Alonso Duralde

A little more deviating from the playbook would make Hellion stand out more amidst an ever-growing pack of similar films.

This new Rebecca has its own sense of style, and it’s not above fully embracing the pulpy delights of du Maurier’s book, but unlike the unnamed second Mrs. de Winter, it can’t quite break free of the inevitable expectations placed upon it.

It’s a grand, old-school saga full of sacrifice and betrayal and loss, and just when the audience is gearing up for a powerfully tragic resolution of the kind that Thomas Hardy might have written, the movie veers off into Nicholas Sparks territory instead.

The cast seems game, and perhaps they realize it’s on them to elevate the material, so the scenes between Reynolds and Jackson have some genuine snap to them, even though the dialogue and characterization are barely memorable.

At nearly every juncture, the filmmakers display a lack of nerve, exercising restraint precisely when restraint is anathema to their goals. They’re cautious rather than crazed.

It’s a film that positively reeks of good intentions, but it’s so timid and tentative — the words “trans” and “transgender” are never uttered aloud — that it feels as hopelessly retro as casting a cisgender actress in the lead.

Co-stars and co-writers Daveed Diggs (“Wonder”) and Rafael Casal have a lot to say, much of it funny and/or provocative, but neither they nor first-time feature director Carlos López Estrada can figure out a way to shape all this material into a cohesive film.

If this latest one was aiming to mix it up by giving equal weight to the masks of comedy and tragedy, it’s an effort that falls short.

While the provocative title promises a film that will reveal new information about the infamous Koch brothers, there's little on display here that regular viewers of “The Rachel Maddow Show” won't have already heard.

From a rain-soaked carnival midway to a glossy, Art Deco therapist’s office, everything in Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley looks gorgeous. There just doesn’t seem to be a lot going on under the art direction.

For all its craft, though, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes never finds the “aha” moment that justifies returning to the well for reasons more pressing than branding and global markets.

While The Wedding Ringer isn’t the total waste of time that its painful trailer (and January release date) threatens, it’s also a movie whose occasional good ideas are ultimately drowned out by sloppy, contrived screenwriting.

Jurassic World never works all that hard to wow us, either with groundbreaking effects or with a story that remotely holds our attention.

The Look of Silence feels more like an extended DVD extra to his genre-defying previous film than a stand-alone documentary.

It’s a slow, sluggish and whimsy-deficient movie that seems designed to entertain neither children nor adults, and the film’s script opens a Pandora’s Box of a plot twist.

While The Interview never slacks in its mission to tell jokes, it's such a messy and meandering movie that it never quite lands as a satire of politics or the media or anything else.

There’s not much to Victoria & Abdul, but as a delivery system for Judi Dench, it serves its purpose. Otherwise, it’s just Buckingham Palace fetishism cranked up to peak mumsy.

For much of the film, Nolan (who co-wrote with his brother Jonathan) seems to be unafraid to allow this big-budget extravaganza to tell a story that's about pain and loss and melancholy and sacrifice. Until it's not that anymore, and Interstellar becomes thuddingly prosaic.

If Emma Thompson can’t make The Children Act...into something interesting and meaningful, then no one can. And she can’t.

A smiling Cameron Diaz and a weeping Leslie Mann bring a lot to any movie, but they aren't enough to overcome the mix-and-match mania of these proceedings. Girls just wanna have fun, but they'd also like a coherent night at the movies.

This “based on a true story” underdog tale is infectiously determined to make you fall in love with it, like a mangy dog that plops its head in your lap and gazes adoringly at you until you scratch it behind the ears. Eventually, you give in and scratch. And then you wash your hands.

This is the sort of film in which we’re told that a certain action is impossible, until it isn’t, or that a certain thing would never happen, and then it does, so even with all those lives on the line, the movie can’t effectively build up stakes or consequences.

As a portrait of an author on the verge of a breakthrough, this is a run-of-the-mill, occasionally clumsy biopic; as for contextualizing Christmas, it never explains how it functioned before Dickens and only briefly mentions how it changed after him.

As a 20-minute short or even a 50-minute TV program, London Road might maintain its sharpness and its potency, but as a feature film, its cleverness wears a bit thin and its messaging gets too overblown.

Ellis and editor Richard Mettler craft an agonizing and unforgettable finale; if their sense of pacing had been as sharp throughout, “Anthropoid” might have fulfilled its potential.

It works in the hits, and it casts singers who make those hits sound virtually identical to the original versions. What the movie doesn't do is answer the question, “Why did I just spend 134 minutes watching the Frankie Valli episode of ‘Behind the Music'?”

There’s a history of great directors going out on a lesser film, and unfortunately, Friedkin joins their ranks. He leaves behind an extraordinary filmography of groundbreaking work that will inspire generations to come, but The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial will exist, at best, as a footnote to this legendary career.

Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase is clearly made by people who have thought through the material and tried to make it enjoyable and palatable, but the set-up at the end for further sequels feels a little too hopeful.

There’s a lot to like about the world of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, from the mid-century kitsch to the progressive social ethos to its generally upbeat demeanor, but the movie itself lacks the nerve to carve out a memorable personality. Bespoke costumes and vintage Lucky Charms boxes are the empty props of a timid movie.

Even with De Niro (and De Niro) in the leads, this is mob-movie cosplay, a hollow shadow of previous triumphs. As a mob lawyer might bellow, “Nothing to see here.”

A movie with more potential directions than its globe-trotting-assassin heroine has wigs, “Ava” offers moments that suggest it might have succeeded as an action thriller, a dysfunctional family drama, or a character study. Since it commits fully to none of these, the results are the sort of bland bang-bang-pow that keep Nicolas Cage and Bruce Willis afloat in between movies that critics actually like, or even see.

It’s a mannered and muddled take on an exciting subject, and even Taymor’s trademark flights of fantasy are fairly hit and miss.

Apart from the pleasurable specifics of Hanks’ and Landry Jones’ performances (to say nothing of Seamus, the film’s scene-stealing canine co-star), you’ve seen all this before.

You get flashes of the clever comedy this might have been — a funny line here, an amusing bit of business there, the occasional whiff of relevance — but it too often lumbers along, coasting on the backs of some very talented performers.

There are moments of fun to be found in Think Like a Man Too... It's just a pity that the movie does better by members of the Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority than those of the Screen Actors Guild.

Writer-director David Ayer tries hard to make this dirty not-quite-dozen into an engaging band of misfits, but the results feel undercooked and overstuffed, with 10 pounds of supervillain backstory being crammed into a five-pound bag.

This ultimately feels like four very promising movies mashed together, with spectacular highlights bumping into each other in a way that’s ultimately lacking, even as they all demonstrate the prowess and bravado of the filmmaker.

It’s always applause-worthy when a biopic focuses on a few key years rather than try to tackle the span of a notable life, but Cooper never fully captures the mental anguish or the artistic glory tied up in Nebraska’s creation. It’s as spare as the album it chronicles, but never as subtle or satisfying.

You’ll come away from this film remembering some of the better moments, and a few of the quieter interactions between the characters, but they’ll be mostly overpowered by the stench of everything else.

Frantz too often belabors the obvious and ultimately blunts its own message.

“Secret” contains a passel of interesting ideas and effective scenes that don’t add up to an interesting whole.

On a pure craft level, The Creator delivers as a sweeping, big-screen science-fiction experience. What dazzles the eye, unfortunately, fails to connect with either the head or the heart.

If “Wonder Woman” provided a glimmer of hope that DC Comics movies might start looking, moving and sounding differently than before, Justice League plops us right back into “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice” territory, albeit with a little more wit and humanity.

Blair Witch does manage to generate occasional moments of tension, particularly when it strays from the first film’s narrative and peeks into some new dark corners.

There’s no denying that the tale of Colin Warner, a man who spent decades behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit, is a powerful one, but writer-director Matt Ruskin doesn’t give us anything here that a documentary couldn’t do better.

Actor-turned-filmmaker Fran Kranz’s choice of subject matter for his feature debut is certainly timely and provocative, but the emotions are too big and too messily human to fit into the tight box he has constructed to contain them.

From its facile depiction of the role of incarceration in the rehab process — addiction is a health issue that we keep mistakenly treating as a criminal issue — to the under-writing of the characters, what should be a harrowing drama instead comes off as an anti-drug pamphlet.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is for the fans, all right, but in that expression’s worst way.

Lucy is a confounding experience, but at a brisk 85 or so minutes, it manages not to outstay its welcome. Those not enamored of Besson's particular brand of Euro-schlock grindhouse existentialism, however, may find their brains more stimulated elsewhere.

Rather than play like a significant departure from the “Toy Story” films that spawned it, Lightyear instead emerges as a disappointing runner-up, capturing but a fraction of the comedy, thrills and poignancy of its predecessors.

The Legend of Tarzan isn’t as singularly joyless as many of this summer’s other current offerings, but it also feels distinctly like a missed opportunity. Even when Skarsgård offers up the character’s famous jungle cry, it sounds more mournful than enthusiastic, and that sentiment seeps into the entire enterprise.

Director Josh Trank, whose debut feature “Chronicle” put a smart new spin on superhero tropes, has assembled a quartet of engaging, charismatic performers and stranded them in a miasma of exposition and set-up that sinks the movie.

The ingredients steadfastly refuse to whip up into the froth this film so clearly wants to be.

