The shopworn script by Pablo F. Fenjves, who ghost-wrote the unpublished O.J. Simpson book, If I Did It: The Confessions of the Killer, gets no help from director Asger Leth (Ghosts of Cite Soleil).

Dillon is a potent combination of looks, charm and menace, as he proved in Drugstore Cowboy, but Dearden’s script fails to provide the raw material that would let him go beyond the stereotype.

The updated, oversized mayhem is emblematic of a culture and a movie in which the outrageous is too often deemed an improvement, and showbiz suits can’t seem to leave cult classics well enough alone. Thinner than Victor Wembanyama and ever eager to please, the new White Men tries way too hard and acts like a teammate more interested in hamming it up than hitting the open man.

This is the final game: Do you recommend this to your friends out of brand loyalty, knowing that they’re Saw completists and hey, you endured this, so why shouldn’t they? Or should you take mercy on them and let them know that Spiral should be avoided at all costs, regardless of its slasher-flick pedigree.

Tarsem uses the dramatically shallow plot to create a dream world densely packed with images of beauty and terror that cling to the memory even if you don't want them to.

The chance for delicious satire melts away quickly in Butter, a spoof without oomph.

It's all a jumble and, worse, a damned impersonal one.

Hal claims that a Lantern's only enemy is fear itself. The thought of a sequel to this shamelessly soulless Hollywood product scares me plenty.

A romantic thriller of more than usual ineptitude.

Admirers of Irving's sprawling tome are sure to find Birch a botch.

A snooze-fest without any scares.

No matter Bateman and Reynolds make The Change-Up seem a lot better than it is. Each earns a star in my review. The movie would be literally nothing without them.

Luna and Garai struggle to look like they're having the time of their life. But the movie, more wan than wicked, proves you can't go home again.

Wherever you find yourself in the Perry equation, Medea herself deserves a final high-five. Perry hints that she may come back in a younger version, not played by him. But Medea will never be the same without her creator. In A Medea Family Funeral, she hosts a memorial service that defines the term hellzapoppin. And Perry correctly and adoringly gives her the last word in which she lets all the women have for letting any damn man abuse them. Hallelujah, sister!

The film is a sham, with good actors going for the paycheck and using beards and heavy makeup to hide their shame.

The Green Hornet doesn't suck. But don't expect it to hang together either, what with the clashing tones and melting logic.

There's nothing to distract you from a plot so tired there are tire tracks from other racing movies all over it.

Slow torture for kids and grownups alike, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms gives a bad name to the very concept of family entertainment.

This is crap as we know it, a 113 minute package of romcom suck.

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.

There are moments in this borderline incoherent mess of a movie in which fans may be convinced that its sole purpose is to try making the original follow-up, 1977’s legendarily godawful Exorcist II: The Heretic, look positively genius by comparison.

Though Virtuosity connects all the dots to give audiences a roller-coaster ride, the movie begets nothing new: It's stillborn.

The Gunman degenerates into dreary setups for guns and gore. Penn merits more. So do we.

Murphy looks comatose delivering the played-out poopy jokes.

Too limp to deliver.

Bloated, boring, repetitive, draining.

You see Evan Hansen, all of his flaws and desires and self-loathing laid bare. And there are enough of these goosebump-inducing, epiphanic moments courtesy of the actor that you see why people might love this film as well as cringe at it. Platt does not ruin the movie. He singlehandedly gives it a voice.

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.

So what's not to like? There's the bad CGI, the choppy pacing, the comically intense acting, the repetition, the dullness and mostly the idiot plot about how there's only one male dragon and everything will be fine if they kill the Big Dick. Wha? Somebody get a hose and put this Fire out.

Woodshock is both gorgeous and pretentious in equal measures, and it's hard to reconcile the fact that you don't get one without the other – or that, coming in the shadow of another free-form swing for the fences, any rush to ding the movie for being an exercise in style over substance isn't even slightly tinged by gender.

Go Ahead And Scoff. But This cheap-jack sequel to the 1982 cult favorite about a hunky scientist (Dick Durock) turned talking plant delivers more tacky hit-and-miss hilarity than a Cineplex-ful of teen-sex comedies.

