The main talking point of this empty-headed thriller from Mexican director Amat Escalante is a sure-to-be-notorious instance of penis incineration — a dubious distinction.

This is a movie too enamored of its own tawdriness, turning every violent act and violation into gratuitously salacious grindhouse set pieces.

Despite the chronological juggling, the film's stylistic debts (a Hitchcock flashback borrowed from Stage Fright, a Bertolucci-esque apartment sequence that could be titled Last Tango in Auschwitz) are simplistic to a fault; they lack the multifaceted suspense and sensuality typified by those directors at their best.

An overlong, hardly believable psychological thriller.

Look, the movie didn't have to cure cancer or anything. But sans the original's redemptive nostalgia or any newfound cleverness, it's just a manic, flop-sweat-drenched mess.

It's blackhearted fun, but eventually the spurt runs dry, and all that's left is a pallid corpse.

Even with Gallic neomusical royalty like Catherine Deneuve joining in the fray, the whole endeavor reeks of the filmmaker throwing everything against the wall yet barely making anything stick.

The connections among the film's various plot strands are painfully obvious; by the time a grizzled Jeremy Irons saunters in, ready to dole out a comeuppance, perceptive viewers will have mentally flipped to the last page.

Getaway cares little about plot and even less about credibility (cue a pouty-mouthed Gomez spouting nuggets of wisdom about computer servers and ISPs). If you can’t even deliver blatant car-nography, what’s the point?

The stylistic conceit of keeping us entirely with the clones (so that we are as ill-informed as they are and never get to meet their powerful oppressors) only reveals what an empty-headed abstraction this tale was from both page and frame one

Something, Anything doesn’t really engage with issues of faith or materialism.

Never once does the film feel sharp on black identity (as did Bill Gunn’s original), and the terror is theoretical only.

Such passé testosterone worship might have been passable if the filmmaking weren’t so amateurish--every emotional exchange is accompanied by insipid, high-volume pop songs--and the film’s self-satisfied chest-thumping didn’t extend to its creator as well.

Fans hoping to watch Schwarzenegger growl his catchphrases with a slight edge of shtick are underestimating the patience involved in sitting through a two-hour slog. As for those who want a little apocalyptic tension or (dare to dream) romance, this new model is not for you. It’s the Skynet cut.

Things quickly fall apart, with a pileup of sub–Rod Serling narrative twists, a choppy action sequence heavy on the Michael Bay slo-mo and a sequel-ready climax that reveals the whole project as little more than a feature-length calling card.

Almost half a century after "Night of the Living Dead," filmmakers are still misunderstanding how George Romero made his besieged shut-ins compelling.

This twist doesn’t so much probe the situation’s ambiguities as reflect the filmmaker’s uncertainty about how to properly portray a major historical figure in all her troubling complexity.

While Seagal is spraying bullets, breaking bones and throwing interchangeable bad guys through windows, this has a certain mindless appeal. But Malmuth's flaccid direction lacks the vicious muscularity and authentic edge of Seagal's previous feature.

Thin even by Presley standards.

There's more than a few things off in this tale of a disillusioned professional thief (Affleck, dull), his unlikely inamorata (Hall, wasted) and the determined FBI agent (Hamm, solid) out to apprehend him.

It’s a neurotic treatise that simply adds to our cultural dementia instead of illuminating it.

What made Snowden so compelling in the excellent 2014 documentary Citizenfour reduces him, in the context of an Oliver Stone thriller, to a blur. Even Hackers was more exciting.

It’s only when the sentient snacks are front and center that this middling sequel to the 2009 animated hit truly comes alive.

Hoffman predictably knocks a familiar role out of the park (and just as unsurprisingly, wrings excellence from his performers) in this rather trivial, downbeat four-hander about a working-class couple trying to connect during a Gotham winter.

Christopher Felver, while an inspired photographer, is not the director for the job; he dutifully ticks off Ferlinghetti’s major achievements — such as the founding of North Beach’s literary mecca, City Lights — yet never imbues his life with anything more than lefty zeal.

This trite road-trip comedy can be so lazy that it squanders the goodwill of a premise that ought to be self-evident.

A quintet of Canadian TV comedians, hit the cinema screen with a splat.

A dog in wolf's clothing, Lionsgate's drab, anthropomorphic animal saga does little more than reconfirm the preeminence of Pixar.