This raunchy dreck, cut from the same disposable toilet tissue as the recent trailer-trash creepfest "Killer Joe," is a leap downhill from "Precious."

It's a fascinating film that I enjoyed thoroughly.

Nothing seems real, including the fact that the star is playing an allegedly legendary jazz singer without a single indication that she has any talent for the job. Although she looks weary and downbeat for good reason, she is touching and fearless in an underwritten role, and the considerable vocal chops she has displayed onstage in Broadway musicals serve her well, even when the movie doesn’t.

Movies about dying with dignity are always a box-office challenge, but this one doesn’t even qualify as a sad reflection on life’s bittersweet third act. It’s a soggy lump.

True originality is so rare that it’s a treat to welcome a movie as completely different and provocative as Upside Down. It’s unlike anything you have ever seen.

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.

Not only disgusting and unendurable, but filthy and boring, too.

As the narrative builds, the movie shows how the harassed and impatient Chinese-American finds tolerance, acceptance of others, inner salvation and love. A lot for one movie to negotiate, not always successfully, but the enjoyment factor is obvious.

Despite good intentions, the movie never lives up to the breathless excitement the real-life story promises.

All of this furious, empty noise keeps reminding you that you’re watching a cheesy horror film that is not confident enough in the story it’s telling to avoid succumbing to old tricks.

Unlike many of the other films of its ilk, The Rhythm Section never feels the need to move beyond Stephanie’s sadness and sense of loss. This is really a tragedy thriller more than it is a revenge thriller.

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.

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.

Some of the scenes are tonally strange, which will appeal to certain viewers and feel off-putting to others. But thanks to the visual style, which evokes a vintage palette and lighting, and Wilson’s likable portrayal of Carl, Paint has its own sort of indie-movie charm.

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

It is true that with Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Jason has entered the unofficial family business of trying and failing to recreate the inexplicable magic that made the original Ghostbusters such a frothy delight.

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

It is a doom-invoking, cathartic and strangely satisfying head-trip that’s also a bit ridiculous.

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

Not a bad film, just a dull and inconsequential one. here today and gone tomorrow.

The intelligence and unhackneyed humor of the believable, unself-conscious screenplay by fledgling director Mr. Zwick (son of veteran director Edward Zwick) deserves special praise. It never hits a false note.

It takes nearly an hour and a half to watch the charade go south. I’m not sure it’s worth the wait.

For a subject of so much titillating eroticism, the script (co-authored by the director and Mikko Alanne) is as dull as navel lint, the lighting is like an undeveloped hospital X-ray and the director has no idea how to move actors around in frame to make them feel like anything more than talking corpses.

Nothing in it comes close to the magic, the originality or the everlasting entertainment value of the original, which only cost $2.777 million and didn’t use a single computer-generated graphic. This says more about how much better movies were in 1939 than they are today. Still, I had enough fun to predict that history (or at least a tiny piece of it) seems destined to repeat itself. People just can’t get enough of this stuff.

Grousing aside, this is a disarmingly sweet movie, enjoyable to the hilt, with music that really stomps.

Smutty and grotesque little sex parody.

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.

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