Watching the stars try to out-cutesy the mutt is one for the puke bucket.

Magicians have been pulling rabbits out of hats for ages. And yet, with all this talent, no one can make a decent script materialize.

So Risen joins the swelling ranks of faith-based films that pander to audiences instead of serving them.

The spectacle feels lifeless and what could have been a challenging moral provocation dissolves into sappy, feel-good pandering. Lawrence and Pratt deserve better. So do audiences.

There's no thrill in Gone because you can see every surprise coming. It lies there flapping like a dying fish. Skip it.

What I can't buy is that Refn has made a movie this lifeless and devoid of human interest.

And just when you think this movie cannot get more unendurable ... it does. And then some. You can see every twist telegraphed from miles away even in a driving blizzard. The Mountain Between Us is epic all right – an epic waste of talent and your time.

Though Wilson is always reason enough to see a movie, she’s stuck here in a fluffball that plays like warmed-over subplots from "Sex and the City."

A trio of appealing actors is trapped in an action-spiked romcom death-sentenced by a lack of humor, heart and a coherent reason for being.

The movie, however, is a crock.

Con Air has all the signs of a hit. That's depressing.

Mostly, it's a collection of spare suspense parts that someone ransacked at the movie dump and is trying to resell as fresh product. Good luck with that.

A movie about death that stubbornly refuses to come to life.

Satire in a blanket of bland.

Is a Brian DePalma movie that laughs at Brian De Palma movies still worth your time?

Though saddled with hoary jokes, Goldberg at least pumps some funky life into the bland proceedings.

Chockablock with things we're not supposed to notice: that Roberts is wasted; that she and Cusack have no characters to play, so it's virtually impossible to understand why she loves him or vice versa; that the script provides comedy without bite and romance without resonance.

It’s the product of a satirical ambition that lacks the wit to land any heady blows; the horror mastery to be even glancingly scary; the intellect to make those thrills invigoratingly existential; and the sense of humor to make it entertaining. What it is, is limp, dull, half-cocked — with a few good performances from good enough actors that hints at how a smarter movie might have worked.

Off the shelf after two years to capitalize on the popularity of Vin Diesel, Seth Green and Barry Pepper. It should have stayed there.

A corporate I.P. Easter-egg hunt posing as a movie, this horror-comedy raids the House of Mouse’s resident spoooooky ride’s signature bits while nudging your ribs as aggressively as (in)humanly possible. Even for die-hard Disney fanatics, it’s still about as fun as waiting endlessly in line for something permanently closed for repairs.

There are many reasons that 1999 is considered a banner year for American cinema. This attempt to revisit the type of fanciful, footloose and fancy-twee storytelling that helped characterize that cultural moment is a big swing, and an even bigger miss.

Slack direction fails to touch a nerve. Martin was scarier and funnier extracting Bill Murray's molars without Novocaine in "Little Shop of Horrors." Now that was one crazy dentist.

Retribution is not the worst of his thrillers/action movies — that honor belongs to either last year’s god-awful Blacklight or this freezer-burned turkey — but it does suggest that Neeson may want to consider retiring from the everyman action-hero beat for good. What once felt like a niche being expertly filled now resembles a formula beaten into submission, like so many nameless thugs threatening the safety of a tough guy’s offspring.

Affleck doesn’t sell it this time. He’s too busy going for the easy laugh. And so the supposed fun of the movie just doesn’t add up, like a long equation with a missing number.

What DePalma has never made is a dull movie. Until now.

Love may hurt, sure. But it’s not nearly as painful as being forced to watch a great actor stuck in a bad movie.

Judd is slumming again in ths lame suspense yarn that could barely pass as a TV quickie without the bankable names of Judd, Tommy Lee Jones and director Bruce Beresford.

Crossing "A Beautiful Mind" with "Sex Kittens Go to College," first-time director Stephen Gaghan (he wrote Traffic) causes a head-on collision.

Somehow, though, he made a movie that, to paraphrase an album from the director’s former musical endeavor, has seriously missed the Black Mark.

The dialogue starts at risible and descends from there.

There’s something incredibly deflating about all of this, from the waste of precious screen-talent resources to the sense that you’re watching the last gasp of an age-old formula. It is like staring at a bright, shiny epitaph for two hours.

Even if you view this as just another superhero movie, it still feels like a litter’s runt. We’d have been fine if this kingdom stayed lost.

It’s a disaster movie in more ways than one. Should you indeed look up, you may be surprised to find one A-list bomb of a movie, all inchoate rage and flailing limbs, falling right on top of you.

