Its pulls back from the original film’s cruelty and comeuppances for non-believers, yet its non-Christian characters are still parodies of human evil: greedy, bitter, violent, and out to prove that “God is dead.”

The Masked Saint didn’t screen for critics, but it’s no worse than any other faith-based film, which as a canon tends to sacrifice story for the sermon. A movie that can finally combine the two — now that’d be a miracle worth beholding.

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.

Occasionally Norm and everyone around him will break out into a dance, and you have to wonder if these numbers were scheduled as bathroom breaks.

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.

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

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

If all you need from a love story are two people smiling at each other and a narrator saying they’re in love, then Life Itself is for you. If all you require to show the passage of years is a CG montage or some cheap makeup, then Life Itself is for you. If the only way you’ll know things are tough is if everyone dies, then Life Itself is for you.

Sixteen years later, 9/11 remains too touchy a subject for a movie as clumsy as 9/11 to get entirely right. And even if the film relies too much on the real-life horror of the actual event to loan it some gravitas, the performances touch the emotions honestly and deservedly.

The chief distinction of Replicas is how detached it often is from the expected sense of words and images.

They just tried to do the same schtick, but longer and worse, and let’s face it, 'longer and worse' is only the goal if you’re trying to torture somebody.

Director Doane offers no storytelling pizzazz; the lighting is careless, the pacing is deadly, the occasional stabs at comedy fall flat. Ultimately, Saving Christmas has nothing to share that Linus Van Pelt didn't already say better on “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”

It’s a film full of boring conversations, daft sci-fi conceits, and confusing suspense, which add up to practically nothing. “Zero” indeed.

A brainless, exploitative folly which gives John Travolta free rein to mine the history of cringe-worthy autism portrayals for an offensively garish Frankenstein pantomime of unhinged obsession.

The Ridiculous 6 is everything wrong with Hollywood for the past two decades: a circle-jerk of imbecilic white-dude humor.

The film constantly reveals itself as having no idea how human beings speak or behave.

The film is just plain bad, with an amateur cast (led by Taylor James), cut-rate special effects, who-cares storylines, and confusing details shoehorned in from the Bible.

What’s never visible, through the monologues and hackneyed one-on-one chats, is a desire to use lighting beyond flat luminosity. Visual delivery matches the insipidness of the material.

If A Haunted House 2 is a step up from the previous go-round, it's either because a slightly more talented crew of comic actors are being asked to waste their time or because 2013 offered a better crop of horror films (“The Conjuring,” “Sinister,” etc.) to be lazily parodied.

Imagine an improv class where students sit in clusters, waiting for something funny to be said or to transpire, and you’ll have an idea of how this haphazard mess plays out.

What’s most dizzying about this film has nothing to do with political messages; those are all too clear. Instead, it’s the particularly mean and bizarre humor that boggles the mind.

This is about as egregious as filmmaking gets.

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.

It would be one thing if D'Souza had an idea, or any idea, he could stick to as a through-line in his project. But America isn't a documentary; it's more like the badly-filmed version of a badly-written, meandering op-ed piece from a paper that lacks fact-checking or proofreading.

The humor level in the film is so moribund that it doesn’t even inspire groans or eye-rolling; instead, it figuratively puts its hands on your shoulders and pushes you deeper into your theater seat until you’ve been completely subdued by all the nothingness it has to offer.

Has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer and production values that verge on parody.

It is a soul-crushing disaster because it lacks humor, wit, ideas, visual style, compelling performances, a point of view or any other distinguishing characteristic that would make it anything but a complete waste of your time, not to mention that of the diligent animators who brought this catastrophe into being.

The title promises disaster, and the movie delivers: Love, Weddings & Other Disasters is a witless, charmless, barely-written, indifferently acted, hideously shot, and generally odious waste of 90 minutes.

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

Toxically indulgent ... Add up nothing but the shots of jiggling butts and you’ll have an hour’s worth of footage.

