You Won’t Be Alone may not be a dumb or unimaginative exercise in style, but it also rarely encourages viewers to engage meaningfully with whatever’s on-screen.

It trots out a lot of posturing and a lot of gang-movie clichés but flails instead of giving us much reason to care.

If this new movie — referred to in some circles as Blumhouse’s Fantasy Island — were a pilot for a TV reboot, it would come off as overwrought and underwritten but still possibly on the right track for a revived anthology series. As a movie, those flaws are magnified to the size of the silver screen, and its contrivances and coincidences come off as even less convincing.

It’s fine to forfeit elements like stakes or suspense for a character piece, but when the characters are this vague, there’s nothing on which to hang your hat (or headband, for that matter).

"When the Game” is like a bad seven-layer salad: it's tempting in theory, but it's really just a jumble of random ingredients that wind up supremely unappetizing in the aggregate.

We’re told over and over how stunning, how sensitive, how remarkable he is. But he’s such a blank slate that there’s not much actual evidence of these traits. It’s not Dickinson’s fault; he’s been directed towards a particular style of performance that favors tell over show.

Ideologically, morally, and narratively, the film contains no point of view, no perspective that suggests human beings joined forces to create a piece of art they can stand behind.

Each empty bump in the night lands with a dull thud. Even a terrifying dog that becomes crucial to the film has a bark that’s worse than its bite.

A howlingly inane movie that somehow managed to collect an impressively A-list cast on its way toward becoming a cop movie that’s not just dumb, it’s disastrous.

Presumably, Sudeikis took this job to prove his dramatic skills, and he does deserve credit for achieving that goal. What he’s never able to generate, though, is a compelling case for the movie itself.

A busy but witless and stale comedy that rehashes every raunchy gag we expect from R-rated comedies, it also wears its hackneyed sentimentality and cookie-cutter underdog story beats as proudly as adhesive nametags.

This “Mummy” is rags that produce no riches.

18 ½ attempts to be part cloak-and-dagger thriller, part romantic comedy, part screwball comedy, and part mood piece, and its plotting is slapdash, to say the least.

Sex Tape is a hustler of a film — it works very hard for its laughs — but it's so haphazardly directed (by Jake Kasdan) and written (by Kate Angelo and Segel and Nicholas Stoller) that it can easily be divided into three distinct sections.

At the climax of Into the Storm, colossal tornadoes make noise, blow things up, and go around in circles; that's pretty much all the film does, too.

A misguided attempt to spin a nightmare scenario into a cutesy rom-com premise, this British production takes place in a harrowingly claustrophobic world where personal growth ends at age 18, and you meet everyone you’ll ever become friends with in your whole life during high school.

The Most Hated Woman in America is ultimately a simplistic approach to a fascinating figure, more Lifetime than a woman’s life and times.

The bad news is that no matter how charming or fizzy the chemistry between the actors might be, they're still trapped in the dead, fake melodrama and brainless coincidences of a Nicholas Sparks story.

Without that emotional groundwork to establish the contours of Cathy and Jamie’s relationship, “The Last Five Years” is largely a numbing experience.

For the most part, writer-director Stephen Susco (“The Grudge”) sees the Internet as a gimmick, a way to get some attractive, disposable protagonists from Point A to Point B. (Point A is “alive,” so…).

Following her well-received debut “First Match,” Newman hits a sophomore slump with this literary reinterpretation, where the performances in general renounce nuance for theatricality and most storytelling decisions unfurl like a subpar pastiche of vague components we’ve seen and heard plenty of times before.

This wildly uneven mix of nasty and nervy...is primarily a time-waster, trotting out clichéd misadventure tropes and predictable zigzags in a manner neither terribly funny nor suspenseful.

In Superintelligence, an average human being must convince a sentient AI program not to wipe out humanity. Lucky for all of us, the film Superintelligence is not entered as evidence that our continued existence is justified.

The major problem with Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom — the fifth installment in this dinosaur series, and the second of a prospective trilogy — is that the makers treat the action and suspense sequences in the way most of us go to the dentist.