The intent of the film, and its timeliness, are beyond reproach, but that doesn't make Kill the Messenger as stirring or inspiring of indignation as it clearly wants to be.

While many of the big moments of If I Stay can be easily dismissed, it's the little ones that elevate the film to at least mixed-bag status.

This stodgy adaptation creaks with solemnity — not to mention reactionary casting choices — and apart from some nifty frog and locust infestations, even the special effects pale next to a wind-blown Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea.

There’s a sketch, or a short film, or even an Adult Swim series to be mined from these characters and situations, but as a feature film, Welcome to Me comes off like taunting followed by hugs, where neither feels genuine.

There’s a goofy spree of a movie buried deep within Sausage Party, but it’s missing both the spree and the goofs. This comedy needed to be a lot smarter if it wanted to succeed at being this stupid.

Whether the eventual people-eating of the film’s final act merits enduring the turgid early portions of Meg 2: The Trench is, of course, a matter of opinion, but viewers might be well advised to wait until they can see the movie in a medium that involves a fast-forward button.

This is a rare misstep for Russell, who in the past has sold us on all kinds of stories, whether they’re as indescribable as “I Heart Huckabee’s” or as traditional as “The Fighter.” Unlike his indefatigable heroine, however, Russell just can’t seem to close the deal on Joy.

Besides Bentley’s performance, the only thing “We Are Your Friends” has going for it is the occasional directorial flourish, with words on screen or characters addressing the camera or that painterly drug trip. These jolts are few and far between, but they’re most welcome when they arise.

Ferrell and Wahlberg are both game, but the material only sporadically lets them let loose and do something truly creative, while poor Cardellini transitions from naggy to unreliable.

The one-joke nature of this adults-only spoof wears out the film’s welcome, even if director Brian Henson and his talented crew never let us see the strings.

F1 doggedly follows the expected ups and downs of most sports-movie narratives, and it’s clearly more interested in recreating the experience of racing than telling a story or crafting a character piece.

If the script undercuts the enormity of what their characters are enduring, the two lead actors rescue the film from utter negligibility.

Lovers of spectacle for spectacle’s sake will come away from the film with many discrete sequences to admire, but there’s not enough of a human element to bridge them together. In terms of its lasting power, In the Heart of the Sea roars in like a great tide, but then just as quickly dissipates.

If nothing else, The Last Word demonstrates that Shirley MacLaine still has the comic chops and screen presence that have made her a Hollywood legend.

So confoundingly ridiculous that it takes mediocrity to another level; narrative cinema rarely cares this little about actual narrative, transforming what’s supposed to be the concluding chapter of an ongoing saga into little more than pure sensation — blobs of color, bursts of sound.

About the best that can be said about the sluggish Self/less is that it’s a better Ryan Reynolds body-switching movie than “The Change-Up”; still, you’re better off seeking out “Seconds” — or heck, “All of Me” — instead.

It’s nice that the two photogenic leads are treating sex like a pleasurable activity rather than an onerous chore in this second entry, but overall, the film plays like an un-asked-for collaboration between the Hallmark and Playboy Channels.

Somehow, the blistering comedy you would expect never quite manifests, and instead we get a lot of on-the-nose sermonizing and weak-tea social commentary.

If you have waited your entire life to see this world brought to life, and to watch humans and Pokémon occupy the same space, then Detective Pikachu may well be everything you ever wanted. But for those of us who don’t know a Jigglypuff from a Charizard, this film scores low on wit, coherence and engagement.

Field uses her considerable powers as an actress to imbue some humanity into Doris, but the film kneecaps her efforts at every turn.

Whether or not you think Crowley’s very of-its-moment piece still has something to say to audiences of the 21st century, it’s a play that deserves better than this waxwork karaoke.

Overall, the movie left me feeling bombarded with images, bored by the lack of an interesting story, and irritated with my own cultural past.

Neeson has certainly starred in worse action vehicles than The Marksman, but rarely have they been more forgettable.

Even if the big numbers in Step Up All In don't always hit the heights of its immediate predecessors, there are enough exultant moments – during the crew battles or Sean and Andie's pas de deux on a carnival ride — to tide you over until the inevitable Part Six.

Unfinished Business isn’t a laugh-free experience — Nick Frost steals every scene as a business underling with a kinky side — and some of the comic set pieces actually work.

If The Flash proves anything, it’s that the fans won, and that’s a loss for everyone else.

Neither poignant nor eccentric, this just feels like a lesser 1970s Disney live-action comedy smothered in digital effects.

If writer-director-star Tyler Perry makes good on his threat to make A Madea Family Funeral the final film featuring his larger-than-life comedic heroine, then Madea will going out with a whimper and not with a bang, even by Perry standards.

