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.