Barry Hertz

She Came to Me is overstuffed to be sure, but in an admirable way that underlines Miller’s fierce desire to enchant and entertain an audience looking for stories about people, not intellectual property.

The trouble with Renfield, though, is the fact that it’s called Renfield and not Dracula. Snivelling when not stiff, the title character is a bore, as is Hoult’s shoulder-shrug of a performance.

Eisenberg does an admirable job porting his typically nervous energy into Marceau, a man who’s not portrayed as a full-blooded hero so much as a sincere, if naive, nebbish constantly wrestling with his fears and doubts.

Nelson seems content to just swing one giant axe after another, hoping that he busts as many guts as he does brains. His intentions are naughty, and the result isn’t so nice. Even for those who prefer a little blood on their snow boots this time of year.

The Devil Made Me Do It is a resolutely pedestrian kind of horror.

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.

A movie so dumb that it has tricked itself into thinking it is smart enough to be self-knowingly stupid, the new astronaut thriller, I.S.S., is a true waste of inner and outer space.

The film spins off into several tonally unsteady directions.

There is a delicate touch deployed here, and not only with Julie, but those surrounding her. Depression, Koppleman seems to be saying, is not a one-person battle. It can swallow everyone in a victim’s orbit.

Presented with every opportunity to say or do something remotely new or compelling, Wright, typically a talented stylist, elects to shrug his shoulders, delivering a wafer-thin confection that is aggressively disinterested in both ideas and action.

More an extreme theatre-school exercise than a substantive act of filmmaking, the new drama Wolf is one wild, rabid mess.

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

The dialogue is to the point without being eye-rolling, the action is meaty and mostly CGI-free (the highlight is a night-vision firefight) and the performances are committed, even touching.

More prickly than David Suchet and more mischievous than Peter Ustinov, Branagh plays Poirot as a tremendously fun nuisance, embracing the character’s cleverer-than-thou righteousness with glee. Whenever Branagh puts himself at the centre of the action, Death on the Nile clicks well enough to justify the whole act of big-budget copy-pasting.

Eternals is shockingly, depressingly lifeless.

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.

It is respectful and smooth filmmaking that never loses sight of its one and only goal: keeping its audience hooked.

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.

No matter how many nifty shots he inserts of Major’s hologram-ridden metropolis, the director cannot shake the impression he simply does not care about his creation. At least Johansson makes an effort.

By the time the film reaches its obvious conclusion – by the time Hart expends more energy than Bugs Bunny, by the time the espionage plot twists itself into corners too convoluted for even "Homeland" fans, by the time Thurber exhausts the audience by unleashing cameo after cameo – it’s only Johnson who remains standing tall.

Although its two lead actors are strong – and Meyers affords them a generous number of scenes where they can bare raw emotion – the film stumbles toward the end, and the central duo don’t develop all that much.

While his character is intended to be lost and powerless, Pine seems adrift in another way, too – a star without a proper star vehicle.

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’s a solid notch in Statham’s career, but nothing that will change anyone’s mind about the actor.

It’s a goofy, confusing mess of a sequel, a cautionary tale of what happens when a filmmaker lives too long inside his own franchise to realize that no one takes it nearly as seriously as he does.

The sequel isn’t a masterpiece of children’s entertainment by any stretch, but it is sufficiently bizarre and thrilling enough to turn the head of any kid, parent or – judging by my curiously populated press screening the other night – fully grown and childless adult around and around till the room resembles a Looney Tune.

Like almost every other major studio film this summer, Fallen Kingdom plays dumb, and happily.

A pharmaceutical-industry satire so flaccid that it’s in desperate need of Cialis, Death of a Unicorn is destined to fade into the mythical margins of cinematic history, with future moviegoers convinced that – like its title creature – the film never really existed at all.

This is a movie that will make you scream – in confusion, in delight, in anger, in ecstasy. Sometimes all at once.

Bird Box could easily be reduced to, “It’s A Quiet Place meets Blindness crossed with The Happening!” And that high-concept pitch wouldn’t exactly be wrong.

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.

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.

It is as if every time Forster is presented with an opportunity to do something mildly unconventional – or even, gasp, European in sensibility – he defaults to the easy and cheap Hollywood option.

