Kevin Smith toys with death in Clerks III as a shortcut to bring emotion to a film that otherwise has no meaningful hook.

Matthias Schweighöfer’s film puts itself in a box, consistently failing to justify why its story deserves our attention more than the spectacle of the recently deceased rising to feast upon the flesh of the living.

This grimly self-serious tale of violent destiny is consistently drowned out by Vicente Amorim’s overreaching visual style.

The Unforgivable is devoid of all textures and emotions that don’t readily affirm the film’s rigid worldview of redemption.

The film stumbles sluggishly from one chapter in Foreman’s life to the next.

The film is too blinded by manufactured sentimentality to see the more compelling what-if scenario lying right in front of its eyes.

The film misplaces the root of our current existential dilemma, then covers it with tepid droll comedy and clunky melodrama.

Promising but failing to deliver the colorful characters and winding, breakneck plot of a caper, Operation Fortune may itself be a ruse, but it’s not a convincing one.

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

Prey proves to be an apropos title, as the film is cowed by John McTiernan’s original Predator.

As a peek into the relationship between sports, media and capitalism, National Champions feels like a beginner’s playbook.

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.

The new Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a deeply miscalculated mix of incoherent social commentary and over-the-top gore.

The film’s toothless showbiz satire mostly comes down to teasing its characters for their entitlement and self-importance.

The film is a Hollywood-approved show of Old Testament judgment that sees all people as sinners and thus deserving of all the punishment they receive.

William Brent Bell’s film proves that not every horror concept has the potential to be franchised.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson skulks and slays across a slew of gory insert shots that scream “reshoots” from the highest mountain, and while he certainly looks the part with his shirt off, there’s little here that Hugh Jackman hasn’t delivered multiple times over the years and with a deeper well of earned pathos to draw from.

To say that the film grows tedious quickly would suggest that it wasn’t already trite from frame one.

Neil Jordan’s Marlowe is an homage so riddled with noir clichés that one may initially take it for a genre parody, except that the jokes never arrive.

If only everyone else had followed John Travolta’s lead, then the film might have lived up to its title.

The film defaults to the most pedestrian narrative turns imaginable when it’s not just recycling bits from the series.

Cocaine Bear starts running on fumes almost immediately and peters out before the second brick of cocaine is even devoured.

Charlotte Regan’s film is a baffling clash of two incompatible visions.

The relative grace of A Child of Fire’s action direction only underscores how disjointed and generic the rest of the film is.

Perpetrator cycles through characters and settings at a considerable clip, never stopping long enough to flesh them out beyond an outline.

In the end, The Miracle Club is splintered at the seams between its desire to tell an uplifting story of forgiveness and a cheeky tale of patriarchal floundering, all the while doing both a tremendous disservice.

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

It’s not unlike a partially completed sketch whose occasional flashes of color only serve to remind us how incomplete and lazily constructed the rest of it is.

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.

The film shamelessly announces from the very start that it’s an attempt at atonement for disgraced designer John Galliano.

And the more each new twist is revealed and summarily falls flat, the faster the next one is slotted into place to get ahead of the story’s anticlimax, leading to a spiral in which the plot becomes even more meaningless.

The film is all table-setting, with the stories lacking in polish and dramatic momentum and the characters never developed beyond archetypes.

The film never thinks to lean into the blatant silliness that its premise invites.

There’s an elegiac beauty to many of Night Swim’s pool scenes, but everything that surrounds them is leaden, from Wyatt Russell’s comatose performance to the baseball metaphors that have been unsubtly shoehorned into the impossibly routine narrative.

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.

It’s easy to imagine the nihilistic avenues that Renny Harlin’s trilogy capper could have gone down.

In grappling with the implications of its story, Folie à Deux’s every attempt at showcasing cleverness, verve, or engagement is held cruelly underwater by staid direction, shoddy emotional plotting, a gleeful sense of cruelty, and a grave nihilism that makes Zack Snyder’s work seem like a season of Bluey.

As a WWE superstar, Cena is a perfect casting choice for a larger-than-life character like the formerly imaginary Ricky. He rattles off jokes with the boundless energy of a man used to spending three nights a week catapulting himself across a ring, and he’s completely at ease as the absolute center of attention.

