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.