The movie’s off-putting and constantly foregrounded political agenda wouldn’t be so unpleasant if the action scenes were more plentiful and/or thrilling. They aren’t.

The movie comes to life any time the actors are given space to mess around. It's just not enough to hold the whole thing together.

Not even the able actors that Glanz somehow managed to rope into his project can do much with the draggy story and the vapid characters that they have been given to play.

While "Red One" may scratch at some interesting ideas about lamenting the world's cruelties, it lacks the narrative depth and commitment to fully explore its angst.

By the halfway mark of the screen-popping and kinetic but ultimately tiresome and borderline dopey AI thriller “Mercy,” I found myself yearning for a wireless mouse so I could log off.

Despairingly bland.

I removed my eyeballs from my head as soon as I got back from Alice Through the Looking Glass and cleaned them in a sink. I could have left them in and only cleaned the fronts, but I didn't want to take any chances.

Director Patrick Hughes’ latest is both 112 minutes, and a hodgepodge of so many other movies that it becomes the most obnoxious of cinematic collages.

Imaginary is utterly forgettable, bland, and directionless, ironically so, as for a film that lauds the power of imagination, it shockingly neglects the very element of its own ethos.

Baggage Claim is so archaic in its depiction of feminine self-worth — and, frankly, so insulting — it's amazing that it's coming out in 2013, not 1963.

The Possession of Michael King becomes one of the most plodding, dull exercises in horror in a very long time. The most horrific moment for this viewer came when I checked the time on my screener to realize it was only about half over.

It’s a startling misfire, a movie that fundamentally fails at almost everything it’s trying to do. Leatherface deserves better.

When does a bad, cheap horror movie becomes something more offensively horrible? When it pegs its generic nonsense on real-life tragedy and becomes exploitation. Ben Ketai’s Beneath, not to be confused with the Larry Fessenden film of the same name from last year, is the kind of mediocrity one finds on The Movie Channel on a Saturday night and pretty easily dismisses.

Addicted to Fresno is such a mean-spirited, dull and silly movie that it buries its talented cast under the weight of a horrendous script that they can’t possibly redeem.

My All American offers viewers a thoroughly shameless hero piece.

There’s a lot of walking and talking, but this thing never really moves fast enough, not even during its action scenes.

Devil's Due is one of those films that borrows so many key elements from other and often better movies that genre buffs could amuse themselves by composing lists of all the titles that it blatantly rips off throughout.

The dialogue creates an arch and artificial mood, never sounding like real talk despite the clearly talented actors (Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Michiel Huisman) playing the roles. The film itself seems to be in denial about its own story.

If you want to see the 1992 Los Angeles riots turned into a bad sitcom and an even worse Lifetime movie, buy a ticket to Kings.

Nothing about this inert, dull project feels like a movie. It’s a half-idea, half-heartedly filmed. Yes, it’s a kids’ movie, but kids are smarter in 2020 about their action entertainment and putting this alongside all the Marvel movies on Disney Plus feels almost mean.

Uglies is an Orwellian tale with weak conviction. Among its contemporaries, it’s a disappointing volume in the YA dystopian canon.

A dull-as-dishwater, paint-by-numbers cinematic hiccup with no discernible reason for being.

There is, in other words, nothing new in Hellions that you can't get already in earlier, more ambitious horror films. But McDonald delivers an effective thrice-told tale, and he does it with enough avant garde flair to show viewers that temper their expectations a good time.

The Last Victim plays like a bet between the filmmakers and some sadistic bully who triple-dog-dared them to fit all its disparate plotlines into a cohesive whole.

It then becomes very funny, funny enough that my wife observed that she thought I was going to have a stroke, as I was laughing so much.

The tone rarely hits its target for dark levity, often making one wonder, “Was that meant to be funny?”

Don’t be distracted by the eye-pleasing purple and lavender hues that have been added to the typically chilly color palette. This plot is as disjointed as it sounds.

This is a story that still resonates in the way we deal with war, torture, and detainment camps. It demands depth.

It took me a while to realize she actually IS Shania Twain, because I initially thought “What does Shania Twain need this kind of low-rent enterprise for?” Maybe she really wanted to meet Travolta.

The idea of remaking "Point Break" was not necessarily a bad idea, I suppose, but whatever charms that film might have had, they are utterly lost on the people behind this embarrassment.

All these “what incredible irony!” moments are designed to…well, I’m not quite sure. The movie’s final line, an appropriation of the dying words of a black man killed by police, is an exploitative and cheap reversal that legitimately addresses precisely nothing.

It’s amazingly relentless in its naked borrowing from other, better horror and sci-fi movies that I was able to keep occupied making a checklist of the movies referenced.

Gans’ sequel delivers more of the same, so it likely won’t impress anyone who doesn’t already enjoy getting lost in the fog.

Vacation is, minute to minute, one of the most repellent, mean-spirited gross-out comedies it’s ever been my squirmy displeasure to sit through.

