautiful (filming in the Virgin Islands, you’d have to be a moron to make a movie that looks ugly) and the four-member cast is easy to take. Not the worst way to spend 90 minutes on a hot day.

You go away exhilarated. The movie has been through as many hurdles getting here as dear, sweet Jolene, but sometimes the most engaging movies are the ones worth waiting for.

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.

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.

Described as a satire on Hollywood detective flicks, this bucket of swill is so amateurish and confused it doesn’t know what it is. It’s not a comedy, drama or anything in-between.

A sensitive career-changing performance by luminous Penélope Cruz dominates the Spanish film Ma Ma, but there’s no escaping the fact that the rest of it is not much more than a dreary, tear-stained soap opera.

The result is 98 minutes of moronic stupidity already being labeled on the Internet as "the worst movie of the year."

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.

This turkey is too clumsy and boring to make much of a ripple in the summer landscape.

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.

The direction is credited to somebody named Anne Fletcher, but no evidence of it survives.

With so much junk littering the screen these days, the movie business looks like a garbage strike, and it’s beginning to smell, too. The latest pollution from the celluloid dumpster is sub-mental horror called Cop Out.

The Book of Henry is a wildly imaginative film with a lot of shifting parts, and an absolutely huge heart. A film this original deserves to be seen and felt.

It’s good to have Demi Moore making a comeback after a prolonged absence from the screen, but not in a load of unmitigated crap called Corporate Animals. It’s never smart to make up lists of the worst movies ever made, because every time you do, something comes along that is even worse than what you saw before. But I think it’s safe to say that in the final top ten tally, this abysmal dreck will come in close to the top.

Movies get crazier and more incomprehensible every day, but you don’t know demented until you see Winter’s Tale.

That the film is a mediocre product doesn’t matter nearly as much as the fact that Disney+ now has a shiny new big-budget spectacle to dangle in front of its core audience.

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

As a movie, it lacks the unlimited manpower to equal Hacksaw Ridge, but as a dramatic postscript to the factors that led to Japanese surrender, its power and importance are undeniable.

There is a lot to admire here. Writer-director Alejandro Monteverde (Bella) is not afraid to take his time letting you get to know the characters or moving things along, but the movie never seems ponderous.

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.

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.

The Electric State is weighed down by a staggering tonnage of stuff, dozens of CGI robots wandering around and muttering off-camera jokes, clunky newsreels dumping details that end up contributing very little (but featuring MTV News anchor Kurt Loder as himself!), a total overload of boring, gray dreck.

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.

The movie, which has all the freshness and insight of a Movie of the Week on the Hallmark channel, is a first for the writer-director, which probably accounts for its lack of any definitive style or focus.

It’s a feel-good film with an infectious sense of fun and inspiration that brings out the best in people instead of catering to their lowest instincts.

It’s all so confusing that I found it next to impossible to keep up with who’s who, how they’re related to each other, and why—and I found the script too baffling and sentimental to care.

The trajectory consists of one damn thing after another, with the able Mr. Walker giving it all he’s got without getting out of the vehicle to catch his breath.

A lurid, tasteless crime procedural about a plague of serial slaughters by a pair of particularly demented maniacs roaming across Europe torturing and mutilating young newlyweds and leaving their victims nude and positioned to resemble famous works of art. It’s more gruesome than I dare to describe.

The Great Alaskan Race is the vigorous, heartbreaking film about that true story that will leave you cheering.

A good idea gone bad plagues this movie adaptation of D.M.W. Greer’s controversial 1992 play Burning Blue.

Not only is it the worst movie I have seen this year, this dog is one of the worst movies ever made.

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.

AfrAId, the new thriller from writer-director Chris Weitz, is a boiler-plate example of the exploAItation genre, a condemnation of A.I. so by the numbers that an A.I. could have written it. And, like the best examples of A.I. “art,” it’s solidly, emphatically, “good enough.”

The Mark Wahlberg–starrer reveals just how stuck Hollywood sci-fi is in 1999, when The Matrix cemented ideas of digital consciousness in the Western mainstream (with a bent of pan-Asian spirituality).

Liam Hemsworth, the Ben & Jerry Flavor of the Month, is a sexy Australian centerfold without a trace of an accent who can actually act. His love interest is Teresa Palmer, a fellow Aussie who recently starred in the zombie flick "Warm Bodies." They may be camera-ready smoothies who take their clothes off often enough to keep the teen dweebs drooling.

Mostly it just redefines the word “asinine.” Marcia Gay Harden never makes a wrong move, but this movie is so futile, one goes away convinced that the moves she makes are hardly worth making.

Blame who you must, but whatever went wrong with 6 Souls, God had nothing to do with it.

Overrated, overexposed and overindulgent, James Franco is all over the place, like cow chips in the abandoned pasture of a derelict farm.

Expect the dregs for weeks to come, but I can safely say with absolutely no trepidation that it is unlikely to get worse than a lurid, lewd and loathsome shockfest called The Divide.

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

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

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

Stranded is no blockbuster, but it manages to pass the time better than most of them have done in this summer of discontent.

Phil is the only puppet character that registers at all, which is one of the countless ways that the movies falls short of the legacy it is meant to expand and subvert.

