A brainless plot would be almost forgivable were it not for the perverse depiction of innocents butchered in Invasion U.S.A.

Whether or not they’re familiar with the source property, kids are unlikely to be bothered: There’s just enough blaring sound and color to this knowingly silly tale of interplanetary derring-do to adequately offset its impersonal corporate sheen.

Technically and comedically strained by the demands of its special effects-filled haunted house setting. Worse, the need to top the first pic's outlandish stunts is ghoulishly unfulfilled and terribly ironic.

A listless romantic comedy that, almost out of desperation, turns a little more violent than necessary near the end.

Woman Thou Art Loosed: On the 7th Day is crammed with enough melodramatic incident for three movies, all of them seemingly scripted by Tyler Perry in a very foul mood.

This transparent piece of propaganda blatantly overplays its hand.

Many of the actors give performances in line with their low profile here.

Taking more than a dozen credits, including helmer-scribe, Jackie Chan emerges a Jackie-of-all-trades and master of none.

Bringing together some of the least compelling dinner guests in recent memory at a world-class restaurant that’s about to permanently close its doors, this blandly seriocomic misfire from Spanish co-writer/director Roger Gual is too lazy to rise to the level of farce, too banal and insincere to work as drama.

Bearing a distinctly musty odor confirmed by its 2011 copyright date, this day-and-date Lionsgate pickup never achieves dramatic liftoff.

Intermittently enjoyable hokum at best.

Laughs are few, attempts at feel-good catharsis fizzle out limply, and all of Murray’s most elaborate performance setpieces — especially his endless rendition of “Smoke on the Water” for tribal elders — fall embarrassingly flat.

This ambitious, yet astonishingly well-executed Netflix tentpole directly benefits from the way Ayer’s gritty, streetwise sensibility grounds Landis’ gift for creating an elaborate comic-book mythology.

Happiness means steering clear of Hector and the Search for Happiness.

None of this is particularly credible, let alone memorable, but it’s all executed with sufficient energy and humor to make for an enjoyable night’s entertainment.

Helmer Donald Petrie seems at times to be making the modern-day equivalent of a Doris Day comedy, setting the pic in a lacquered fantasy New York, piling on cutesy-coy dialogue and mining a fluffy premise for all manner of far-fetched cleverness.

Small children will be amused by the frenetic antics of Cuba Gooding Jr. Grownups, however, will be far less enchanted.

Although The Postman conveys a thoroughly imagined vision of a future society, its basic concerns are actually far from those of traditional sci-fi, as it quickly comes to feel more like a Western than anything else.

Broadway musical purists will shudder in horror, but parents will be whistling a happy tune that there's at least one acceptable pic out there for their kids.

I take no vicious pleasure in saying that Poolman, a movie that Pine co-wrote, directed, and stars in, is not only the worst film I saw during the fall festival season but would likely be one of the worst films in any year it came out.

When not serving up sentimental contrivance, Shirin in Love is just tepidly cute, with wan comic situations and lines that provide little opportunity for a game-enough cast.

A dumbed-down remake of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's disturbingly abstract Japanese horror film.

This turgid fantasy thriller, boasting scant thrills or imagination, douses a mystic time-travel concept with soap operatic hand-wringing to mawkishly unconvincing effect.

A Chinese propaganda film without the heavy dogma and dour treatment that would have been expected a generation ago, Beginning of the Great Revival is a slick and lavish historical epic charting the 1921 formation of the Chinese Communist Party.

The line between priggishness and creepiness is repeatedly smudged by multihyphenate Rik Swartzwelder in Old Fashioned, a faith-based drama that looks as lovely as an expensive greeting card, but moves as slowly as a somnolent turtle.

This tale of two former lovers reuniting after a 21-year separation also functions as a study of two terrific actors struggling to overcome the relentless mediocrity of their material.

The message feels muddled amid all the pratfalls and fart jokes.

Not so much a probing examination as a fulsome celebration.

Unfortunately, the operative word is bland, as the newcomers don't add much to the formula, leaving it to their nemeses to enliven the proceedings. Narrative drive and humor are also in short supply, which creates a serious sagsag in the middle when the novelty of the fresh components has mostly worn off.

Compact, ultra-explicit two-character pic about what transpires when a beautiful straight woman hires a handsome gay man to "look" at her is gloriously mannered, proudly pretentious and undeniably compelling.

Picture's dubious brand of heroism, half-baked historical sense, simplistic dialogue, flat staging and barely formed characters make for sluggish sledding.

Manages to squander three generations of formidable actresses.

No mere crime drama, but rather the latest in the recent resurgence of independently financed, spiritually themed pics that seek to couch religious dogma within the shells of B-grade genre entertainment.

An especially insipid example of the Hollywood message movie.

Torpid, academic vanity project for helmer-thesp Rodolphe Marconi.

A fiery, convoluted finale fails to deliver any satisfying payoff.

