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.