Angelica Jade Bastien

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.

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.

X-Men: Apocalypse is a confused, bloated mess of a film.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.