Agonizing, blandly shot Desperados, which is among the most abysmal romantic comedies that came out of this century.

As a result, anyone who does bother to show up will find themselves bearing witness to unpleasant people doing and saying unpleasant things to each other while hoping in vain that the two guys from "Funny Games" will show up hoping to borrow a couple of eggs.

One of several reasons River Runs Red is such a resentment-generating movie is that it takes a vitally serious subject and makes such a relentlessly dumb hash of it.

An unbearably preachy post-financial-crisis civics lesson in heist movie drag.

The sleepy, dopey action bonanza Angel Has Fallen is disappointing, and not just for the reasons you might expect.

The two couples in this film are so annoying that I did not just want them to break up with each other; I wanted to find a way to break up with the movie, or perhaps scrape it off my shoe.

In spite of its enjoyable, easy-to-exploit aspects, 47 Ronin is a big budget spectacle hamstrung by its need to be at once flippant and respectful of its honor-driven source material.

HairBrained is painfully contrived and self-consciously quirky from the word go.

Hovannisian's documentary would be much more convincing if he picked a single aspect of Tankian’s activism—or composing, or personality—and considered it in greater detail.

The Icelandic/German conspiracy thriller Operation Napoleon would be as comforting as its airport thriller plot if it weren’t also baggy, joyless, and spiritually depleting.

Lathan’s film is only a pale imitation of what came before it. But while “On the Come Up” is a major miss, here’s hoping that Lathan returns with a bigger and better directorial effort next time out.

As with the many trend pieces complaining about millennials spending too much money on avocado toast over home mortgages, Echo Boomers gets a lot wrong about the generation it wants to discuss. Maybe the filmmakers should have listened more.

The best thing that can be said about Who Invited Them is that Birmingham and his game ensemble cast do sometimes exhibit a sense of humor.

The film falls victim to the subtlety of a ten-car pile-up. Neither the characters, all archetypal, nor the sequencing of the story, choppy and ham-fisted, inspire any engagement in its subject matter.

Both the French and U.S. iterations of Martyrs are transparently voyeuristic cheaply ginned-up Guignol peep shows with intellectual pretensions.

Some will dismiss it by saying it’s so ineffective as to never really aggravate critical faculties, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a complete waste of time and talent as well.

Daniel H. Birman’s Murder to Mercy: The Cyntoia Brown Story is what happens when a crime documentary loses sight of its focus.

I guess the “Black Hawk Down” comparison derives from the many gaping wounds the characters and the extras suffer. I don’t know where the rest comes from; because all told this effort is a cavalcade of crap. Loud crap.

Small Engine Repair is little more than 103 minutes of a would-be provocation whose only real advantage is that it's ultimately too dopey to be as offensive as it clearly could have been. It has nothing of note to say about the issues it pretends to raise, though it does try to say them as loudly and as pseudo-colorfully as possible.

Its greatest value is probably in how it could educate budding movie-lovers on cheesy and predictable storytelling, but even that seems like a lesson Rim of the World cynically teaches at an elementary level.

The main thing wrong with Robocop is that it's dumb, and it's trashy, and it's both of those things in a not-good way.

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.

Several of the changes to Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata’s brilliant manga have already been widely reported, including the whitewashing of the entire project by relocating it from Japan to Seattle, but those are just the symptoms of a greater disease known as complete creative bankruptcy.

Bills itself as the first-ever Asian-American romantic comedy. But it's so chock full of the usual clichés and conventions of the genre, it could have been any movie over the past 20 years that you've seen and then promptly forgotten that starred Julia Roberts. Or Kate Hudson. Or Jennifer Aniston. Or Renee Zellweger.

The movie’s main feature is a group of long-take, moving-camera action scenes that I guess might have been more engaging had the characters on the run and in battle been figures you wanted to spend any time with. They’re not.

Most of the power of these moments comes from our strong feelings about the issues, not from what we see, as the screenplay is superficial and manipulative.

Watching Smith's buddies pay him heartfelt tribute is one thing, but that doesn’t make spending so much time (115 minutes???) with his fawning co-conspirators feel much less oppressive.

Edward Hall’s new adaptation of Noël Coward’s play Blithe Spirit is so aggressively un-funny it might make audiences unfamiliar with the script's successful track record wonder why it was ever a success in the first place.

It’s an emotionally manipulative, overlong dirge composed of cloying songs, lackluster vocal performances, and even worse writing.