In addition to listless direction from Sonnenfeld, and an overall feeling of cheapness and carelessness, Nine Lives also suffers from incoherence.

Neither good nor bad, nor campy nor scary enough to be in any way memorable, The Boy Next Door is a lot like our own neighbors, just there. You could make the effort to sneak a peek, but it probably wouldn’t be worth your while.

This version seems to have been made not to honor Alcott’s little women but instead to please the parents who want blandly wholesome family entertainment for their own. One can only imagine what Jo herself would have to say on the subject.

Tom Hooper’s jarring fever dream of a spectacle is like something that escaped from Dr. Moreau’s creature laboratory instead of a poet’s and a composer’s feline (uni)verse, an un-catty valley hybrid of physical and digital that unsettles and crashes way more often than it enchants.

American exceptionalism certainly deserves to be deconstructed, but that can most assuredly be accomplished with a lot more nuance than it is here. As an exercise in liberal self-flagellation, hey, whatever floats your boat. But as a political call-to-arms, I believe in America: We can do better.

Too earnest to be satisfyingly arch and too scattered to succeed as parody, Thorpe's goofy musical comedy only manages a sporadic charm through the occasional bon mot or a madcap flight of fancy.

Director Daniel Espinosa’s Child 44 turns a best-selling period-piece procedural into a slow, tedious thriller almost totally devoid of thrills. While the cast is full of exemplary performers — Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Noomi Rapace, Joel Kinnaman and more — the fault here is not in the stars, but in the material.

It's clear from the start that Dowdle isn't taking any of this seriously. The same cannot be said for the game and luckless cast of young actors, who are so whiny and hysterical right from the start of their plunge into the tombs that they win hearty unintentional laughs throughout.

By the film's end, Black or White raises only one question: Is its racial-baiting disingenuous or oblivious?

The Angry Birds Movie basically hits all the squares on the Lazily Conceived Family Cartoon bingo card.

Setting aside the half-baked characters and a plot so raw it’s probably got salmonella, Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is staggeringly inept in surprisingly obvious ways.

If nothing else, Dirty Grandpa is consistent: it maintains a tone of aggressive charmlessness from start to finish.

Russell’s brand of Sturges-inspired madcappery has always been a high-wire act of energy and tone, but Amsterdam doesn’t even feel like an “I Heart Huckabees” or “Joy” misfire. It’s sloppy and disconnected, crammed with thinly drawn characters play-acting ‘30s screwball as Russell’s unmoored camera and jarring editing force the issue instead of capturing something genuine which, even with a game cast, clearly wasn’t there to begin with.

Title’s command of the material is haphazard, her direction not artful enough to know when expository clunkiness is undercutting the chance to dig into the meat of personalities in deterioration.

Words and Pictures never accrues enough emotional resources to bear out the darker, heavier moments, which turns its big dramatic moves into clunky embarrassments.

Millepied’s debut . . . is a woefully pretentious and uninvolving slog, an arthouse screen-saver only sporadically ignited by its two best components: composer Nicholas Britell and Almodovar regular Rossy de Palma as a flamboyant nightclub owner-performer.

During the holiday season, when kids are being aggressively marketed to by every toy company who wants the top spot on Santa’s list, families deserve a movie that isn’t one long toy commercial.

A sex comedy lacking in sex, silliness or subversion, when just one would do.

There’s simply no time for the impact of anything that happens to get its reflective due, because the movie is too busy reverting to the up-and-down status of Michael’s and Ana’s increasingly inconsequential relationship while lining up its next large-scale set piece.

Some B-movies, of course, are highly entertaining. This one, though, seems like it was as much of a slog to make as it is to watch.

Third Person is an intricately constructed but unaffecting bore. Kinder people might call it an “interesting failure,” but to earn that label it would need to be interesting.

Does Tulip Fever feel like a precious bulb poorly nurtured? Primarily it comes across as something laboriously over-handled, and any flower so treated is bound to lose its luster. After waiting so long, the strongest fragrance on display is one of sweat and mediocrity.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2, is just good enough to make you painfully aware of all the ways it's not good at all.

The problem isn’t that the new 'Animal Farm' is unfaithful, it’s that the changes aren’t an improvement.

