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.

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.

There are some interesting things going on, and some insight into New York's economic hierarchy, but the film veers off into a hard-to-believe crime heist, and, ultimately, none of it really hangs together.

Incarnate is such a pointless bit of hackwork that it almost makes the recent horror dud “Shut In” seem focused by comparison.

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.

It's awfully tasteful and emotionally detached in its blissed-out depiction of beautiful young people cavorting in the sunlight.

To be fair, the slow burn does eventually catch fire and there’s lots of screaming and heavy breathing and dark tunnels and running and what-not. The relatively tense final half-hour is clearly the reason that very smart producer Jason Blum thought this would be a solid follow-up to “Paranormal Activity.” It’s that first hour that is the reason it took six years to (barely) get released.

The performances are consistently monotone, and the dialogue is alternately treacly, in terms of romantic statements, and on-the-nose, in terms of giving Hardin a back story to explain his rebel act.

The first act of Cabin Fever: Patient Zero is so defiantly stupid that I imagine most who rent it or struggle through it in a theater won’t care that there’s actually some material in the final act that clicks, mostly due to some incredibly strong makeup work.

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

Despite a premise rife with potential dark humor, there’s too little edge in Let’s Be Cops. Director/co-writer Luke Greenfield chose wacky over witty and the result is a film with no sense of danger, no reason to care and not enough laughs to make the sitcomish handling of a strong premise forgivable.

The sixth time is not the charm with this load of hooey that tries to make up for its lack of legitimate scares or basic narrative clarity by adding the alleged miracle of 3-D into the mix.

The good news is that I found the sequel better than the original — the writing sharper, the jokes fresher and smarter, the comic interaction between the lead characters consistently engaging.

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.

I came to McGuckian’s film knowing nothing about Gray and left feeling frustrated that I hadn’t learned more about her, apart from the boorish chauvinists in her life.

What's missing is any genuine personality from the robot (or the human characters, for that matter).

The poems — and the film as a whole — fail to flesh James out as a whole and complicated human being worth rooting for.

What is harder to achieve than building a hospital? Producing a realistic movie about coping with grief by helping others – at least for the filmmakers behind Louder Than Words.

Then again, even they may find that this collection of half-baked scenes, inscrutable imagery and, yes, a couple of splendid musical performances wears out its welcome long before its conclusion.