When Malick reaches the end of Jaggerstatter’s story, A Hidden Life does reach something profound. Relief, maybe, that the film was over. But also a distinct pang that some filmmakers never change.

It’s zippy and distracting enough to keep you and your brood entertained for half an afternoon, but don’t get too comfortable – I can see the soundtrack eventually grating if you ever find your kids demanding to watch it over and over again. Which is inevitable.

Too terrifying for children, too boring for adults and arriving far too soon after a nearly identical project, Andy Serkis’s Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle is a frustrating, fascinating mess.

Quotation forthcoming.

It would be nice to say the drama redeems itself with a scene of Fassbender absconding with the cutest puppy ever captured on film, but even that cannot save almost two hours’ worth of narrative dithering and four-letter conversations.

We’re still a long, long way from the heights of animation titan Pixar. But you (parents, that is, not whichever five-year-old might have a Globe subscription) might also put your phone down for a stretch to see just what’s happening on-screen. At the very least, you’ll see which toys you’ll soon have to buy. Yelp!

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.

Watanabe and Moore acquit themselves well (although the latter’s lip-syncing is questionable), but Bel Canto falls short of the operatic notes Weitz attempts to hit.

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.

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.

The most shocking part of this too-shocking-for-audiences-today production is that Cuse and Lindelof are even involved, given the far smarter and sharper work they did last year on HBO’s "Watchmen," which took the carcass of U.S. politics and thoroughly eviscerated it in a new and startling fashion.

This new Snow White is neither a chore à la 2023′s The Little Mermaid nor an abomination on the scale of Robert Zemeckis’s ghoulish Pinocchio redo. Whistle hard enough, and it almost sort of works.

Listen, Will: The film, your first with streaming giant Netflix (which maybe says something about the state of your brand of big-screen comedies, or maybe not), isn’t a total disaster. There are moments where you and Dobkin embrace the surreal . . . that hint at a better, more interesting kind of absurdist comedy.

Statham is as enjoyably stern and semi-serious as ever, but his sturdy presence cannot enliven a weirdly buttoned-up exercise in mercenary mayhem.

What we’re instead left with are two diametrically opposed performances: Williams goes small and intimate as the distressed Isabel, while Moore opts for a more operatic, less successful tenor that results in what might be the actress’s most unhinged moment ever (and not in a good way).

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.

There are enough secrets, lies and tepidly chaste sex scenes – both of the straight and same-sex variety – to fill a hundred kitchen sinks. But the resulting drama is all drips and drops, no deluge.

The familiar and facile elements are drowned out – often, and loudly – by the impeccable comedic talents of Hill and Murphy, two performers whose very different styles clash and complement one another.

After watching the film twice in quick succession – a futile attempt at catching a glimpse of what usually makes a Falardeau film so immensely watchable (see the Quebecois filmmaker’s Monsieur Lazhar, The Good Lie, My Internship in Canada and Chuck) – My Salinger Year ultimately lands as a mere footnote.

Blonde is a precisely engineered nightmare. From Monroe’s childhood to superstardom, Dominik presents her as a passive victim of never-ending tragedy: neglect, abuse, heartbreak, addiction. And in doing so, Dominik creates a cinematic experience so repellent that it is destined to be loathed and misunderstood, written off as crass and opportunistic just like those who profited off Monroe’s body during her own life.

While there are the requisite number of jump scares and red-herring narrative fake-outs, Berman and Pulcini – who are odd fits in the first place, given their decidedly non-genre filmography – zig where you expect them to zag.

Conceived as a climate-change metaphor, but given an oily new layer thanks to the pandemic, the film’s conceit could be sharply effective, in careful hands. But McKay knows only of punching down with meaty fists, so the result is a messy, smarmy assault.

Just because Body could be made doesn’t mean it needed to be.

It is at times extremely uncomfortable, but captivating and engaging all the same.

This is flat, flaccid action that makes the wan green-screenery of the MCU look like the delirious highs of Mad Max: Fury Road.

Bullet Train’s biggest weapon, of the secretly funny variety, rests in the chiselled form of star Brad Pitt, who once again proves that he is as charming a buff-and-tough movie god as he is a wry, self-deprecating comedy star.

Russell’s film is not remotely playable. Amsterdam so badly wants to be a light romp with heavy-duty meaning that it cannot help but be flattened by a sagging self-exhaustion. It is an exercise in interminable madcappery.