The film’s most genuinely funny moment involves A.J.’s ringtones, which should perhaps come as no surprise — the stakes, and the laughs, are so small that Ride Along 2 was apparently designed to be watched on your phone.

It’s tough to get invested in a romance between two people more interested in likes than love.

The material swings between the sensual and the puritanical with whiplash-inducing speed; the dialogue all too often has the flat, dead sound of a first draft.

The unfunny, unmoving, and uninspired Penguins never persuades us of its need to exist. Sure, there's a muddled lesson at the end, as tacked on as a Post-It on a piece of week-old cake.

The Loneliest Boy in the World mostly bobs along without incident, never challenging viewers’ assumptions nor giving us much to sink our teeth into.

The movie has too much on its plate in selling its paint-by-numbers uplift.

I was tempted to remark that Benson doesn't know how to write women, until I noticed that he doesn't know how to write men, either.

The results are an uncomfortable mixture of sanctimony and silliness.

The film veers back and forth between the obvious and the ridiculous.

What’s particularly disappointing about this effort is the amount of talent wasted.

The Fall Guy feels like an entire feature of scattered ideas that have been done better elsewhere.

If the past is any indication, Hendler, Winchell, Bello and everyone else involved have the capacity to create interesting, original, and engaged art. Max Steel is none of those things.

As soon as Willis deploys his trademark smirk, and the comfortable vengeance of tracking down his wife’s killers while avoiding detection takes over, it just becomes a million other B-movies about lowlifes getting what they deserve.

It’s an interesting enough premise, even if you divorce the film from its comic book origins, but bland direction and awkward dialogue overtake the film and add a sheen of mediocrity to the entire thing.

This sleepy and visually murky black-and-white drama belabors the same banal truisms about memory and role-playing during wartime –basically, it’s impossible to maintain your autonomy when you’re only a pawn in a complicated game — and tends to be more interesting to think about than to watch.

Whatever Life of the Party needs its star to be, it gives us — frumpy, hot, weird, normal, kind, mean, humiliated, heroic, limber, uncoordinated, sexy, unsexy — in the desperate hope that you’ll latch on to some nugget of McCarthy-patented brazenness and you’ll laugh, as if story and cohesion meant nothing.

Given that this is the auteur’s 20th theatrical feature film, there’s no longer any excuse for the pacing issues, the scenes that don’t end and the general flaccidness of his direction.

A clunky, heavy-handed film that takes a pressing contemporary issue and flattens it under two genres the writer-director seems ill-equipped to handle — the mockumentary and the courtroom drama.

Unconscionably overlong while offensively appealing to the lowest common denominator of filmgoers, this film would appear to lack a single reason to exist.

The dramatized movie we’ve gotten, All Eyez On Me, is a hagiographic dud that unfolds like a depth-free magazine listicle.

There is both too much plot in Just Getting Started and too little.

It’s a film that’s full of love, but it’s an unhealthy love that’s detached from reality and the movie seems detached as well. It’s too maudlin to convey its own moral complexity and too foreboding to be sentimental.

It’s just feature-length publicity, and it plays like damage control.

Viewers who, for whatever reason, love the first “Space Jam” may well find themselves delighted all over again, but as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to plunge a beloved sports figure into a century’s worth of pop culture iconography, “A New Legacy” is a big fat airball.

The inconvenient truth about Geostorm is that it’s dumber than a box of asteroid-sized hail. But to take it seriously for just a second, it misses an opportunity to turn idealism about the world coming together to solve its biggest problem and instead turns it into more of cinema’s biggest problem: empty-headed spectacle.

A joyless exercise in IP mining, Cheaper by the Dozen is all the more depressing for its glimpses of unfulfilled potential.

Unfortunately, to follow these characters around is to experience not great theater, nor rich cinema, nor architectural wonder, but rather the itch of the restless spectator.

We get a few effective set pieces early on that provide the requisite scares that A Cure for Wellness so obviously wants to deliver, but the movie just doesn’t know when to quit, lurching onward and growing more and more ludicrous.

