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

There’s so little “fun” here, feeling as if everyone is merely fulfilling an obligation. I was excited for another time jump movie with a twist. After this one, I just wanted my time back.

In order to keep the flimsy narrative going, both allegedly brilliant characters are forced to act like morons throughout.

Willy’s Wonderland feels like a movie conceived during a drinking game. A few people had a few too many after a few rough days and dared each other to come up with the most ridiculous concept they could get produced.

For a movie that is supposedly about the consequences of absentee fathers, it sure has little of importance to say about the families they desert. The Moon deserves better symbolism.

The script's interest in the past becomes a dead weight, which leads to boring emotional monologues from the adults and later a typical referencing of every supernatural movie's guidebook about how to deal with the demon in one's house.

Eventually, the fact that the characters are all aware of the multiple clichés they’re uttering — an exchange between Brian and a young editor (Olivia Thirlby) is particularly excruciating in this respect — doesn’t redeem or excuse the clichés.

It's all a dull, repetitive slog of talking heads saying the same thing over and over in slightly different ways, and it never picks up steam.

Unlike previous iterations of music stars struggling to make it to the spotlight, “Clika” lacks the electricity and the excitement of watching a performer bring the house down.

While I rather doubt that co-writer/director Yuval Adler pitched his new picture as “'Death and the Maiden' meets ‘Leave it to Beaver,’” that sure is what he ended up with, conceptually at least.

Trespassers is fairly timid, as far as home-invasion thrillers go: it’s got some machete - and gun-related violence, a couple of leering masked killers, and a little rough sex, but that’s about it.

Watching Drinking Buddies is like being the designated driver for a most uninteresting bunch of drinkers.

If “Alarum” had been directed by either a complete novice or a total hack, maybe some of its grievous cinematic sins could have been forgiven or at least tolerated.

It’s more of the same, without any discernible improvement in quality, despite the massive technological leaps over the past two decades.

A grievously ill-advised motion picture on every level.

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

While empathy is first to go in the tasteless When the Bough Breaks, there is nothing good in its place.

A mixture of misplaced gallows humor, wildly over-the-top caricatures and a gimmicky use of animation combine to make My Dead Boyfriend one of the year’s more uncomfortable movie-going experiences.

We could use much more insight into what made [Reagan] “the great communicator,” but this movie is a poor communicator about the history and the man.

Even at its relatively trim 89-minute runtime, "Armor" feels padded.

Back in Action isn’t as obnoxiously soulless as “Red Notice,” but it’s firmly within that subgenre of glossy, globetrotting action pictures you can stream while you fold your laundry. It all feels so cynical.

This long-delayed would-be erotic thriller is a shabby bore that promises viewers any number of kinky thrills and then proceeds to deflate those expectations.

A movie that’s as empty and unlikable as the characters themselves.

Time may feel like a flat circle, but the calendar says it’s January, so that means we get shoddy, dumping-ground dreck like the generically titled Redemption Day.

Emperor is lousy in the same way that many other mediocre slave narratives are: it re-presents a dark period in American history without being inspired or insightful enough to be worth your curiosity or emotional investment.

Based solely on its own merits, Shortcut is both an amateurish production and a mindless genre exercise.

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

By and large, "Dear Santa" feels as if someone took a Diary of a Wimpy Kid book and added some truly weird Satanic mythology.

The film, unfortunately, is poorly acted and offers Hallmark Channel-level craftsmanship.

There are a lot of fragmentary ideas in The Real Thing, but they’re not cohesive or worthwhile as they’re loosely formed into one grey 232-minute lump.

America is like the cinematic equivalent of one of those forwarded e-mails of mostly discredited "facts" that you receive from an uncle and at least those sometimes include family photos or a meat loaf recipe that can be of some value.

Maybe the joke’s on us, and all the pre-release hype suggesting that a micro-budget train wreck was barreling our way was merely part of the marketing strategy.

No one expects The Babysitter: Killer Queen to be anything other than your basic escapist entertainment, but it fails even at this modest goal. It's a defiantly stupid movie, with references so bizarrely dated that it verges on fascinating.

It is baffling to discover that for her third directorial effort, By the Sea, she has produced a film that is such a borderline unendurable exercise in vapid self-indulgence that it almost feels like an exceptionally straight-faced parody of empty-headed star vehicles.

