It’s been a while since we’ve seen a movie that feels as though it was made by someone who just discovered the collected works of Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie.

Given the ingredients (the deeply personal vision; a cast including Driver, Aubrey Plaza and Laurence Fishburne; the big budget; the years of gestation), it’s fair to wonder why it ends up being, one, so little fun, and two, so deadening on an intellectual level.

Unfortunately, writer-director Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s has made just another sadistic slasher movie, notably only for its inexpressive animal masks.

It’s to the 1993 original what The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was to Raiders.

Compelling characters are the lifeblood of a good superhero story, so it’s tragic that a film about two warring vampires in the Marvel universe is utterly bereft of them.

It all feels so rote and old-school, especially during such an exciting era for the genre (thanks to Jennifer Kent, Ari Aster, Jordan Peele, Rose Glass and co). Never mind the fact its once-sturdy beats have been spoofed, homaged and riffed a thousand times. In the era of Netflix’s Fear Street and The Haunting of Hill House, big-screen horror surely has to work harder than this.

It's a bloated two-and-a-half-hour mess. An endless patchwork of weightless, computer-drawn blah and fake out ‘deaths’ that underline the total lack of stakes.

A wooden ensemble, paper-thin frights and dull TV-special looks don’t help matters. ‘This place doesn’t suck,’ someone observes early on. If only.

While it’s based on the bizarre 2007 story of the female astronaut who drove 900 miles in adult diapers to confront an ex-boyfriend, Lucy in the Sky doesn’t include that intimate detail. Then again, the movie shits the bed in so many other ways, it may have been overkill. Director Noah Hawley (TV’s Fargo) omits the headline-making undergarment, instead stocking up on paper-thin observations about workplace misogyny and mental health in a cloying feature debut that begs to be scorned.

None of the care that Stallone imparted to his recent Rocky reboots—Creed and Creed II (both of which were produced by him)—is in evidence; it’s as if he were admitting that the Rambo movies were always trash. He may not be the best custodian of his own legacy. Graying, splotchy and barely intelligible, Stallone turns in a self-negating performance, just as ugly on the inside.

Clearly surge pricing also applies to jokes, because it’s mostly about as funny as a traffic jam.

Seriously missing the memo in a cringe-inducing way, The Hustle takes a perfectly fine premise from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels—two predatory men get played by a savvier woman—and obliterates it by swapping genders and ultimately selling out its feminist credibility.

There’s the odd nifty camera move but the action sequences are often messy and rote. The self-healing Hellboy is able to withstand endless punishment, which may be faithful to Mignola’s source material but hardly ups the stakes. The audience is not so lucky. Hellboy? Just hell, actually.

There’s a way to make this kind of trashy noir work beautifully—was Wild Things director John McNaughton somehow not available?—but Serenity is too blandly generic to stick its snout in the muck and luxuriate, barring the occasional jail-baity line of dialogue from Hathaway (“You said I was finally old enough,” Karen whispers, reminiscing).

A completely charmless, laughs-free experience.

The only thing Peppermint does accomplish, after Proud Mary, Traffik and Breaking In, is to cement 2018 as the year Hollywood proved itself incapable of turning out a decent female-led action film.

Stuffed with lifeless gags, this cringeworthy puppet provocation is too pleased with its own naughtiness.

Confuses hostility for characterization, and cheap nihilism for dramatic depth.

The whole film pinballs between reverence and poop jokes in a way that feels far more blasphemous than anything Monty Python ever did, while a cloying R&B soundtrack further cheapens the tone. Unless you have tiny religious children, it’s probably best to avoid it.

Their movie is a tedious slog filled with pinging bullets, show-offy long takes ripped out of the Children of Men playbook and zero humor.

Stupid, offensive and as substantial as a text message, this toxic piece of kiddie trash isn't worth the pixels.

Wish Upon claims to be based on the classic 1902 supernatural short story "The Monkey's Paw." In reality, it’s a mix of "Mean Girls," "Final Destination" and the "Insidious" franchise, the latter on which director John R. Leonetti worked as a cinematographer. You'll be wishing you were watching any of those other films.