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.

This hollow attempt to turn a provocative showpiece into a crowd-pleaser makes you wonder if the filmmakers are actively disdainful of the original.

Given that Mel Gibson makes little attempt to instill any sense of physicality to this dispiritingly paint-by-numbers affair, it becomes easy to understand the marketing of the film’s 4DX theatrical option as an act of overcompensation.

My Spay: The Eternal City is derailed by how readily it succumbs to the ludicrousness of a plot that generates stakes that are far too heavy for the threadbare structure to support.

In the end, Nicolas Cage can only do so much to bring this hastily assembled oater to life.

Late in this reboot, a character states “Nostalgia is overrated,” and it feels like an indictment of the film we’ve been watching. Far from making a case for the original I Know What You Did Last Summer as one with its own identity and a legacy worth turning over, Robinson’s update is so cynically made and self-indulgent that it will at least leave you respecting the workmanlike scare-making that director Jim Gillespie brought to the 1997 film.

As The Home trudges along until its inevitable rug-pull, its obnoxiously loud and incessant score tries to convince us of the sinisterness at play at the retirement home. And by the time the rubber finally hits the road well into the third act, the twist is aggravating not only because it’s so patently absurd, but because so little in the previous hour feels remotely connected to what occurs in the homestretch. All of the horrific imagery and supposed clues that came before are revealed to be signposts signifying nothing. Even the outbursts of violence in the climax do nothing but remind us just how empty and cynical the whole charade has been.

It seems unsure whether it wants to be a campy slice of macabre in the vein of Dexter and American Horror Story, where the religious imagery and bloodletting are played for both chills and thrills, or a genuine rumination on death, faith, and the morality of doing bad things to bad people.

Osgood Perkins mistakes abstruseness for surrealism, and an oppressive atmosphere for palpable tension.

The few glimpses we get of the supporting cast suggest a more exploratory film, but these strands only exist to be woven back into Philip’s formulaic journey of self-discovery.

The film struggles to bring its non-zombie characters to life.

In the Blink of an Eye feels less like a film than a commercial for life insurance that got out of hand, or perhaps more accurately one for the kind of hollow Silicon Valley tech optimism that has been thoroughly exposed as a sham by now.

The slower it moves, the more obvious One Spoon of Chocolate’s deficiencies become.

It feeds the warrior fantasies of adolescent boys with a testosterone-heavy tale of a war free of moral complications.

The story is a worthy one, but the film lacks any daring expressive touches that might have made it, at the very least, noteworthy.

It's that rare thing, a movie that clocks in under 90 minutes, but feels like an endurance test in every moment, at every plot concern, and every musical number.

Remarkable only in how brazenly it embraces the tired yet proven formula that these modern ghost tales deal in.

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.

If the result is a movie that seems like a much slicker, more condensed, and speedier version of the Sandler comedies that have guaranteed his grandkids' retirement, count it as a blessing that it's over quickly. Not without pain, but quickly.

The lesson to learn from watching Garry Marshall's New Year's Eve, a predictably insufferable, self-congratulatory cash cow designed to be ingested and then happily discharged without a second thought by gullible moviegoers who just don't know any better, is that we live in a time without economic dignity, a time in which we must be ready to do just about anything for a paycheck.

Awesomeness seems to be the chief quality prized by both the film and its characters; all other considerations--like safety, property damage, and especially good taste--are secondary.

Any goodwill it boasts is terminally suppressed, buried beneath a layer of bullshit as thick as blubber.

The only thing that manages to outpace Underworld: Awakening's ineptitude is its utter soullessness.

To question where things went wrong feels somehow strange, as the project seems to have been ill-conceived from the very start.

The film consistently settles for the cheapest shock devices and the most shopworn totems of our current neo-gothic moment in the genre.

As film theorist Siegfried Kracauer once wrote, to paraphrase, art often blooms in the most hostile soil. No such luck here.

If the Adam Shankman film's debasement of its subject into campy kitsch is the unavoidable fate of all culturally dangerous art, that doesn't make it any less palatable.

This epic waste of $190 million plunders the grab bag of overused plotlines, failing to put its own stamp on much of anything.

