Barry Hertz

Rest assured that the story is as nonsensical as it is disposable, a cocktail-napkin of an idea brought to digital life with hundreds of millions of dollars of the emptiest-looking CG animation ever produced.

It’s all too silly to arouse, but too garish and annoying to be thoughtful. It feels as if Fennell is torn between having her cake and eating it out, too.

Ratner’s film commits too many cinematic sins to count.

In a more controlled and less punishing film, Lawrence’s deeply committed performance would be the discussion of the year. Yet she has tossed herself to the wolves here, the star provided no care or cover by her director. What is the point in going so raw, so feral, if the result is so scattered, so interminable, so irredeemably silly?

A House of Dynamite doesn’t so much self-destruct as fail to even ignite a spark.

Whereas Jang’s original film was driven by a funky visual inventiveness that embraced wacky comedy over repellent and snide creepiness, Lanthimos’s version merely doubles down on the filmmakers’ most annoying tendencies: obvious observations about power dynamics, ostensibly outrageous acts of violence that underline a juvenile affinity for shock humour, and an overall contemptuous view of humanity that is played for easy, repetitive yuks.

If you can’t Smurf anything nice, then don’t Smurf anything at all. Such is the key lesson to be taken away by discerning parents this weekend after being dragged by their children to yet another big-screen adaptation of everyone’s second-favourite blue-man group.

So many of Rebirth’s images and set pieces are lifeless, and no amount of on-location filming in Thailand – versus the soundstage green screenery so favoured by most of Jurassic’s blockbuster contemporaries – can hide the fact that very little in the screenplay makes logistical, narrative or emotional sense.

More often than not, Heads of State feels as if it is missing its own leader, as if the director was simply a package lost in the Prime delivery mail.

Nothing in Shadow Force surprises, delights or even attempts to raise your pulse above a twitch.

This is a movie of pussyfooting and sidestepping, unconcerned with race, history, heroism or really any idea at all beyond “Hulk smash.”

A C-grade thriller that is further dumbed down to dunce-cap calibre, Flight Risk might have worked as an enjoyably grimy piece of genre trash had Gibson not made every single wrong directorial decision along the way.

The film’s sense of history is hasty, its characterizations crude. And by combining a twinkly-eyed tone with some of the goofiest performances in recent memory, the whole thing constantly threatens to reveal itself as a stealth parody flick.

Incoherent and cheap, with its aesthetic sensibilities seemingly cribbed from an elevator pitch of “John Wick goes goth,” Sanders’s version of The Crow is a truly ugly thing to endure.

Roth likely deserves much of the blame, though the film is so relentlessly middling that it feels curiously divorced from his typically extreme sensibilities.

The screenplay feels like the feverish byproduct of an all-nighter pulled off the very first day back from a writers' strike.

A truly torturous experience for almost everyone involved – up to and including the starry cast of Lanthimos regulars, who must now surely realize they have been duped by a master cinematic con artist – the film is an aggressively juvenile and tedious dissection of the notion of free will.

A tonally bizarre and dramatically inert feature that is so detached from baseline human emotion it might as well be the fever dream of Artificial Intelligence, the new Canadian-Israeli film Longing is the most frustrating cinematic experience of the season.

This new Garfield outing is a true feat in shoulder-shrugging nothingness.

It’s not about nothing, but it is nothing special.

Imaginary is as dour a slog as M3GAN was a bloody bit of self-aware camp.

Stupendously stupid and never remotely in control of its faculties, the film represents a kind of weaponized incompetence, hostile and assaultive.

One of the most chaotically stupid action movies to torture audiences in ages.

The Boys in the Boat is a film made with such a gently dull spirit that you cannot help but wonder if Clooney put himself to sleep during production. Someone get this man a Nespresso.

Chalamet seems to be a Gene Wilder fan / But he can’t live up to the original candyman / He’s flat, and he’s grating, and he can’t sing a tune / The heartthrob is best off on the sands of Dune.

The Marvels is just that kind of production, a white board of sticky notes that magically coalesces, slowly and grudgingly, into a feature-length motion picture that merely acts as a long advertisement for the next.