This one’s unforgettable indeed, just not for the right reasons.

If you like sexy vampires or ferocious werewolves, you can do much better than this exhausted, computerized sequel.

Mottola has made some brilliantly idiosyncratic pictures: Superbad, Adventureland, The Daytrippers. But as Joneses’s director for hire, he’s allowed zero personality.

The Dark Knight director has had a mortifying effect on movies. In this case, it’s almost as if Affleck’s somber plunge into the calamitous, Nolan-produced "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" has followed him into other projects, like a heavy cologne. Avoid this one like the stink it is.

Excruciatingly incoherent.

Forget cowabunga, this is cowadunga. Still, the Oscar for Most Shamefully Contrived Scene goes to the scriptwriters for managing to get franchise eye-candy Megan Fox into a sexy schoolgirl outfit, which, any shorter, would land the film with an R rating.

When great actors meet a misguided script, the results can be hilarious. And so it proves with Criminal, a nutso mash-up of The Bourne Identity and The Man with Two Brains which, despite a laughable plot and ridiculous dialogue, somehow managed to attract Kevin Costner to the lead role, with support from Ryan Reynolds, Tommy Lee Jones, new Wonder Woman Gal Gadot and even Gary Oldman (who really needs to have a word with his agent after this and Child 44).

As the film totters to its predictable finale, the closing moments set up a sequel, a prospect far more terrifying than anything we've just seen.

Romance, tragedy, toned bodies, conservative values: It can only be the latest from Nicholas Sparks.

A ridiculously infantile film, one that flatters itself by intimating a deeper comment about suppressed masculinity or romantic passivity.

No Escape takes pains to pause for some unconvincing speechifying about Western meddling abroad, but its showbiz racism gets an infuriating pass.

These charmless characters are meant to learn that spending time with each other isn’t so bad, yet surviving 100 minutes with them is one of the great cinematic endurance tests of our time.

After several tedious jump scares and boneheaded escape plans, a bag over your head won't seem like such a bad idea. Or the noose.

Entourage can’t muster enough conflict for a podcast, let alone a feature.

Can a single guitar riff tell you everything you need to know about a movie? The dreadful Kill Me Three Times, which has nothing to offer beyond some aerial looks at the white-and-turquoise beaches of Western Australia, opens with a power chord so cheesy and generic that it immediately identifies this story of amateur criminals as the charmless ’90s throwback that it is.

Forget that The Lovers doesn’t have the courtesy to be fun; no cosmic romance should be so deeply afraid to shoot for the stars. As one of the film’s many forgettable characters so eloquently puts it, “This stinks worse than an oyster’s fart.”

I can’t fault Ridley Scott for wanting to stage a version of this saga, just as I can’t ignore the fact that my dad tells the same tale every spring, but much more engagingly, in half the time and drunk on Manischewitz.

What really makes Rudderless a full-blown affront is a late-breaking narrative revelation (no spoilers here) that’s meant to add resonant emotional depth, but instead comes off as jaw-droppingly repugnant. That’s appropriate, though, for a movie with no sense of direction.

Drab, silly and mind-numbing, this Dracula is strictly for the suckers.

Good God almighty: Not since Edward D. Wood Jr. unleashed a flotilla of paper-plate UFOs on beautiful downtown Burbank has there been a movie as stem-to-stern inept as this adaptation of the bestselling Christian novel series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins.

The Equalizer is a stone-dumb movie.

Probably the biggest sin in a movie filled with many is turning Fonda into a nymphomaniacal sight gag who makes Barbarella look like Gloria Steinem.

From "Police Academy" to "Hot Fuzz," there are satires to be made about undisciplined law enforcement; this will not join their ranks, try as it might.

The funny thing about all these sub-"Matrix" shenanigans is that they’re genuinely meant to stoke thought and reflection. Frankly, though, few movies have left me feeling as shorn of gray matter.

Displaying a weird lack of memorable or endearing characters, this animated effort feels more like a direct-to-video job from the 1990s than a fully fledged John Lasseter–exec-produced theatrical release.

The whole sorry enterprise leaves you feeling, well, shafted.