Is it the worst of the seven screen Sparks so far? Nope. My vote still goes to 2009's "The Last Song" with Miley Cyrus mothering those unhatched turtle eggs. But it's still pretty damn insufferable.

That this retelling has no time for the facts, given the book’s dodgy relationship to the truth, isn’t shocking. That it feels this surprisingly fun-free and generic to a fault, frankly, kind of is. Fans deserve better. If any of them want to collectively sue for defamation of character, let me know where to sign.

A movie utterly devoid of wit , excitement and any reason for being.

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.

It can give you something approximating action. What it can’t give you is a watchable action movie. That’s where it truly fails to go the distance.

Chainsaw is produced by Michael Bay (Bad Boys I and II), which explains its soullessness. But nothing explains the flaw in this bad boy: How can a movie scare you when you’ve seen it all before?

If you can buy the pillow-lipped Angelina Jolie as a psychic FBI agent in Montreal to hunt a serial killer, then you can swallow the other implausibilities in this retread thriller.

I'm OK with Entourage onscreen because it's really a victory lap for a cast that once earned our DVR-ready affection. To echo Perry Farrell: "Yeah! Oh, yeah!" As for the haters? Hug it out, bitches.

Terminator Genisys fires on all action cylinders when director Alan Taylor (Thor: The Dark World) follows the model James Cameron set in the first two films, still the glory of the series.

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.

Bad Boys II has everything. Everything loud, dumb, violent, sexist, racist, misogynistic and homophobic that producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay can think of puking up onscreen.

Hemsworth and Thompson, who has the makings of a major star, do the heavy lifting. And, miraculously, they keep it light, breezy and watchable. Memorable? That’s asking too much.

Was this eventual big-screen take on Shakur going to be an epic look at a complicated legend's life and times – a Gandhi of gangsta rap iconography – or merely a slightly larger Lifetime TV movie filled with hysterics and greatest-hits moments. We now have an answer. It was not the one we wanted.

There's no arguing that Cuba Gooding Jr. is trying to do right by the mentally disabled James Robert Kennedy.

This movie really moves. But a fleet of tanks couldn’t help the brothers Dowdle push past the plot holes in this rancid mess.

Confessions is no more than a painless time-waster. But the beguiling Fisher is well worth the investment.

It's hard to deny that The Rite is guilty of sins against its audience.

The "Citizen Kane" of flatulence.

They are all victims of a script of such colossal banality and gross stupidity that smiles freeze on their faces, leaving them looking trapped and desperate, much like the audience.

Despite Joan Cusack, whose comic spark earns the film its only star, Raising Helen is like tumbling into chick-flick hell.

Chaos Walking doesn’t even get to the level of high camp, where pleasure is found in the sheer badness of it all.

It simply does not have the courage of its crass convictions. There's a going-through-the-motions vibe to the whole affair.

If you laughed at Tim Story's first "Think," based on Steve Harvey's bestselling advice book for women, you'll probably ride along for this jacked-up, Vegas-set sequel in which dudes and dolls offer sexist approaches to throwing a bachelor party.

It's a shallow, melodramatic device that would sink most actors. But Lewis is not most actors. In fact, despite age and illness, he remains a mesmerizing star in front of the camera, compelling to watch even (and especially) when sitting perfectly still.

This black-comic assault on family entertainment is going to set a lot of teeth on edge -- If only his (De Vito's) material were better this time.

I don't like this movie. I don't like how it walks, talks, struts and sells itself. I find it contrived, tortured, humorless, infuriating and interminable. And yet if you care anything about film and the creative drive that still exists in the people who make them, then Third Person needs to be seen.

Preacher Reitman won't be satisfied till we stomp our smartphones. LOL. WTF.

Kramer takes on a hot, unwieldy topic in Crossing Over -- the dream that immigrants have of U.S. citizenship and the nightmare of achieving it, especially with shortcuts. I'm sure Kramer will be picked to pieces for trying something while Hollywood crap climbs the box office ladder. There are all kinds of nightmares.

The last of the summer's movie epics is a digitalized eyesore hobbled in every department by staggering incompetence.

