Writer-director Kelker never establishes a consistent tone, eventually aiming for a tragic conclusion that feels hopelessly unearned.

It's never fun watching a comedian's shrewdness ossify into shtick. Yet whatever incisiveness Ricky Gervais once had (and he had plenty, if The Office and Extras are any indication) is barely evident in the new Netflix-released satire Special Correspondents

It may be Hot Sugar's Cold World, but that doesn't mean we have to live in it.

Where Attenborough's script lent an air of dignity to the shorter film, Allen's reading of Philip LaZebnik's cutesy narration has a canned feel, and is unlikely to connect with viewers too young to appreciate cliched humor about the joys of bachelorhood versus the duties of parenting.

Eli Roth and screenwriter Joe Carnahan could have done the same thing, manifesting the rages and fears that afflict the country we live in right now. Instead they offer a cheap and dishonest Death Wish that (references to social media notwithstanding) is interchangeable with get-tough knockoffs that have flooded cinemas for decades.

Blumhouse has certainly proved very successful with its inventive, low-budget approach to horror, but now that the company is spewing out movies like an assembly line, more and more duds are starting to appear. Everything about this effort, including its hackneyed, overfamiliar title, smacks of laziness and a cynical indifference to its lack of originality.

Every conceivable button is pushed to achieve rote satisfaction in young viewers, while any notion of creating tension and suspense is dutifully ignored. Not for a moment is actual peril considered as something worthy of a dramatic climax.

Many Christians yearning for faith-based entertainment will be moved by this film, and that crowd may well ensure a profit for the production. But more picky viewers will admit that even taken solely as an exploration of the trials of being a Christian teen, it's awfully weak tea as a movie, instantly disposable if not for the tragic backdrop.

Lack of originality and self-awareness prove to be a fatal combination. There is something way too familiar about Hoffman's rites-of-passage portrait of wasted youth, with its inevitable soundtrack of fashionable angst-rock and predictably retro-cool cult-movie influences.

In terms of real horror, nevermind sexual-politics provocation, "Grave" can neither re-create its predecessor's impact nor compete with stranger new beasts like Lars von Trier's "Antichrist."

This is a shallow snapshot of First World problems and feeble conflicts that makes you despair for the state of gay-themed drama, perhaps even more so because it's capably acted and assembled with a slick sheen.

Far stronger on atmosphere than actual suspense, Grand Isle plods along in tedious fashion, not helped by its awkward framing device that gives it the feel of a Southern fried police procedural.

Despite the best efforts of the talented lead performers and an overqualified supporting cast, this is a movie for which you should practice social distancing.

No legitimate distributor would bother with a film "whose crackpot elements aren't even exploited in a way that will appeal to those watching solely to make fun of them."

Even with locked-down consumers scraping the bottom of the Netflix content trough, this new addition to the lineup is pretty dreary.

The charisma-endowed Washington and Sy do all they can to make the proceedings engrossing but even they are hard-pressed to make it interesting.

Director/co-screenwriter Pearry Teo succeeds in investing the silly proceedings with spooky visual stylishness, providing enough scary demons and possessed mannequins to deliver the requisite jump scares. Unfortunately, the film also features sound, which results in the audience being able to hear the inane dialogue accompanying the familiar horror tropes.

Depicting the very long, violence-filled night that ensues after a group of young people trespass in a creepy, abandoned prison, Against the Night proves as generic as its title.

There's little sense of personal investment from the director, but Egoyan does what he can to keep the story moving forward, without getting bogged down in its implausibilities, which are too many to count.

The dialogue suffers from a strained, turgid quality, most resembling a daytime soap opera.

As leaden as the bullets whose random behavior it revolves around, Géla Babluani's 13 fails to recapture the sweaty tension of his original 13 Tzameti, a French import that reeked of style and first-timer ambition.

The film's pretentious style and fractured storytelling preclude any audience involvement in the coy melodrama.

Whatever you have to pay, it's too much.

Making her feature directorial debut at the tender age of 70, veteran actress Connie Stevens delivers an obviously heartfelt but sadly unfocused melodrama in the form of Saving Grace B. Jones.

