The characters, the dumb dialogue, and the story mechanics are the biggest problems with “Hot Summer Nights,” which never convinces, while it uses an annoying, legend-building voiceover narration from an unseen local to keep hawking the notion that we’re seeing life-changing, mythic events.

The battling, metallic heroes have never looked better, but Michael Bay's choppy, dissonant storytelling methods remain as audience-punishing as ever.

For all its cheap talk about the importance of innovation, Agent 47 just feels like a copy of a copy of a copy.

Trying to overwhelm the audience with spectacle, as “Kingdom” attempts to do, is a sorry substitute for the detailed characters and thoughtful conflicts that populate prior entries in the series.

First-time feature filmmaker Dave Wilson and cinematographer Jacques Jouffret (“Mile 22”) can manipulate the speed of combat scenes all he wants (the stylistic crutch of a slo-mo point of contact is evergreen) but dull choreography, CGI overuse and Cuisinart editing are still the bane of today’s action sequences.

Zemeckis and co-writer Chris Weitz do make some attempt to dust off the concept, but the modernized moments further undermine their efforts. When they add empathy, the story loses its soul. And when they jam in easy updates, it just highlights how out of touch the rest of the script feels.

There’s ultimately too much strained seriousness in The Song of Names' dramatically flimsy and symbolically heavy episodic narrative, making Girard and Caine’s already dated feel-good historical drama seem especially tacky.

Bloated, inexplicably un-entertaining.

Effectively acts as an animated ode to heteronormativity, toxic masculinity and patriarchal worldviews, passed off as harmless plot points to entertain young audiences.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a movie that takes its characters and its premise seriously, until it doesn't, and that operates at two speeds: tortoise (ponderous) and hare (head-spinning).

Despite its outstanding performances, The Quiet Ones remains the very thing its protagonist scoffs at: a pointless story about “evil begetting evil for the sake of evil.” Evil can be defeated, but emptiness always prevails.

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.