Spenser Confidential makes far more narrative and visual sense than the incomprehensible "Mile 22," and carries less of an America First odour than any of the pair’s previous partnerships. But it also proves that it is finally time that Berg and Wahlberg explored a trial separation. If you really love someone, guys, set them free.

It doesn't actually explain much, throwing a bunch of names and seemingly arbitrary incidents at the screen in the hope that everyone watching the film happened to work at the Washington Post back in the day.

While Ed Harris, as the cruel patriarch of the Redfellows, is not so much phoning his role in as he is sending it by carrier pigeon, it is Margaret Qualley and Glen Powell who do the most unintentional damage.

At least Bell and Fisher make the most of their screen time, with each playing off each other like close friends simply thrilled for the opportunity to frolic in the film’s ridiculous fantasyland.

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.

Luckily, Henson finds just enough in this thin movie to chew on, and every moment that the actress is on screen feels like we’re glimpsing the promise of a better, different movie to come.

Unfortunately, not even all of McConaughey’s substantial powers can overcome director Stephen Gaghan’s lacklustre vision or the screenwriters’ muddy narrative.

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.

Most of Nattiv’s film is a dry and frustrating affair.

Doesn't quite reach the heights of the original film, which found surprising pathos in Doug's tale of sweet good guy to brutal goon. But it delivers on nearly every other scale, including standout performances from returning players Scott, Alison Pill and Liev Schreiber, as well as some bits of comic gold courtesy of series rookies Wyatt Russell, T.J. Miller and Jason Jones.

On the whole, the film slays in all the right ways: killer cast, killer one-liners, killer kills. But there's a distinct sense that the story is stitched together from other, hastily discarded plot lines – even the simple manner in which some characters get from Point A to Point B is messy.

Ares is a mostly disposable and thoroughly dumb product of lazy franchise fetishism from filmmakers who could not seem to care less about what story they are trying to tell. But as a two-hour visual screensaver to a thunderous and hypnotic Nine Inch Nails soundtrack, Ares rules.

Burdened with a needlessly complex conceit, flat character design, limp jokes, and a soundtrack completely absent a single ear-worm (unless you count an overreliance on Madonna’s Lucky Star), Luck feels dredged from the bottom of Pixar’s few lows (Cars comes to mind) than plucked from its many highs (Inside Out would like a word).

A solid, well-acted, and slightly predictable drama of morals whose novelty evaporates once you realize that the general beats of the story itself have been presented before, to far more haunting effect.

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.

Jolt is a perplexing mix-up of genre and intentions. From one scene to the next, I had no real understanding of where the film might go next – but instead of anticipating the unpredictable, I came to quickly dread the arbitrariness.

Mary Magdalene is ultimately an unnecessary cinematic resurrection.

When Dougherty is able to keep these intelligent-ish impulses at bay, King of the Monsters is stupendous stupidity.

Simien is no doubt a talented storyteller – his work on Dear White People, both the film and Netflix series, is evidence enough. But his vision here is clouded by corporate obligations and a woefully weak script by Katie Dippold, who herself is much funnier in every one of her other projects.

It is all extraordinarily interminable, even if Yates and company had the good sense to swap out Johnny Depp for Mikkelsen this time around.

Radwanski creates a visceral, impossible-to-ignore document of one man’s fraught reality. It is creative, bold and even dangerous filmmaking.

But hey, at least Zwick and company carve out some time for Tom Cruise to run, with Reacher dashing across a busy avenue for about 18 seconds or so. It’ll make for a great supercut one day.

Monster Hunter is all sorts of super-dumb fun. And though its middle section lags – there are only so many training montages audiences can handle – Anderson and his wife Jovovich prove that their long-running Resident Evil franchise was no fluke: this is a couple who know how to take the flimsiest of video games and turn them into self-knowing slices of cinematic ridiculousness.

The animation also feels half-caught between inspired and derivative . . . Thank goodness, then, for the songs.

Midway is a choppy bore, its main source of intrigue centred around whatever New Jersey-ese accent British actor Ed Skrein is attempting as dive bomber Richard Best.

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.

Every single beat of The Alto Knights feels like an historical footnote from Goodfellas or The Godfather Part II stretched out to interminable feature length – musty, dusty, dry.

