Alonso Duralde

While sitting through its interminable 133 minutes, I found myself parsing the difference between the unsettling and the merely unpleasant, and between the grotesque and the icky. In both cases, the former requires some engagement with human experience and consciousness while the latter — where this film permanently resides — merely relies upon witless bad taste and simple-minded gross-outs.

Obvious jokes, facile insights, and emotional Band-Aids are all that’s on the menu.

While Pratt has become the most stultifying of screen presences — he was a lot more fun to watch back when Bekmambetov cast him in a small role in 2008’s Wanted — Ferguson and Reis are both as electrifying as the material allows them to be.

Ultimately, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 makes no effort to expand its appeal beyond its built-in audience of gamers.

It’s entirely possible that Benny Safdie was out to craft a different kind of underdog sports movie, one where the audience isn’t manipulated into raising a triumphant fist at the end. But surely the writer-director-editor hoped for more than a disinterested shrug.

Spending its entire running time between quotation marks, this tedious exercise represents one of the most egregious wastes of talent in recent memory, from a talented cast (led by Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell) to legendary composer Joe Hisaishi to director Kogonada, whose previous films After Yang and Columbus conveyed emotional truths that exist beyond the understanding of this cutesy waste of energy.

If you find yourself revolted by the low-budget slasher movies made by such recently-released-from-copyright characters as Winnie the Pooh, Popeye, and Mickey Mouse, apply some of that distaste to Juliet & Romeo, which turns Shakespeare’s work into quite the horror show.

The barely-crafted romance between Marvin and Rose — for all the individual charisma of Quan and DeBose, there’s no sense that these two have ever experienced affection for the other — relies upon the screenplay telling us (via clumsy internal monologues) that they love each other rather than showing it, which is just one element of the bad writing on display here.

It’s an effect that gives viewers the feeling of being an audience member at a play or, more appropriately, at Disneyland’s old Carousel of Progress attraction, where a rotating stage showed tourists the same living room over the course of decades as fashions and technology evolved at each stop.

The Killer’s Game gets credit for letting Budapest be Budapest, rather than trying to pass it off as a featureless European metropolis, but that’s about the only way in which the movie avoids the generic.

Usually, the architecture of a thriller involves introducing a complicated scenario and then slowly but surely ratcheting up the tension; with Trap, Shyamalan has chosen to set it and forget it, spelling out the circumstances of the titular snare and then rarely bothering to introduce new elements or to elevate the suspense.

The fourth film of a franchise that probably should have packed it in at least two movies ago, this by-the-numbers sequel offers absolutely nothing unexpected, starting with its opening beaches-and-bikinis montage to the climactic standoff with the villain.

It’s an earnest attempt at a warm embrace that squeezes the life and charm out of itself.

Drive-Away Dolls is, at its core, a comedy about eccentric people contending with inept but still deadly criminals. But neither the eccentrics nor the criminals feel remotely like real people, and their hijinks never summon up much hilarity or suspense.

Lisa Frankenstein is a deadly dull and stitched-together effort that doubtless worked better on paper than it does in execution

Director Matthew Vaughn, fresh off the success of his irritating Kingsman franchise, makes Argylle utterly weightless, both literally (the stuntwork all seems to be taking place in zero gravity) and figuratively (the barely-there characters never register).

The film commits a sin that is new to cinema: it’s a boring James Wan movie.

It’s the absence of Lawrence — or at least of any young performer matching her charisma — that’s a key part of the problem here.

Freddy’s is rarely frightening — a crowd-friendly PG-13 means fear and carnage are suggested but almost no blood is shown — and it doesn’t have much to say about its underlying subject matter besides, “Hey, wouldn’t it be weird if those musical pizza robots came to life and had sharp teeth?”

The idea behind the series has always had potential — round up some beloved action stars of yesteryear and give them one more chance to ply their trade — but the expected fun has never materialized, with this latest entry lacking any sense of urgency, wit, or grace.

For all its potential, Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken remains stuck in the shallow end.

What we’re left with is an unromantic romance that’s as generic and forgettable as its title.

It’s a hyped-up cocaine conversation of a movie, throwing out lots of ideas and images and mammoth set pieces without ever amounting to anything.

Most disappointing of all, Black Adam is one of the most visually confounding of the major-studio superhero sagas, between CG that’s assaultively unappealing and rapid-fire editing that sucks the exhilaration right out of every fight scene.

All Bullet Train had to be was high-gloss, all-star, late-summer nonsense, but instead it gives high-gloss, all-star, late-summer nonsense a bad name.

Memory often feels more like a direct-to-video threequel than an actual movie.

We can confirm that Morbius is, really and truly, a movie. Granted, it’s not much of a movie, but it’s a movie nonetheless.

The 355 is the kind of star-packed, glossy adventure that wants to be the launching pad for a franchise; instead, it’s going to be one of the films most mentioned in future discussions regarding January as a studio dumping-ground for misbegotten movies.