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.