It’s an overly calibrated hodge-podge of better movies with absolutely no original thought of its own, populated by stock characters, and brought to life with uninspired filmmaking.

There’s a rather disturbing sense of privilege in After the Fall. It can’t help but justify Ben’s actions by stacking the deck against the victims.

The Color of Time has considerable ambition, but no inner life.

Dear David is branded content—uninspired and hollow to a fault—and perhaps that’s even more disturbing than a five-year-old internet ghost story.

A machine to deliver gore and violence, Brightburn also features some of the most improbably and even hatefully dumb salt-of-the-Earth type characters in a recent American horror movie. But even if you watch Brightburn knowing that it doesn't have much going for it beyond a few disturbing kill scenes, you will still be disappointed.

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

Me Him Her might look cool on the outside, but it's a vapid mess.

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

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion once said. And yet, watching Misconduct, a twisty but exceptionally bone-headed—one might even say cretinous—legal thriller, sitting through its story hardly felt like “living.”

It all leads up to some very bad green-screen work depicting a dangerous traipse around the Brooklyn Bridge, and reaches a sort of epiphany with a view of a floating carousel. Yes. It is very much that kind of movie.

Not all tearful screaming sessions translate well from the page to the screen, and this is an excruciating example of overkill.

I didn't see what was funny about the shallow wackiness of VHYes.

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.

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.

The film is as unimaginative as it is corny, as dull as it is cheap, and as unfulfilling as any cash grab for a well-known property could be.

A thin, problematic and amateurishly-made documentary, 12 O'Clock Boys plays like two films awkwardly grafted together.

The makers of “Boy Kills World” don’t trust their audience enough to let us just feel a feeling, nor do they encourage their enthusiastic cast members enough to deliver fully-developed performances.

Clichés are already shorthand, so when you shorthand the shorthand, assuming audiences will just take the leap into whatever "reality" you are trying to create, you end up with a cop-thriller like Darkness Falls: a bizarre series of cliché after cliché, with no real work done to fill in the blanks with complexity, nuance, or even basic human reality.

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.

The kind of childish genre movie that gives genre movies a bad reputation.

While Hedlund’s character eventually melts into the kind of dissolute puddle that Hedlund has made performance meals of before, no real dividends are paid off on the viewer’s investment of time.

Like a magpie, it takes bits and pieces from better films and cobbles it together with some paper-thin characters into something that is a movie in definition only.

Aimless, immature, and frustratingly amateurish, Richard Bates’ “King Knight” feels like it was made exclusively for those involved in it, with no regard for an audience’s patience or time.

You could get mad at Seifert for being so bad at being so nakedly manipulative. Or you could just give up all hope, and counter-intuitively root for Monsanto. This is a David-vs.-Goliath movie, but David's aim is so spotty that Goliath has nothing to fear.

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.

This is the kind of earnest but inept and obliviously indulgent indie flick that a film festival's artistic director would program in full awareness of its deficiencies, because they thought the name of someone associated with the project (in this case, the director) will put butts in seats.

Aardvark doesn't know how to do what it wants to do. It's not that the tone is uneven or uncertain, it's that the film doesn't have a tone at all. Because a specific tone isn't established, earnest moments come off as insincere, deep moments seem like they're supposed to be a joke. It's not clear if all of this is by design or an accident from a first-time director.

When you reach the critical point that you consider that Trejo, the star of such gems as “Zombie Hunter” and “Dead in Tombstone”, to be above this material, you know you’re in a rare category of awful.

Our characters here are not so much stuck in a time loop, as they are in a very lazy movie filled with cliches and middle school-level humor, and which starts over half-way through the events for no reason. The joke is on anyone who mistakes this movie for entertainment.

You could listen to Dr. Feelgood two full times during the run time of The Dirt and learn just about as much about the band as you do in this R-rated Wikipedia article of a movie. And you’d have way more fun.

Pay the Ghost, out in very limited release today, is a new low for Nicolas Cage. Just when you thought he couldn’t get any more apathetic about a role, he pops up in this lazy, boring retread of “Insidious” that even his most diehard fans should ignore.

An exhausting slog through overly familiar cliches that is nowhere near as profound or touching as it clearly thinks it is and is utterly lacking in the kind of intelligence and artistry that it so often pays lip service to in the dialogue.

Remarkably pointless movie.