The problem is that for all its R-rated ambitions, none of the kills in Expend4bles is particularly inventive, memorable, or even base-level fun. For a movie centred on the cathartic pleasures of mercenary murder, the only death wish that audiences will walk away muttering is one directed straight at the screen.

This is spaghetti-brained moviemaking, more interested in goosing empty-calorie nostalgia than telling an original or thrilling story.

A thoroughly pointless cash grab of a thing, this new Little Mermaid is one of the most uninspired films to slither out of Disney since the company started raiding its own vault.

Coloured wall-to-fake-wall with cheap-looking CGI, the film looks like it was shot from inside the guts of a first-generation iPhone – there is an aesthetic emptiness to it all that is soul-crushing.

From the projectionist played by Toby Jones who regularly pops up to vocalize what everyone onscreen and the audience is already well aware of – movies are an escape, of course! – to its eye-rolling treatment of Hilary’s mental health, Empire of Light is the most noxious kind of faux-benevolent “prestige” cinema.

Set aside the fact that Sugar’s screenplay is filled with holes, that its characters are as loathsome as they are thinly sketched, that its budget is as bare-bones as your local No Frills, and we are still left with a movie that is barely competent on a technical level.

Even when the maximalist visuals grab hold – as in, by your collar with an unpleasant yank – it is hard to feel much but exhaustion.

Johnson, who is also a producer here, having shepherded Black Adam through a decade and a half of development, gets off relatively easy. The real victim, or perhaps perpetrator, is Collet-Serra.

There are movies that are on-the-nose and then there is Ruben Ostlund’s Triangle of Sadness, a satire™ that is so pharyngeal that it is the cinematic equivalent of a COVID-19 swab.

This film is a dud all on its own, a watered down Woody Allen facsimile that is long on F-bombs and short on wit, with an internal logic that falls apart with barely a half-cocked glance.

A stupendously dull action-comedy that is devoid of both thrills and humour.

It is charmless, incoherent, ugly and so aggressively stupid that it defies any attempt to shove it into the desperate “guilty pleasure” box.

A “clever” film that doesn’t do anything clever at all beyond its Hitchcockian opening credits, Windfall is a disposable and eye-rolling endeavour that will have you re-evaluating your household streaming budget.

Much as I have enjoyed the actor’s embrace of scuzzy revenge-thrillers, he may have hit the point of diminishing returns. Put it this way: Blacklight is a movie that Bruce Willis would deem below his standards.

This is a movie that is one giant Easter Egg, cracked and rotten and sulphurous in its stink.

The story is bland, the action incoherent, the surprises detestably nonsensical, the humour never rising above the level of a half-smirk. And for a movie that gathers the world’s most perfectly sculpted denizens, everything is bafflingly sexless. If Red Notice is the future of the big and shiny movie, then we are now in the era of the neutered blockbuster.

If you squint hard and focus most of your mental energy on folding your laundry, yeah, Army of Thieves is kinda cool. But it’s also kinda bland, kinda formulaic, and kinda sad. If this is the sort of instantly franchisable content that the streaming giant thinks its audiences want or need, then we’re truly doomed.

Hardy’s use-it-or-lose-it charm very nearly drowns out the dreadfulness all around him, but ultimately it’s not enough to sustain life. And given that the actor has a “story by” credit here, he deserves more blame than praise.

Watching Snake Eyes (full title: Snake Eyes – G.I. Joe Origins) is not a physically painful ordeal. But it is an emotionally harmful one – a soul-deadening exercise that approximates satire, minus the self-awareness.

This is regurgitated shoot-’em-up nothingness fetishistically dressed in the cosplay of equality. The women are not characters to care about, but props to kill and be killed.

It is all very, very stupid, But first-time director Simon McQuoid regrettably refuses to embrace that stupidity.

Chaos Walking is, in its own way, a masterclass in everything that contemporary filmmakers should avoid doing.

With the exception of a few demented scenes teleported over from a stranger, better comedy . . . Thunder Force is as sloppy and disappointing as the label “A Ben Falcone Film” previously suggested.

