Alison Willmore

Wild Mountain Thyme is not just charmless. It is genuinely confounding, a movie constantly working against itself to make its characters and their dilemma comprehensible.

Venom: The Last Dance isn’t a lark, but a smirk to let you know that while everyone may be aware of what it’s up to, you’re the sucker who bought the ticket.

While Urban hurls himself into the role of Johnny with the commitment of someone for whom the phrase “sequel to a reboot of a fighting-game adaptation” signals only the latest opportunity to shine, the film, which was written by Jeremy Slater and directed by a returning Simon McQuoid, offers so little to work off of that even he gives off the faintest whiff of exasperation.

Voyagers, in keeping its focus where it does, feels like a waste not just because of how predictable its beats are, but because it ends just when it feels like it’s getting interesting.

The ending may be heavily foreshadowed, but that doesn’t make the lead-up any less exasperating or what happens any less egregious.

It’s an adaptation without direction or purpose, with an unwieldy but deeply committed performance at its center. Hathaway looks to be having fun, at least. Someone should!

65 is not good, if that even needs to be said. For something that involves almost nonstop dino action, it’s impressively unengaging, like watching a video game no one’s allowed to play. But its mangled badness is kind of compelling.

Mostly, Arthur is acted upon, even when he thinks he’s seizing control — a punching bag for the world and, more importantly, for the director, who subjects the character to so many indignities that he actually stops being pitiable and starts resembling the punchline to a very long, shaggy joke. By the end of Joker: Folie à Deux, that joke feels like it’s on us.

It’s when the music stops and the movie is forced to contend with the mishmash of recycled elements it’s trying to use as a plot that it really flounders.

It’s a bold formal choice to regard the world through a fixed point in space, and, unfortunately, it’s all in service of the biggest pile of schmaltz you’ll see this year.

What makes Flamin’ Hot such a depressing offering isn’t the relative truthiness of its source material, but the qualities it holds aloft as inspiring.

The Six Triple Eight is about people who received no public recognition for their achievements at the time, but in trying to give them their belated due onscreen, this clunky excuse for a war movie ends up being more about what they endured than about what they accomplished.

It’s not the first film to try to disguise its titillation at violence, in particular against women, with blunt, larger themes. But when those themes are about the structures that enable that violence, the whole enterprise just feels repellent.

Kraven the Hunter explores the inner workings of a guy we didn’t care about to begin with, alongside underwhelming action sequences and a lot of scenery chewing.

Like Shelley’s much-adapted creature, The Bride! is a creation of enormous ambition. It’s also an incoherent disaster — and not of the noble folly variety. It leaves you with the sinking feeling of watching someone fight their way to the front of a crowd to speak, only to realize when the spotlight is finally on them that they’re not actually sure what to say.

The Bricklayer isn’t worth seeking out — it’s ideally stumbled onto on cable TV on a hungover Saturday afternoon, when there’s plenty of time to reflect on how little time a slumming Tim Blake Nelson, playing the director of the CIA, must have spent on set.

The real sin of The King’s Man is its near-total lack of fun.

This new movie suggests that Berger isn’t capable of rising above his source material or, in this case, even meeting it.

Skarsgård and Twigs have a total absence of chemistry, and while she’s adequate in what’s still basically a dead-wife role, he’s shockingly inert for someone with a career built almost entirely on characters at the intersection of creepy and hottie.

If the series was conceived as a way to hold on to the fans of the original books and movies who are now grown, what’s clear in practice is it’s a children’s story staggering to support a few ambitious and deeply underdeveloped themes.

Östlund’s slog of a film is exceptional in the distance it creates between the viewer and its characters and in how comfortable its attempts at causticity actually feel. It comes complete with an ending that should be bitterly dark and instead just comes across as a moue of indifference.

It’s hard to guess whether the story was mangled by studio reedits or just didn’t have much to say to begin with — both seem possible. The bigger question is why so many strong actors signed on for this misfire.

There are a few funny sequences . . . But the film is otherwise so sloppily assembled, and so lazy, that it frequently ends up feeling like an inadvertent parody of the underdog-sports genre it belongs to.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie, an almost impressively generic kiddie movie re-skinned with characters and concepts from one of the most famous video game franchises in the world, might as well have been assembled by a focus group.

The problem with Capone isn’t that it’s an unconventional biography or a challenge to the image of a famous figure. It’s that it’s not bold enough on either of those fronts.

The kaiju of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire don’t stand for anything but themselves. They’re just giant monsters that occasionally fight one another, which would be forgivable if the fighting in the movie weren’t so torpid.

Audiences may not have run out of enthusiasm for what the Jurassic Worlds are selling, or at least they haven’t yet, but the people tasked with making them sure are out of ideas.

It’s so obviously shaped by fan response that it feels like the movie equivalent of someone who went viral online and now can only repeat themselves to diminishing returns in an attempt to hawk merch while they can.

Even Johnson has her limits, and Madame Web, one of Sony’s attempts to build out its own Spider-Verse, blows so far past them that you can practically guess which scenes were shot last based on the degree to which its star has given up.

The Scargiver plays like a screensaver. Its shots are littered with lens flares and aesthetically pleasing smoke, with the contrast of golden light and planted fields alongside spacecraft and gas giants on the horizon. It would be just as evocative as a carousel of stills on an unused monitor, or maybe more so, given that the stills wouldn’t be accompanied by ponderous dialogue.

Watching it feels more like being frog-marched through a wax museum than watching a movie, each milestone restaged with an off-putting, uncanny-valley resemblance and no interiority.

Smith is a stunt coordinator and performer, a background that’s led to some great action fare in other contexts, but in this one, produces a mess of chopped-to-bits showdowns that sometimes seem to be missing coverage.

It’s a film about Amy Winehouse that just doesn’t care for Amy Winehouse much, as an artist or as a person.

The line between a movie and an advertisement has gotten increasingly blurry — movies used to be a way to sell toys, but now toys have become the sole basis of movies. But Gran Turismo, in its texturelessness, the lack of joy in its depictions of gameplay, its too-sleek race footage and void of a main character, is particularly egregious in what it’s doing.

It’s a mess of a movie, and no amount of threatening huffing and puffing on Wahlberg’s part can make it worthwhile.

Thunder Force doesn’t work as a comedy, but that’s because it doesn’t really work as a movie. There’s so little chemistry between McCarthy and Spencer, longtime real-life friends, that, rather than buddies, their characters often just come across as mildly surprised to find themselves in the same room.

Its empty girl power aesthetic has the quality of an intrusive thought. Like something out of a time capsule cracked open too early, The Princess is an artifact of girlboss feminism that retains no resonance, but that’s also not distant enough to have curiosity value.

The movie is so charmless and hopelessly incoherent that you might feel the need to consult Wikipedia afterward for some help on what it was even about.

It is a terrible horror movie, by the way, just wretchedly unenjoyable.

Irresistible isn’t just shockingly ineffectual in its insights into national schisms — it is, in an added betrayal, unfunny, requiring its audience to slog their way through so much laborious farce without a laugh in sight.

Without Remorse is awful — an incoherently shot, grindingly dull movie in which just about every actor manages to seem miscast.

Infinite feels like a depressing fable about the movie industry.