Alison Willmore

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.

Shyamalan . . . feels caught between the more emotionally considered movies he used to make, and the leaner, meaner ones he’s done more recently. His filmmaking can’t make up for the fact that Old is hovering indecisively between the two halves of his career, unable to commit to either direction.

The film is a dead-on skewering of the high-on-their-own supply megalomania that now afflicts so many members of the techno oligarchy, who unfortunately also control the levers of the world. I found it incredibly unpleasant to watch, in a way that made me think about comedy’s limitations as a critique of power when its targets are already more awful and more ridiculous than any fictional version.

If the results are mixed, it’s because the movie devotes more thought to putting distance between itself and Suicide Squad than to imagining what an independent version of the character is actually like.

Alpha is more evidence of Ducournau’s genius for evocative imagery and striking compositions, but it also suggests she’d benefit from boundaries to push against.

The film wallows in a particular brand of Americana — denim and leather, cornfields and Harley-Davidsons, crumpled packs of cigarettes and boilermakers on the bar at a dive — without being comfortable laying claim to it.

While the movie feels empty and pointless overall, it’s not without its scattered interesting elements.

Despite the obvious effort that went into the making of Maria, there’s so little life. For a movie built around a performance meant to be lauded for its bravery, there’s no sense of anything risked.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings may give us the franchise’s first Asian American superhero, but what may be the most Asian American thing about it is the way it’s caught between the legacy of its forebears and a still-developing sense of self, its protagonist yanked away from that journey and enlisted as the face of the latest representational win, without ever seeming entirely decided on what he’s representing.

For all that Nyad is happy to show its subject’s personality flaws, it has trouble finding her humanity,

There’s a disconcerting shrewdness underneath its patina of tastefulness — it’s too calculating to achieve the transcendent almost-romance it strives for but never inhabits.

Nothing about the film is especially coherent, including its simultaneous status as a piece of art, a gesture of religious conviction, and a shameless act of commerce. It feels like notes from an artist who’s not sure if he wants to express himself as a worshiper or an object of worship — but who’s prepared to give it a try anyhow, on the biggest screen possible.

Caught Stealing is an intermittently fun experience that would be a better time if Aronofsky either loosened up a little more or, conversely, maintained a tighter grip on the wheel.

The King of Staten Island shrinks Davidson down a little too much, to the point where his pathos and humor doesn’t blend with but actively gets obscured by his immaturity.

There’s a bitter irony to the fact that, whether due to access issues or an inability to wrangle what he wanted from his material, in retreading the Manson details, Morris has made something that feels a lot closer to that omnipresent slop than to the work that inspired it.

It’s easier to think about Frozen II as a product than as a film because a (sometimes stunning-looking) product is all that it feels like.

The problem with Holland is that Cave has no aptitude for tone.

The film’s bursts of violence are genuinely bracing — a face bashed in, a skull shattered, and the signature act of animal mutilation performed by a carnival geek, a figure of abject degradation who haunts the film’s ill-fated protagonist. But for a pulpy tale of addiction and desperate lives on the fringes, Nightmare Alley is otherwise depressingly short on actual darkness and discomfort.

Despite being half–“Let’s put on a show” movie and half–romantic comedy, two genres dedicated to delight, Magic Mike’s Last Dance never achieves satisfaction.

Echo Valley feels in need of an additional twist, or one fewer — to either commit to being foremost a drama about addiction or to go harder into the suspense, rather than ending up an awkward hybrid of the two.

Those bookending sequences, the start and the finish, are the only ones The History of Sound fully inhabits, while in all the others it plays coy, holding back for no particular reason than that it offers the illusion of sophistication.

Chemistry is nothing to sniff at, but P.S. I Still Love You does come awfully close to arguing itself out of its central romance.

The artifice of the aesthetic premise overwhelms any of the film’s other intentions.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is the 15th feature from Guy Ritchie, and while it’s not very good, it’s also hard to dislike something that has the genial tone of a day-drunk romp.

The Blackening gets halfway there, and has the benefit of some gifted performers and some very good ideas. It just never really figures out how to be a movie.