Violence in The Bad Batch has neither artistic nor narrative purpose.

It’s a fascinating premise by screenwriter Gregory Poirier, one that is methodically and quietly built, but ultimately loses any grit, atmosphere, suspense, or emotion it could possibly carry because of a few narrative headscratchers. Even Keaton, usually a sure bet, doesn’t land what the movie is selling.

If it sounds like a fun idea for a ‘90s-style slasher pic, it is, but the execution is something else altogether. For a good HOUR, Thriller is the kind of flat, dull teen drama that even The CW would pass on.

An action comedy with feeble fight scenes and little laughs creates a film that feels more like a screen test than a finished product.

Ultimately, “Azrael” lacks the energy or chills to terrify viewers.

What a grim experience.

It’s not just a bad movie—those are common enough to be dismissible—but a movie that I found grossly condescending and manipulative, a dramedy that’s so deeply unconcerned with its actual true story other than how it can be crafted to emotionally impact an audience.

The main distinguishing feature of this film is its almost-novel nesting-doll plot structure, and passing thematic interest in its narrative's formulaic nature.

Asking for It, the pitifully underwhelming feature debut of writer/director Eamon O’Rourke, is like a guest that shows up to the party late, empty-handed, and without the common courtesy to at least be a good conversationalist.

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.

The only chance of experiencing any actual chills is if you doze off and generate a more interesting nightmare of your own.

Well, if there’s one positive thing to say about Brimstone, it’s that it doesn’t lack for lunatic ambition.

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

Watching Hercules, you can feel your intelligence being insulted in almost every frame.

This disaster can’t be waved off as shallow escapism because “Tyler Perry’s Duplicity” fails on that level too, possibly keeping bored people engaged enough to follow its mystery but never really entertained.

The makers of The Possession of Hannah Grace clearly intended for it to be dark. After all, it’s about an exorcism that goes horribly wrong, resulting in further mayhem months later at a morgue. But they probably didn’t mean for it to be visually inscrutable, which is what this quick and dirty — and mostly scare-free — horror film ends up being.

Over and over again, this is the level of humor in My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 — this is the shrill note it hits.

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.

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.

“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.

Great actors wander in and out of a scene, some of them get shot, some just disappear, and the move trudges onward. At least it pauses briefly to address Vince Vaughn’s ridiculous haircut.

The resulting mishmash is as exciting as getting a tow from AAA, and just as slow.

The best family films capture the imaginations of younger viewers and teach them the power of storytelling in ways that can affect them for their entire lives, possibly inspiring them to create their own stories as well. By comparison, “Sing 2” serves no other purpose than to waste a couple of hours.

It turns out the creators of this cash grab are aggressively unwilling to go much of anywhere at all.

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.

To begin with, the very premise feels off. Peter Pan isn’t a superhero and doesn’t really need an origin story, especially one that opens at a London orphanage for boys during the Blitz and borrows heavily from the “Oliver Twist” handbook.

Pseudo-sensitive bro-dude rom-com Date and Switch comes out today, and it already feels dated.

On paper, it feels like a can’t-miss, especially when one considers how much it plays with themes that Van Sant has often - brilliantly explored before. Movies don’t exist on paper. And this one’s a mess.

The result is another vacuous melodrama/thriller that doesn’t lay a glove on the era’s historical complexities.

A gross, stupid and relentlessly ugly film from start to finish, this may not be the absolute bottom of the barrel in terms of Netflix Originals but nothing else worthy of that title immediately springs to mind.

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."

Cheaply made, dramatically inept and staggeringly dull despite a running time that only clocks in at maybe 80 minutes tops before the end credits begin, it is so devoid of passion, energy and intelligence that it makes one wonder why those responsible even bothered to make it in the first place.

Almost every female character is there to be screwed or to screw the guys over. Or both. This is how Sandler’s brand has always portrayed their female characters, but it’s just increasingly depressing.

Holidate is a reminder of how easy it is to get every aspect of a romantic comedy wrong.

A unique kind of very bad movie. The spectacle of this misbegotten thriller is not amusing enough to recommend to fans of casual movie cheesiness, but it’s the filmmaking choices that made me laugh out loud.

As is customary for many hack films, the writer or producer or whoever it was that nailed down the title Trigger Point for this cinematic bag of pain didn’t/doesn’t care what the phrase actually means, or whether it applies to anything that actually happens in the movie; they just thought it sounded cool.