Simply put, I didn’t care for a single person or situation on-screen, and Jacobs’s curiously unconfident and drab direction, which is in desperate need of tighter editing, only hastened my growing annoyance.

Norbit was memorably offensive. Coming 2 America is merely offensively forgettable.

Malcolm & Marie is the worst kind of self-indulgent nonsense. It is an obnoxious gripe about everything and anything that is so devoid of wit and imagination that it ends up being about nothing at all.

Completely miscast, egregiously plotted and ludicrous in absolutely every single other way, Bliss is a true cinematic disasterpiece.

The resulting film, while sporadically affecting, is ultimately a slog of gooey sentiment and needlessly long death rattles.

Imagine the worst night of two-hander theatre that you were ever subjected to in the Before Times. Then add in 12 too many scenes of (accurate but annoying) glitchy Zoom calls featuring other famous actors. And then multiply that by the number of minutes you’d be better served scrolling through the back catalogue of your streaming service of choice.

Warning: If you are experiencing nausea, headache, fatigue or vomiting, you might have just watched Songbird.

For a movie about an assassin charged with killing Santa Claus (!) on the orders of a Richie Rich-like brat (!!), and starring Mel Gibson (!!!) as Kris Kringle himself, Fatman is astoundingly boring.

Appropriately for a film about art forgery, every cast member in The Last Vermeer seems to be attempting their best impression of someone else.

The “new” film is firmly an artifact of the past. More specifically the imaginary era of Gotham that Allen has become a permanently unstuck-in-time guest of since "Annie Hall."

Make no mistake: Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy is a bad film, inert and clichéd and largely devoid of cinematic imagination. But it is not a problematic film.

And before anyone pulls out the “guilty pleasure” card – no. There is zero pleasure here, no matter how low your bar is currently set. Only pain. So much pain.

Instead of funnelling his inspirations into one singular vision that he could call his own, Boone has made a Frankenstein of a franchise movie, a giant elevator pitch that leads directly to the sub-basement of originality.

I also appreciated the film’s quick glimpse of Hell itself, which Lucia is plunged into as a warning to whose who won’t accept salvation. With its cheap CGI demons and soundtrack of wailing souls, it was unintentional comedy of the highest order. If you need me, I’ll be laughing all the way to Hades.

Fatal Affair will live up to the first half of its name, and you’ll be bored to death.

Regrettably, and predictably, Force of Nature isn’t interestingly bad – it’s just bad.

Irresistible is toothless, it is weak-willed and it is depressingly unaware of either of these facts. If this is indeed Stewart’s response to the madness of the Trump era, then we should all be glad that he decided to depart The Daily Show when he did. It is clear that he didn’t have anything left to say.

A confusing, muddled, sloppy mess of bad intentions and worse execution.

An exercise in miserablism that, although clocking in at an ostensibly tight pace, feels never-ending.

Overriding everything is a profound sense of laziness. Jokes do not land here so much as they ooze forth, slow and noxious.

From its lazy title down to its yes-we-all-saw-that-coming third-act twist, Dangerous Lies offers a particularly boring kind of last-resort viewing.

If there is a one-word skeleton key to unlocking Guns Akimbo, it might simply be: “sloppy.”

Unless you are a direct descendant of Robert the Bruce, or perhaps part of the Macfayden clan, you’re better off letting this particular version of history get lost in the sands of time.

As far as the preaching-to-the-choir genre goes, though, I Still Believe is a far more tolerable exercise than, say, last year’s anti-abortion screed "Unplanned" or any recent movie with the word “Heaven” in the title (Heaven Is for Real, Miracles from Heaven).

Diesel’s "Fast & Furious" movies have heart. His "Riddick" movies have weirdness. His "XXX" entries have lunacy. (Can we pause to admire how many franchises this man has to his name?) Bloodshot, though, only offers mere generic mediocrity.

Okay, one kind word: Bill Nighy is clearly enjoying himself playing a New York businessman whose caviar restaurant improbably becomes a beacon for a host of impoverished ne’re-do-wells. But that is the only nicety I can muster for this otherwise cartoonish treacle.

