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

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.

The problem with Smurfs 2 isn’t the message, it’s the way the film repeats it so baldly and emphatically that even the youngest kids can get it. Also, the way it surrounds that message with groin-smashing and farting.

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.

Never less than predictable and all-too-often torpid, it’s a work that filters roiling true life through stolid formula.

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

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.

I do not invoke the terms “Gestapo” or “genocide” lightly; for an ostensible romp aimed at small children, Guardian Of The Highlands is an incredibly dark, disturbing film that derives all of its suspense from putting adorable animals in horrible peril.

[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.

It’s a film that feels like it’s simply going through the motions—not to mention one whose ultimate critique of trying to relive the past is, in light of its mass of clichés, more than a tad disingenuous.

This trio of leads is so wooden, they make Mann’s hysterically over-the-top villainy seem refreshingly energetic by comparison.

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.

Haunt winds up being memorable only for its absence of subtlety or surprise.

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

Made In America is a puff piece, a shallow, insufferable exercise in hagiography that seems to operate under the delusion that a festival bill combining rock, pop, and rap acts represents a dazzling innovation, not the status quo for festivals like Lollapalooza, Coachella, Bonnaroo, and countless others.

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.

If Persecuted wasn’t such a dire thriller, its sweaty fear of pluralism (Obama’s “We are no longer a Christian nation” speech gets handed to Davison’s evil senator here) might at least be amusing.

Rather than having its characters’ circumstances reveal something about societal dynamics or human nature, Aftermath avoids depth; Engert casts his material in strictly suspenseful terms.

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.

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

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.

It is much less understandable, and not at all forgivable, that in eschewing the culture-clash comedy of the first film for generic action, the filmmakers forgot they were making a comedy at all.

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.

Nearly every one of the film’s attempts at comedy is clichéd, tasteless, or forced—sometimes all three at once.

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.

Loves Her Gun goes nowhere at a slothful pace.

The tease of 50 gorgeous women fighting to the death has a classic grindhouse appeal, but Raze is strictly a “be careful what you wish for” proposition.