A thrill ride that’s as terrifying as it is no-nonsense.

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.

The experience of watching this new Shazam! is akin to watching an exceptionally wealthy but ultimately sweet and innocent child smash their toys together for 130 minutes. There’s little point in it all, but hey, at least the kid is happy.

If someone somehow convinced somebody somewhere to turn the screenplay for Gringo into a real-life motion picture with real-deal actors, then, hell, it could happen to anyone.

Natali’s aesthetic exercise eventually outgrows his narrative trappings, and he’s forced to add unnecessary and foggy backstory to the source of the overgrown greenery.

A giddy and fitfully amusing mashup of "Adventures in Babysitting," "Date Night," the Spy Kids franchise and, um, "Wet Hot American Summer," The Sleepover is the latest entry in Netflix’s experiment in catch-‘em-all entertainment.

For some reason that shall forever remain a mystery to all those but director Ben Wheatley and the almighty Netflix algorithm, 2020 has delivered one of the most unnecessary remakes in the history of an industry built upon revisitation: Rebecca.

You Should Have Left will, however, make you seriously rethink your next Airbnb rental. And maybe even push you to watch "Mortdecai," just to see what a real horror looks like.

The tension between trying to make something unique and trying to adhere to whatever expectations you place on yourself when you call your movie Capone (although to be fair its working title was Fonzo) is right up there onscreen. In all its glorious mess.

As interesting as reading the computer code that was used to create the original Mortal Kombat video game, and about as fun as getting your spine torn out.

Cranston and Hart fight tooth and nail to keep the film as charming as possible, though, with Hart going to particularly impressive lengths. It almost works, until you remember it shouldn't.

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

It is a fool’s errand to imagine what someone like Verhoeven would have done with The Tomorrow War’s material – this is a movie made for the express purposes of delivering some lazy woo-hoo summer fun, not any kind of sneaky subversiveness.

There is something perversely impressive about a movie that can make globe-trotting adventure seem so relentlessly boring.

The filmmakers score half a point for at least avoiding the old “hero-who’s-constantly-filming” device, but fail to add anything else to the proceedings, except, perhaps, the movie’s unique setting.

Everyone here is simply a mismanaged thing to be moved around an isn’t-that-shocking storyboard as needed.

Another stroke of casting fortune was landing Scott as the disturbing Miles. I hesitate to applaud any business decision that encourages a kid to channel the spirit of a rapist and murderer, but the young actor accomplishes what I can only assume The Prodigy set out to do: make you reconsider parenthood, and just how much paprika you should stock.

Steers can compose and capture a shot fine enough, but seems otherwise bored to be here. Each of his scenes collide lazily against the next; transitions are rushed and often ugly, and the director never seems to know what emotions he should be steering his cast toward.

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

Hafstrom’s feature might be fine background noise to fold your laundry to. But there is also a very real danger that the film’s sloppy plotting and watered down set-pieces might also make you so disoriented and frustrated that your socks will end up in mismatched little balls.

Cherry is a mess. Nonsensically stylized, wildly overlong and constantly mistaking yelling for dramatic tension, the film unintentionally underlines everything that made the Russos’ Avengers films so sloppy .

Miracles from Heaven is mostly an embarrassment.

A work of soulless indifference. It is not so much a movie as an exercise in how to wring the life out of even the most lifeless of properties – grave robbing writ large, except the ostensible corpse was never more than a worthless bag of bones in the first place.

A wild, reckless, gleefully immoral work of pop nihilism.

The movie surprises on almost every level, breaking a number of contemporary rom-com rules along the way thanks to Tiffany Paulsen’s self-aware screenplay. I don’t mean in the meta-satirical sense of, say, David Wain’s absurdist They Came Together. More like a watered down Nora Ephron project.

With all due affection, del Toro is the fantasy world’s Quentin Tarantino – his originality rests in how meticulously and enthusiastically he repackages the work of others. DeKnight has no such goals; he can’t even be bothered here to ape del Toro’s imitation game.

Ultimately Murder Mystery 2 is the most business-as-usual kind of Sandler shtick, its only real surprise being how the production manages to pull off one solitary, very lonely surprise toward its end (it involves a quick appearance from Jillian Bell, bless her heart).