Despicable Me 4 plays like an assemblage of note cards that have been stapled together in a rough approximation of a screenplay. There are about 20 different plot threads that aren’t woven together as much as they’re shoved into one ungainly knot.

When Ramírez and Cruz, or Moura and de Armas, are on screen together, addressing the human cost involved in spycraft, Wasp Network becomes much more interesting. When it veers away from them, the film seems mostly comprised of conversations in restaurants, where new characters and organizations are constantly being introduced.

There’s a mild chuckle every so often in Early Man...but overall the movie collapses in a heap of familiarity and lackadaisicalness. Park is an animation legend, but even the greats occasionally whiff it.

The film has a killer case of the cutes that only Smith’s acidity can cut, and only so much.

While the film far outshines most of Cage’s recent efforts (he was direct-to-VOD when direct-to-VOD wasn’t cool) in terms of art direction and fearlessly madcap storytelling, the results are nonetheless muddled and messy.

Camp X-Ray never makes the bond between this particular woman and this particular prisoner feel genuine or organic. Their relationship (platonic, obviously) smacks more of screenwriter contrivance than of two put-upon souls finding each other under duress.

Every few scenes, there’s a chuckle-worthy bon mot or sight gag, or the animation style will alter radically for some plot-driven reason, but there’s far too much downtime between Smurfs’ sporadic delights.

A cover version is pretty much what this do-over of The Gambler represents, with the rougher edges mixed out and sweetened. It's no mystery why actors and directors want to relive the magic of American studio movies from the fabled 1970s, but if you're not going to take the risks that the originals did, or illuminate as much about the characters, why redo them at all?

Every good idea this sequel has to offer winds up taking a backseat to the most obvious cat-in-the-closet “BOO!” moments imaginable.

As with so many of the ideas on display here, Snow White can’t have it both ways or even decide which way it wants.

And while it’s always commendable when a disaster movie establishes early on that any member of the cast can die at any moment, the film makes a fatal error in killing off the funniest of its teen characters, with only a bunch of earnest Breakfast Clubbers in their place.

Mawkish, bland and banal, this dreary love story — and it’s no “Love Story” — seems to think it can throw together dying girl and handsome prince, and that’s all there is to it.

Aficionados of Nicholas Sparks movies may swoon over this film’s distressed T-shirts and kudzu-choked back roads, but lovers of love stories deserve much better.

With a combination of jokes that don't land and a constant flurry of exposition and plotting to keep these flimsy plates spinning, Let's Be Cops more often than not feels more like a court-ordered defensive-driving class than a rousing high-speed chase.

This sequel might (in, one hopes, a happier future) be hilarious in retrospect, but at the moment, it’s a mostly cringe-worthy experience.

Last Breath was made by someone who clearly connects with this material, but somewhere between the non-fiction and fiction versions, the emotional impact has been rendered unfathomable.

The Expendables 3 is silly and overblown, yes, and it could definitely do without Antonio Banderas‘ motor-mouth routine (not to mention an out-of-nowhere reference to Benghazi), but it's less silly and overblown than “The Expendables 2,” for whatever that's worth.

These characters and their dilemmas could be the stuff of great, or at least good, drama, but Slattery's insistence on accentuating their sorrows with clinically depressed art direction wears thin rather quickly.

Which version of the film each viewer sees will be a subjective choice, of course, but the fact that the lead character is so utterly guileless and innocent and kindhearted...makes Katie less a victim of the world and more a victim of first time writer-director Wayne Roberts.

You can feel this movie's attempts at Big Ideas about technology get weighed down by a dopey, nonsensical plot.

If anyone walks away unblemished from Walk of Shame, it's Banks, who throws herself into every bit of physical comedy and humiliation the movie sends her way. If the movie had gone for broke as often as its lead actress, the results wouldn't feel so disposable.

It doggedly follows the well-worn rom-com path, down to saving all the personality and occasional laughs – very, very occasional ones – for the supporting cast.

X-Men: Apocalypse provides a hint at what might one day take down the ubiquitous superhero genre: utter dullness. For all its bangs, the movie is ultimately a whimper.

What makes this film go astray are the problems that plague so many screen biographies: too much narration, too much telling and not enough showing, and presenting an artist's accomplishments in lieu of exploring his perspective.

What grates about director Yuval Adler and his co-writer Ryan Covington pilfering so obviously from Dorfman’s work is that they haven’t done anything particularly interesting with it.

Piven’s Ari is so over-the-top in his narcissism and megalomania that he’s fun to watch, but the other lead characters are the kind of bros who should be having drinks thrown in their faces on a regular basis.

Hillbilly Elegy isn’t interested in the systems that create poverty and addiction and ignorance; it just wants to pretend that one straight white guy’s ability to rise above his surroundings means that there’s no excuse for everyone else not to have done so as well.

