It’s as punishingly dull as Sunday-school homework — and just as unnecessary.

Horror films that backstory the audience to death lose all hope of mining what’s eerie and unsettling about the unknown, and Rings is a perfect example: it doesn’t so much spread its familiar myth as dilute it.

The whole film feels like filler, an empty space waiting to be padded with plot points, characters and jokes that are so generic it was incredibly easy to transform them into product placement.

Terrible character design, combined with a painful lack of laughs and a crushing plethora of ghastly songs, makes Strange Magic perhaps the worst animated feature ever to come out of Disney (which might explain why the studio is releasing the film under its now-rarely-used Touchstone label). Compared to other Lucas missteps of recent years, it’ll make you nostalgic for Jar Jar Binks.

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.

If anyone walks away unblemished from Walk of Shame, it's Banks, who throws herself into every bit of physical comedy and humiliation the movie sends her way. If the movie had gone for broke as often as its lead actress, the results wouldn't feel so disposable.

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.

This silly chamber piece about sex and murder elicits only yawns, interrupted by the occasional unintentional giggle.

The film is bland and predictable, underestimates kids’ abilities to understand story and humor, and relies way too much on sight gags that are clichéd and overdone.

The paucity of new ideas is evident from the opening crawl.

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.

Coroners of comic failure will find much to uncover in the corpse of Holmes & Watson, a thoroughly tedious and never-amusing spoof of Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary detective.

Collateral Beauty is certainly a case of outright sentimental damage, not beauty, but of course the word collateral also means money that can be bargained with, and hopefully that’s what the ill-fated cast of this picture received in some abundance.

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.

There’s an old expression that goes, 'If you can’t think of anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.' I propose we update that a little. 'If you can’t think of anything nice to say, you’re probably talking about Bride Hard.

The Sea of Trees is a movie about guilt and grief that elicits just that in its viewers: guilt and grief. Because for every ephemeral moment to admire in Gus Van Sant‘s latest film, there are about a half-dozen more that make you wonder what went wrong.

Selene seems ready to put this story behind her for most of Underworld: Blood Wars, and it’s hard not to wish that for Beckinsale, as well.

When it seems like the movie can’t get worse, it does, with a finale that’s just cringe-inducing and far too neat and tidy. It’s the kind of climax that undoes all of McCarthy and Sandler’s efforts to make us invest in Max and his story.

Instead of a film that’s gleefully outlandish (see: “Sausage Party”), Yoga Hosers is a drag. It contains none of the vivacity of “Clerks,” “Mallrats” or “Chasing Amy,” and plenty of references to those days of yesteryear. It’s a cannibalization of all that we once loved about Smith and his movies.

Sean McNamara’s fawning and superficial biopic about the 40th president of the United States treats the political figure as a godlike messiah who was placed on this Earth to vanquish America’s enemies, foreign and domestic, and fall perfectly in love with the perfect woman while riding horses dramatically across the California hills.

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.

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.

A rancid comedy fueled by male entitlement and uxoricidal rage.

Depending on what you need from horror like this – shock followed by relief, or a brutalization fix – Martyrs is bait-and-switch, or it’s a drawn-out tease that makes good. Either way, it’s a sop to vile tastes.

If you’re going to make propaganda, fine, but at least make good propaganda.

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

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.