It’s nice that the two photogenic leads are treating sex like a pleasurable activity rather than an onerous chore in this second entry, but overall, the film plays like an un-asked-for collaboration between the Hallmark and Playboy Channels.

Like a bad orange, this adaptation of the series-spawning novel by Rick Yancey lacks both juice and flavor.

Jenny’s Wedding isn’t ill-intentioned or actively bad; it’s just a little too familiar, a little too safe and a little too satisfied with itself.

Overall, The Longest Ride feels cloying and contrived; the only time it’s unpredictable is when the plot takes a turn so utterly unbelievable that, admittedly, no one would see it coming.

Like a Boss is vibrant and sometimes funny, but rarely heartfelt and entirely stale. While it hits a few sentimental notes, the film’s failure to delve into the friendship it celebrates, or to say anything significant about women’s relationships in business, ultimately hampers it.

As handsomely mounted, TV-movie-quality cinema goes, “Light in Darkness” is at once the best looking, most coherent, and least histrionic of the franchise.

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

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.

Sheridan proves he can still act the crap out of a movie, even when crap is all the movie has to offer.

The spaceships and the destruction are bigger but not better in Roland Emmerich‘s twenty-years-later follow-up, where only Jeff Goldblum‘s sense of humor saves the day.

Imagine “Battlefield Earth” without the verve and you get this sludgy, tedious fantasy adventure, a fun-starved dud that’s not even unintentionally hilarious.

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.

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.

To be fair, the unraveling of “Careful” is not the fault of the stars.

Visual stakes are heightened here, to an absurd, laugh-inspiring degree, the deaths sliding into the realm of “Saw”-style ridiculousness.

The new Firestarter is a lot like the old Firestarter, if the old Firestarter was duller, cheaper, and devoid of almost all meaning.

Rife with stereotypes, a terrible script, and odd “300”-esque cinematography that just doesn’t fit, this is not only a film nobody asked for, but also one that nobody should be forced to endure.

The action’s accent on Russian rogues, lethal ladies and Rivera-set car chases makes The Transporter Refueled feel less like a film and more like the world’s most violent Vanity Fair fashion spread, all poses and pouts instead of the two-fisted, rough life of the originals.

The death scenes range from goofy and completely preventable to modestly suspenseful.

Despite its feel-good title, The Kindness of Strangers is a rather bleak movie, one so tied to the miseries of its characters that it’s difficult to see the point of it at all.

While Tyler Perry’s Acrimony doesn’t quite live up to its stylish trailer — that water-torture sound design promises a floodgate that will burst at any moment — it’s the kind of “women’s picture” that used to be Joan Crawford’s bread and butter, the sort that allows its star to glamorously lose her grip in a succession of great outfits.

Unfinished Business isn’t a laugh-free experience — Nick Frost steals every scene as a business underling with a kinky side — and some of the comic set pieces actually work.

The Hitman’s Wife Bodyguard is a comedy with not one legitimate laugh, and an action movie where cars keep blowing up while the A-listers yell at each other, as though that were inherently amusing or entertaining.

Michael Goi, serving as both director and director of photography, does a better job placing the camera around the claustrophobic location than he does exploring the depths of his actors.

It’s clichéd, stodgy and overly faithful to the original books.

It is simply what it is, and that is a hugely expensive but uninspired “Star Wars” knockoff with some thrilling action sequences, and some truly ugly moments that taint the entire thing.

The Lazarus Effect is a smart, unsubtle chiller that should leave even a dedicated horror fan shaken and spooked from its opening scene’s revelations to its final scene’s implications.

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).