A hillbilly romantic comedy in which the hillbillies show up but the romance and comedy never do.

The script has been written compactly if without great imagination by Nicolas Aaron Mezzanatto, and directed likewise by actor-turned-helmer Donowho, whose work here reps an uptick from his prior, mostly B-grade horror features.

When crises start occurring at the halfway mark, they pile on too quickly to underwhelming effect, sacrificing credibility for excitement that never really materializes.

Insofar as Hitman: Agent 47 is about anything, really, it’s about the pleasures of being on location — from the gratuitous image of Ware taking a dip in a five-star-hotel swimming pool to the sight of Singapore’s staggering Gardens by the Bay.

Utterly routine futuristic horror-thriller The Colony substitutes the term “ferals” for plain old zombies (the modern, fast-moving kind), and that’s about it for originality.

In its only novel twist, Halloween 5 takes the liberty of setting up its sequel (albeit clumsily) at the film’s end rather than ‘killing’ that pesky Michael Myers and then figuring out how to revive him after counting b.o. receipts. Otherwise, this is pretty stupid and boring fare.

The more you start to nitpick this movie, the more innumerable its plot holes appear, until the whole thing collapses in on itself.

Franco has a truly radical streak in him, and considering how poorly the movie functions as a traditional crowdpleaser, he might as well have gone all out and pushed Zeroville to whatever event horizon the deranged project called for. His mistake wasn’t trying to adapt Erickson’s novel at all, but attempting to turn it into a tragic romance between Vikar and Soledad.

A sweet, at times cloying confection enlivened by strong performances in the central roles.

It's a picture that's akin to a terrarium of plastic flowers -- gaudily decorative, but airless and lifeless.

Return to the Blue Lagoon is a pointless spinoff of the 1980 hit, which was itself a remake of a 1949 British pic.

Willis still packs that rapscallion charm, balancing his wisecracking, reluctant-hero shtick with the unstoppable, all-American quality that earned the original film its title. But the chemistry between him and Courtney is nonexistent, with the younger thesp, who makes co-star Cole Hauser look expressive, adding so little to the equation, one can only hope the studio doesn't plan to pass the franchise on to him.

Launched with a few surprising touches and a disturbingly bloody prelude, horror pic collapses under the weight of its own dull conception and weak direction, dialogue and character portraits.

What could have been a powerful ode to the impact that movies have in shaping our identities — and by extension, the reason broken people are drawn to the profession, through which they hope to reach others like themselves — becomes an over-the-top celebration of Dolan himself.

Pic stays on the surface, without attempting any exploration of painful depths. Result is at best amusing; at worst, uninvolving, often confusing, and sometimes a little boring.

Uneven but enjoyably titillating black comedy should elate Rickman fans while pleasing aficionados of extra-flakey caper flicks.

Veering crazily in tone, Inside Out might fail to catapult its star into wider acceptability, but should delight fans of lightly absurd actioners.

Pic lapses into formulaic predictability with nearly an hour of frenetic chase scenes and technically perfect explosions from Industrial Light & Magic. Action comes sporadically alive in scenes with scientist Jones, who becomes possessed by the spirit of an evil Dark Warlord that entered his body during the same fateful mishap that brought Howard to Earth. There is an abundant amount of special effects wizardry that emanates mostly from Jones as he transforms into a monster, but it is not spectacularly unique enough to distinguish this film from other, more entertaining, sci-fi thrillers.

“You think you’re in the movies or something?” crows Davi’s Genovese to an underling, but Mob Town’s wink-wink address of its own artificiality doesn’t excuse its inept execution, which extends to a stereotypical Italian score by Lionel Cohen.

As impressive as these visual elements prove to be, the film struggles to grab and maintain audiences’ interest, whether or not they know the underlying legend by heart.

Mature in terms of production polish and pro performances, writer-director Rob Margolies' feature debut, Lifelines (until recently called "Wherever You Are"), stumbles in a familiar way: It crams in so many family dysfunctions and plot crises in search of cathartic impact that credibility is stretched to the breaking point.

For all the slicing and dicing of the editing, narrative momentum grinds to a trudge after the synthetic spectacle of the capital’s undoing.

The Guits’ provocation is about as amiable as something so abjectly appalling can be, though it’s perhaps a few jaw-dropping shocks (or a few uproarious belly-laughs) short of the cult status it seeks.

The result is a rough-edged, head-scratching mix of tones. Fortunately, musicvideo vet Rhein's competent helming skills counterbalance her off-putting dialogue and flat acting style so that the picture doesn't come off strictly amateur.

A schlock supernatural shocker.

This small-scale, chamber piece, which boasts good acting from Moore, Skarsgard and Fichtner, has a strong built-in appeal for women but may experience harder times in going beyond the specialized arthouse circuits due to the narrowly-scoped, undernourished script.

Slipping from fantasy to soap opera without any authorial control, pic's best hope is to be recognized as some kind of cult movie of badness.

