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.

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

Mostly loud and graceless, despite some arresting hyperbolic visuals that deserve an action film of actual soul and purpose. It's simply too generic at heart to justify director Schwentke's delirious, sidewinding, arcing, snap-zooming and whip-panning anti-gravity camerawork.

At least a bit of an improvement over the embarrassment of "Giallo", but no matter how promising the idea of him tackling Bram Stoker's classic might sound in theory, the result cannot be regarded as anything but a disappointment.

I thought of one of Roger Ebert’s most famous quotes while watching Cold Blood: “No good film is too long and no bad movie is short enough.” I think he’d understand what I mean when I say that Cold Blood feels like the longest movie of the year.

More wearying than frightening, Rings is a total non-starter.

Me Time has some structural problems that drag the story, taking too long to reintroduce Huck in the second act, and littering the overall canvas with too many side players throughout. But it comes with enough rewards nonetheless thanks to an idiosyncratic group of lovable people who just need to get a little crazy in order to survive as their true selves.

A handsomely mounted, largely watchable, and I suppose reasonably well-intentioned family drama with things to say about grief and loss and deception. It is also kind of irritating in is purposeful disingenuousness and determined challenges to plausibility. Your mileage may vary, as they say.

There are vikings in this movie, and there is destiny. Pure to its junky intentions, if you like your movies served to you without confusion as to the character or their narrative arc, here it is: The destiny of a viking.

Strange Magic is essentially a jukebox musical so song-laden as to practically be an operetta, and the songs are so eclectic that they never quite fit into the movie’s flying-insect world, which is divided into dark and light forests.

The kind of lazy genre hackwork that will inspire more yawns than screams—at least until the final reels, when the sounds of incredulous laughter will no doubt take over.

Elizabeth Banks’ character — a perky and wholesome local news anchor — is mistaken for: • A stripper • A hooker • A junkie • A crack whore • A drug dealer • A thief • A masseuse who gives happy endings • A witch. This repetitive misogynistic streak is in the service of painfully wacky gags, the vast majority of which land with a thud.

The alternately cornball and self-aware dialogue and the clearly not state-of-the-art CGI would seeming charmingly retro (like something from a TV miniseries two decades ago) if the movie didn't trot out one epic action film cliche after another.

Through the playing of the game, the real life characters' true personalities emerge, and we can see that this is a pretty heartless bunch.

An odious stew of murder, revenge, casual racism and overt misogyny that is all the worse because of its apparent celebration of those ingredients.

“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.”

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.

Between Worlds is also, unfortunately, a weird "Twin Peaks" homage, complete with industrial band ohGr's not-so-industrial, "Twin Peaks"-y score and "Twin Peaks"-like theme during the opening credits sequence (performed by "Twin Peaks" composer Angelo Badalamenti, no less).

Playing With Fire tries to be tasteless and crass but also treacly and cheery. It wants to you go: “Ewwww …,” but also: “Awwww ...” You’re more likely to groan, then look at your watch again.

Worst of all: Dumbbells is never as shocking as it so desperately strains to be. What is shocking is the fact that this movie is seeing the light of day in actual theaters — even during the January dumping-ground time.

It fails to provide the sorts of human inter-connections and deep revelations for which director Mitch Davis seems to be striving.

There may one day be a great movie made about John Gotti. This one ain’t it.

In news that will probably not startle too many of you, The Pyramid is pretty much junk from start to finish.

So excruciatingly awful that you have to wonder what it was, other than their paychecks, that could have possessed the cast and crew to keep coming back each day, when it must have been obvious from the first day of shooting that the project was the most hopeless of cases imaginable.

The movie ventures into the realm of pure grindhouse sadism. It’s borderline reprehensible, in spite of Kumar’s intentions.

Carrey’s commitment is in the service of a movie that is not just muddled in the conventional ways but down to its core; it really never figures out what it’s about, even as it grimly manipulates its volatile content.

Midnight in the Switchgrass is the type of crime thriller that’s so full of cliches that it becomes one big cliche itself.

Director Nick Stagliano doesn’t help matters much by presenting the material with a poky pace that does not exactly bring the narrative to vivid life.