The compositions are dull. The scenes are flimsy and shapeless. The pacing is the direct antithesis of what normally induces the excitement of adventure.

It’s a film with alternating shots of Katie Holmes looking scared and the doll looking creepy. Rinse and repeat. And it becomes so tediously boring that your mind will wander.

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

To put in Clichénese, the only language Battle of the Year knows: the creator's hearts just weren't in this thing.

Hurry Up Tomorrow takes its star’s caterwauling about how hard it is to be famous and heartbroken for granted, and expects its audience to roll with every self-inflicted wound. It’s vapid, meandering, and insistent on its own profundity as a tale of an artist reckoning with fame.

The irony is that as Gallner’s performance gets stronger, the film around him grows weaker.

If Hot Tub Time Machine 2 accomplishes anything — and it really doesn't — it is that it too never manages to find a way to justify its own existence.

Feels like it probably began life as a one-act play, set almost entirely in Lucy’s living room and with a small cast of characters. It has that feeling of a piece that needed a bit more workshopping to discern its purpose and, like a lot of independent cinema that feels like it has theatrical origins, never becomes convincingly cinematic.

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

Imagine the most overdone, Philip Glass-style horror movie music playing over glossy footage of a university art class, and you have some idea what your eyes and ears are in for while attending The Time Being.

Instead of focusing on gastronomic nirvana, this listless culinary drama feels and looks more like a glossy European travel commercial.

In the end, it is up to Leem Lubany, a beauty who hails from Palestine and made her debut in the 2013 Oscar-nominated foreign language film "Omar," to lend a much-needed grace note as Salima.

A gaudy, overstuffed piece of blockbuster trash.

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

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).

The movie has a clearly defined aesthetic and a consistent tone and a good heart, and there are moments where it wanders into the sublime.

Shirin in Love blends tangy romantic comedy and tart social satire into a cinematic cocktail that's pleasingly off-beat, warm-spirited and knowing.

It's one of the year's most convoluted original screenplays, but is probably best taken as a test in plot summarizing.

Swartzwelder, going for “thoughtful,” instead achieves “glacial.” A romance wants to sweep viewers up, not bog them down. Still, Old Fashioned is both unusual and intelligent enough that, despite it not being entirely MY cup of tea, I’m hoping that it’ll succeed at doing at least a little more than addressing the converted.

Incoherently directed, thematically muddled, and poorly acted, writer/director/producer/star Livia De Paolis’ drama The Lost Girls should have stayed on the page.

As a moviegoer, however, you do have a choice. Either weep with them–or laugh at them. Or stay far, far away.

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

Despite a few musical bright spots, you’ll leave humming the costumes.

America has long had its wildest forms of fantasy and comfort fueled by promises about things that are not of this world. Stuff we can’t confirm until we die. An afterlife, the pearly gates. After Death follows this tradition, with a cadre of talking heads who had incredibly traumatic physical instances that are bundled here as Near-Death Experiences that prove the existence of God and Heaven.

It’s painful to watch. Not because no one cares about Adam’s heartache. But because the movie is boring, trite, sexist tripe that wants to make the viewer empathize with a guy who’s actually pretty aggressive in his pursuit of loserdom.

These are all cartoon figures out of Frank Capra’s most feverish populist nightmares.

The film may be completely worthless from an artistic standpoint but it certainly can’t be beat from a convenience standpoint.

Here is a film that is so awful in so many ways that at one point, it includes a clip from the notoriously dreadful “The Emoji Movie” and you begin to worry that that film’s reputation might be tarnished by association.