There are certainly far more despicable franchises in the world of children’s entertainment than the “Peter Rabbit” series, but there are few this negligible, particularly considering the talent involved. Just because you don’t have to aim higher doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.

Wish plays more like a collection of deleted tracks than greatest hits.

Far From the Madding Crowd will no doubt captivate future generations of tenth-graders who couldn’t be bothered to read the book, but it flattens the complex characters and grand scope of Hardy’s novel into an airless and overly truncated CliffsNotes version.

Nourizadeh and Landis are clearly going for a Tarantino level of blood-soaked dark humor, and while their cast is game, the film’s bursts of violence grow tiresome as its plot gets more and more ludicrous and hard to swallow.

Take everything annoying about a cobbled-together, overly familiar YA adaptation, add the built-in wheel-spinning of a sequel, and you’ve got Insurgent, a film that works best when it places its heroine inside virtual-reality situations — at least then it has an excuse for eschewing logic and context.

One of the film’s best features is that it does a minimum of seeding the ground for the next five MCU sequels; one of its worst is that it generates little enthusiasm for ever seeing these characters again.

With The Conjuring: Last Rites, this venerable franchise finally (one hopes) gives up the ghost, not with a bang, but a whimper.

So much of the film’s brutality has been removed in favor of melodrama and CGI fake-outs that it doesn’t matter that the cast is bringing their A-game. The game has already been called due to lack of interest.

I Can Only Imagine 2 is a Marvel movie for Evangelicals, but not in a good way: it rehashes the emotional beats of its predecessor to sell audiences an exercise in diminished results. With its reliance on familiar tropes and story clichés, it’s a movie that, even if you haven’t seen it yet, you can probably imagine.

It's not even that the film shifts wildly in tone as much as the fact that none of those tones work at all: the horror parts aren't scary and, surprisingly for Smith, the comedy bits aren't funny.

What’s most dispiriting about War Machine is that you can sense the satire it wants to be — and could have been — but never becomes.

If you ever wondered what Richard Linklater’s “Before” trilogy would be like without the insightful writing, sharp directing and intuitive performances, Long Weekend will pretty much fill the bill.

Movies about artists, ideally, celebrate the art while also providing a glimpse into the blood, sweat, and tears behind its creation, but any exciting moments here can be found in their original, natural state on YouTube. Michael has no ambitions beyond being its own commemorative souvenir booklet.

If the undemanding silliness of the first “Hot Tub Time Machine” was your cup of comedy, then you may well enjoy another plunge in these waters. Apart from a few laughs, however, I found the experience tepid and soggy.

It’s one thing to bring a gravelly gravitas to characters like this, but Penn suffers and glowers so much that it weighs down the material. If he plans to strap on the Kevlar in future, he might consider lightening up a little and saving the intensity for more serious movies.

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.

Burnt ultimately feels like those sous-vide bags that Adam finds so worthy of mockery: trapped in plastic, with the air sucked out of it.

The period detail is rich and worth watching, and there’s a deep bench of strong character actors to give the movie occasional jolts of life. Overall, however, the usually charismatic Affleck never manages to bring gangster Joe Coughlin to life.

The film’s attempts at comedy and sentimentality are equally unsuccessful, resulting in a movie that feels more like a third-rate “Saved by the Bell” knock-off than a legitimate teen flick.

What Alice Through the Looking Glass constantly underscores, however, is that even the greatest cinema trickery serves little purpose without stories and characters to support. The pictures are pretty (or scary or awe-inspiring) but they ultimately don’t mean anything.

Even a better political satire would have a hard time keeping up with the bizarrely eccentric vaudeville currently taking place on cable news, but Our Brand Is Crisis can’t even come close.

Blanchett, as you’d imagine, is riveting, even when she’s saddled with the movie’s on-the-nose dialogue, not to mention a handful of fairly contrived domestic scenes.

The Hollars feels so painfully familiar and so dramatically undernourished that even the great Margo Martindale can only do so much with this cliché-riddled script.

Forget art, or even craft: This is the kind of movie that can’t even get its shameless audience-pandering in order.

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.

So what does Guadagnino’s version convey? Boredom, mostly, with confusion and a dollop of disappointment and irritation.

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 first “Point Break” was absurd and hyper-macho, but the director committed to the story enough to make it, at the very least, vibrantly watchable. This remake offers nothing but the absurdity, along with a handful of impressive stunt sequences that are both its reason for being and a complete distraction from what little story is happening here.

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.

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.

Neither intelligent enough to be involving nor fun enough to be trashy, this is a movie that would only work if it were a little worse or a lot better.

Poltergeist ultimately plays like the most perfunctory of remakes, one born of rights ownership and title marketability rather than a burning desire on anyone’s part to do something interesting or provocative with a classic. The 1982 original remains unassailable, all the more so when stood side by side with its pipsqueak descendant.

