Alison Willmore

More than anything, The Instigators is ethnic comedy if being a white guy from Boston counts as its own ethnicity, an argument that Damon and the Afflecks have spent a good portion of their careers making. Those local specifics and in-jokes may not amount to much, but they are what distinguishes this film from other half-baked crime movies.

Mostly, when you watch Tron: Ares, you become aware of the degree to which this franchise has exhausted its own metaphor.

Mothers’ Instinct is, indeed, pretty terrible, and not in the so-bad-it’s-good sense, and yet there’s something strangely moving about it. It’s a poignant example of how what looks like rich material to actors can turn out to be lousy material for audiences.

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.

The Mummy is an enormously silly gross-out flick that for some reason believes it ought to be a meditative slow-burn affair.

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.

Lisa Frankenstein just doesn’t seem all that interested in what its main character is going through, which leaves it feeling lamentably flimsy, just a collection of references assembled around a hollow center.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

Despite the verve of the film, there’s no there there — just an exercise in quippy banter and witty violence that works well enough to remind you of better movies.

Reminiscence is the damnedest thing — a movie filled with promising concepts it doesn’t get around to exploring, because it’s dedicated to a romantic mystery that’s never very romantic or mysterious

We love charismatic murders and compelling monsters, but it’s always a little more comfortable to love them when they appear to be acting for good. The best thing about Don’t Breathe 2 is the way it constantly undermines that comfort, as though demanding we question the desire to assign hero and villain roles at all.

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.

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.

Not every figure in films like this one needs to be rendered with full psychological complexity, but when a horror movie rushes past a promising start in order to wallow in clichés, it feels as though it’s squandering a premise.

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

This variation on the demon child subgenre has enough of the familiar and the new to be a decently good time at the movies.

The result is an underwhelming addiction story that feels not just familiar, but more focused on the bad-boy swagger of its main character than his actual recovery.

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

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.

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.

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.

To give A Big Bold Beautiful Journey credit, it is a democratically even-handed waste of talent.

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