While we do not condone the excessive consumption of alcohol, or sneaking spirits and other such beverages into a theater, or any display of public intoxication, we also do not think you should endure Ambulance while being sober.

This is a movie that keeps going out of its way to be any kind of blockbuster except an actual Jurassic World movie.

It’s a bad movie, full stop. Which is a pity, because the pedigree looks great on paper.

An all pain, no gain, minimal-reprieve character study completely unaware of the ways its selling the singer short.

Thanksgiving is less a movie than a messy attempt to coast off an oldie-but-goodie one-off without adding anything to the party. It can 100 percent go stuff itself.

This isn’t really a biopic. This is the Passion of St. Michael, rendered with great fidelity to and emphasis on both Jackson’s undeniable suffering and equally undeniable talent.

The batshit bonkers Serenity fails on every level, first as entertainment and then as a new-agey thumbsucker about a magical, mystical tour through the subconscious. Serenity finds new definitions of bad that almost make the damn thing worth watching for its magnificent flameout.

There's a strong movie in this life, but writer-director Leon Ichaso ("Sugar Hill") hasn't found it.

This mumbo-jumbo plays like The X Files on Prozac. No wonder the actors look narcotized.

Even marking on a B-movie curve, Unhinged is running on empty.

How can you recreate the first Ziggy concert in 1972 at Borough Assembly Hall, Aylesbury, and fail to evoke even an ounce of the moment’s dynamism even when you have the moves down? Does Stardust exist solely to make Bohemian Rhapsody seem better by comparison? Why are we still watching this?

It is not only bludgeoningly nasty but also, viewed from a May 2021 standpoint, quite staggeringly un-prescient.

There’s an art to making action films, and that artistry is as AWOL here as it is in the first movie.

A stuffy, soggy slog of a movie that fails to generate sparks or a lick of dramatic sense.

Something vital definitely seems to have been lost in the translation, however, and what you’re left with is a retelling that feels deader than anything skulking around the shadows.

Blue Iguana makes the freshly minted Oscar winner (for his totally worthy performance in Three Billboards) work way too hard to cut through the film’s blatant stupidity and buffet of clichés.

What you’re left with is something that wants the brand-name recognition of being a Spider-Man project by proxy, but also wants to give you an overly violent, extremely gory vigilante movie that, despite featuring Kraven fighting a weak-tea CGI version of another well-known Marvel villain, has nothing to do with those films. Congratulations on failing twice, we guess?

Emmerich can crack the whip on computer pixels like nobody’s business. But in sacrificing a reckoning on the human toll of war for cardboard characterization and showoff fx, he’s left an empty space where the soul of the film should be.

Something lazy, slow, shallow, stupid, amateurish, unfunny, unsuspenseful, uninformed, unspeakably dull and witlessly written, directed and acted (the special effects suck, too).

For starters, it blows. Madonna continues to mistake a knack for striking poses with the interpretive skill of a real actor.

At one point, a character is forced to stand in front of an automatic football launcher and take a series of pigskins to the cranium, each of which is shot at him with increasing speed. And by the end of this mess, you’re left thinking: I now know exactly how that guy felt.

Regardless of whether you’ve ever played Minecraft or not, you’ll recognize the kind of endless ribbing, nudging, winking knowingness on display here; this is steeped in the self-aware absurdism of, say, those Old Spice commercials that aim to confuse and confound in the name of moving products off store shelves. A Minecraft Movie is essentially a 101-minute version of that.

Not even J-Law off the nice-young-lady leash can save something this lazy and desperate to offend, however. The movie simply isn’t on her level. Or really much of any level at all.

Plods along in the Oscar-winning, yawn-inducing tradition of "Out of Africa," making me yearn for something less "National Geographic."

When continuity and plot logic are AWOL in your movie, who ya gonna call? Not these folks.

OK, so, listen: There’s really no point describing what happens, or how, or when, or why. This is not a narrative film. This is not “cinema,” or maybe it is, who the f**k knows anymore? This is a Michael Bay movie.

Contrived, manipulative and shamelessly sentimental, this film is notable for the courageous reach of Sean Penn, who gives a bold, heartfelt performance.

Sure, it has a low-rent, get-high-and-watch-it-at-3-AM vibe to it, but the film's mind-numbing longueurs and its dialogue do away with any Z-movie verve one might be expecting. DiCaprio isn't too bad as a pissy kid; indeed, he seems to be the only cast member who can actually act.

A fine case ... but none weighty enough to keep this fluff from evaporating as you watch it.

Martin Sheen makes his directing debut with this military drama mixed with laughs. It isn’t awful — just bland, which is worse.