A sloppy, stupid, and — evidenced by other casual misappropriations of history at its darkest (Frederick Douglass was also part of this Transformers secret society but apparently couldn’t convince them to do anything about slavery)— quite possibly evil movie.

A turgid, pretentious, and incomprehensible existential joke. What a star on the rise is doing in it is a question mark for the archives.

Words are generally a problem for Dolittle—a fatal flaw when your picture is about talking animals. While the words are abundant, most are either perfunctory exposition or anachronistic jokes that fall flatter than the state of Nebraska.

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.

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.

I'm not sure what went wrong with this picture. It could just be bad judgment on the part of screenwriter Steve Adams, who for all we know finds stalking adorable.

Cheap, preposterous and mind-bendingly dreadful.

A disastrous catalog of flaws, all accentuated by dilated, out-of-focus cinematography. The coke-snorting, booze-guzzling and vomiting add up to nearly two hours of frustration, anesthesia and pointless, self-indulgent excess. They should have called it "I Vomit With You." There's plenty of that too.

After awhile, Last Blood feels less like a new Rambo movie than the latest installment of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

With eyes closed and jaw firmly set, concentrating hard enough to break a blood vessel, I cannot think of a movie more incomprehensible, moronic, pointless or abominable than a load of trash called The Big Bang.

Bad movies are indigenous to summer, but rarely have I ever seen one as bad as Cold Blood.

We’ve seen it all before in dozens of low-budget slasher movies. This one just has a better cast — dismally wasted and left to seek better employment elsewhere.

As the film builds to a feverish hysteria, you have to work hard to keep from laughing.

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.

A benign thriller that fails to thrill is like a wet match that fails to light: frustrating and pointless.

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.

Written and directed with precision and sensitivity by Thomas McCarthy (The Station Agent), it revives the pleasant art of storytelling most of today’s young filmmakers have all but abandoned, and cures (temporarily, anyway) my allergy to Adam Sandler.

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.

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

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

In the 2014 annals of throwaway flops, save a special place for 95 wasted minutes of drivel called Reach Me.

Mr. Williams’ performance is so grating that you may find yourself more infuriated than amused.

It is still Gerard Butler who keeps it all afloat, negotiating rough waters with superior skill.

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.

It reminded me of everything from "Ten Little Indians" to a low-budget take on Neil Simon’s "Murder by Death" without the laughs. It’s diverting for people who love games, but not for the squeamish.

An idiotic bore called The Lovers has so little connection with anything professional that it’s hard to believe it was written and helmed by the same man. It’s so deadly and unintentionally funny (I hope) that it practically defies description.

It’s a disaster.

Plotless and leaden as a rusty drainpipe.

Even a guest appearance by Jamie Lee Curtis couldn’t bring this celluloid zombie to life.

Gary Oldman, in the worst performance of his career, plays a one-eyed slum lord and master villain named Ezekiel Mannings.

I endured this modest, sometimes vulgar and often insulting family flick for one reason only: an unusual chance to watch the charming, likable and woefully underrated Tom Hanks clone, Tom Everett Scott, in a rare leading role. Big mistake. We should all have stayed home with a good book or worthwhile rerun of a real family film like "Meet Me in St. Louis."

Pierce Brosnan’s charm and finesse haven’t been put to good use since "The Matador." That was years ago. Some Kind of Beautiful doesn’t improve his luck at all.

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

If it all seems a bit familiar, that doesn’t mean it isn’t also funny and pleasingly transporting, thanks to a game and attractive supporting cast and a transfixing setting that seems cut out of the pages of Conde Nast Traveler.

The result is such a bomb—exaggerated, infuriating, and about as funny as a root canal without anesthesia.

There’s nothing to make your hair stand on end in The Shed because it’s not convincing. Despite walk-ons by a pair of experienced professionals, Timothy Bottoms and Frank Whaley, the actors are unknown for a reason, and despite familiar weapons of self-defense such as fires, shotguns, hatchets and chainsaws, the plot is jokey and the action defies all logic.

Bullets fly, but none of them in the right direction.

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.

This one is certainly different. That doesn’t mean it’s good. It’s just different.

Loren & Rose is the kind of exemplary film that depends on the value of feelings expressed through words. Fortunately the economical direction and illuminating dialogue, triumphs of nuance and revelation, are both by Russell Brown, a pliant and meticulous filmmaker worth keeping an eye on.

It’s not dull, you won’t dare doze, and there’s something to be said about a cast of bloodthirsty carnivores in the middle of an actor’s strike.

What the film does effectively is revitalize Welles’ work by viewing it through the lens of media consolidation, government repression of art and leftist thinkers, and social justice.

At the Gates is a noble film that forces you to think about both sides of a controversial issue in a new light. Not exactly a masterpiece, but highly recommended.

Between its recreation of that Greenwich Village apartment, its use of archival audio recordings of telephone conversations and its fuzzed-out cutaways to vintage TV clips, One to One...often feels more like a museum installation than journalism. But its subject and its music would reward either.

The latest entry in the overcrowded genre is a sobering, well-made drama that is well worth seeing, titled Truth & Treason, about the youngest person ever executed by the Third Reich for his dedication to criticizing Adolf Hitler.