Greedily tries to cram every dystopian curse into one misbegotten plot, resulting in something wildly disjointed, even if its pieces arguably connect.

Symptomatic of the Marvel-ization of modern action cinema, the film seems to exist mostly as an advertisement for future product.

Writer-director Guy Moshe's crime saga is a work of second-generation derivation, weaving together scraps from homages to Westerns, film noir, samurai films, gangster pics, and class-warfare dramas.

It feels like Sheldon Wilson tossed a bunch of third-hand scares in a blender and set it to puree, resulting in a gray, flavorless sludge.

The film feels like it was reverse-engineered from its "Yippee Ki-Yay Mother Russia" tagline, a wholly generic international actioner barely distinguished by the presence of Bruce Willis's banner hero.

It doesn't take long to gather the influences trickling through Derick Martini's Hick, an aimless tumbleweed of a road movie if ever there was one.

The deceptions and romances carry on as one might expect, all while the film makes some attempt at exploring the cultural shifts of the time period.

Inside Out should be wild and violent, playing on the soap-operatic mood swings that drive televised wrestling; instead it's one or two murders away from being a Lifetime movie of the week.

This botched vision accepts the warrior's nobility at face value and sees the story merely as a springboard for high-flying action and CGI special effects.

A wannabe French-style infidelity farce that keeps indulging in unnecessary bathos and subplots.

Like its predecessor, the film is content to dumbly relish in the inanity of Mike's rampage.

The film belongs to a long tradition of horror films that offensively suggest that all atheists might as well hang a Welcome sign up for the devil.

Of all the questions raised by The Amityville Horror, the most vexing one revolves around the external range of a haunted house’s supernatural powers. Because while it makes sense for a demonic abode to slam windows shut on small children’s fingers, let loose with swarms of buzzing flies, and turn bearded wood-chopping fathers into homicidal paterfamilias, it’s not quite as clear why such a structure would have the ability to sabotage the brakes of a sedan driving on the highway, or to cause a woman’s briefcase, sitting on her car’s passenger seat, to magically burst into flames.

Whereas "Bad Santa" was nastier and riskier, as well as more mischievously winsome, A Merry Friggin' Christmas is as curiously timid as it is morally dubious.

It borders on parody as it tries to portray its hero as martyrdom-bound genius, which makes the film feel as if it was made by Franco's vain, art-fetishizing character from "This Is the End."

The words of Henry James have never sounded as leaden and preposterous as they do in Julien Landais’s The Aspern Papers.

In Xavier Gens's The Divide, the revolution will not be televised, only the degradation of human civility--and in a mire of clichés more toxic to the mind than the radioactive dust that causes everyone's hair to fall out in the wake of a nuclear explosion.

For a movie ultimately about what freaks we all are behind the fronts we build for the sake of normalcy, the apathetically performed The Big Wedding couldn't possibly be more square.

Mostly notable for its distracting resemblance to Rick Rosenthal’s Halloween II, Chapter 2 suggests for a while a needlessly extended epilogue to the first film.

The characters shout themselves hoarse, but they don't really say anything, and it isn't long before we feel like hostages ourselves, bound by the filmmakers' strained moral outrage.

Dito Montiel's silly plot machinations waste a solid performance from Shia LaBeouf.

The premise might make sense, if only hypocritically, but the film abandons this already flimsy parody of macho pride disastrously at the last minute.

The film speeds ahead with almost gleeful disinterest in dealing with the narrative challenges it sets up before resolving them in the most perfunctory ways imaginable.

It's easy to see how Daniel Simpson's desire to return the found-footage genre to its roots resulted in cheap imitation.

An aimless, if sporadically clever, parody that tirelessly conceives of human sexuality as punchlines for its shortsighted cultural ribbings.

Paco Cabezas's film is little more than a revenge relic pretending that the ethical treatise of David Cronenberg's A History of Violence never happened.

This is the kind of filmmaking that gets touted as "workmanlike" when it's really straight-laced to the point of tepidness.

The film is the cinematic equivalent of a teenager, making everything more melodramatic than it needs to be, and impatient with the subtle details of life.

Lost in this barely coherent and clichéd hugger-mugger is the initial killer-website conceit and the attending erotic dread, which is retrospectively revealed to be an illusory siren call.

Amityville 3-D—one-dimensional in every way but its hokey visuals—is too poorly written, awkwardly staged, and pathologically stupid to register as campy fun.

This is a Happy Madison production, and as such it's exhaustively lazy, outside of its righteous dedication to the valorization of the man-child.