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

Forget fever – this floral-scented fiasco is so lifeless you can barely feel a pulse.

A tale of alien abduction, Proxmity serves as an in-and-out impressive calling card for debuting feature writer and director Eric Demeusy.

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.

Where's Sandler in all this? Lost in gimmicks that smack of desperation. Damn it.

Stupefyingly stupid thriller.

Working from a script by the gifted Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons, Atonement), who seems to have traded his wit for a paycheck, Fontaine manages the trick of making sex joyless. Like porn. Then she tops that by draining her film of variety, longing and feminist insight. Like farce. Ouch.

It bristles with the brute force he brought to 1986's underrated "52 Pick-Up."

There’s not a real or spontaneous minute in it.

As a movie, Papa improves every time it shuts up and allows action to define character.

No cliché is left unturned, and Gordon compensates with slick action.

What once bubbled up from a sincere love of Greek family has now congealed into the all-too-familiar Hollywood tale of milking a cash cow until cries for mercy.

You know a sequel isn't working when, ten minutes into the movie, a voice inside your head starts screaming, "Please make it stop!"

Propaganda is a bitch to act. And this misguided movie leaves Hudgens buried in it.

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.

In a year of craptaculars, The Tourist deserves burial at the bottom of the 2010 dung heap. It offers talented people trapped in creative inertia. A microscope and a search party could not discover any trace of chemistry between Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie.

Lawrence forgoes his knack for verbal comedy and replaces it with crude nonstop mugging.

The movie is full of possibilities. Frustratingly, only a few of them are realized.

This feeble followup to 2010's godawful "Clash of the Titans" sucketh the mighty big one.

Here they're just putting "Pirates of the Caribbean" in a saddle and pretending we won't notice.

It's Carell who projects the movie's only sense of mischief. But it's too little and too late.

Some bad movies should carry a leper's bell to warn off ticket buyers. Such a contagion is Charlie St. Cloud, a load of mawkish swill starring Zac Efron (bereft of the talent he showed in "Me and Orson Welles").

The film collapses because Lee can't sew these vignettes into a seamless tapestry. He's more interested in getting even than he is in getting it right.

The motor of the plot, involving nuclear terrorism, not only knocked Bad Company out of last year's release schedule due to 9/11 sensitivity, it stops Rock and Hopkins from sustaining a comic rapport. The waste is criminal.

No comedy this year can beat this dud for mealy-mouthed hypocrisy.

Overthought, overwrought and thuddingly underwhelming, this high-profile misfire makes a congealed gumbo out of Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer-winning 1946 novel and the Oscar-winning 1949 movie that followed it, sinking a classy cast in the goo.

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.

Charlie Day owns one of the highest-pitched male squeaks in the business and he puts it to hilarious use on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I could watch him in anything – but Fist Fight is pushing it, given that's it's always raining a storm of comic clichés that quickly drowns any semblance of audience goodwill.

The sequel, also directed by Harold Ramis, is painfully padded.

The movie damn near lives up to that promise. Picture the Marx brothers and the Coen boys collaborating on a valentine spiked with mirth and malice.

"GoodFellas" Oscar winner Pesci, who hasn't appeared onscreen in a major role since 1998's "Lethal Weapon 4," is a dynamo of conflicting emotions. And Mirren, bawdy in ways that erase all memory of her award-winning role as Elizabeth II in "The Queen," is magnificent.

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.

It's sad to see risk-taking director Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas, Hotel) do a generic thriller for a paycheck and then not even screw with the rules.

Horror-movie fans often have put up with a lot to get their requisite amount of fright per month, and that tolerance limit is seriously tested by this slapdash attempt to introduce a new slasher hall-of-fame character into the mix.

Where "Drive" shrewdly mystifies, Only God Forgives stupefies. You can see its gears grinding. But I'll always hang on for a rare talent like Refn. Even when he stumbles, he leaves you eager to see what he's up to next.

Turns into a bogus drivel courtesy of a sitcom monster.

There is one high note. You can approach Speed Racer as the trippiest stonerfest since Stanley Kubrick took his space odyssey.

Here's Madge one more time doing something for which she is eminently unsuited – directing.