Deep inside the new Charlie’s Angels movie, there is a fun film struggling to breathe. There are momentary flashes of energy, of wit, of something sorta-kinda-maybe resembling entertainment. But every time writer-director Elizabeth Banks’s reboot threatens to come alive, it immediately falls to the floor, leaden and lifeless.

One of the worst movies of the year.

Sorta-kinda based on the true story of astronaut Lisa Nowak, Noah Hawley’s directorial debut may have started out as a feminist-forward film decrying the fact that women have to work five times as hard to succeed in the workplace, but it ends up being a movie whose message boils down to, “Ladies be crazy.”

Crowley knows his way from adaptations thanks to 2015′s Brooklyn, but as this 149-minute mess proves, The Goldfinch should have never flown away from its literary perch.

There is, buried deep somewhere in Linklater’s film or however many edits it may have undergone – the thing reeks of indecision – an insightful, even invigorating story about what happens to a creative genius once they stop creating. But the actual work presents a good argument that, for some artists, it might be best to quit while you’re ahead.

There are small spurts of creativity ... but everything else about the production feels more watered down than the landscape our four interchangeable leads find themselves flailing about in.

An awkward, painful mash-up of horror and comedy that induces all the wrong kind of squirms.

Unplanned will make you writhe in agony over how such an ugly, malicious and potentially dangerous piece of religious and political propaganda could have made its way into this world.

I can’t imagine that the filmmakers behind the new horror film Isabelle were thinking about anything other than cold, hard cash while producing this utterly disposable work.

The new movie is dumb, pointless and completely bereft of laughs. It wastes a talented cast and all of your time. Worst of all, though, it is unconscionably lazy, starting with its generic title (again, who is naming these things?) and ending with its shrug-of-the-shoulders climax.

Who needs original stars Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones when you have, um ... well, what does this new Men in Black Cinematic Universe offer, exactly? As evidenced by MiB:I, absolutely nothing of value.

There is the overwhelming sense that Domino was not directed by any one person at all, but rather spliced and diced by committee into something barely watchable.

Most everyone who watches The Perfection will instead be staring at the screen slack-jawed, dumbfounded at the gory silliness they endured.

The new animated film UglyDolls is a lazy flip, its main intention to foster the toy-aisle bond between kids and its quasi-hideous title characters.

The Public is writer-director Emilio Estevez’s grand, well-meaning and extremely dumb vanity project/tribute to the public-library system.

There is an occasional sense of self-awareness that this is all pointless and silly, but 139 minutes is a long time for a film to forgo even delayed gratification.

McAvoy and Paulson fight as hard as they can against Shyamalan’s instincts – even though, as with "Split," it’s gross to watch dissociative identity disorder played for horror and laughs – but theirs' is a pointless battle. The somnambulist Willis and Jackson have the better idea, dozing through their scenes until the cheques clear. (Jackson, to be fair, has the benefit of his character being literally asleep for the film’s first hour.)

Welcome to Marwen is the ultimate Robert Zemeckis movie. This is not intended as a compliment. The film – not quite comedy, not quite drama, but definitely indigestible – finds Zemeckis embracing his worst late-career indulgences.

Cheney remains an enigma throughout, less a character than another anonymous object for McKay to smash in his cinematic rage room.

The only truly shocking thing about this new work, though, is the fact it took this long for von Trier to make a movie about a serial killer. For a man who loves blunt provocation, the subject should’ve been first on his hit list.

It’s a stew so thick with brand loyalty that you just might choke on all the intellectual property and consequential commerce.

The entire endeavour is so crass, sloppy, and infuriating (especially the “twist” ending, although the film contains no real ending at all) that it treads close to zero-star, brand-killing territory. But then Jude Law pops up all-too-briefly as a younger, sexier version of Albus Dumbledore, and everything seems mostly right with the Potter-verse. But the magic, it’s fleeting.

It isn’t hard to find all the many ways in which this film exhausts both itself and Lisbeth. It is time, already, to give this Girl a rest.