Onscreen, it somehow manages to be at once wildly overblown and terminally boring.

This treacly and overwrought piece of mishegoss from French novelist turned director Amanda Sthers is pretty much a chore from start to finish.

This talky, ham-fisted effort proves particularly disappointing because it should have been much better than it is.

This Bannon is a snooze, occasionally making a wry aside but nearly never saying anything unusually smart or new. ... It's hard to see what ordinary viewers at any point on the political spectrum will gain from this particular status report.

It would, after all, take a sleuth of Hercule Poirot-like talents to discern what attracted these supremely talented (not to mention, in the case of one of them, Oscar-winning) thespians to such lame, cliched material.

Concerned with both physical and psychological hazards of the job, Life on the Line manufactures a pileup of looming disasters to which director David Hackl lends no cadence.

As recently as last year's "Motherless Brooklyn," Willis has proven that, when he feels like it, he's capable of giving interesting performances. Although no one begrudges him a decent living, it's frustrating that he seems to be settling for such low-rent VOD Steven Seagal/John Travolta-style vehicles at this point in his career.

The film becomes a hodgepodge that will enlighten few viewers.

Despite its effort to double as a sincerely impassioned message about female empowerment, My Way mainly comes across as a relentlessly self-serving promotional vehicle.

What fun there is falls to Jackman, who gives the grand old man of pirate characters plenty of fresh and unusual wrinkles and emerges better than the others simply by virtue of playing a two-dimensional, rather than one-dimensional, figure.

Not so much blasphemous as just outrageous for the hell of it.

Well-intentioned but heavy-handed ... To be fair, while Parker's film lacks finesse and the writing too readily slides into bullet-point didacticism and self-righteous speechifying, it does go to some lengths to give both sides a voice, even if it inevitably stacks the deck.

Toilet humor, jokes about paraplegics and serious overacting make this lowbrow comedy an irritating watch.

Assassin’s Creed is resolutely stone-faced, ditching the humdrum quips that are par for the course in today's blockbusters. But this is almost two hours of convoluted hokum that might have benefited from a few self-deflating jabs.

The English term "shambolic" best describes a slow-paced, bloated and self-indulgent picture that combines science fiction, sophomoric humor and grisly violence soaked in a music-video sensibility.

This remake turns a fondly remembered horror/thriller into a mild and tedious suspense film.

A seemingly well-intentioned but deeply flawed film about dementia that becomes as erratic and misguided as its protagonist, Sharon Greytak's Archaeology of a Woman does no favors to those afflicted with cognitive disease or those hoping to understand them.

Given the tragic and highly charged events it depicts, All Eyez on Me is oddly low on emotional bite, perhaps because it never feels real. As clean and polished and blandly overlit as a TV soap opera, Boom’s film looks and feels smaller than Tupac’s cinematic life story.

Lacking suspense and at times bordering on unintentional silliness in its characterizations, the film is a misfire that sorely disappoints as it comes from the director of such acclaimed efforts as The Syrian Bride and The Lemon Tree.

As it thuds along from one wolf attack to the next, Catherine Hardwicke's first film since taking leave of Bella and her toothy friends adamantly refuses to provide any wit, humor or fun.

A very loose and extremely limp adaptation of Don DeLillo's 2001 novella The Body Artist, it palpably aspires to be a classily highbrow kind of romantic ghost story with psychological thriller undertones, but falls laughably short of its goals.

Sadly, there’s no trace here of the authentic fondness for his characters that illuminated Hill’s directing debut, Mid90s. Just a load of solipsistic L.A. brain rot trying to pass for satire.

Originality or insight aren’t very high on the priority list of this drama.

A sluggish exercise in formalism ... [Monica] feels like a movie perpetually struggling to connect.

Not even Douglas can redeem The Reach, the terminally silly and thoroughly disposable new thriller he stars in and produced.

The sad result is a karaoke nightmare. Loud and pointlessly crude, the film takes the disintegration of a dysfunctional working-class family and gives it the song-and-dance treatment.