It may suggest an Alien incarnate, but once you get past its exterior, it's as empty as outer space.

Nicolas Cage’s amusing turn as a kooky hermit with an affinity for newspaper hats often feels awkwardly spliced into the film.

The film sprints past its targets, dealing glancing blows to subjects that have already been obliterated by decades’ worth of Tinseltown parodies.

Another macho celebration of fighting for "freedom" because someone else told you to, devoid of any acknowledgement of the inherent irony of that ideology.

Writer-director Nika Agiashvili buys into the concept of the American dream with the zeal of a true believer.

The alignment with Herman's perspective, even as it never downplays the gravity of his crimes, leads the film into a set of obvious conclusions.

The film is committed to the sort of broad strokes that reduce a great artist's life to a spectacle of self-pity.

For all its polish, Bonfire of the Vanities neither sustains the feverish, revolutionary energy nor reaches the visceral peak of Hi, Mom! But as major Hollywood pictures go, it can become stunningly hot-tempered, a quality most journalists are too quick to ignore.

Dangerous betrays the promise of its title by playing things extremely safe.

The film aims only to shock, refusing to deliver anything in an intriguingly post-ironic way in the process.

Instead of elaborating its plot, Blacklight offers up repetitious, dialogue-driven scenes that deliver only the shallowest of exposition, advancing the story at a sluggish pace.

But that hardly matters, as Cherkess is so inept it inspires appreciation of the craft that goes into even grade-B romantic melodrama such as last year's "The Other Woman."

The sensory overload of Michael Bay's hyperkinetic cinema is such that it eradicates any actual sense of place.

This enterprise is so listless that one can't even work up a proper head of self-righteous steam over the spooky Native American clichés that drive the plot.

It trivializes victim trauma by treating its main character's best-laid plans as punchline fodder.

Gabriele Muccino's film is knee-deep in "don't hate the player, hate the game" territory.

Terminal's actors are awkward and stiff in trying to project hard-boiled cool, and all while delivering lines that sound as if they had been passed multiple times through an online translation tool.

It adds more grist for the mill to the notion that studios don't hit the big red "reboot" button in any other state than a panic.

A bald rehash of Jaws, only with the Moby Dick elements played up even further, Orca isn’t a cheap thrill (producer Dino Di Laurentiis was also the man behind the idiotic-but-exhilarating King Kong remake), but it sure does seem like it’s in a rush to finish.

When its third act erupts into full-blown theatrical maximalism, Tyler Perry's Temptation practically turns into Brian De Palma's Temptation.

Dolittle’s inability to completely develop any of its characters reduces the film to all pomp and no circumstance.

Most Nicholas Sparks adaptations say, in cinematic terms, nothing so complicated as "roses are red." This one just points to a garden and shrugs.

More conspicuous than its rote melodrama is the way the film elides the concurrent genocide of ethnic Armenians by Ottoman forces.

The film makes mind-boggling choices for an adaptation of a game series so inseparable from its obnoxiously rough-and-tumble tone, characters, and humor.

The hygienization of Rio into what at times looks like a soulless Southern California town is so scandalous it feels like a spoof of the Cities of Love series.

Importing WWE's brand of hokey fighting--the most memorable scene, during which Cena jumps from a ledge onto a helicoper, recalls in-the-ring rope-jumping than anything else--into a place where there is an alarming amount of real bloodshed seems unnecessary and somewhat imperious.

Madame Web grinds to a halt as it gets bogged down in scene after scene of characters, both good and bad, standing around explaining their backgrounds, hang-ups, and desires.

By now, everyone knows what to expect from this kind of movie, but what’s surprising is how the low-budget rawness, cheap film stock bubbling over with grain, and washed-out lighting schemes give the film a kind of base in reality.

Writer-director Josh Shelov (working with co-writer Michael Jaeger) is trolling in fertile, easy territory, but rather than mine the subject for what it's worth, he resorts to depressingly cheap mistaken-identity shenanigans and raunchy "he-milk" gags.

Reclaim's highly mechanized plot ensures that the film is over before it even ends.

Wayne Kramer thankfully refuses to cloak his excessiveness in hedge-betting self-consciousness and the result is a gratifyingly disreputable B-movie blow out.

The only thing more narcissistically indulgent than the film's repugnant protagonists is Mark Pellington's iPod-scored, visually flashy, thoroughly hollow directorial celebration of them.

The film splits its time evenly between half-heartedly pretending it's an allegory for our current war on terror and pretending that it's not.

