Theory’s premise dares to interrogate what, if anything, the apparent randomness of life means. Brown and screenwriter Michael J. Kospiah haven’t the foggiest, but they’re willing to unload as many harebrained plot twists as it takes to obfuscate the question.

The film isn’t remotely funny or insightful enough to justify spending an hour and a half in such intensely disagreeable company.

Where Ted managed a respectable ratio of clever (or at least transcendently dumb) gags to lazy/offensive ones, Ted 2 is a repetitive, self-congratulatory slog, dragged down by a haphazard plot and the same third-act problems that ultimately sunk the first film.

Bound To Vengeance is not necessarily an evil film, or even a hateful one. It’s confused at best, though it’s more likely that the film’s misguided pseudo-feminist subtext is a result of simple thoughtlessness.

United Passions leaves no historical-drama cliché unexploited: the voiceover narration, the jumbled Europudding accents, the expository dialogue, the hasty compression of major world events, the thickly applied old-age makeup, the not remotely seamless mix of re-creations and archival footage. It’s all there, in support of FIFA’s lies.

There’s little in Burying The Ex to suggest it’s a Dante movie at all, given how far it’s removed from the smart, exciting films he used to make. Maybe it’s best if everyone just pretends he wasn’t involved.

Virtually nothing happens in the film that enhances viewers’ understanding of the situation. Winterbottom and company merely survey the scene, kick around a few half-assed moments of atmosphere and suspense, shrug their shoulders, and pack it in for the night.

Phantom Halo is overstuffed even before Bogdanovich starts layering in the soliloquies and comic book metaphors.

Gomez-Rejon has erected a gleaming shrine to adolescent narcissism.

The movie offers more of the same, only more: more T&A, more conspicuous consumption, more cameos, more Jeremy Piven yelling, and significantly more Mark Cuban than anyone outside the city of Dallas needs to see.

Though the memory of Hooper’s picture haunts every frame of nü-Poltergeist, Kenan’s will fade unseen into the great beyond first.

There are reasons why everyone on screen looks as unhappy as they do, but Llosa puts viewers in a place where they can’t understand precisely why, so the only choice is to sit there marinating in misery and boredom.

It’s only fitting that a series that began with the concept of linking the digestive tracts of three people would end by feasting on its own shit.

Barbarash doesn’t do much to compensate for the misshapen script, either. Fumbling camerawork and incoherent editing rob the film’s generous fight sequences of their oomph, and amateurish green screen hobbles a car-chase sequence.

There’s nothing clever or subversive about Playing It Cool, which makes the film’s overt self-satisfaction exponentially more infuriating.

Branaman’s script piles on low-level drama, bad decisions, and enough misdirection to make the film’s baffling ending feel not just unearned, but entirely unbelievable.

In some ways it takes the right approach, attempting to mix moral lessons into a narrative rather than hit audiences over the head with them. But the lessons are so pat that every moment in which Pepper makes a good moral choice feels like an act of self-congratulation.

Sorting through the shards of the Ottoman Empire requires a historical complexity that eludes Crowe, who flattens the landscape into bromides on family and country, and the hard-won glories of being Russell Crowe. His on-screen persona could stand to be as modest as his filmmaking abilities.

After The Ball commits its most garish faux pas in rooting its plot in the thorny politics of high fashion, despite an apparent lack of any understanding of how the business works.

Planetary’s message is repetitive without being enlightening, and the film and its assorted participants insist on hitting the same beats without pause, until the concept loses all meaning.

It can’t be faulted for its noble intentions. Like many an after-school special, however, it can be faulted in virtually every other department, including stilted performances, turgid dialogue, flat direction, and a general ignorance regarding human nature.

However misguided, it’s clearly one from the heart, a movie that should never have happened, and one that’s hard to believe actually exists. Roar is one of a kind. With any luck, it always will be.

In the past, James at least had likability on his side. He was a big, lumbering oaf, the ideal drinking buddy. But there’s an arrogance to the way he treats people here, particularly a gorgeous hotel employee he’s convinced is in love with him, that renders him strangely unsympathetic.