When the film’s pace slows down every now and then, and Cohen gets room to breathe, the film is a genuine riot.

The film is not nearly as strong as its villain. It is, however, just as immature.

There is no guts to Pain Hustlers’ try-hard gonzo-ness, resulting in a sub-Scorsese style that both underlines and loses its point.

The Rise of Gru is the weakest entry by far. But with just enough semi-inspired moments of weirdness to skate by.

A tonally wild and historically, um, loose First World War thriller, The King’s Man arrives as a head-scratching mess of bewildering ambition and outrageous style.

There is an unshakable and electric hum to Foe that ensures director Garth Davis’s work will stay with audiences attuned to its distinct frequency for days, months, perhaps ages.

The talented performers are ultimately overmatched by a janky script that telegraphs every emotional swerve and narrative beat as if audiences are not to ever be trusted.

The 86-year-old director could stand to at least polish the material, which in Rifkin’s Festival is so well-worn that it threatens to disintegrate into nothingness.

The film might be pretty to look at, but narratively speaking, it is a disaster.

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

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.

The action, when it does arrive, is quiet enough to send the most insomnia-plagued of audiences to sleep.

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.

The film is neither heartbreaking nor thrilling, often feeling like a blown-up version of a Hallmark flick-of-the-week, its ambitions far greater than its capabilities.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

Ultimately, Yintah wants to leave you with the sourest of tastes in your mouth. Mission accomplished, in a way.

Similar to getting caught in the grip of a giant Amazonian snake, in which you have the privilege of hearing your bones break before the power of the embrace causes your veins to explode, the experience of watching Tom Gormican’s new action-comedy Anaconda is a painful one.

Despite its half-decade worth of aspirations to be something, Scoob! is a middle-ground of nothingness. Toss it a bone, if you wish – just know that your stay-at-home kids will be fighting over other, more interesting scraps soon enough.

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

While one-time teen dreams Hewitt and Prinze Jr. earn their paydays by lending a semblance of gravitas to the silliness, their brief on-screen presence only underline the lifelessness of today’s fresh meat.

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.

Every now and then, Jackman dips into Serious Acting exercises but seems so visibly uncomfortable placing himself in such situations that he feels a micro-second from jumping out of his own skin, when he should instead be sinking into someone else’s (see The Fountain, Prisoners, The Front Runner).

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.

Through design or happy accident, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom closes out the DCEU on a mid- to high-water mark.

The thrills here are both cheap and oddly, comfortingly captivating. Of course nothing can ever kill Liam Neeson, but it is a whole lot of no-brain-necessary fun to watch everyone and everything try.

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

Daddy’s Home is not the world of Peak Ferrell, where jokes fly fast and absurdism rules the day. Instead, it is a land of predictable punchlines, easy sight gags and easier paycheques.

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

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.

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

There is something entertaining, or maybe just enjoyably puzzling, about what Gordon Green and McBride think a Michael Myers movie could or ought to be. If it ain’t dead, don’t kill it.

There is no harm in allowing Clooney to further stretch his directorial muscles – "Good Night, and Good Luck" is not bad – but there ought to be a law against wasting such talents as Matt Damon, Julianne Moore and poor ol' Oscar Isaac in this hollow exercise.

A riotous and gleefully delirious assault on the senses. It is vulgar. It is absurd. And it is completely enthralling.

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.

Superintelligence arrives this week as a comedy with actual charm, wit and, yes, laughs.

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.

Just like the film’s half-hearted conceit, take comfort in knowing that you’ll be able to divorce yourself from the proceedings with the click of a button.

At least Without Remorse gets one thing right: casting onscreen dynamo Michael B. Jordan as the out-for-blood hero.

Maybe Rapoport’s script from way back when was fiercer, sharper, and funnier, and the sands of time have simply eroded any of its interesting edges down to mere nubs of gross-out nothingness. But watching it today on Netflix, it can’t help but feel highly algorithmic.

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).

What's worse than the actual movie itself, though, is how indicative it is of modern group-think studio production.

The script, which has a “story by” credit from Stuckmann’s wife and fellow genre enthusiast Samantha Elizabeth, jumps all over the place in tone, from wild to solemn, with no real resting place in between.