The filmmakers themselves betray a lack of knowledge about the Old World, while unfailingly repeating physical hijinks one time too many.

Flies swarm where they shouldn't, pipes and walls ooze ick, doors fly open, and priests and psychic sensitives cringe and flee in panic. It's definitely a house that audiences will enjoy visiting, especially if unfamiliar with the ending.

An unbelievably trashy meltdown of the tartan warrior franchise, Highlander III checks in as a breakneck, roller-coaster genre ride that’s brainless fodder for undiscriminating auds.

While foreign viewers are apt to focus on the action, native English speakers can't help but notice the sheer awkwardness of the performances.

Rude, heavily contrived, pretty funny, just remotely connected to real-world youth life.

Kids might enjoy this teenage fish-out-of-the-surf comedy , but anyone approaching the high school age of the movie's characters will spot the obvious formula within 15 minutes of opening credits.

Neither warm and fuzzy in the best holiday movie traditions, nor edgy and irreverent a la “Bad Santa” (coincidentally also co-starring Graham, to better effect), it’s something of a mystery what audience A Merry Friggin’ Christmas intends to serve.

A sort of Clockwork Orange meets Mad Max on the beach, pic hasn't one redeeming feature.

Shepard just sprinkles overstated banter onto a generic plot and bits of pedal-to-the-metal action, as if he was serving the action-comedy gods by sticking the usual ingredients in a blender and pushing “puree.”

An object lesson in overconfidence and underdevelopment, almost as unbalanced as its central psychotic.

Though the actors don't flesh out or particularly fit their roles, they seem perfectly at ease with them and with each other.

It’s hard for the audience to invest in a protagonist this solipsistic.

Winchester is the supernatural-schlock version of a liberal think-tank paper.

Cross-country race of the title comes off as almost entirely incidental to the star turns. Overall effect is akin to watching the troupe take a vacation.

Plodding and repetitive in its efforts to maintain pressure-cooker intensity, The Divide resembles nothing so much as an extended "Twilight Zone" episode as it brings a sci-fi twist to a familiar scenario about stressed characters who bring out the worst in each other while trapped in close quarters.

Writer-director Kenneth Johnson provides a tinny story and a leaden pace for his tarnished titan. There’s a coziness and simplicity to the production that would be better served on TV. Cinema-size, it comes off as corny, antiquated and slightly cheesy.

Special effects are none too convincing, while sound effects are of the cheaply jolting variety favored by producer Paul W.S. Anderson in his films as director ("Resident Evil," "Event Horizon"). Other tech credits are, like the pic as a whole, lazily derivative.

The film isn’t so much funny as it is merely amusing — a laundry list of inappropriate and potentially embarrassing moments that strive mightily, but never quite manage to land the laugh.

A dispiritingly lazy high school comedy.

In the absence of actors with the tremendous presence of Rutger Hauer and Jennifer Jason Leigh, picture loses its raison d'etre. Yet, directed by video helmer Dave Meyers with a certain fastidious distance from its plentiful gore, picture is also insufficiently over-the-top or corny to incite gleeful audience feedback.

A relatively pain-free, if brain-free, diversion.

A much more intense action vehicle for hero Ash Ketchum and his band of pocket monster trainers than its leaden, sometimes claustrophobic predecessor.

Colorful, crowd-pleasing toon.

Christensen underplays throughout 90 Minutes in Heaven, even in scenes when Piper isn’t operating under the influence of painkillers, and his earnestness often comes off as monotonous. Still, he generates interest and sympathy, almost in spite of himself, and Bosworth lends capable support as a loyal spouse.

What scant charms this direct-to-video-style Nineties throwback has belong mostly to Willis.

This softcore thriller runs strictly by the numbers.

The fifth in the series of slapstick comedies about Ernest P. Worrell will please his fans but is unlikely to convince anyone else as to it merits.

Cameron is genuinely compelling as Caleb.

Bland even for the armchair traveler, “Lost” is as inoffensive as a picture-souvenir booklet, and equally unmemorable.

It’s only the Brazilian-born Da Costa who seems to be trying to create a real character.

Still nothing but a gussied-up B movie.

Timlin bears a good-enough resemblance, and gives as much of a rounded performance as she can. But this conception provides no insight into any real HRC, past or present, and seems trite even as a fictionalized act of hostility toward whatever she represents to the filmmakers. Which is, in a word, murky.

Swan is more of a doodle than a fully formed idea, though not necessarily less enjoyable for it, since it was clearly intended to be an undisciplined, anything-goes kinda story.

Part one of a trilogy that may never see completion, this hasty, low-budget adaptation would have Ayn Rand spinning in her grave, considering how it violates the author's philosophy by allowing opportunists to exploit another's creative achievement -- in this case, hers.

Both overblown and undercooked, Season of the Witch is a fine example of a film that would've been great fun if only its creators had a sense of humor about the wild brew of absurdity they had percolating.