The movie’s style consists of tossing up a lot of heartbreaking medical stories next to a characterization of the industry as a mysterious monolith, and letting viewers finish the correlation in their heads. When it’s possible to use the same line of reasoning to push both truth and lies, different tactics are in order.

Try as they might to make sense of their characters, Chopra’s actors are unanimously defeated by the oft-embarrassing dialogue they’re given to recite.

With familiar faces like Arquette and Sevigny turning up in nothing roles, the film looks like a cheap, underproduced facsimile of the crime movies it’s trying to emulate. It goes down in a blaze of hoary.

this old-school international hodgepodge production is weighed down by a lumbering humorlessness and a glacial pace that makes it seem far longer than its 115 minutes.

The deathly silence doomed to haunt theaters during Get Hard allows audiences far too much time to think about its problematic attitudes toward race, gender, sexuality, and class, as well as its borderline-nonsensical plot.

The result is a relentlessly dour film livened up only by Bardem’s shameless scenery-chewing and the occasional jolt of action. Otherwise, it’s an endless frown of a movie that does little but confirm that Penn’s talents, while impressive, aren’t limitless.

It doesn’t make any sense, but Insurgent demands its audience play along anyway. The problem is, the film doesn’t do enough to earn viewers’ trust, or reward it once it’s given.

Although the film is supposedly about movement, Growing Up And Other Lies frequently stalls out, and whole patches of it grind on without momentum or purpose.

The Cobbler is such a weirdly somber comedy that it would almost be in poor taste to laugh during it, though there’s not much danger of that happening.

Although the film appears to be aiming for pitch-black humor, it’s all so mirthless that the result is genuinely ugly.

Shatkin is trying hard here, but Whaley’s overwrought script keeps the young actor from utilizing his charm; Reggie is simply difficult to be around, even as Meester’s Eleanor is expected to act charmed by all his quirks and issues.

Unfinished Business aspires to high-spirited antics, but it feels defeated and exhausted from the very start.

The humor is seldom character-based: It’s more a matter of actors saying whatever outrageous thing springs to mind at that moment.

Cross gathers a lot of narrative strands and elegantly knots them during a big, farcical climax. But that’s the one aspect of the film that truly works as it should. Just about every other element of Hits, from its eagerness to snigger at the expense of small-town yokels to its sneering disdain for the common-rabble forum YouTube, leaves a sour taste.

Perhaps it was deliberate strategy on the part of McCann and his screenwriter, Anthony Di Pietro, to neutralize the politics of a mass killing and focus more on the psychic stress that triggered it. But even if that was the case, it doesn’t make the film any less crushingly banal.

Grant specializes in bastards, but he makes them so charming that viewers can nearly forget, and even forgive, their consistently bad manners. It’s a good skill, and it’s put to heavy use in Marc Lawrence’s otherwise charmless, vaguely offensive The Rewrite.

Old Fashioned fails in more banal ways, too. It’s a flatly predictable sort of romance; numerous leaves are turned over, both figuratively and literally. The film’s predilection for screamingly obvious symbols gets old fast.

Come third-act time, however, Enter The Dangerous Mind goes straight into the toilet, transforming into Jim: Portrait Of A Schizophrenic Serial Killer.

Luke Matheny’s perversely milquetoast romantic comedy seems to have escaped from the afternoon schedule of the Lifetime network and secured a VOD and theatrical release it patently does not deserve.

The trouble with Black Or White is that it feels reverse-engineered, as if Binder wanted to deliver one big statement about race, and rigged an entire movie to make that possible.

Supremacy is a well-acted, abysmally written, deeply unpleasant exercise that pays no dividends of insight (or heaven forfend, amusement) for the chore of enduring its endless racial epithets and handheld shots of gun barrels in faces.

Strange Magic certainly isn’t an ordinary sort of mess, and the personal nature of the project is still evident in the finished film.

Mortdecai’s farcical mechanics are actually well worked out, which is a credit to Koepp, an ace Hollywood screenwriter (Jurassic Park, 2002’s Spider-Man) who directed the fun late-summer sleeper Premium Rush two years ago. It’s just the jokes that are astonishingly unfunny.

The film’s lazy reliance on distraction extends to keeping its female lead underwritten and unsympathetic.