Sundown is the misbegotten lovechild of “The Hangover” and “Project X”: Stupendous in its stupidity, offensive in its attempts to be funny, and downright unpleasant from beginning to end.

“ASIII” feels like the most scattershot entry in the trilogy, despite a relative rally toward competence with the second movie.

The Haunting of Sharon Tate is an astoundingly tasteless motion picture, perfunctorily produced and insensitively conceived...It’s far too early to call “Haunting” the worst movie of the year. But if it’s not, it’s going to be a rough 2019.

The thing that wrecks The Human Centipede III isn’t how the film is disgustingly, degradingly unclean; instead, Six’s work is ruined by how his film is desperately, depressingly unclever.

Melania is the feature film version of that wedding video in Love Actually, the one where the best man spent the whole event obsessively filming the bride ... Ratner made a film that makes Ratner look more invested in Melania Trump than her husband, which is a really weird vibe to shoot for.

"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.

One of those rare films so unfathomably ghastly you could write a better one while sitting through its interminable 110 minutes. I’d rather re-watch Elton John's "Gnomeo & Juliet" 110 times.

Zemljic spends most of the film front and center, and the movie wisely relies upon her to be our eyes and ears and insight into the story. It’s not a showy performance, by any means, but she earns our empathy.

Gurrola and Alzati throw themselves into their performances, completely unafraid to explore the full range of physical and emotional characteristics of the people they’re playing.

It’s a story of closed borders in Europe, and foot-dragging immigration bureaucracy in safe countries, together spelling ruin for countless displaced victims.

Crisply written by TV producer Ethan Sandler (“New Girl”) and directed by theater veteran Lee Wilkof with an eye for small details and a lifetime of experience, the film is a loving, if slight, excursion into the world of New York theater, actors’ division.

In a strong field of excellent performances, the standout is easily Shalhoub, who is enthralling and almost entirely sympathetic in what could have been a monochromatic bad guy part.

Most of these guys want to be “guys” in the most conventional ways, but at its best, this is a movie about how deviations from that norm can still be taken in and accepted and even championed.

There are tender moments in The Keeping Hours. But mostly there are missed opportunities. When it misses its mark, which is more often than not, it’s hard to wonder why it made you feel anything in the first place.

Part incomplete rom com, part squishy lampoon, La Boda de Valentina ultimately falls short in both modes, but accomplishes just enough to warrant a RSVP.

This is a thoughtful and enlightening documentary about artistic censorship and free speech.

If there are any takeaways from Grodner’s film, it’s that we are all powerless to stop the passage of time, and, as Future Music owner Jack Waterson says, “Be truly loved or truly hated, man, cuz anything in the middle is garbage.” I think you’ll truly love or truly hate this film, but I’m firmly in the “love” camp for this remarkable Los Angeles time capsule.

A film that could have been taken seriously as a drama — a politically one-sided but nonetheless competent drama — devolves into ghoulish sideshow grotesquery.

Better Angels is a shallow analysis disconnected with the harshest realities of out time. It’s far from being malicious, but making a movie centered only on the shiny parts is too unnaturally artificial to make an impact.

In its modest efforts, That Way Madness Lies embraces a kind of sensitive nuance you don’t always see in depictions of mental illness in the movies.

After Maria is an affective, personal film that humanizes a persistent national tragedy.

It’s got all the cinematic bravado of an expensive high school A/V project, and like a school project, it’s easy to root for the young people involved. They’re getting out there and they’re making a movie, dang it! Good for them! Not good for us, of course, but good for them.

When these artists get to the point where they are completely unconstrained, it conveys a freedom and strength that surprises not only the audience but the performers as well.

Impressive sound design, which makes every carabiner clink and boulder impact seem monumental, and Lee’s skilled use of close-up photography (combined with fast-cut montage editing) make “The Climbers” worth seeing on a big screen.

