Angelica Jade Bastien

Unfortunately, Kravitz has neither the vision nor the range to deftly skewer the heinous foibles of wealthy men, let alone disrupt Tatum’s onscreen reputation.

Poor Things is ultimately ugly — spiritually and narratively, which curdles even its aesthetic splendor.

The film is remarkably banal. It’s a deteriorating rest stop on the road to nowhere.

Bailey is, unfortunately, completely failed by the dull, misguided production around her. As the studio has done with other live-action remakes, Disney betrays its own lack of imagination and an essential misreading of what made its original children’s fare such a joy to audiences in the first place.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is trying for a blend of horror and humor, something close to the heart and terror that Raimi was able to bring to bear throughout his career. But here, his craft has been hemmed in, gamified, leeched of color and vivacity.

With Eternals, Marvel proves itself to be nothing more than a staid, lumbering black hole.

In trying to reckon with the contradictions of the ’92 film, as well as carve out their own work, DaCosta and her collaborators have created a misfire that can’t make its tangle of politics — about gentrification, the Black body (horror), racism, white desire — feel either relevant or provocative. When Blackness is whittled down, this is the kind of poor cultural product we are sold.

The film’s humorlessness is off-putting; it is slick to the point of lacking texture. But the underlying problem is more fundamental. Gunpowder Milkshake is led by someone without the star power to carry it, surrounded as she might be by actresses far more interesting.

Cruella takes one of the richest narrative archetypes — the madwoman — and whittles her down into a glossy, hollow, capitalism-approved monster fueled by girl-boss politics. It has nothing to say about how women move through the world.

Sadly, all that glittered in the franchise’s first outing is gone in Wonder Woman 1984. The disappointing sequel highlights not only the dire state of the live-action superhero genre in film, but the dire state of Hollywood filmmaking as a whole.

Bad Hair surprised me, ranking as the most stunning floundering of filmmaking in 2020 — a failure of empathy, intellect, and morality that I haven’t been able to shake.

The leads set the tone for this unfortunate waste of time, heralding a series of issues that reflect poorly not only on this ugly retread but on much of Hollywood’s recent output as a whole.

Antebellum is ultimately a travesty of craft and filmmaking with a perspective that hollows out the Black experience in favor of wan horror.

At this point, what could have been a passably entertaining diversion, the kind of film best enjoyed overcoming a hangover or while folding laundry, falls flat on Diesel’s lips. He lacks the gravitas of delivery, disinterested in his lines even before he finishes saying them.

But a star — even a great star — can only do so much when the film around her is a haphazard mess on nearly every level, only able to work in fits and starts.

The Kitchen is one of the most frustrating films in recent memory owing to how it squanders the mammoth potential baked into its dramatic genre — and its cast.

Violence in The Bad Batch has neither artistic nor narrative purpose.

Ends up being an emotionally empty, thematically ill-defined, and listless affair. It is never able to communicate the complexity of the woman at its center.