Despite Quan’s best efforts, there isn’t one square foot of this tepid film worth buying.

Their game of cat-and-mouse is not meant to be original in the slightest, but there's no good reason for it to be this dull.

It's not the most original of concepts, and writer-director Liz W. Garcia struggles with the tone throughout, but The Lifeguard is often saved by Kristen Bell's sensitive and complex performance.

The film is best in its embrace of the random, its moments when the talented and funny cast goof off with each other, responding to one another's eccentricities.

By the time you’re meant to learn just what the tie is between John and Louis, you’ve stopped caring. But, thanks to the excellent if a little on the obviously-pictorial-side cinematography by Robert Barocci, you’ve seen some lovely vistas on the way to indifference.

The opening party represents what is best about the movie: it's pure mayhem and it's entirely silly.

The filmmakers were able to pay his fee, and so Hopkins shows up for another rubbishy, misbegotten project and shames the whole enterprise with his open and volatile face, his incisive voice, his mere ultra-soulful presence.

The plot’s central mystery suffers from “Body Double” syndrome in that the movie has so few characters that the villain’s reveal can only elicit a shrug.

The end result is the kind of vaguely distasteful Yuletide concoction that viewers normally find playing on cable channels that they don't even realize that they have.

As tedious as much of this sounds, an odd thing happened around “Allegiant’s” midway point. The fairly packed audience started vocally reacting “Rocky Horror”-style to some of the more overtly melodramatic turns with “oohs," “ahhs” and even laughter.

Lead actors Byrne and Deen do grounded, stalwart work, and director Mitu Misra occasionally succeeds in making the characters’ milieu’s register with force. But the storytelling is rickety.

A cross between "Ocean's 11" and "The Expendables." American Renegades is also not nearly as fun as that sounds.

A morality play wrapped up in gothic horror tropes, “The Dreadful” is definitely committed to the bit, and its darkly medieval setting is a refreshing change of pace. I just wish it were a medieval tapestry that worked as a whole, rather than just in fits and starts.

In a comedic bildungsroman like this one, it’s apt to have doubts about the hero early on, but you’re not supposed to want to throw him out of a high window. I did, and I never quite recovered from that feeling.

The Blazing World falls short narratively and visually, not leaning hard enough into its stylistic possibilities to leave an impression past its opening credits. It’s fantasy for the sake of therapy, and there’s no romance or joy here in imagining a better realm.

Unfortunately, with the exception of Jonah, the rest of the characters aren't much more fleshed-out than the screeching beasties.

Five Nights at Freddy’s has most of the right elements for a good post-Amblin kiddy fright-fest, except maybe good dialogue and distinct characters. Watching the movie, one gets the sense that the games’ morbid personality has been sanded down to its most generic jump-scares and banal revelations.

Films don't have to feature likable people to be successful. Far from it. But a film has to let us know why we want to watch these people. Like its lead character, In Stereo does not want to do the necessary work.

The main takeaway from War of the Worlds Goliath is that such a yearning still burns in some folks. If its articulation here were more compelling, it might have struck me as stirring rather than merely odd.

Aside from providing an object lesson in how Chinese film financing forces some rather remarkable storyline convolutions into generic international action pictures, Outcast provides nothing of interest.

Even if you allow for the the fact that the film is geared towards the 5-year-old set, it's still a pretty dreary experience, made even more so by screamingly vivid colors, uninspiring animation and grating songs.

Hand-in-hand with its bleeding-heart nature, Collide has the ballsy idea of making a serious action movie about a fool in love, but that just becomes one of its many bungled stunts.

It’s almost a shame that the film overall isn’t better and that David Spade doesn’t give half the effort of his co-star because Lapkus is just good enough to allow one to see how this movie could have worked.

Watson and Bruhl give it their best, and Nyqvist makes a powerful villain, but Colonia winds up being a movie that wants to get its way on too many levels, and winds up not satisfying on most of them.

The whole thing ultimately collapses in a heap of unintentionally hilarious melodrama.

Much like “Self/Less,” Amnesiac feels like a director-for-hire gig for an artist too talented for the job.

That’s one dismayingly archaic trend throughout The Young Messiah: the fiendish characters are also wildly effeminate.

Jackals put me in a foul mood. Maybe that’s the intention of this lean, mean slab of B-horror trash: to set you on edge and keep you there long after it’s over.

Annie is light on its feet, frothy, and always insistently, at times provocatively kind, determined to melt grumpy hearts like marshmallows.

Out of the Dark never leaves much of an impression despite character actor Stephen Rea's endearingly cocky performance, and an exotic—though largely under-utilized—South American setting.

Ritual cuts a lot of corners on screen and in the story.

There's a lot of inadvertently hilarious stuff in Fifty Shades Darker.

This is a warmed-over remix of crime comedy and thriller tropes, as awkwardly paced as it is murkily shot.