There’s plenty of fart jokes, forward motion and bright colors to engage easily-entertained children, but their parents will be subjected to yet another movie that has all the zing of watching evolution in real time.

Sam Raimi is a producer here, and it’s hard not to think about how he might have mined this material both for provocation and for fright; his “Drag Me to Hell” remains the gold standard of how to scare the heck out of an audience within the restrictions of PG-13. What we get instead here is a tepid little chiller with an overqualified cast.

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

From “Vanilla Sky” onward, unfortunately, Crowe seems to have been stricken with some form of tone-deafness that curdles quirky into shrill.

Lacking appealing characters (or character design), this misfire will, with any luck, eventually become a forgotten footnote among the output of a production company that has, up until now, shown real promise at making films that defy the usual tropes and storytelling mechanisms in contemporary family-friendly animation.

It's hard to get invested in the father-son dynamic here, even it when it represents a diversion from the limp comedy bits and the flatlined suspense.

Despite the powerhouse presence of Reese Witherspoon, this limp little midlife crisis comedy leaves out the comedy and the crisis, and it certainly never comes to life.

Even if you agree with everything The Confessions has to say about the problems of our era and who caused them, you’ll learn nothing new and will find little entertainment in hearing your opinions espoused.

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.

It’s not inherently misguided to use a current tragedy as the jumping-off point of a genre movie, but any filmmaker who decides to do so had better create something provocative or interesting or at least competent to justify it.

[McCarthy] and her husband Falcone (who also directed) have created a character comedy that's missing both comedy and character.

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

Overall, The Little Things — which is how Deke refers to the details that lead to killers being caught — isn’t much of anything.

The cast of old pros (including Bruce Willis as a soldier of fortune) amble through amiably enough, but a few laughs here and there aren’t enough to make this movie come together in a satisfying way.

Whether or not one should tamper in God’s domain remains a matter of opinion, but Victor Frankenstein provides evidence that mere mortals should not mess with what Ms. Shelley hath wrought.

Combines the barely-there characterization and irritating cutesiness of “The Smurfs” with the hideous character design and awful pop covers of “Strange Magic.”

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

Ultimately, Equals fails because Silas and Nia aren’t all that much more interesting as a romantic couple than they are as zombie-like individuals.

The loss doesn’t hit, and the comedy doesn’t land, leaving Dean a wasted opportunity that offers a few talented artists the chance to do fine work in the service of an empty vessel.

This true-crime saga of the Gucci family losing control of their own fashion empire could have been a full-blown camp classic were it not so frequently dull and tentative.

There’s no shortage of imaginative sci-fi details or of talented actors on-hand, but the film boils down to characters we barely get to know chasing each other and yelling. That it hardly matters who’s being chased or what, exactly, is being yelled — mostly “Stop her!” and “AAAUUUGGGHHH!” — is just part of the trouble here.

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.

The battling, metallic heroes have never looked better, but Michael Bay's choppy, dissonant storytelling methods remain as audience-punishing as ever.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a movie that takes its characters and its premise seriously, until it doesn't, and that operates at two speeds: tortoise (ponderous) and hare (head-spinning).

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.

If this new movie — referred to in some circles as Blumhouse’s Fantasy Island — were a pilot for a TV reboot, it would come off as overwrought and underwritten but still possibly on the right track for a revived anthology series. As a movie, those flaws are magnified to the size of the silver screen, and its contrivances and coincidences come off as even less convincing.

It’s fine to forfeit elements like stakes or suspense for a character piece, but when the characters are this vague, there’s nothing on which to hang your hat (or headband, for that matter).

A howlingly inane movie that somehow managed to collect an impressively A-list cast on its way toward becoming a cop movie that’s not just dumb, it’s disastrous.

In Superintelligence, an average human being must convince a sentient AI program not to wipe out humanity. Lucky for all of us, the film Superintelligence is not entered as evidence that our continued existence is justified.

The Angry Birds Movie basically hits all the squares on the Lazily Conceived Family Cartoon bingo card.

Words and Pictures never accrues enough emotional resources to bear out the darker, heavier moments, which turns its big dramatic moves into clunky embarrassments.

The film’s most genuinely funny moment involves A.J.’s ringtones, which should perhaps come as no surprise — the stakes, and the laughs, are so small that Ride Along 2 was apparently designed to be watched on your phone.

The results are an uncomfortable mixture of sanctimony and silliness.

The film veers back and forth between the obvious and the ridiculous.

Given that this is the auteur’s 20th theatrical feature film, there’s no longer any excuse for the pacing issues, the scenes that don’t end and the general flaccidness of his direction.