This airless, laugh-less true story about 20-something wheeler-dealers who became arms salesmen during the Bush-Cheney invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan has no point of view, nor anything to say about war or commerce or even 20-somethings who wheel and deal.

Unfortunately, the Gemini Man that Ang Lee has finally made has such risible dialogue, such perfunctory characterization, and such rudimentary international-espionage plotting that viewers will soon stop asking why it took so long to go into production, and start asking why it went into production at all.

With zero romance and nonsensical thrills, the only legitimate theft here is of the viewer’s time.

Maybe if you hate movies, LaBute’s attempt to bore us to death with classic noir material is a nifty prank. For anyone else, you’re better off revisiting Garfield and Turner, or Stanwyck and MacMurray, or Hurt and Turner — or even “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.”

What’s especially pitiful about this installment, which has been given a perfunctory dark-action look by cinematographer Brendan Galvin (“Self/less”), is how often Stallone tries to give psychic heft to the wounded-warrior part of his creation, as if he were Ethan Edwards in “The Searchers” and not just a monosyllabic killing machine easily triggered.

Gods of Egypt might have merited a so-bad-it’s-good schadenfreude fanbase had it maintained the unintentional laughs of its first 10 minutes. Instead, it skids into dullness, thus negating the camp classic that it so often verges on becoming.

"Hillary’s America” isn’t designed to stand up to skepticism. It’s not intended to convince or to provoke thought, but to confirm the biases its intended audience already holds.

Watching Father Figures is like finding a piece of food in the back of your fridge that you barely recognize, but know right away it’s not worth eating.

It was disingenuous of the filmmakers to use the phrase “A New Era”, because the film relies wholly on its viewers’ affection for characters and situations they have seen many times before.

Ya Veremos, with all its clichéd antics and uneven performances, has already been a hit in Mexico despite middling reviews. Would an unsuspecting, non-Latino viewer who randomly walks into this have a pleasant reaction? Very likely, if your sensibilities align with the film’s tropes and feel-good qualities, and you don’t mind the glaringly predictable trappings.

A-X-L may be a dog, but he’s designed to be a weapon, so he looks like nightmare fuel. And nightmare fuel usually isn’t the best centerpiece for a family-friendly flick.

Dolittle doesn’t have a fraction of the verve of the similarly misguided “Cats,” but it does share with that movie a staggering amount of “What were they thinking?” decisions.

There are no build-ups or pay-offs here, just a lot of random moments of people saying stupid stuff, and fashion people being gently lampooned.

The glaring inadequacies of The Snowman are the only things shocking about it. Harry Hole’s film career could not have gotten off to a more inauspicious start.

Here Today tries hard to be warm and witty and ultimately devastating and poignant, but it remains firmly in the mushy middle of sitcom sentiment, with lessons learned and hugs exchanged and an “aww” from the studio audience.

So lacking in substance and purpose that after a while you can’t even hear the dialogue over the incessant sound of Aristotle’s ghost punching himself.

Its empty, loud breathlessness is the real bunk to behold: think trailer for a movie more than movie itself. Or more accurately, think teaser to the trailer to the movie. It’s a broken record of ersatz positivity and empowerment, practically shout-singing at you to be all you can be while it mostly just is what it is, plastic flash without any enduring oomph.

The filmmakers are more concerned with shock-cuts, loud bangs, and creating Indian characters that are either servants or monsters, than with pushing the genre forward into satisfyingly visceral or psychological territory.

Lacking poignancy at every level, what could have been a moderately exciting, if unoriginal, occupation thriller instead becomes a muddled and dispirited disappointment from the director who once earned high praise for “Rise of the Planet of the Apes.”

As an actor, Serkis may be the industry’ mo-cap master, but storytelling through performance is a different skill than writing or directing.

Wilson’s comic routines here set her apart from the others in the cast, and they more than amply hint that she should be set loose in her own vehicles far, far away from the other girls and all their “Glee”-like karaoke.

One of the more plastic molds of troubled heartthrob storytelling in recent memory...is the kind of dispiriting effort that thinks it’s scratching an itch for masochistic young girls, but primarily suggests that romance, desire and sexuality aren’t worth genuinely exploring.