Magazine Dreams certainly isn’t inept, and Bynum, who wrote as well as directed it, summons a devastatingly spare atmosphere that’s broken up with some arrestingly dreamlike compositions when Killian arrives at a show or competition. But it consists of the same idea, underlined over and over.

Netflix’s previous attempt at an extravagantly priced star-driven action movie, Red Notice, felt like it was written by an AI and performed in front of green screens without ever requiring its stars to be in the same room. The Gray Man at least feels like a middling studio movie that wasn’t worth catching in theaters but that would comfortably fill an afternoon if you stumbled on it airing on cable.

Watching Goodrich isn’t like playing tourist in an upscale world — it’s more like stepping into the head of someone whose sense of normal is wildly different from your own.

In fitting with its main character’s desperate aversion to vulnerability, Vengeance squirms away from any satirical or emotional territory that might genuinely hurt.

Dog feels like it should have been bigger and braver, but by the end, it also feels as if it could have been improved by being much smaller, closing in until it was just a guy and a dog and some of the country’s most beautiful scenery. What else do you really need?

Gaga is wildly watchable in the role, broad but unwinking, an absolute scream, and the movie only really makes sense when it’s about her.

Ready or Not 2 moves at a decent clip and is generally entertaining, but there’s something deflatingly lazy about its slate of rich assholes, which is heavy on standard-issue entitled daughters and smug failsons who treat the staff like props.

Waititi hasn’t always been the most precise at mixing pathos and humor (Hunt for the Wilderpeople, yes, Jojo Rabbit, no), and the calibrations in Love and Thunder are all off.

Hoult, playing a pallid, anxious, disconcertingly dreamy Renfield, and Cage, fully Cageing it up as the count, manage to be compelling even when vamping (sorry) with all their might to make this material work.

The thrill of the action sequences just underscores the hollowness of the rest of the enterprise. Sure, not all of us spend a lot of time thinking about the Roman Empire, but those who do deserve better than this.

For a filmmaker who used to make these movies with a measure of anarchic glee, Ritchie appears to have bought into his own bullshit here.

Aja knows what sort of product he is turning out and does it ably, if without much excitement, as though understanding he is filling a hole in a lineup. It’s actually Laurent, who is too classy to be here, who doesn’t entirely grasp the assignment. She keeps overreaching, giving her cutout character shows of realistic emotion that the film she is appearing in can’t support.

The 355 was directed by X-Men: Dark Phoenix’s Simon Kinberg, who wrote the script with Smash creator Theresa Rebeck, and he’s genuinely terrible with fight sequences, which is a real issue in a movie that has a lot of them.

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

It’s not Chaves’s takeover that makes this new film feel like it runs off the rails — it’s the choice to shift focus from a haunting to a murder.

They’re progressive, positive young women, and they’re tragically boring, which is less the fault of their woke makeover than the film’s conviction that it’s incompatible with conflict or distinct personalities.

If Red One were a disaster, it’d be more interesting. Instead, it’s a technically passable action-comedy transparently stitched together from parts scavenged from other movies.

The trouble with trying to push at the boundaries of the superhero genre isn’t that we’re out of material, it’s that imaginations are so limited that a film that starts with a twist on a familiar premise nevertheless loops around to a standard showdown involving an incoherent blur of computer generated effects.

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 sequel is a string of callbacks and remember-this moments that ask an awful lot of something whose charms and cultural impact were modest at best — a feature-length effort at congratulating the audience for having shown up for the original film a decade ago.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye, which was written by Abe Sylvia, is unable to decide if it wants to understand its subject or make fun of her, and ends up never really committing to either.

Baby Invasion in a theater is akin to watching someone play a video game in the middle of a rave being thrown on a truck driven at high speed down winding streets. If anything, it’d be weird not to end up nauseated.

While Sohn has said Elemental was inspired by his parents, his upbringing in multicultural New York City, and his own mixed marriage, the lack of deeper consideration his film gives to its ideas leads to some ugly reductiveness.

For a movie marking a week in which theaters are reopening, Unhinged feels a lot like a movie that would be best caught on cable someday.