The movie’s few bright spots feel unintentional, like mistakes left in because no one else noticed the absurdity of some scenes or the comic potential in others.

The story, the jokes, even Hank’s imaginary pill-shaped friends, and an expensive trip to the curador/local shaman are cheap tricks for a hollow laugh. Better to savor the few carefree moments of Camil’s stellar performance and the poignant lessons to learn about love, health and communication.

#Unfit feels like a rational argument, and a powerful one. But if it’s liable to scare lots of people who already oppose Trump, it doesn’t feel as if it will change anybody’s opinion.

The impact of the last-act reveal also speaks to the considerable strength of the filmmakers, including not just Lucks but his gifted co-writer Natalie Medlock. Because although the movie concerns itself with love and sexuality, its true subjects are vulnerability, trust and self-knowledge.

It’s Klein at his most conservatively verité and least pointedly judgmental — he was a fan of the game and setting, after all — but he still offers up a tapestry of personalities, playing and performing that captures what is ineffably beautiful and edgy about tennis, at a time when it was as popular as it had ever been.

White as Snow doesn’t go far enough into strangeness, but neither is this an adaptation aiming for realism. Only Huppert is on that skewed mindset, while everyone else plays it straight.

Dramarama is finally worthwhile mainly because its players are so responsive to each other and to the idea of friendship that they make large sections of the movie come alive.

Suzanna is quite an alluring figure and a convincing liar. Even when the plot gets melodramatic, she remains steady, feigning confusion while passively exerting and exuding her power. It’s a character sketch steeped in old-school femininity that is curiously both nostalgic and surprisingly contemporary.

Without the willingness to connect the dots between his very powerful examples, Chandler creates the opportunity to indict America’s culture of violence and then disappointingly misses his shot.

The movie is composed of three disparate shorts meant to explore a range of connections. Instead, all three feel as if they were designed inside an echo chamber thematically, and none displays a desire to push the envelope creatively.

Love and Fury itself feels like a commercial that can’t figure out what it is ultimately trying to sell.

Shot in anamorphic, with long, silent scenes backed only by Amin Bouhafa’s haunting score, there is not a spare word or wasted image in the 92-minute running time. It should be said that this is not an easy watch, by any means. But it would be fair to call it a revelatory one.

The new New York Ninja often feels like a pre-fab midnight movie that was made with apparent love and care but without much urgency or creativity.

I’ll Find You is an ideal diversion for those who like their cinematic escapism with heavy doses of music and love.

Song for Cesar manifests as the scrappy but meaningful results of people coming together to document a chapter of America’s recent past still not as visible as it should be.

It’s a difficult world out there, so once in a while it sure is nice to just sit down with the family to watch a wholesome movie about a wholesome man, his wholesome dog, and their tireless, never-ending hunt for human corpses.

Although some of its components spark with cleverness, it lacks overall narrative sophistication as a work of storytelling art, even if considering the vintage-cinema tone it seeks to replicate.

Ultimately, FLINT is real-life American horror at its most devastating and disappointing, as it provides no indication that either hope or human decency can prevail.

Block Party is a lightweight comedy that frustrates because there’s the potential for it to be great, to resonate beyond its blandly formulaic charms.

Leave No Trace tackles an urgent topic and relays essential truths.

We can, thanks to movies like this one, continue to bear witness. But we will never truly know the reality he tries so hard to unearth, and that remains our burden to hold.

Nearly 30 years later, Alma’s Rainbow makes the statement, perhaps even louder than ever, that film can and should reflect the lives and realities of Black women.

For all its telling — and showing — of sex, Bloom Up never really gets going until its final few minutes. And that late-stage twist occurs during the rare scene in which everyone is fully clothed.

There is an intimacy in the doc — as NTA’s drama continues to unfold, there is no indication that the activists will be triumphant, only that they will fight until the very end. The fact that Shaw and his team never turn off the cameras show their commitment to the people, rather than the outcome.