Even a script written by algorithm would make more sense than Force of Nature, a dumb dud of a movie that relies on the most preposterous of coincidences and the most exhausted of premises (in both senses of the word).

Judy Greer assembled a monumental cast for her directing debut, A Happening of Monumental Proportions. Then she stranded her fellow actors with material that doesn’t even begin to tap into their talents.

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.

No one needs a paycheck this badly. This goes far beyond the one-for-me, one-for-them theory of role choices.

Ben Young’s atrocious Devil’s Peak is a case study of excellent performers being given so little to work with from a script.

An outdoor odyssey that feels like it's fueled by Prime energy drinks and daddy issues, "Whiteout" is grim, grisly, DIY dudebro-horror for guys who thought that Liam Neeson vs. wolves nailbiter "The Grey" wasn't savage enough.

All you need to know is that this slow-moving, sci-fi origin story was made by Norwegian co-writer/director André Øvredal, the man who previously gave us the far more entertaining “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.”

Every holiday season sees a new influx of Christmas movies desperate to become the next big seasonal perennial destined to provide laughter, tears, humanity and healthy residuals for years to come.

Dreamland is a half-remembered nightmare. It’s full of incomprehensible flashes of striking imagery, most of which won’t make sense in the morning. But in the moment you’re watching Dreamland, you’ll feel the restlessness of its messy story, the fitful starts-and-stops of its erratic editing and the leaden quality of its action sequences, which has all the grace of someone who took a Benadryl pill too early.

A parody only by legal definition, The Mean One has no teeth as a naughty comedy or gory horror.

Great hero stories leave the viewer feeling inspired by the potential within the human condition. This one will just leave you depressed.

It’s a plodding, vague fantasy about the way things could be that gets interrupted by a rote chase/body count pic.

Orwell did not intend “Animal Farm” as light entertainment.

Another season, another “Liam Neeson Has Skills” movie.

The earnestness brings the movie from mildly irritating pastiche status to actively awful, and that is all she wrote.

In order to do this subject—and these women—justice, there is a need for a clear-eyed reckoning. Unfortunately, “Brainwashed” does not deliver that, instead favoring disingenuous rhetoric and often patently false information to serve its predetermined narrative.

The Darkness is pretty much a total bust—it isn’t scary, it isn’t exciting and it plods along at such a snails pace that even though it clocks in at just over 90 minutes, it plays like it runs at least twice that.

The movie might just make people associate bullying with a hollow, tedious endeavor that lacks any satisfaction.

The Pickup is as generic and forgettable as its title suggests: a bland action-comedy that will surely end up being one of the year’s worst movies, if only for the egregious way it squanders its talented cast.

Overlong at a mere 87 minutes, there's nothing timeless or elegant about this flop entirely composed of elements derived from much better films.

Feature-length failures as abject as this one are almost frightening, in part because one worries about what kind of a snit the director will be working out if/when he gets a second shot.

Between underwhelming action scenes and draining expository dialogue, Assassin Club often leaves its cast out to dry.

As an action movie and as a historical document, it is a bombastic and wholly inauthentic mess that displays precious little interest in the men whose actions and sacrifices it purports to honor.

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.

The bad behavior on display, instead of emerging organically from the characters, seems frequently chosen from a menu of sorts.

If Susie Searches wanted to critique the true-crime podcast trend, it could have done so more directly. For now, we have a movie at odds with itself and its main character.

It’s such a non-movie that it actually becomes difficult to review because there’s so little to hold onto that it dissipates from memory while you’re watching it. There are no laughs. The plot is inane. The action choreography is insulting. It is such a lifeless piece of product creation (not filmmaking) that even writing about it feels like a waste of time, much less watching it.

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

A drama in which belief is reduced to well-meaning but inert treacle.

Someone must have said, “... like 'Ghost,' but you know, for teens!” when pitching Endless, Scott Speer’s shameless and embarrassingly vacant rip-off of Jerry Zucker’s wildly successful, otherworldly 1990 romantic drama. But I bet no one in that room expected the outcome to be quite this irritating.

The Conjuring is as toothless as it is because it's two different kinds of boring. The film's plot is explained exhaustively whenever loud noises aren't blaring, and random objects aren't teasingly leaping out at you from the corner of your eye.

