The film crams in jokes long past the point of relevance and often to outright distraction, if not annoyance.

The political dynamic that underpins The Rules of the Game is nonexistent in 1st Night, which is fixated entirely on the zany sexcapades of its characters.

There's a sinister, even insidious quality to a film that insists upon using incessant food montages not as a source of passion, but fodder for class-based self-congratulation.

The film quickly settles into a depressingly one-note groove as a culture-clashing circus act.

A welter of dissonant intentions, the film fails to seamlessly intertwine its elements of realism and fantasy.

It culminates in a weepy climax that verifies its status as a proud hunk of propaganda from America's massive self-help industry.

The film presents its scattershot cop-movie tropes in earnest, as if, like hurricanes, they were natural, unavoidable phenomena.

Beginning of the Great Revival is muddled, all right, but it's the helter-skelter speed at which it ticks off names and incidents, both in hopelessly confused action and on-screen text, that seems nearly unprecedented.

Any masochistic joy that can be derived from watching the film owes to seeing it take its bullheaded conceit to its logical, artless extreme.

Even permitting that the movie's setup counts almost by default as one of Nicholas Sparks's more complicated scenarios, that makes his failure to draw up compelling, flawed, human characters all the more conspicuous.

The film may be too preposterous to take seriously, but at least writer-director Aram Rappaport trains his sights on the right enemies.

If first-timer Aleksander Bach's choices as a director are any indication, he's a filmmaker who cares less about characters and actors than about dubious surface dazzle.

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.