A clunky, heavy-handed film that takes a pressing contemporary issue and flattens it under two genres the writer-director seems ill-equipped to handle — the mockumentary and the courtroom drama.

Viewers who, for whatever reason, love the first “Space Jam” may well find themselves delighted all over again, but as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to plunge a beloved sports figure into a century’s worth of pop culture iconography, “A New Legacy” is a big fat airball.

We get a few effective set pieces early on that provide the requisite scares that A Cure for Wellness so obviously wants to deliver, but the movie just doesn’t know when to quit, lurching onward and growing more and more ludicrous.

This airless, laugh-less true story about 20-something wheeler-dealers who became arms salesmen during the Bush-Cheney invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan has no point of view, nor anything to say about war or commerce or even 20-somethings who wheel and deal.

Gods of Egypt might have merited a so-bad-it’s-good schadenfreude fanbase had it maintained the unintentional laughs of its first 10 minutes. Instead, it skids into dullness, thus negating the camp classic that it so often verges on becoming.

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.

Dolittle doesn’t have a fraction of the verve of the similarly misguided “Cats,” but it does share with that movie a staggering amount of “What were they thinking?” decisions.

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.

There are no build-ups or pay-offs here, just a lot of random moments of people saying stupid stuff, and fashion people being gently lampooned.

Here Today tries hard to be warm and witty and ultimately devastating and poignant, but it remains firmly in the mushy middle of sitcom sentiment, with lessons learned and hugs exchanged and an “aww” from the studio audience.

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.

This adventure should have been spooky and witty and exciting, but instead it’s just dreary and dull. Peculiarity has rarely been this tedious.

Maybe it was the massive reshoots — directorial credit is shared by Lasse Hallstrom, who shot the first go-round, and Joe Johnston — or perhaps the script by first-timer Ashleigh Powell was always muddled and convoluted, but the results are singularly dispiriting.

If By the Sea weren’t so aggressively humorless, it might almost qualify as camp, so unsuccessful is its pursuit of weighty drama. Unintentional laughs are hard to come by here; instead, there are yawns aplenty.

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?”

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.

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.

The Laundromat flails about, with an excess of bad ideas that undercut the justifiable outrage over the events depicted.

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.

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

Imagine an improv class where students sit in clusters, waiting for something funny to be said or to transpire, and you’ll have an idea of how this haphazard mess plays out.

Why Him? is the kind of movie that makes trendy sophistication and homespun values look equally unattractive; the only remaining alternative is anarchy, an ingredient that’s sadly lacking in this bland, formulaic comedy.

A summer franchise movie that can’t decide if it wants to be a hard-R bawdy comedy, a d-bag-comes-of-age tale or a fairly unironic reboot of the glossy TV show (which ran from 1989-2001), Baywatch fails at all three, despite the best efforts of the perennially game Johnson and Zac Efron.

The existence of a movie like Sleepless constitutes definite proof that there aren’t enough good scripts to go around; Foxx, Monaghan, Mulroney and Union (who finally gets introduced into the action in the silliest way possible) deserve much better than this.

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

When it seems like the movie can’t get worse, it does, with a finale that’s just cringe-inducing and far too neat and tidy. It’s the kind of climax that undoes all of McCarthy and Sandler’s efforts to make us invest in Max and his story.

Blackhat is such a massive fiasco that it’s hard to know where to begin analyzing it.

The paucity of new ideas is evident from the opening crawl.

If you’re here for the director’s trademark chaos editing (where fights go from points A to D to Q), toxic masculinity (and female objectification), comedy scenes rendered tragic (and vice versa), and general full-volume confusion, you’ll get all those things in abundance.

It’s hard not to engage in eye-rolling over what already promises to be one of 2017’s worst movies: The Space Between Us spends so much time piling one daffy, laughable plot beat upon another that it never bothers to nail down the characters.

Stonewall somehow manages to be simultaneously bloated and anemic, overstuffed and underpopulated.

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

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).

Between the script and the superior editing by Elliot Greenberg (“Chronicle”), there’s an enormous amount of tension and thrills to be found here; unfortunately, they’re all in the service of a movie that’s reprehensible to the core.

The Ice Road is so often inept and heavy-handed that not even the reliable presence of Liam Neeson can rescue it.

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.

If A Haunted House 2 is a step up from the previous go-round, it's either because a slightly more talented crew of comic actors are being asked to waste their time or because 2013 offered a better crop of horror films (“The Conjuring,” “Sinister,” etc.) to be lazily parodied.

The Hitman’s Wife Bodyguard is a comedy with not one legitimate laugh, and an action movie where cars keep blowing up while the A-listers yell at each other, as though that were inherently amusing or entertaining.

This black hole of a film is a waste of this talented crew’s time, yes, but it’s also a waste of audience time, offering no laughs, no ideas, no fresh perspectives, nothing.