Shot inconsistently in the series’ mockumentary style, which often finds the characters delivering direct addresses to an unseen camera crew, the relentlessly tedious film is devoid of laughs.

Poms is equal parts boring and infuriating, especially when you consider the actresses made to perform caricatures of old age.

Despite its very brief running time, the film feels plodding, never quite managing to land either the intended dark humor or scares to which it aspires. You can admire its ambitions but lament the missed opportunities.

At a lean, mean 90 minutes or so, Ambulance might have been a guilty pleasure. Instead, it’s the sort of cinematic thrill ride so overstuffed that you can’t wait for it to be over.

For all its admirable intentions and the terrific performances by its talented ensemble, Inherit the Viper fails to have any genuine impact. Neither weighty enough to satisfyingly explore its themes nor sufficiently suspenseful to work as a straightforward thriller, the film proves dramatically inert.

It falls short on character definition, emotional involvement, narrative drive and originality.

If ever there was a lusty, lowbrow genre film destined for a life on video, this is it.

Excitement is hard to find in Joo-hwan Kim's The Divine Fury, a leaden good-vs-evil tale that takes issues of faith very, very seriously but fails to make K.O.-ing the Devil look the least bit fun.

What spark there is in the movie comes in the scenes when Vivian and Nana are getting to know each other. Both actresses have a sweet chemistry and strong screen presences that you wish were better utilized.

It’s a shame, because Cuoco’s well-honed comic skills are very much on display and Oyelowo, working in a lighter vein than usual, seems to be enjoying himself. Which is more than you’ll be able to say about the viewers of this tired action-comedy retread.

Fails both as historical re-enactment and as action-flick thrill ride.

Its rhythms are sluggish, its jokes predictable and the gags are set up with such thudding deliberateness that even the sight of Ferrell losing control of a motorcycle, careening through the air and crashing straight through his house barely raises an eyebrow.

For a movie with so much volatile physicality and bruising punishment, there’s an inertia about the whole thing, a soullessness that makes every contrived smirk grate. We don’t care about who gets pounded to a pulp or shot to pieces because there are no characters to root for — good guys or bad.

The acting is overly broad, so even the dimmest light bulb in the audience gets the gags.

While the precociously talented Sidney, played by Logan Lerman, is not an uninteresting character, the artificially constructed nature of the narrative gives the supposedly shocking revelations way too much importance, essentially subjugating any sense of character development and flaws to its mystery-type structure.

Combining its adventure and romantic plotlines in painfully hokey fashion, The Space Between Us (the title is a pun, get it?) is so ludicrous that only a cinematic stylist might have been able to pull it off.

With the exception of a decent train-top chase, Torque is all vroom and no action.

Let's Go to Prison ultimately feels as long as a stint in the big house.

There’s no denying that The Tomorrow Man has a knockout ending. But is it worth sitting through the mundane, relatively uneventful film that precedes it? Few will think so.

This latest installment of the horror movie spoof franchise is mainly notable for its Charlie Sheen/Lindsay Lohan cameos.

There’s plenty of imagination on display in The Blazing World, but it’s buried amidst the narrative and stylistic self-indulgence that assumes we’ll be interested in going on this very strange and ultimately enervating journey.

Small-screen comic talent is all over Fresno, with key players from series including Parks & Rec, Arrested Development and Portlandia teaming up for a tale of two sisters stuck with a hard-to-dispose-of dead body. The feature, sadly, exhibits none of the smarts or agility that fuel those series.

Whatever goodwill superfan director Colin Trevorrow earned with 2015’s enjoyable reboot, Jurassic World, he pulverizes it here with overplotted chaos, somehow managing to marginalize characters from both the new and original trilogies as well as the prehistoric creatures they go up against in one routine challenge after another. Evolution has passed this bloated monster by.

Notable Bollywood producer-director Vidhu Vinod Chopra makes a highly uneasy transition to American films with this weirdly baroque modern-day Western that, while it boasts undeniably imaginative visual and plot flourishes, is far too absurd to take seriously.

It’s especially sad to see such notable actors as Caan and Patric reduced to appearing in this sort of bottom of the barrel, direct-to-video fare.