If you set out to combine the worst parts of Hallmark holiday movies with the worst parts of frenetic ‘90s rom-coms, you’d probably wind up with something a lot like About Fate. The women are nuts, the men are clueless and the production is so cheap you could pass the time spotting every mistake no one bothered to fix.

It’s not just one film, or one election, or one win — it’s a movement, as the energized subjects keep repeating. “Justice is not a destination, it’s a journey,” is one of the many resonant quotes shared by one of Booker’s advisors and friends, and it’s a reminder that the fight is never-ending.

It comes off as more of a wandering travelogue that only hints at richer insights into the bridging of cultures, preferring the comfort of an established trajectory to what seems, in bits and pieces, to have been an intriguingly uncertain quest.

There’s not a single frame in Stever’s film that takes the obvious compositional choice, placing the viewer in a perennial sense of disorientation that matches the film’s perturbing themes.

It is rare to find a film that reflects its subject so insightfully, in both an artistic and thematic sense.

Given that Kalderon juggles as many tones as Erez has moods, it’s tough to imagine how he could possibly wrap them all up. And yet he brings his hero, and all of us now cheering him on from the stands, to the perfect conclusion. Unveiling one of the best finales of the year, he turns his ambivalent swimmer into a superstar.

For fans of Ivory’s films, A Cooler Climate reveals more about him than his memoir did, but on certain subjects he remains as tight-lipped as he needed to be in his youth.

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

Silent River feels intensely personal, but also impossibly closed off. But is that so bad? Ultimately, for all its awkwardness and attentiveness, its grab-bag of tones and problematic pacing, there’s a lot about “Silent River” that gives one faith in off-the-beaten-path cinema, from how much Lee cares about what his images and sounds convey, to how little he cares whether your narrative questions are satisfactorily answered.

Too much of Dear Zoe, though, feels factory-designed to engineer emotion rather than aiming to earn it organically.

The cars are the stars in Lamborghini: The Man Behind the Legend, a pamphletized biopic that does the easy thing — beautifying Italy and vintage automobiles — but stalls with everything involving humans.

If you like unabashedly corny teen romances, there’s a fair chance that the sheer too-much-ness of The Quintessential Quintuplets Movie will appeal to you.

It is an often nasty film, with little regard for anyone on screen, far more content to grasp for false depth rather than logic. It’s a shame there’s nothing to root for other than its dwindling runtime.

Formally speaking, Dionne Warwick: Don’t Make Me Over isn’t nearly as much of a groundbreaker as its subject, but that subject has lived such a rich life — and recorded so many unforgettable songs — that the film is, ultimately, as pleasurable as hearing a vintage Warwick hit on the radio.

Cold Copy is a tense journalism drama that ultimately can’t be saved by a group of strong leads who are running lengths with the material they’ve been given. Helberg’s directorial eye proves to be something to watch, but the story she tells falls flat in the wake of uninspired character motivations that ultimately don’t make much sense in light of the stakes at hand.

Richland is a unique and heart-wrenching portrait of a town willingly taken advantage of and is a necessary documentary in an age of nuclear unease.

Happy Clothes gives us an intriguing snapshot of a creative force who can mix patterns and colors more fearlessly than anyone in the business. But it ultimately leaves us craving move.

Co-directors Bryan Darling and Jesse Finley Reed and writer Peter Jones manage to cover a lot of territory in a compact 83-minute running time, while striking the same balance between sexy and peculiar that makes the catalog such a hard-to-parse artifact of its era.

While “Aliens Abducted My Parents” can be a little rote, its greatest function isn’t as a delivery system for drama, or humor, or even coming-of-age clichés. This is one of those movies about young people where, regardless of whether you like it or find it a little bland, you’re grateful that it introduced you to these cast members.

In its happiest moments, The Movie Teller is glorious and yes, a little corny; in its darkest ones, it’s still lovely and sad.