Sinister 2 may be ambitious, but its best ideas are, as they're expressed, dumb, unmoving, and repetitive.

The end result is pretty much what you might expect—a work so desultory that you wonder how all involved managed to work up the energy and enthusiasm to make it to the set each day.

A film that goes through the motions with such apathetic predictability and pure cinematic laziness that you may want to set whatever device you’re watching it on ablaze.

While The Stranger is bad, the fact that it makes you wait and wait for its excessively dismal perspective to be justified by a measly little twist is even worse.

Bad acting, bad writing, bad directing, bad music, bad sound and bad fight choreography can only take a film so far. A film must be entertaining on its own terms in order to be worth recommending, and Dangerous Men is, for the most part, a bore.

Is American ready for a feel-good movie about a toxic, conservative talk show host who learns to listen? Maybe, but Frank Coraci’s Hot Air is too shallow, sloppy, and unfunny to lead the cause, basing itself off the nation’s divisiveness as if it were a wistful set-up for ideological kumbaya, all while being afraid of starting a tough—and true—conversation.

This slick and cheesy Netflix movie only occasionally rises to the potential of its wild premise, thanks mostly to a crazy-eyed, licking-his-chops performance from Jason O’Mara. He knows exactly what kind of material he’s working with here. For the most part, though, “Hypnotic” is dopey, but never quite dopey enough.

You could build a suspension bridge over the gap between what Robin Hood could have been and what it is. Its hero is credible as a man who wants to rob from the rich and give to the poor, but the storytelling is so impoverished that the message can't stick.

It’s not as abrasively awful as the worst of Netflix/Madison projects (“The Ridiculous Six” still holds the standard), it’s just forgettable. It’s akin to a mediocre sitcom you might catch on network TV on a Monday night. You won't hate the experience of watching it, but you’ll forget you saw it before it’s even over.

A few sequences of classic T&J comedy aren’t nearly enough to make up for the dull plotting and flat characters in this soulless product, one that will fail equally for adults who grew up on Tom and Jerry, and their kids who have never heard of these characters.

It will work best for those lamenting the cancellation of the Comedy Central hit that spawned it, but probably not much for anyone else.

It is nowhere close to being the worst thing that he (Travolta) has ever done, but it never for a single moment makes a plausible case for its own existence.

Lack of specificity in the writing aside, the opening of Brightest Star — which had its title changed, to no avail, from "Light Years" — tells the viewer loud and clear that this trek is not going to lead anyplace new.

To be honest, this storyline is not noticeably stupider in theory than any of the other "Transporter" films.

Wish Upon is another one of those movies that would be memorable if it were a lot better or a lot worse.

Scherfig’s latest effort pursues something naively magical, only to end up with a mélange of miscalculated, cheap sentiments.

There is nothing new, exciting or particularly challenging about what The Secret: Dare to Dream is selling.

Farmland is essentially just masquerading as an actual documentary. In reality, it’s a glossy corporate infomercial for American agribusiness.

I’m not sure the movie knows what it wants to say. Perry’s maltreatment of his morally ambiguous character feels excessive, and if Melinda is mentally ill, then that treatment is cruel.

The characters are not people, but rough drafts of simplistic character-traits, and the actors (game as they all are) cannot create something out of nothing.

Directed by Patrick Hughes, this comic book-energy spy adventure, gorgeously captured by cinematographer Terry Stacey and keenly scripted with barbed laden dialogue from Tom O’Connor, Brandon Murphy, and Phillip Murphy, is heavy on blood, guts, action, and star power.

This isn't an unwatchable movie, just an underachieving and forgettable one, and somehow that's more irritating than a disastrous swing for the fences would've been.

If only Dying of the Light had broken Schrader's recent close-but-no-cigar streak.

Every now and then, one comes across an indie film that's so showily awful, so drenched in bathos and cliché, and yet features such a uniformly sharp cast that you have to wonder: "What is it with actors?" Or, if one already knows what it is with actors, "Did this material actually look good on paper?" The heavy-sigh-inducing Charlie Countryman is just such a motion picture.

This thematic concern with disingenuous allies isn't subtly expressed, but it is compelling for a while, especially given the movie's high-concept premise.

Unfortunately, Mary's concept - and it's a good one! - doesn't blossom into the truly spooky, the truly eerie, even though it's given countless chances to do so.

The Single Moms Club is almost good.

It's a vast understatement to say that Vonda McIntyre's book deserved way better treatment than this.

The Escape of Prisoner 614 is (at first, at least) an amiable comedic shaggy dog story in which inept law enforcement meets corrupt law enforcement.

In fact, very little here is special, despite the individual charms of Evans and co-star Alice Eve.

The problem is there's not enough sex and too much ... everything else.

“Rebel Moon” often looks more like an animated pitch for a movie than an actual movie with human characters, urgent drama, emotional stakes, and so forth.