This lame effort represents international collaboration of the most mediocre kind.

The movie morphs from sluggishness to confused ludicrousness, as it turns into a thrill-deprived thriller.

Dead air left in conversations may be meant to unnerve viewers, but is more likely to bore them.

Writer-director de Souza, with the help of five editors and 12 assistant editors, is unable to tell a coherent story or put together a decent fight sequence. There are likewise far too many characters to keep track of, undercutting what instant allegiances one forms for those heroes or villains that make a strong impression. [27 Dec 1994]

Despite the high-stakes drama, there's nary a compelling moment throughout, and some of the characterizations, especially Stormare's villainous Sanitation Department honcho, are so absurdly one-note that it's hard not to think that the film is meant as parody.

What's most disturbing about "Bank" is its lack of ambition. Maybe Jenkins will take more chances in the future. If he's lucky, this stinker will be quickly forgotten.

Nothing anchors the lighter-than-air story as it drifts away under the direction of Stephen Norrington ("Blade") into an FX stratosphere where wit, character and vigorous storytelling cease to matter.

Lame sketch comedy, an uninspired performance from Will Ferrell and an overall failure of the imagination turn Brad Silberling's Land of the Lost into a lethargic meander through a wilderness of misfiring gags.

Using the Desperate Hours template that has fueled countless thrillers since, Survive the Night is a particularly forgettable example of a tired subgenre that, like so many of Willis' recent efforts, squanders his still estimable movie-star charisma.

Gus Van Sant’s sticky, gooey side — previously on display in the likes of Finding Forrester and especially in the 2011 Restless — oozes out once more in the woefully sentimental and maudlin The Sea of Trees.

The film ultimately becomes bogged down by its meandering dialogue, generic characterizations and such mild attempts at suspense as one of the quintet worrying about a brother in New York City.

Eden Lake has the trappings of a low-IQ thriller but it's really a contemptible tract feeding the prejudices of the U.K.'s rightwing tabloids that claim the country is overrun by teenagers wielding knives.

A lackluster affair, devoid of laughs and just about anything else one might construe as entertainment.

Its largely Hispanic cast and extensive Puerto Rico locations lend a unique quality to Paul Kampf's prison drama starring Laurence Fishburne as a morally corrupt warden. Unfortunately, those elements are the only original aspects of this turgid exercise in prison movie clichés which doesn't even manage to be convincing as melodrama. Although certainly well-meaning in its condemnation of capital punishment, Imprisoned is too dully executed to achieve its desired impact.

This overly convoluted and contrived farce features a typically scenic setting and an engaging performance by Helena Noguerra in the central role but otherwise has little to recommend it.

It's never remotely involving, and you can feel the lead performers straining to handle their acting chores. The exception is Haddish, who is so convincingly scary and menacing here that you wish her character were in a better, dramatic movie.

The real problem here is not the shameless blurring of fact and fiction, but how unforgivably dull it all seems.

It's certainly an imaginative concept for a detective story, but the storyline gets so convoluted and baroque that unintentional humor sets in. By the time we learn the outlandish motivation of the time-traveling serial killer and her true identity, the twists have been coming so fast and furious that we've long stopped caring.

This is the sort of bad film that can only come about as the result of misguided ambitions.

Such an utterly routine, formulaic and forgettable example of its genre that watching it becomes an exercise in endurance. Even the always welcome presence of veteran actor William Fichtner, terrific as usual, isn't enough to save it.

Despite its scaldingly hot cast and formidable writer/director combination, The Counselor is simply not a very likable or gratifying film. In fact, it's a bummer.

Playing somewhat like a juvenile version of "Rosemary's Baby," this inept, incoherent attempt to cash in on young girls who can't buy a ticket to the R-rated "Saw V" (or are too lazy to sneak in) will be out of theaters long before the Halloween pumpkins start to rot.

The Happys never manages to find a consistent tone, awkwardly blending broad comedy with serious emotional moments that don’t come off. It also attempts to weave in serious discussions about sexuality and ethnicity in Hollywood, generally via stilted dialogue exchanges in which the themes are explored in boldface fashion.