There is something endearing about watching a high-end cast and crew treat this material with such seriousness, even if they all seem to have missed the point. Sometimes schlock is just schlock, and it’s better off treated that way.

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

It’s a carefully crafted world of hyperfemininity intended to be as ominously smothering as it is pretty, and if the story that Paradise Hills, the directorial debut of Spanish filmmaker Alice Waddington, told were as sharp as its visuals, it’d have a guaranteed future as a cult classic. Instead, it’s a disappointingly half-baked riff on The Stepford Wives whose brand of feminism feels more 1970s than 2010s.

The glee everyone involved obviously felt in getting this improbable flick made is never balanced out by a sense of why anyone would need to actually watch it.

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.

For all its bloodshed, the movie’s not sharp enough to land a cutting blow — or even to break skin.

There’s enough material for a rollicking 25-minute short in Death of a Unicorn, which unfortunately spreads its goods out over the stretch of a feature.

It’s so devoid of bangers or any remotely memorable tunes that there’s nothing to distract you from the movie’s lack of clear stakes, or meaningful drama, or antagonists with any personality.

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

Napoleon is not, thank god, a hagiography. But it has the faltering rhythms of a rough draft — it plays as though Scott gave up on trying to carve a good film out of what actually ended up on screen.

Where the last two Charlie’s Angels installments were sold on their trio of stars, this soft reboot has leads at various levels of recognizability, and they all seem to be acting in their own movie.

That, in chasing something vaguely progressive and YA-inspired with Snow White, Disney has turned out a film with some hilariously timely choices is a great joke, though I wouldn’t call it an intentional one.

That compulsion to reverse engineer serious stakes for a fundamentally frivolous story is Twisters’ most contemporary quality and its most irritating.

There is something magical about the simple fact that this movie exists, in all its obscene, absurd wonder, its terrible filmmaking choices and bursts of jaw-dropping talent. It doesn’t need to be timely to be an artifact of its time — a movie about nothing but song and dance and, most important of all, about cats.

This Is Spinal Tap is a comedy about how the desire to be seen as a rock god collides with the humiliations of actually being human, and the visual of a group of guys in their 70s and 80s unable to move on from the styles of their youthful heyday is as effective a continuing riff on this theme as any. It’s also the only one fully realized by the new film.

Watching the movie summons the distinct sensation of arriving at a party just as the guests are starting to leave.

It’s hard to think about who, exactly, is going to be moved to make changes to how they live their lives by Don’t Look Up, a climate-change allegory that acquired accidental COVID-19 relevance, but that doesn’t really end up being about much at all, beyond that humanity sucks.

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 movie is all concept and, well, not quite no execution, but such confusing, conflicted execution that it makes the entire exercise feel like it was messed with after the fact.

The results are dispiritingly pleasureless, as though to fully embrace the idea of a penthouse prison would get in the way of the movie’s nebulous ideas about art.

COVID has proven a difficult subject for fiction, but In the Earth feels as though it sets up an emotional parallel that it doesn’t follow through on, abandoning the virus as a backdrop for a horror story that’s slapdash and never very creepy. It’s another instance of pandemic cinema that feels as if it could use more distance to figure out what it wants to say.

Evans has assembled a worthy cast and has crammed his film full of what should be fun elements, and yet the final result is weirdly without joy — akin to filling your plate with all your favorite foods at a buffet, only to sit down and realize you have no appetite to eat it.

What’s obvious after a few minutes of Piece by Piece is that the movie isn’t rendered the way it is because of some profound thematic ties between its subject’s life and the plastic construction set, but because the Lego is an attempt to inject something of interest into what is, even by the pre-chewed standards of authorized celeb docs, textureless pablum.

While Here Today never works, there is a confessional quality to it that makes it intermittently interesting. It’s the movie equivalent of someone telling what they think is a funny anecdote, but that instead comes out as an inadvertent glimpse into their soul.

The best part of Scoob!, a computer-animated reboot of the Scooby-Doo franchise, is the part in which the movie painstakingly recreates the opening credits of the original series.

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.