Perversely low-budget and oddly devoid of imagination, Vice seems less like a proper film than a bargain-basement SyFy pilot, shot on the cheap and drafting off Willis and Jane’s star power. It’s about androids aching to be real, but it doesn’t have an ounce of genuine humanity in its tin heart.

Even Neeson can’t rescue this halfhearted shrug of a movie.

As well-intentioned as it is thoroughly inept, Black November would be a serious contender for year-end worst lists if it weren’t so painfully noble and sincere.

Even for the third entry in a family franchise, the construction is lazy to the point of indifference.

A film that could only succeed by sorting through gradually darkening shades of gray works exclusively in embarrassingly bold strokes.

By the end of The Pyramid, found footage becomes just another possession to be buried alongside long-dead Pharaohs for use in the next life. Here’s hoping the next life has no return policy.

No amount of cosmic fireworks or woozy strings can hide the nice-guy passive-aggressive bullshit squatting at the center of Comet—it’s like a dreamy, swoony De Beers ad that stars Cecil Rhodes.

The movie is dreadful, filled with painfully broad humor, grating performances, and acidly rendered characters.

Ribald yet frantically unfunny, it wears out its welcome within the first five minutes, and never comes close to gaining it back. It feels like an alternately flat and flailing television pilot for a bro-comedy no one in their right mind would ever pick up.

While a defter touch could have made the marriage between fizzy romance and domestic drama work, All Relative fails to engage because the emotional connection between all parties—Harry and Grace, Harry and Maren, Grace and Maren—is weak to nonexistent.

It feels like the series has run its course, and should be relegated to the dustbin of history alongside the hardware it so lovingly pays tribute to.

Reach Me wants to be masterpiece, but it’s a finger painting. By Captain Hook.

As the onscreen moon goes through its inexorable cycle, Late Phases transforms from laughably non-frightening horror film to self-serious family drama and back again, all the while remaining ferociously, ravenously boring. Silver bullets would be a mercy.

The film uses its setting as lazy shorthand: for the nostalgia of lost childhood, the virtues of independence, and the spiritual purity of acoustic rock. And the hero unearths all this meaning while only having to interact with one person older than 30.

A Yuletide comedy so slight, it sometimes feels like a bonus-sized Christmas episode for a sitcom that never should have been green-lit in the first place.

Sex Ed takes a lot of glee in subjecting its timid hero to a rancid sewer of sexual excess early on, but the film’s apparently strong belief that it deserves to be taken seriously—despite its title, premise, and utter worthlessness—both as a comedy and as social advocacy might just be the most offensive thing about it.

Hit By Lightning might have worked as black comedy, but Blitt clearly lacks any instinct for genuine darkness.

Exists isn’t a found-footage horror movie about Bigfoot experts; it’s one about a group of stranded cinematographers. Just kidding, it’s obviously about a group of stupid young people who couldn’t shoot a competent Vine, let alone a visually coherent feature.

Young Ones looks promising in the early going, when it’s relying on Shannon’s customary intensity and building its harsh, arid world. (Principal photography took place in South Africa.) Shannon quickly disappears, though, and that’s when the dreary plot kicks in.

Alejandro González Iñárritu is a pretentious fraud, but it’s taken some time to understand the precise nature of his fraudulence.

There’s a good horror movie to be made about how the insularity of the Amish could stoke paranoia and fear—and obscure the truth and forbid outside perspective—under these circumstances, but The Devil’s Hand doesn’t have more than a casual interest in Amish rituals and traditions.

Although the live-action Kite has been graphically desexualized, the anime’s exploitative attitude nevertheless prevails, made all the more prominent by the film’s refusal to engage with it directly.

Dracula Untold boldly attempts to retell the Dracula origin story by sinking its teeth into Bram Stoker’s novel and draining it of all the passion, sensuality, and ambience that have seduced readers and moviegoers since the turn of the 20th century.

Lewins’ reductively humanist approach is at odds with how distanced the movie feels from any trace of a real human at its core.

To borrow a phrase from Patton Oswalt’s bit on a particularly monstrous fast-food creation, the film is “a failure pile in a sadness bowl.”