By its conclusion, what we’re left with is a cinematic Frankenstein, whose disparate genre elements have been cobbled together without much consideration or fuss.

Ryuhei Kitamura's latest genre bloodbath is par for the course, in spite of the occasionally flourish of interesting subtext.

Empowerment porn for those who long for the Cold War's clarity of purpose and American dominance in this murky age of terror.

The Looney Tunes nature of Rambo’s murder spree tempers much of the script’s ideological offense.

BJ McDonnell, too hesitant to stray from the beaten path set by Green's previous films, lacks the looser, more whimsical hand that would have allowed Hatchet III to transcend its thoughtlessly imitative state.

The film is almost refreshing in its flightiness, even as it remains defiantly ignorant of the world in which it exists.

Huck Botko's film asks us to laugh at, even revel in, the misadventures of womanizing men, even as it condemns them for their behavior.

The film's so preoccupied with being "inspirational" that it disastrously fails to evoke the allure of rock n' roll, particularly in America in the 1950s, when it represented an erosion of racial and sexual barriers.

It's more interested in borrowing terminal cancer as a narrative shorthand for intensity than investigating it as a lived experience.

Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes Part 2 is a bland, bloodless shambles. Sequel-making of the laziest sort, it’s nothing more than a perfunctory, undisguised cash-grab.

With dubious scruples, and much Broadway-style caterwauling, the film imagines what The Wizard of Oz would look like with a should-have-gone-straight-to-video chimney on her.

It's a misnomer to label the climax of Steven C. Miller's patently sick Arsenal an actual climax.

Mark Steven Johnson's Killing Season is a hard movie to take seriously, which is particularly unfortunate since it deals with such weighty issues as genocide, the ethical compromises that everyone makes in combat, and the lingering effects of wartime decisions on participants years down the line.

Slacker that it is, the film never seems willing to put in the necessary work to live up to its potential.

A brain-dead slog whose bankrupt aesthetics ironically soil the very legacy it purports to aggrandize.

R.I.P.D. devotes far more energy to concept than execution, leaving most of the promising aspects high and dry.

The film is dispiriting because there's virtually no sign of Dario Argento in it, nor of any novel motivation to mount yet another version of an oft-told tale.

The film suggests an ineffectual mishmash of Ruby Sparks-ish high concept and modern Elizabethan comedy.

Rings is unsure as to whether it’s a sequel to the other entries in the series or a contemporary reboot.

Throughout After, the filmmakers crank the trials of the film's Valentino family up to 11, sans irony or subversion.

Michael J. Gallagher's half-cocked horror fiasco is filled with clichés, pitiful dialogue, and clumsy aesthetics.

Showgirls is truly one of the only ’90s films that treats pop culture as a vibrant field of social economics and cerebral pursuit, and not merely tomorrow’s nostalgia-masturbation fodder.

As juvenile and frivolous a wish-fulfillment fantasy as one might expect from the visionary behind the lightsaber and Princess Leia hogtied to Jabba the Hut, Strange Magic depicts war as a series of scarcely muddied binary oppositions: between good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly, and singing and death by karaoke.

Odds are John Singleton doesn't know he's made one of the funniest films of the year.

By the end of it, you'll be crying uncle--or wish you were watching The Help instead. At least that was a more artful lie.

The levels of insight provided into the characters are exactly commensurate with any conceivable viewer's interest in learning more about these nonentities.

The film is impossible to take seriously as a commemoration of Moultrie's life or Allen's prolific status because of its plethora of contrivances.

Its virtues as throwback don't elide the foolhardly decision to imprint an ancient mythology on a contemporary superhero framework.

The conceit has the potential to be amusing, but the role-playing is never as funny or immersive as it could be, and the characters' repartee often feels more stilted than witty.

A nasty, cleverly revealed monster might have redeemed some of the monotony of the first (seemingly endless) hour, but the beasty here manages to be ludicrous, dull, and unoriginal somehow all at once, compromising the marginal hope you may have been holding out for the film.

The opposite of enlightenment, the film hides its anxieties behind a mélange of third-rate grit and playful xenophobia.

Uwe Boll's insistence on plugging genre tropes into his imagined idea of populism returns us to the same cynical place as Postal, except with none of the sizzle.

A few trite race and religion jokes goose up what's mostly a sentimental story of a dysfunctional family suddenly and magically learning to function again.

A Warrior's Heart is so inept at developing itself as a film that it hands in all of its devices to the soundtrack itself and becomes a music video.