Families with canines are better off staying home and having an old-fashioned backyard frolic than trotting out to see Show Dogs, a panting, poorly trained entry in the live-action/talking animal genre that for once makes viewers long for the candy-colored, half-witted professionalism of third-tier Pixar-knockoff animation.

When I say The Garfield Movie is the best Garfield movie, it’s going to sound like faint praise. Because it is. But faint praise is still praise.

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.

A shabby low-rent thriller with a few vaguely interesting ideas and an ensemble that deserves better material.

Marshall’s Hellboy is a horrifyingly good time. It captures the breathless quality of reading 30 issues of a single comic-book series in one sugar-addled afternoon, shoving as many amazing characters and storylines and images into one film as it can possibly hold. It could have seemed overstuffed and frenetic, but this new “Hellboy” instead comes across as imaginative and freewheeling.

Never was a film I’m more likely to forget, than this of Romeo and his Juliet.

As Nomis steps up the pace like a runner losing balance and falling forward, the clichés pile up and plot points fly at us more like insecure stabs at holding our interest than naturally edgy developments.

The finale, though a bit cheesy and decidedly telegraphed, is sweet and a welcome antidote to all the bare-skinned romping.

The smooth professionalism of so many outstanding participants can’t help but elevate a very ordinary film a little bit higher. Despite the best efforts of both McCarthy and O’Dowd, though, there’s never a moment where it truly takes flight.

Blended director Frank Coraci, a Happy Madison vet, is too much of a company man to elevate this passion-phobic rom-com beyond something more than an above-average Sandler production.

A thriller that wants to be more than that and stretches the bounds of plausibility to get there, Inheritance may have you squirming in your seat and shaking your head in equal measure.

The vignettes sometimes resonate with the viewer but don’t really connect into a plot, there are too many characters with too many stories and pretty good flashbacks, and some of the jokes are impossible to laugh out loud at unless you’re a highly trained and paid actor.

The joyless and perfunctory Hot Pursuit would be a black mark on anyone’s résumé, but it’s an especially disheartening one for Witherspoon at this point in her career.

The really sad thing is that this is a movie with some intriguing characters that has some real comic and dramatic potential, but all this gets lost in increasingly silly plot mechanics.

Named as if it knew its destiny, The Disappointments Room brings together those horror movie standbys that just can’t quit each other — a creepy old home and a troubled family — for some truly convoluted, non-scary, and execrable psychological mishegoss surrounding a hidden chamber and the noxious historical shame it holds.

A convoluted plot leaking sappiness, in-your-face preachy dialogue, and TV-movie-style lighting are adequate, so long as its bigoted message is getting out there. God Bless the Broken Road is subtler than its predecessors, but that’s not saying much.

An utterly idiotic movie that uses social media as a conduit for witchcraft and mayhem.

While an energetic kids’ fantasy with cool creatures fighting each other is probably a reasonable win for Disney’s new premium service in these days before most theaters reopen, it’s hard to watch it as an adult and not wish for something that produced a little more magic of its own.

When you stifle the emotional simplicity of a story like The Crow to emphasize the plot, the plot had better make sense. And it doesn’t. It’s got perplexing rules and a vague chronology and nothing seems like it matters anymore.

Seventh Son tells a story of dragons, witches, ghosts and ogres, but the most fantastic thing about it is the idea that someone thought this lumpy, bumpy and swollen sack of tired tropes and cluttered CGI would attract audiences.

Homelessness among military veterans is a noble subject for a filmmaker to take on. So it deserves a better vehicle than Sgt. Will Gardner, writer-director Max Martini’s clumsy and sometimes downright laughable portrayal of an injured Iraq war vet.

Most impressively, the film admits that the line between faith and magical thinking isn’t as solid as most believers would care to admit — and the Church knows it. Unfortunately, these worthwhile ideas are contained in a phony-baloney tale more artificial than a polyester teddy bear stuffed with Splenda and Cheez Whiz — and just as appealing.

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.

The first thing you need to know about Expendables 4 is that its studio somehow made the grating decision to fashion its title as Expend4ble. It’s a needless spelling challenge for a dull and vulgar flick with a lot of empty-calories muscle, but little-to-no skill or fun to spare.

Everything in The Electric State feels done for convenience, so there’s no tension in the storytelling or the emotional stakes. It glides on a smooth track from point to point without ever considering how narrative friction would deepen the characters and the story.

The tone and plot of the film keeps swinging this way and that.

Cox’s film plays like a pureed mash-up of “The Wolf of Wall Street,” “The Social Network” and last month’s indie heist film “American Animals” — without the richness or texture of any of those films.

Stonewall somehow manages to be simultaneously bloated and anemic, overstuffed and underpopulated.