A new directing and writing team fails to shock or scare with a color-by-numbers plot and a meandering, languid wannabe frightfest.

A bewildering 90-minute, narrator-less and wordless experiment that’s as audacious as it is infuriating. It’s not clear if everyone was high making it or we should be while watching it.

It might still be passable for cable, but this series has sadly fallen into unwatchable territory.

The question does arise not long into this, the 10th movie in the “Chainsaw” oeuvre: Did we really need another? And sadly, given the lack of imagination, creativity or even basic attention to logic in a perfunctory and downright silly script, the answer seems a resounding “Nope.”

Paramount’s limp, animated remake actually triggers new stereotypes in the service of trying to expose racism for a pre-teen audience. The studio seems to have reached for legitimacy by bringing the venerated Brooks along for the bumpy ride, darkening both legacies. What emerged sits uneasily at the corner of tribute, parody, theft and laziness.

It is more like half a movie, standing in the shadow of its parent. It is a film made to sell us more lunchboxes.

Spenser Confidential is a bit of a mess tonally with a plot that keeps attracting new weird layers, like lint on a sweater. It wants to be funnier than it is. It hopes to be deeper than it is.

Green wobbles as he tries to land this plane and what had been an intriguing premise to talk about fame and the parasitic industries that live off it turns into a gross-out, run-for-it bloodfest and a plot that unravels. It becomes what it intended to satirize — a pop spectacle.

Christmas on the Square is pure, studio-lot fantasy and not really trying to be anything else.

The filmmakers employ all kinds of ways to try to keep viewers interested, like split screens, some farce and a surreal dream sequence, but there’s not enough humor or grit or anything other than actors swanning around in period clothing.

If there was a stylish chic in the first film, it’s gone in the second, which sometimes seems cloying in its attempt to recreate the first.

Jenna Ortega’s stark rise as Gen Z’s goth-glam princess takes a pointless, awkward turn in “Miller’s Girl,” a new romantic horror movie about cerebral people that’s simply tiresome.

A sure sign that a movie is doomed from the start is when it opens with a printed quote from President Bush's September 1989 so-called "war" on Colombian drug lords, and the screening audience giggles. Fire Birds tumbles to the very depths of lousy filmmaking on that note. [21 May 1990]

Kraven the Hunter can climb sheer walls like a gorilla, snatch fish out of streams like a bear and outrun deer. But there’s something this slab of human beef can’t do: Anchor a decent movie.

Black’s filmmaking is old-school, grounded in ’80s humor, reveling at its over-the-topness and often gleefully thumbing its nose at political correctness. That might be refreshing, but it also can lead to questionable decisions.

Showing Up may be a rallying cry to let artists just be artists — Reichardt is famously an artist in residence at Bard College, in large part to have health insurance — but she may have miscalculated how much compassion is generated by a supposed lover of beauty who is as cold and off-putting as her figurines.

Director Julius Onah does well with the action but fumbles the quieter moments and supervises editing that’s the opposite of crisp, not helped by script writers who ape military language — “Negative, the package is the priority” — and grandiose sentiment — “The country is lost.”

The filmmakers — director Daniel Espinosa, hobbled by a meandering script from Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless — simply do not know what to do with this creature once they’ve given us his backstory.

Your enjoyment of the new Netflix comedy Coffee & Kareem may depend on whether or not you find insanely vulgar middle schoolers funny. It’s not just cursing either. Oh no, this is a whole symphony of vulgarity that would make Seth Rogen blush.

The movie is stupid and silly no matter how you look at it. It takes a stab at some sort of backward humor about feminism and male chauvinism. But it's merely pretentious and not very funny. [18 Apr 1989]

Writer and director Drew Pearce has made an uneven feature film directorial debut. He flaps around for a consistent tone, stunts some potential story lines and kicks out a bunch of cliches. Then, clearly unable to find a rational way to end his film, he adds two massive doses of nonsensical ultra-violence.

[A] dreary little waste of celluloid. [12 July 1993]

A Kiss Before Dying longs to be a thriller in the spirit of Alfred Hitchcock, but tailspins into the mire of Bret Easton Ellis. This is a witless, poorly constructed movie, stumbling over plot holes as big as Hitchcock's belly. [22 Apr 1991]

There is no thrill, entertainment or insight to be gleaned in watching the myriad ways people can die by their own hand. It’s just awful, and this is not a film that is interested in grappling with the trauma in any interesting or helpful way. Instead it is two hours of unpleasant drudgery.

Maybe [Borgli's] trolling America but “The Drama” is clearly the worst thing he’s ever done.

Tracy Torme's script is laden with plot holes and humdrum dialogue, and Robert Lieberman's direction does little to cure the deficiencies. [16 Mar 1993]

The director ends on a righteous note but he’s not earned it.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment of Dolittle isn’t the incoherent story line, the suffocating CGI or the unfunny stable of celebrity-voiced creatures. It’s that Downey’s personality doesn’t come through at all, either a victim of the surrounding mess or a party to it.