Caters almost exclusively to the remedial, Duplo Blocks demographic, leaving parents and guardians bored to distraction.

If not for its lack of self-awareness, The Art of Getting By would seem to be a spoof of ennui-inflicted teen dramas, because how else to explain the fact that Gavin Wiesen's debut is comprised of only clichés of clichés?

There's nothing wrong with establishing a field of unlikable characters, but The Ledge not only relies on paper-thin stereotypes, it keeps its allegiances clear from the beginning.

Only a few snippets escape the uncritical narcissism that the film celebrates and, despite their unimaginative employment, they stand as something of a rebuke to the film's dominant images.

Relates more or less the same story as Spy Kids, though in this case the kid is in his late 20s and the spy stuff is much less believable or robust.

It goes without saying that Safe Haven is the whitest thing offered up for public consumption in the three days since Mumford & Sons won the Grammy for Album of the Year.

An amorphous melange of ill-fitting reference points and misappropriated aesthetics, a lumbering family blockbuster both tiresome and wholly indistinct.

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

Absent of any sense of self-awareness, Oblivion seems only self-serious, a ponderous mess both misguided and unaware.

David Guy Levy's movie foregrounds the potential ugliness of modern technology in order to comment on it. But that doesn't make the film's visuals any less hideous.

The Mighty Macs is a film from another planet, where stories are told, obliviously, in cryptic, nonsensical code, and people talk to each other in sugarplum proverbs no earthbound adult would ever inflict on another, not even on the set of a Hallmark Original Movie.

There's no deliberate Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2-style comedy to the film, just dim-witted gruesomeness retrofitted with gimmicky contemporary trappings.

Hell is family in Another Happy Day, a portrait of one clan's reunion for a wedding that overflows with characters even more repugnant than the irony of its groan-worthy title.

For anyone hoping that Jean-Claude Van Damme's self-reflexive turn in Mabrouk El Mechri's postmodern JCVD heralded a new career direction for "The Muscles from Brussels," Assassination Games puts those dreams firmly to rest.

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.

Renny Harlin seems now incapable of taking a movie even as far as a few frames.

If the idea of a political thriller with a modern-day Cold War theme resonates with you or something in our collective unconscious, my FOMO levels are higher than a lonely night on Facebook.

At once hopelessly amateurish and given to desperate assertions of auterist "virtuosity."

Stripped Down seems to prove, if other films hadn't already for you, that a director haunted by traumas and wrestling with demons doesn't necessarily produce artistically substantial films.

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.

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.

One of the film's main problems is the fact that Shlain is so invested in connecting her father's scientific findings... with an astonishingly linear history of the world that she fails to see the more private connections that flicker in and out of her verbose voiceover.

All's Faire in Love's lackluster compositions and absence of rhythm are a perfect match for writer-director Scott Marshall's script (co-written with R.A. White and Jeffrey Ray Wine), which operates according to a Revenge of the Nerds-style us-versus-them template almost as stagnant as Ricci's phoned-in turn.

Andy Fickman's comedy offers a confused and flat portrayal of generational differences.

I'll tell you what's insane: the probability that folks will go easy on this dreck because it's aimed at younger viewers, who are being distressingly trained to expect little from their art.

Is Josh "Skreech" Sandoval the least deserving documentary subject ever?

Speculation is futile, as plausible, worthwhile answers are the last things Answers to Nothing is prepared to give. Not that you really cared anyway.

It's the rare film that should not introduce new story elements or characters past its first act. In Darkness, a garbage movie applying for unlimited credit on the most meager collateral, is that film.

That Red Hook Black, a strained film about two friends struggling with jobs and family in a bleak, thickly spread economic milieu, is adapted from a play is painfully obvious; that it's never able to transcend its staginess makes it unbearable.

Until its pair of ludicrous twist endings, which complicates its message and logistics in ways that make little sense, Gabe Torres's Brake plays like a more simplistic version of Buried tailored specifically to a hawkish right-wing crowd.

L!fe Happens wants us to believe its message is one of female independence and empowerment.

Writer-director Michael A. Nickles may momentarily shout out to Peeping Tom via a shot of its DVD, but Playback is merely a voyeurism-tinged horror film of dismal direct-to-video quality.