That’s all you’ll get in Death of Me, a movie that takes a fresh idea and decides that the best way to present it is through tropes and clichés from better films.

This isn't a real horror movie — this is the kind of horror movie that the characters in a real horror movie watch in order to comment on the lameness of the genre before their authentic terrors begin.

The message about never confusing kindness with weakness is a valuable life lesson and a reminder of why the Smurfs are so enduringly beloved.

If nothing else, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reminds us that nostalgia is often used as a mandate for spectacularly lazy filmmaking.

Even if you can accept that there's nothing inherently wrong with being a little misanthropic in the right context, you'll probably find that Murder of a Cat's mean streak isn't wide enough.

More important than the washed-out blue-tinged rooms, bleached white interiors and sun-blasted sea and sand is Cruz, who single-handedly breathes a sense of genuineness into this maudlin exercise even if she can’t cure all of its flaws.

Countdown pretty much fails on every level that a horror film possibly can — the characters are uninteresting dullards, the story is idiotic, and the scares are nonexistent.

Even by the low standards of this type of live-action, family friendly comedy, Show Dogs is especially lame. It’s actually kind of amazing that it’s getting a theatrical release at all.

There are, to be sure, moments of shock. But they offer very little awe.

The storyline is complicated but not particularly engaging. There are elements that are too arcane or unsettling for children and not of any special comedic value for adults.

The new Death Wish is a vigilante film that's also about vigilante film cliches, when it remembers to think about such things, which is only occasionally. Most of its attempts to subvert or freshen up familiar elements aren't well developed, and they're certainly never strong enough to counter the bloodlust and gun worship that's invariably going to power this kind of project.

Somehow, the film’s 1674 is more convincing than its 1969, and the ideas being worked out in that brief segment are more compelling than the ones that make up the core narrative. But then it’s buried, and it doesn’t come back. Pity, that’s one time when resurrection would have been helpful.

Only the commitment from the always-solid Michael Ealy saves it from being one of the worst movies of the year, although just barely.

You will never realize how much you need Guillermo del Toro in your life until you see the reboot of “Hellboy.”

Alternately idiotic and boring horror thriller.

Pair Fathers and Daughters with a bottle of wine and a friend on a rainy night, and it will work just fine.

"Unnecessary Roughness” is a more apt title for the scuzzy serial killer procedural Night Hunter.

A cheapo “Seven” knock-off that one would be tempted to suggest is beneath the talents of everyone involved, but they knew what they were getting into when they read it.

One of those paint-by-numbers romcoms that feels like you might have seen it a dozen times before.

While this kind of manipulative melodrama is often easy to dismiss, what makes The Starling even more frustrating is the amount of talented people who got sucked into its spin cycle of sadness.

The bar is just so low, people. It’s just hovering there above the ground.

All of the personages in this slight movie are relatively one-note. It’s a shame that actors as searching and scrupulous as Strathairn and Keener are so ill-used.

A movie with a don't-think-too-hard-about-this premise can work if it sustains its own logic. It doesn't have to hold together in our world, so long as we believe it will hold together in theirs. But Inheritance is the case of a film that's so full of holes, it was likely recut from an earlier version and not quite stitched back together. Still, it just qualifies as watchable due to its nutty premise, sumptuous settings, and a couple of dynamic confrontations.

The ensemble cast members all dutifully perform their roles, but there’s not much for them to sink their teeth into.

Indie sci-fi film Kill Switch is the worst kind of science-fiction film: the kind that coasts on a central gimmick instead of delivering either visceral or intellectual thrills.

Granted, it’s meant to be a fantasy film, but not a single moment rings true in A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting — not the teen angst, not the little-kid nightmares, and definitely not the sense of fun and camaraderie meant to fuel these Halloween adventures.

The more curdled-than-cuddly holiday film already had offended this former copy editor even before I entered the theater. Its crime? The lack of punctuation in its name.

As a delivery system for a newly minted and reasonably engaging if not always laugh-out-loud comedy team — Reese Witherspoon and Sophie Vergara — Hot Pursuit works.

The movie's dialogue is clunky and the acting is uneven, which keeps the tone more preachy than dramatic.

Suddenly, The Book of Henry turns into a not very believable thriller, complete with a ticking clock and a talent show.

As the movie did its slow fizzle, I couldn’t help but wonder when the #MeToo movement was going to make its way into actual movie content. Because the misogyny inherent in Josie isn’t just objectionable, it’s boring.

Absolutely Anything is more than its unique place in history, and serves to remind us that no one made movies for goofy adults quite like Jones did.

Imagine “Office Space” with forgettable characters and nothing to say about this next bleak phase of the business world.

Winter's Tale probably won't please anyone: neither fans of the book nor those who have never read it. It lacks visual splendor (except for one or two scenes). It lacks emotional depth. It lacks scope and magic.

When she least expects it, the face of the cat transforms into a monstrous one, with sharp, pointy teeth and a roar. Yes, this is going to be one of those horror movies.

