Amy Nicholson

I’m hesitant to call Melania propaganda because I can’t imagine anyone watching this movie and thinking that Melania Trump comes off well. If this vapid, airless, mindless time-waster had subversive designs of being a satire about the first lady of the United States, there’s not much it would have changed.

Jurassic World Rebirth is a straight monster movie with zero awe or prestige. It’s incurious about its stomping creatures and barely invested in the humans either, tasking Johansson and most of the cast to play fairly similar shades of hardy and determined.

Love Hurts is an action-romance that fizzles like a science-class volcano made of baking soda and cheese. The individual ingredients are fine: two killers on the run from punishment and their personal feelings for each other, played by Oscar winners Ke Huy Quan and Ariana DeBose. But their chemistry is all wrong.

Wolf Man is a boring body-horror endurance test that mostly takes place in one home from sundown to sunrise. There’s so much interior creaking and panting, and so little dialogue or plot, that if you closed your eyes, the projectionist could have swapped reels with a different genre of doggy style.

McG has concocted a fantastical, glossily repellent digital landscape that glows with neon and constant fireworks, causing the film to feel at once too sincere and too artificial.

Made for an audience mostly too young to have held the funny pages of a newspaper, it’s a madcap heist flick that feels like someone grabbed a random screenplay and scrawled “Garfield” at the top.

The ancient Greeks wrote tragedy after tragedy warning against hubris. Yet, Vardalos’s flailing crowd-pleaser needs a shot of self-confidence and logic.

The documentary repeats three monotonous points: Journalists lie. Regardless, Assange is a journalist who deserves protection. Also, his family misses him a heck of a lot.

No one in this movie is playing anything near a human being, although Kutcher occasionally resembles one when he lowers his head, crinkles his eyes and chuckles.

It’s a shallow look at shallow people.

Even viewers with a tolerance for this kind of saccharine cinema — oversaturated green grass, slow-motion sprinting, kindly biker gangs, and a fleeting bar squabble in which the nastiest insult is “Idiot!” — will likely say their favorite part is the end credits.

The disarray is baffling for the audience, and downright punishing for Hart, whose lead character is forced to shape-shift between scenes, veering from milquetoast to petty to tyrannical to pushed-around.

It’s mostly a lot of manic editing and caffeinated camerawork, each trying and failing to juice some excitement out of Hauser’s dull performance.

The movie’s mood is unrelentingly miserable. Its cinematography, by Ross Giardina, is bleached-bone bright; its soundscape features more buzzing flies than music.

The script has plot twists so cuckoo they make soap operas look cowardly.

The plot is scattershot; the drama ant-size.

It’s yet another comedy of indignities — sorry, make that inanities.

The movie comes across as a deliberately, almost defensively, inane trifle; a cupcake whose icing reads, “Enjoy the tooth decay.”

As a distraction, Bressack and the screenwriter Alan Horsnail surround their indifferent lead with tinsel.

Who’s the real victim here? The audience — yet Kemper’s no-nonsense pixie who suffers a dozen thumbtacks to the face runs a close second.

The film’s self-seriousness is as oppressive as its setting’s monotonous fog.

This is a film as tidy, transparent and kid-friendly as a square of Jell-O salad, and so squishily eager-to-please that it doesn’t engage with its religious themes so much as tuck them into song lyrics to hover in the narrative like grapes.

It’s a mess — and I’m not just talking about the close-up of a bleeding, ghost-gratified fingernail.

There’s a frozen loogie at the heart of The Snowman.

Bad Santa 2 doesn't hate Christmas. It just hates women.

Phillips has made a copy of a copy, a brotastic toast to capitalism that steals from all the other movies that stole from Scarface and Goodfellas.

I've rarely seen so much effort for so little thrill.

The film doesn't demonstrate belief in much of anything except that audiences must be so desperate for a peek into these stars' private lives that we'll invest energy in their mopey fictional counterparts, who can't even invest in themselves.