Only Gaby Hoffmann makes a lasting impression, as the thick-skinned pariah of the bunch. Somehow she’s able to give the ring of truth to even the hoariest of Hennelly and cowriter Sarah Adina Smith’s conceits (notably a rally-the-troops speech cribbed from founding father George Washington). The rest makes you long for Armageddon.

There’s not enough villainy—nor lip-smacking comeuppance—to justify a smiting by ash or falling column. The movie in your head melts ten times better.

Since this marks the directorial debut of Hollywood hack Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind), there’s a heavy foot applied to the era-skipping leaps made by source novelist Mark Helprin.

Probably best to dissuade the so-bad-it’s-good crowd: There’s nothing here to laugh at with the communal glee of a "Rocky Horror" or "The Room"; only a spectacularly bad composite shot of a fire-fighting plane induces any real giggles.

The basics of the story remain unchanged, but it’s the wanna-be-blockbuster additions that rankle, be it the incoherent direction of first-time feature director Carl Rinsch or the copious CGI beasties who look like rejected "Lord of the Rings" villains.

Berg may be adhering to the basic facts, but his movie’s childish machismo is a disgrace to all involved.

The film is a string of dawdling sitcom scenarios and saccharine messages, cobbled together with star wipes pulled straight out of a Walmart commercial.

The dialogue is the stuff of rapidly closing Off Broadway plays; the camerawork is flavorless and haphazard. Tucci hits every line like he’s about to break into a malicious tap dance, and Eve looks as if she was handed her script on the way to the set.

Take the last train to anywhere but here.

Everything is tainted by a sneering sense of superiority. It’s like washing down Christmas dinner with rancid eggnog.

Writer-director Will Slocombe preaches the values of laying resentments on the table, but with no true wisdom or novelty to offer, he’s merely served an instantly forgettable slice of cinema de dysfunction.

Wilson and Raphael have been a comedy team for years, and they riff off each other expertly; too often, however, that’s all they do.

To call this a turkey would be an insult to poultry.

Edited to ribbons so that every peripheral player — Kate Bosworth, Radha Mitchell, Josh Lucas, Henry Thomas — is even more one-dimensional than Kerouac himself, it’s a work that accurately expresses the awfulness of narcissistic self-destruction, and nothing else.

If mean-spirited snarksters had set out to trash the reputation of "Juno" screenwriter Diablo Cody, they couldn’t have done a more vicious job than the Oscar winner herself does with her directorial debut.

The film strives to cinematically reanimate that shabby underground lair; instead, it proves to be the most bastardized souvenir bauble of all.

Where, exactly, is Dario Argento? He’s up there in the title, but none of the horror maestro’s former genius (Suspiria) is evident in this silly, Stoker-by-numbers slog, rife with cheesy digital blood spurts but not a single moment of deep-red gorgeousness.

Technically cruddy and tiresome in its we’ve-seen-a-lot-of-movies dialogue.

Bastardizing his own 2007 doc, "Planet B-Boy," Benson Lee throws street cred to the breeze with this unspeakably rote Hollywood mockery of its deft nonfiction predecessor, with clueless bigotry as shrill as the squeak of new kicks on a stage floor.

Director Luc Besson treats his protagonists as likable cartoons yet never provides a single reason to view them as anything less than remorseless, repugnant psychos.

This drama is as listless and self-regarding as its protagonist, flitting among underdeveloped characters and subplots and indulging in rote emo shots by the pool, yet never figuring out how to dive into the deep end.

The movie’s story is limp, its romances are flightless and — despite the talented cast — its performances are toothless.

If only the fantasy surrounding her made a lick of sense. Here, the Muggle types are known as the “Mundane.” An apt label for a wanna-be franchise with plenty of sheen and nothing to say.

The fact that Hemsworth is severely lacking in leading-man charisma also doesn’t help the pervasive overall incompetence of the film, which fixates on the perils and panic of our modern surveillance culture while itself proving to be borderline unwatchable.

Such manic fumblings and desperate crassness might be more forgivable were any of it actually, y’know, funny, but other than Olivia Colman’s occasional cameos as a raging therapist, the laughs have been granted a leave of absence.