It took 20 years for an Artemis Fowl movie to come out, and now that it’s here, the film itself feels like it’s in a hurry to be over already.

It's the kind of movie where, if you saw it when you were 14, you'd see it ten or twenty more times, and be inspired to check out books from the library, maybe memorize some poetry.

Surprise! One doesn’t want to damn the movie with faint praise by saying “it’s not that bad,” but that’s kind of the most objectively accurate description of it, in all honesty.

Every once in a while there is a bright spot, most notably a scene with Gary Sinise as a sympathetic bartender and JoBeth Williams as a fragile barfly.

Only the really strong cast, including great chemistry between the leads, keeps Playing It Cool from totally derailing.

Because of the movie’s uneven story and characters, it’s a bumpy ride no matter which route you take.

CBGB ain't no party, it ain't no disco, it ain't no foolin' around. It also isn't authentic for a second, and it provides zero insight into the birth of the New York City punk scene in the 1970s.

As the story bloats to two hours by mistaking itself for an epic, The Outsider falls into a pit of boredom somewhere between the white savior complex of Tom Cruise in “The Last Samurai” and the much slicker kills by Alain Delon in “Le Samourai.”

A project clearly made by a first-time actor-turned-director, who is most concerned with their own scenes and casting.

The Hangover Part III plays more like a caper film — “Alan’s Eleven,” perhaps — than a comedy. While Phillips ably handles the action sequences, he and co-screenwriter Craig Mazin can’t juggle both genres in the screenplay.

One is apt to mourn the time wasted not just by the movie’s living participants, but also by the VW bug. All participants could have gotten up to something far more enjoyable.

Affluenza thinks it is deep when it is merely trite. It illuminates nothing.

The movie USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage is not exactly unwatchable, but it’s also completely not worthy of watching.

This is one of those movies that is as dull as it is well-meaning and man, is it ever well-meaning.

It’s meant to be a tale of uplift for faith-based audiences, but instead wears viewers down with a heavy-handed narrative, an overbearing score and voiceover that spells out everything in cringe-inducing, folksy tones.

The Boy Next Door has its share of so-bad-they’re-good moments – and details, and chunks of dialogue – but not nearly enough. Mostly, they’re just bad. And it had such potential too, starting with the casting.

There are many points where Expend4bles feels less like a legitimate continuation to a franchise that has been quite profitable to many involved and more like a cheapo television pilot that was mercifully scuttled before it could air.

The screenplay is painfully incompetent, the comedy is puerile, and the direction limps along like a set of disconnected skits, with no sense of pacing or rhythm. It is genuinely painful to see some of the most talented and appealing actors in Hollywood, including Justin Long himself, wasted in a movie that shows such a lack of respect for the audience.

Ultimately, this is one of those movies where it seems okay if you like this sort of thing for a while, but after it crosses the 90-minute mark, it seems irretrievably a little much even if you like this sort of thing.

It’s an amiable misfire. But Brie Larson sure can light up the screen, and she does so here — she’s a pleasant singer, too — and that’s enough to raise this from a one-and-a-half star movie to a two.

At 103 minutes, this film has way too much dead weight. Scenes are repeated over and over, and some of the acting would not cut it in a school play. But in the rare moments when Tyler Perry’s Boo! A Madea Halloween is firing on all cylinders, it displays a cleverness which hints that, with more time and a few more iterations of the script, this might have been a good movie.

The Paulo Coelho portrayed here is a selfish, reckless, immature, spoiled and deeply boring person.

Portals is something of a bait-and-switch. While the concept suggests mind-bending alternate-reality stuff, the not terribly cerebral reality of the movie offers more in the line of eyeball-gouging, blood-spurting, face-melting shock horror.

Without an establishing tone or style — the first scene sits there on the screen like a void — it can come off as trying to jump on some already-long-gone bandwagon.

The film misses the chance to offer an original artistic or sociopolitical take on the 1969 riots that sparked the U.S. gay rights movement.

In theory, these actors should be able to just show up, be themselves, tap into their formidable improvisational abilities and let the laughs flow freely. In reality, though, movies require scripts. They require actual characters and dialogue and narratives that evolve in ways that are logical, or at least engaging.

The plot of Mad Women is ridiculous, unmotivated and "shocking," but that wouldn't be an issue at all if there had been some attempt at style, or mood, or a point of view.

The Right Kind of Wrong is the kind of comedy that asks an audience to find borderline-stalking behavior charming.

A grievously ill-advised motion picture on every level.

All of these potentially effective elements—as well as a stellar cast that includes Charlize Theron, Kerry Washington, and Michelle Yeoh—get swallowed up by the overwhelming reliance on CGI-infused action sequences. They’re both empty and endless, and too often leave you wondering what’s going on and why we should bother.

Sporadically, one can see the movie that Slender Man could have been, but it disappears like the title character’s victims.