Josh Boone’s adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s “Regretting You” is a romantic drama with big emotions and plenty of both romance and drama. But too much of a good thing can be a bad thing, and in the case of “Regretting You,” the narrative buckles under the number of overblown emotional scenes and the commercial interruptions for product placements.

After Earth is ultimately too thin of a story to support all of its grandiose embellishments, but so what? It's better to try to pack every moment with beauty and feeling than to shrug and smirk. The film takes the characters and their feelings seriously, and lets its actors give strong, simple performances.

Sthers has amassed such a strong cast of veteran actors that they manage to create some resonant moments now and again.

The Divine Fury does sound like fun, especially given that, in the film, demons tend to catch fire as they’re exorcised. There’s also a climactic fight scene involving a scaly demon-man. And a ton of dead air, boring asides, tedious backstory, and other unnecessary narrative padding.

These kids have to contrive magical pretexts just to lay hands on each other, and boy, are their excuses rotten.

Bland and bordering on nonsensical, Haunt trots out all the standard haunted-house tropes without breathing any new life into them.

The 5th Wave is Dystopia-Lite.

The two-hour-plus “Ride,” No. 10 in the series, at least offers a few intriguing new variations on the usual Sparks formula of pretty bland people falling in love against a backdrop of verdantly green landscapes most often located in coastal North Carolina.

Like A Boss is a movie written and directed by men which bears very little resemblance to how women actually relate to each other.

A lot of grappling happens. The community grapples. The characters grapple. People grapple alone, people grapple together. Grappling is more interesting to watch than certainty, any day of the week.

The Shack wants to be a sincere exploration of faith and forgiveness but somehow manages to be both too innocuous and too off-putting for its own good.

Euphoria struggles to be little more than a hum-drum meditation on kicking the bucket.

Far from a perfect film. But Wenders is trying to do new things within the confines of a pretty standard European art-film scenario, and the viewer can see he’s not approaching the material as though it’s rote; he’s really trying to use the camera to get through the feelings of loss the characters suffer.

Confounding. But not without its thrills.

One of the loudest laughs arrives when we get to enjoy a scowling James re-imagined as a game character. Points for greater diversity in the cast as well, but, if there is a second sequel in the offing, please allow the women to be more than the sum of their body parts.

The biggest problem is that the most touching moments are hammered so hard. "Redeeming Love" could have tried to reach a broader audience but settles for preaching to the choir.

Granted, the movie does feature a few endearingly goofy scenes where Cage acts like Humphrey Bogart, with sweat on his brow, a stogie in his mouth, and a haughty putdown for anybody who makes eye contact with him. But he basically already did that in Paul Schrader’s underwhelming 2016 Ed Bunker adaptation “Dog Eat Dog.”

Although presumably meant to be a modern-day version of the classic conspiracy thriller "The Conversation," Paranoia is so vapid that it plays like "Antitrust" sans the food allergies.

Loud, repellent, badly written, indifferently directed and almost completely devoid of any genuine laughs, Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse is essentially a film for 12-year-old boys who can still derive some kind of basic entertainment for the mere sight of spurting blood or a bare breast, all the better if they can appear at the same time

It’s just dull and hollow — a massive waste of time and money. The characters are flimsy, the dialogue is stilted and the amount of destruction is ridiculous.

I have to give Morgenthaler credit for what we used to call “moxie” — whatever the hell he’s doing, or thinks he’s doing, he’s fully committed to it, and while he doesn’t really pull off the unhinged apocalyptic fireworks he’s reaching for at the end (and I don’t think any director save Andrzej Zulawski, who’s clearly an influence, could pull them off), I give him credit for trying.

I’m also hoping that the game is more emotionally engaging — or at least, you know, fun — than the movie I just saw. Because that thing was a dour mess.

Addicted is supposed to be erotica, so perhaps thinking about it too much is unfair, but the film is so uneven (it's both hot and preachy), as well as way too long, that thinking becomes inevitable.

Cats suffers from a problem common in contemporary filmed musicals. The musical doesn't trust the audience, doesn't trust that the dancing in and of itself is exciting enough to hold our interest.

The Scribbler never clicks into the escapist mind f**k it really needed to be to work. It can't maintain its style and never finds its substance.

Elizabeth Allen’s generically titled thriller, Careful What You Wish For, plays like a painfully stilted high school production of “Fatal Attraction.”

This one is especially obsessed with grisly details that contribute nothing to our fear or excitement.

The film initially pretends to have some sensitivity about mental illness, but blatantly trivializes it and uses it as a crutch upon which to hang the villain’s increasingly maniacal actions.

For a tale of mystery and intrigue, The Host provided neither.

The story ends up being one wrong turn after another. A GPS hasn’t been invented that could get this plot-hole-riddled script back on track.

The word convoluted does no justice to just how poorly designed Girl on a Bicycle is. It is also stereotypical, unfunny, unromantic, absurd, sitcomish, insulting to several European ethnicities and a slave to what Roger Ebert used to call "The Idiot Plot Syndrome."