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.

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

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

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.

It’s simply tacky consumer product that dishonors the famous name in its title—the same one that’s keeping this film from the direct-to-video burial it deserves.

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.

Cross-cutting the story of a cancer victim who’s struggling to maintain her agency with the story of the woman who’s trying to cure her should compellingly enhance both threads, but Bernstein refuses to take advantage of his film’s structure and draw meaningful connections between the two.

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.

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.

The latest—and perhaps dreariest—horror film to employ a found-footage conceit.

A film’s quality should be measured not by its agenda’s transparency, but by its narrative heft. And the narrative is the problem with Rising From Ashes.

As much an inspirational email forward as a film, it’s helped by the work of a strong cast and some photography that makes Nebraska look like heaven on earth. That doesn’t make it persuasive, however.

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.

The film’s reliance on formula and stereotypes wouldn’t be so frustrating if that formula worked and provided the glib pleasures the filmmakers are going for; instead, Ping Pong Summer feels stilted, undernourished, and oddly sour.

Rose’s film is just another formulaic found-footage throwaway, notable only for its wannabe-porno sensationalism, replete with a climactic money shot that’s simultaneously graphic and underwhelming.

A dull vanity project for the Southern highborn.

Repentance lurches unsteadily to a foregone conclusion that isn’t the riveting twist the filmmakers imagined: It’s the final, predictable disappointment in a film full of them.

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.

Where 300 made a virtue of its low budget by stripping the visuals down to their essential elements, the shot-in-Bulgaria Legend Of Hercules mostly just looks rushed and cheap, only coming to life in a handful of fight scenes, and then only briefly.

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.

The film’s monsters are so unconvincing that director Marvin Kren has no choice but to hide them as much as possible via rapid-fire editing and violent shaky-cam, relying on his actors to fill in the gaps with hysterical screaming.

Dim, compromised, and dead on arrival.

Give Age Of Extinction this much credit: Of all the Transformers movies, this is the longest. And save for a few visual centerpieces and a couple of amusing supporting turns, it’s also an endless, incoherent mess.

Ghost Team One may be the scariest picture this Halloween season, demonstrating that material so blatantly offensive can still be acquired by a major studio, and released mostly without comment.

Crave is nothing but empty movie-shout-out posturing.

Under the direction of Susan Seidelman—who first focused on a lost woman with identity issues in 1985’s Desperately Seeking Susan—the leads in The Hot Flashes come across as one-dimensional, pseudo-feminist clichés whose conversations seem contrived and whose jokes land with the thud of airballs clunking on hardwood.

The film doesn’t feel like a fresh riff on familiar tropes so much as a bad cover of Pulp Fiction.

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.