American Hero is an obnoxious rock star moment, with images of Americana that have apparently been lost in translation by an outsider British director.

What’s really wrong with Richard is that he’s a boring monster.

The first two-thirds of "A Sacrifice" are a largely leaden affair that offers viewers little that they haven’t seen before. It isn’t even awful so much as it is intensely forgettable—the kind of film whose title eludes you even as you watch it.

Oh, The Humanity Bureau! How could a low-budget science-fiction thriller starring Nicolas Cage go wrong? Let me count the ways.

There’s just so much missing, including logic.

I suppose director Paula van der Oest was trying to go for some kind of European Gothic feel, but something this unsavory needs to move a lot faster than this. This contraption is slower than molasses in winter.

Generally speaking, the museum seems like a modest, but vividly-detailed freak show.

The Union delivers tonal whiplash on account of its failure to exceed at either end of its genre attempt at action-comedy.

It's "Eat, Pray, Love"-lite, and "Eat, Pray, Love" was already "lite."

While what Cline did and the fight his victims took to find justice is a truth worth knowing and learning, Jourdan’s crass documentary isn’t the best vehicle for such weighty material.

Farina’s talent is thrown away here; Cuoco is funnier on her sitcom; Klein and Polo you just kind of feel bad for. Hence, the only reason to watch this picture is for the novelty value of feeling bad for Chris Klein and/or Teri Polo.

The reason he’s (Cage) the most interesting thing here is not because his performances is particularly intense or eccentric but because everything around him is so wretchedly dull.

You will be hard-pressed to remember anything about it even only a few minutes after watching it, which should come as a relief to everyone involved with its production.

This movie is atrocious, never making a lick of sense, wearing its “message” on its sleeve like a bad term paper, and then ending in a way that should make you angry more than eager to see if it makes any sense.

Pretend it’s not a “true story” and it’s still a shallow representation of sports, parenthood, and comedy, with almost no laughs.

My All American offers viewers a thoroughly shameless hero piece.

Fear the Night often feels like it was made by artists who understand the type of movie that they’re making but maybe don’t really care enough about making it, either as a by-the-numbers genre exercise or a repudiation of its fans and their need for pseudo-enlightened catharsis.

The only notable aspect of the film is that it marks the feature directorial debut of Anna Foerster, a rare example of a woman being allowed to direct a reasonably large-scale franchise film. Alas, all it proves here is that a female director can make a film of this sort that is just as listless, derivative and perfunctory as one made by a man.

X-Men: Apocalypse is a confused, bloated mess of a film.

A ridiculous fusion of "Paranormal Activity" and "Glee" that is so incredibly dumb that it is almost, but never quite, scary to behold.

While the strange and unusual world of Samuel Bodin’s Cobweb has ample enough unsettling energy thanks to Philip Lozano’s ominous cinematography, it fails to reach its scary ambitions. Jump scares feel less jumpy, and the twists are predictable.

Whatever it is going for, it does not get there. Poorly written, directed, performed, and edited, "Bad Cupid" is a Bad Movie.

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

There’s actually a not-too bad caper plot underneath the incoherent over-direction from Mann.

Secret Headquarters is as bland and forgettable as its title would suggest. It’s so generic, it almost sounds like the name of a better movie translated awkwardly from another language into its simplest terms in English.

Nothing that works about the games has been adapted intact in this ugly, boring, truly inept piece of filmmaking, a movie that was mostly shot years ago and should have been shelved even longer. Like, maybe forever.

Particularly at a time when women’s rights are in jeopardy here in the United States and around the world, “Dirty Angels” represents a blown opportunity to say something meaningful amid the mayhem.

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.

This is a very bad movie that manages to be as insulting as it is stupid.

There's about half a movie in Overcomer. The other half or so is a pretty half-hearted sermon. Neither half is particularly worthwhile, and the whole is cheap, cheesy, and, to put it charitably, churchy.

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.

The sitcommy scenes of family arguments and droll wisecracks clash with the grimmer aesthetic Carnahan wants to give it, so “Shadow Force” feels like an action film serving two masters and fulfilling neither’s needs. It’s laughable, all right, but in all the wrong ways.

The best preachers always know how to tell a story and tie it back to a Biblical lesson, but director Sean McNamara has less than a youth pastor’s grasp on his main character’s crisis of faith.