She (Lohan) isn’t the best thing about this awful, lounged-out drama — it has no best thing — but in her defense, Lohan has been atrociously directed, allowed to get away with the worst aspects of her vocal-fry laziness, and trotted out like a symbolic objet d’art.

The director/subject uses a confessional tone, showing herself nude in the tub and slathering the movie in emotive voiceover. But her self-regard never matures into self-examination, and the only time she steps outside of her own perspective is to moan about how others have it easier.

Tired byplay between Reynolds’s mystified straight man and Bridges’s supernatural old pro will kill off any fond memories you have of zesty buddy films past and present.

In the first five minutes, a deer walks into the star’s bedroom and urinates on his face. It’s all downhill from there.

Only one gag (involving a town’s rival barbers) sticks; the rest is just whistlin’ Dixie.

What played as rousingly dumb fun in "Independence Day" (1996) — all those pie-eyed nationalistic monologues, and U.S. landmarks reduced to rubble — now come off as callously insensitive, even with tongue firmly in cheek.

It’s a film that’s about as funny and/or scary as a lump of sod.

Kastner’s history is simplistic, his pacing is glacial and his film is laboriously constructed around a campy fictional trio of caricatured gay-black-girl “masterminds” planning the “revolution,” thumbing through a “manifesto” and sprinkling glitter ritualistically on a mirror ball.

There’s a need for redemption here, to be certain, and it has nothing to do with the narrative.

All the solemnity is deadly: Not one of these superhuman gang members registers in memory, and you feel stiffed on gory giggles. Talk about having your chain yanked.

A movie sorely bereft of ideas, laughs and justification for the comic duo’s undifferentiating self-regard.

This pubescent navel-gazer has only its star Holland (Brian De Palma’s stepdaughter) to recommend it, not for her acting but only for her undeniable corn-fed–Emmanuelle Béart looks.

It barely tries to offer insight into its much-debated subject, content to rip the scab off an ever-fresh wound for the sake of controversy. The most fitting punishment is to simply ignore its existence.

The uniformly awful performances seem beamed in from Planet Ed Wood, while the script is filled with mock-macho zingers (“If I wanted to hear from an a**hole, I’d rip you a new one!”) that would give former Governor Schwarzenegger pause.

Cloyingly crude and dispiritingly typical ensemble Hollywood farce.

At least Keanu Reeves brings a certain muddled gravitas to the role of an escort-service driver who spends his time idling with off-duty party girls.

It would be kind to call this satire; what it comes off as is a pummeling, testosterone-fueled sensory assault that the film then makes minor variations on for two very long hours.

Smitten to a fault with high-art predecessors, Eric Atlan’s excruciatingly bad drama takes place in an abstract Buñuelian hotel room, glows luminously like Last Year at Marienbad and concludes with a Bergmanesque card game on which the fate of souls rests.

Berger’s script is little more than a series of contrived comic vignettes that prevent the actors from creating believable characters, forcing them to contort to fit the low-rent farce.

The film does offer some revealing anecdotes about his infamous Monroe sessions, but mostly, it simply slouches from one sensationalistic, salacious bit to the next, sans any historical context. Worse, filmmaker Shannah Laumeister continually rhapsodizes on-camera about her own “soul mate” relationship with the subject—leaving viewers feeling mad as hell.

The film feels like its over long before the credits roll — or perhaps that’s just wishful thinking.

That sort of fire-and-brimstone morality dominates this one-note sermon, which pairs its pedantic preaching with the campiness of Vanessa Williams speaking in an absurd French accent and Kim Kardashian as the protagonist’s bitchy fashionista coworker, vainly trying to act.

No matter; this aggressively humorless farce would play like a dead rabbit pulled out of a hat, regardless of the casting choices.

Here’s a mathematical formula for you: Take one overlong, nonsensical script; multiply it by terrible editing and design; then divide the whole thing by wooden performances. Voilà: You’ll have Jeff Lipsky’s unwatchable indie.

Waiting for Inescapable to finally reach its unearned, sentimental conclusion is a tiresome experience, but seeing Tomei submit to its badness is several measures worse.