Neither Grossman’s uninspired staging nor the performances help much.

The impression left by Harmontown is that the podcast and the tour are feeding the beast, worsening a pathology that casts him as the “mayor” of whatever stage he happens to be occupying at the moment.

The film is adequately directed, well-photographed, and competently acted. But it’s rotten at its core.

The film aims for twee, but lands on torturous. It’s narcissism blown up to a global scale, in the guise of a quirky voyage of self-discovery.

A poorly stitched together Frankenstein’s monster of a film: crass one moment, grandiose the next, and dead from head to toe.

To the film’s mild credit, it’s the rare woman-in-peril thriller where the woman takes intelligent steps to defend herself.

Dolphin Tale 2 makes audiences wade through endless oceans of tedium for those scattered, fleeting moments of grace.

The film’s constant nods to the artificiality of its narrative highlight its precious, cloying phoniness rather than subvert it.

Even allowing The Identical its premise, the reframing of the Elvis myth as a wholesome example of following God’s plan is not as inspirational as the film seems to believe. Rock fantasies are rarely this milquetoast.

The prevailing tone throughout Innocence is as somber as the onset-of-twilight blues and grays that dominate the movie’s color palette. All that seriousness ultimately doesn’t blend well with a narrative that marinates in the preposterous.

As Above/So Below purposefully generates a certain air of mystery by keeping the exact nature of its protagonists’ experience enigmatic, but for a film that takes place underground in tightly enclosed spaces, it’s surprisingly thin on suspense and palpable physical danger.

All would be forgiven if director Brian A. Miller were the next John Woo, but the shootouts and car chases call to mind adjectives like “requisite” and “obligatory,” and the ready-made New Orleans ambience is nonexistent, probably for budgetary reasons.

It’s so egregiously awful, so utterly without merit, that it makes its predecessor seem much worse by association. The film’s brainless, chest-beating brand of hyper-pulp calls into question whether Sin City was any good at all, or whether the novelty of its visuals and storytelling merely masked a howling nothingness at its core.

Ostensibly a lame treatise on how slippery self-image can be in the Internet age, the film ultimately reveals itself as a much lamer treatise on the evil sorcery of female sexuality.

While discipline and self-control certainly figure into Ladouceur’s teachings, there’s also a passion and drive that’s totally absent from Caviezel’s performance. It’s not that the film needs any more goosing—it’s broad and shameless even by inspirational-sports-movie standards—but its basic lack of plausibility starts with him.

What keeps Jersey Shore Massacre lively is that this mean-spirited, aggressively stupid film constantly finds new and shocking ways to be terrible.

Ultimately, the lackluster fight scenes are what make 14 Blades a disposable addition to the wu xia world.

Director Gregory W. Friedle, his cast, and crew perform their jobs so poorly across the board, it’s an inadvertent negative demonstration of the professionalism separating even the shoddiest Hollywood production from this kind of self-financed amateur-hour attempt.

Mostly the problem is that every aspect of The Giver feels both painfully familiar and like an awkward, unsupportable stretch. For a film about the deep, hidden dangers of enforced sameness, that’s almost hilariously ironic.

Let’s Be Cops takes its premise in the dullest, most predictable direction imaginable, as a wacky mismatched-buddy-cop movie pitched to the lowest common denominator.

Beyond its mere unfunniness and stupidity, Septic Man is criminally unimaginative.

TMNT confuses “dimly lit” for “gritty” and humorless for substantive. It’s afraid of being too fun or too light, and doesn’t seem to know whether it wants to be a Nolan film or a 21 Jump Street-style spoof.

After is essentially The Room of 9/11 movies, a position that was really best left unfilled. Its heart might be in the right place, but that gulf between pain and understanding has never been clearer, and might now be even wider than it was before.

Sincerity and good intentions are all it has going for it, alas, and the result is the cinematic equivalent of a plate full of spinach.

As fresh as a stiff tissue and even less appealing, the film takes its cues from so many disparate sources, it almost feels like an accidental spoof.

[Andrews] and screenwriter Jake Wade Wall seem fully aware of the long line of icky horror comedies that precede theirs, but their attempt isn’t scary enough for homage or funny enough for satire.