Sheridan proves he can still act the crap out of a movie, even when crap is all the movie has to offer.

If you don’t believe in this stuff, then the film is exploiting a young woman with mental issues. And if you do believe, it’s hard not to question the devil’s strategy.

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

A film with all the right things to say about how government, the media, and corporations ignore the emerging disaster of climate change, but couched within a satire so lumbering that it’s enough to turn a tree hugger into a pro-fracker.

The characters, the situations, and the story are whatever they need to be in the moment to launch whatever joke the movie feels like telling at that moment. This is Wain and Showalter working in “Wet Hot American Summer” spoof mode, and if you're a fan of that movie, you may well like this one as well.

Director Sean Anders (“Horrible Bosses 2”) and his co-writer John Morris (“We’re the Millers”) execute what are supposed to be the laughs with blunt force. The jokes announce themselves with heavy footsteps, and almost none of them land, stranding a talented cast with terrible material that they’re straining to sell.

Selene seems ready to put this story behind her for most of Underworld: Blood Wars, and it’s hard not to wish that for Beckinsale, as well.

This is the sort of film where the plot and even the action become so uninteresting that you start asking plausibility questions.

The movie’s climactic exorcism jamboree provides some relief from the movie’s overwhelming dullness, and the final segments put the movie’s 3-D to use, but overall, Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension feels like the last wheeze of a played-out series.

The film constantly reveals itself as having no idea how human beings speak or behave.

This silly chamber piece about sex and murder elicits only yawns, interrupted by the occasional unintentional giggle.

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.

Audiences the world over made Neeson an action star when they fell in love with his “particular set of skills” in the first “Taken,” but this third go-round finds both cast and crew opting not to exercise any of them. Everyone involved seems to be determined to quash anyone’s interest in a fourth chapter.

It exists as a waste of time (although, one hopes, a sizable payday) for some very talented actors, and it’s proof that even Marvel doesn’t always get it right.

A thoroughly unpleasant experience.

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.

This is a movie full of characters you would walk away from at a cocktail party, engaging in the flattest brand of smart banter imaginable.

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.

In attempting to work through its family issues, it arrives at catharses that are contrived and unearned, and in attempting to find humor in this pungent situation, it fails to deliver laughs.

“ASIII” feels like the most scattershot entry in the trilogy, despite a relative rally toward competence with the second movie.

For a film loaded with decapitations and gun-toting ladies in bondage gear, Sin City gets really tedious really quickly.

Imagine “Battlefield Earth” without the verve and you get this sludgy, tedious fantasy adventure, a fun-starved dud that’s not even unintentionally hilarious.

Do not shelter yourself from the silliness of The Hurricane Heist. Put down your umbrella, throw your arms open wide and get soaked with its idiocy.

The accusations of cultural tone-deafness wind up being fairly moot, since The Forest turns out to be so generally inept and non-scary that to boycott it would give the film more attention than it deserves.

Director Doane offers no storytelling pizzazz; the lighting is careless, the pacing is deadly, the occasional stabs at comedy fall flat. Ultimately, Saving Christmas has nothing to share that Linus Van Pelt didn't already say better on “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”

The humor level in the film is so moribund that it doesn’t even inspire groans or eye-rolling; instead, it figuratively puts its hands on your shoulders and pushes you deeper into your theater seat until you’ve been completely subdued by all the nothingness it has to offer.

Coroners of comic failure will find much to uncover in the corpse of Holmes & Watson, a thoroughly tedious and never-amusing spoof of Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary detective.

If you’re going to make propaganda, fine, but at least make good propaganda.

An utterly idiotic movie that uses social media as a conduit for witchcraft and mayhem.

Terrible character design, combined with a painful lack of laughs and a crushing plethora of ghastly songs, makes Strange Magic perhaps the worst animated feature ever to come out of Disney (which might explain why the studio is releasing the film under its now-rarely-used Touchstone label). Compared to other Lucas missteps of recent years, it’ll make you nostalgic for Jar Jar Binks.

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

The title promises disaster, and the movie delivers: Love, Weddings & Other Disasters is a witless, charmless, barely-written, indifferently acted, hideously shot, and generally odious waste of 90 minutes.

The Assignment is reprehensible, yes, but it’s also dull and inept. Fans of Walter Hill should treat his latest effort like the kind of car crash from which it’s best to avert one’s eyes.

A slapdash movie that’s more unbearable than the heavy-breathing best-seller and its emotionally timid screen adaptation.

Credit must be given: run-of-the-mill mediocrities come and go, but The Identical is the most woozily misguided flop to grace the screen since the “Oogieloves” movie. Connoisseurs of the most wonderfully terrible cinema need to run out and catch this one early and often.