The Beverly Hillbillies is not, as the saying goes, a critic’s picture. Still, you want to root for a movie that wallows without shame in leering, fatuous humor. I did — for about 15 minutes — then the sameness set in like an overdose of Beavis and Butt-Head.

It's sledgehammer whimsy, and it's not talking to me.

This SCI-FI swill is the brain-child of director Mark L. Lester (Class of 1984), who says it’s really about “kids and the future of urban public education.” No, it’s not. It’s about kids and teachers kicking ass for two benumbing hours. What a waste.

It doesn’t take long to realize that what was meant to be a franchise-starter is, unlike its hero, permanently DOA.

For the first time, the Farrellys seem to be embarrassed by their own crudeness. For the first time, they should be.

The true story of the LaMarcas, well told by the late Mike McAlary in Esquire, has been pounded into TV-crime mush by screenwriter Ken Hixon and director Michael Caton-Jones. Shockingly, the acting doesn't help.

It's soft-core pap for horny boys and their hornier dads.

Cruz is a dish, but her movie is as soggy and indigestible as Styrofoam.

This Snow White may not be the worst live-action adaptation of an animated touchstone, though it’s a strong contender for its blandest. The movie does earn points as a bedtime story, however, because it will definitely put you to sleep.

Makes you gag.

A violent cartoon that trivializes apartheid. If there's any justice, the birds of loneliness will be circling the box office.

The Midnight Sky is a good example of a movie that sells itself short by trying to be one thing — serious, heavy, emotional — when, by all available indicators, it should be more of a thriller, or more ridiculous, or at the very least more fun.

Even before the murderer is revealed, you’ll recognize the method in which the movie dispatches its victims: They, like us, were probably bored to death.

All the green-screen magic it takes for Smith to mix it up with a mass of pixels passing for a Fresh Prince-era version of himself does not compensate for a dull plot, achingly familiar characters and dialogue that’s no fun at all.

Even a search party would be hard-pressed to find a spark between Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas in Pollack's latest tear-jerker.

On the page, the limitations somehow feel groundbreaking and expansive. Onscreen, the film somehow reduces the same notion of one angle/one thousand different moments to little more than a blinkered gimmick.

We could give you 21 reasons not to see 21 Bridges — and not single one that’s worth the price of admission.

Good-natured fun when it isn't stale, which is most of the time, this talky comedy set in a Chicago barber shop is a sitcom pilot disguised as a movie.

The kind of movie that TV stars do when they're on hiatus and trying to squeeze one in.

Even with sex, drugs, hip-hop and a murder, these four stories are dull, dull, dull, dull.

Despite melodramatic lapses -- the gripping action recalls Walter Hill's 1981 "Southern Comfort" -- this is Schumacher's most ambitions film since "Falling Down" in 1993, and it plays to his strengths with young actors.

Trash.

The plot of Godzilla vs. Kong matters far less than the basic fact that it’d be a much better movie if it stuck, firmly, to its title.

Maybe the most notable thing about the movie is Wahlberg himself, who hypes up that hapless “Who, me? Aw, shucks” vibe that works so well for him in comedies but utterly fails him here.

Rob Cohen, who last directed "The Skulls" --ouch! -- can consider this one another career-killing skid mark.

The movie may be so scared of being an Auto-Tuned biopic that it settles for simply being out of tune altogether.

Zane, a good actor in the right circumstances (Orlando, Dead Calm), is trapped by screenwriter Jeffrey Boam (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) and Australian director Simon Wincer (Free Willy), who don’t give him anything to act.

For those who mistake Love Wedding Repeat for a comedy with actual laughs, consider yourselves warned.

Shot three years ago, this soggy horrorshow gives credence to the belief that January is the month Hollywood uses to bury its mistakes.

From its generic title to an ending you can see coming from outer space, Blood and Money follows a path rutted with enough clichés to cover the three million acres of Maine forest land where the film is set.

The self-congratulatory histrionics of Williams, lower lip trembling as he triumphs over torture in the name of the human spirit, represents a trend in Hollywood to make accessible melodrama out of unspeakable tragedy.

Slick-dick director Simon West, of "Con Air" and "The General's Daughter" infamy, continues to show no flair at all for blending action and character. Jolie and Lara deserved better. So did we.

The best way to handle this relentlessly nice movie that deserved a touch of nasty, is to enjoy the few flashes of what have been before the sheer heaviness of the production stomps out all the fun.

The saddest element of Two if by Sea is watching Bullock get dragged down in the drivel.

Plane is, in essence, the Frontier Airlines of action films: It’s cut-rate to a fault, makes you endure a lot of unpleasantness on the way to its final destination, and still leaves you with the distinct feeling that you didn’t even get what you paid for.