Isaac pulls a full Tom Hardy by adopting a weirdo voice, awkward mannerisms and unknown motivations in a bid to give life to a villain who is, in his own words, pure “motiveless malignancy.” It doesn’t work, nor does anything else in this so-bad-it’s-good-no-wait-still-bad mess from William Monahan.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Despite the too-twisty story and drippy characters, Larney does extremely impressive work with a limited budget, creating an entire world (or two) as if he had the resources of a Marvel escapade, or at the very least a Terminator entry. It’s only a shame that his performers don’t quite match his aesthetic ingenuity, especially Smit-McPhee, who wails and garbles with grating abandon.

Even though the latest horror-franchise resurrection from intellectual-property gravedigger David Gordon Green (Halloween) isn’t sullying a spotless brand, The Exorcist: Believer still reeks of sulfur-scented soullessness. The moviegoing body may be willing, but the cinematic flesh is weak.

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.

What could have been a layered, insightful portrait of the most complicated, significant figure in pop-culture history has been reduced to a supersized music video slash concert documentary, the man in its mirror more of a faded reflection than anything else.

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.

Somehow, Mile 22 devolved from what Berg promised STX would be – “the new wave of combat cinema” – to exactly the kind of generic late-summer garbage any studio could, and has, released for Augusts immemorial.

The Green Inferno offers up extreme gore, unlikable characters and seriously confused themes (is it a pro-environment film, an ode to imperialism, a satire of social-justice warriors or a poorly sketched combination of all three?).

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.

A cheap, lazy exercise in myth-making. The goods, as it were, will have to be found elsewhere.

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.

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

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."

After almost two and a half hours, all of it glued together with plot-vomiting dialogue and characters that only vaguely resemble the ones Spielberg carefully built, Dominion becomes its very own Jurassic Park: Designed to thrill and enchant, it instead becomes a ride to survive.

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.

From its intense beginnings to its what-really-c’mon-no-reallllllly-c’mon mid-film twist to its defiantly and successfully sentimental finale, the new Matthew McConaughey vehicle is playing by its own demented rules. When it deigns to care about rules.

A rags-to-riches tale that is inspirational in the most sentimental and predictable of fashions, Bigger squanders most of the potential that comes with dissecting such an underexplored world as the nascent body-building industry. At least he nails the casting, with the intimidatingly fit Tyler Hoechlin and Aneurin Barnard as the Weider brothers, the charismatic Julianne Hough as Joe’s wife.

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.

Uziel's screenplay has some clever geopolitical ideas – though it's hard to tell how many of those came before or after it was Cloververse-ified via a tour through Abrams's magical mystery factory – but its twists feel routine, its narrative spine limp and its conclusion especially rushed.

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.

Eventually, The Unholy reveals itself not to be an entertaining ride to Hell but an earnest sales pitch for the power of Christ. Fair enough. But for Easter 2021, I was hoping for something a little more enjoyably demonic and less been-there-redeemed-that. Let us pray.

The corporate-synergy-ness of it all is both deeply distressing and unintentionally fascinating.

Never before have such acting heavyweights been so misused on screen.

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.”

Velvet Buzzsaw is ultimately a matter of taste – and mine was to spit it right back out.

Slowly, but not always confidently, Dowse and Mack begin to upend obligations of the structure, play fast and loose with the limits of good taste and wind up with, while far from a comedic masterpiece, an enjoyably reckless piece of vulgar entertainment.

So for those asking the obvious: Yes, Awake should put you to sleep rather quickly.

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

Because while Stardust covers the period of Bowie’s life just before he released his breakthrough 1972 album, the film doesn’t feature a single track from the record. Or any Bowie music at all.

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

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.

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

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

Zoolander 2 feels like a hasty collection of last-minute comedy panic attacks.

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

There is semi-purpose and not insignificant pleasure to be had in Apatow’s experiment. The Netflix production isn’t the comedy kingmaker’s best film by a wide margin (though it is his shortest, which still isn’t saying much), but it works in spite of itself.

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

One of the most aggressively stupid blockbusters ever made, a painful exercise in Hollywood greed and artistic incompetence on every level.

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.

So highly imitative as to strip the word “derivative” of any meaning, Rebel Moon is fan-fiction writ large, as if Snyder believes he’s outsmarting everyone from George Lucas and George R.R. Martin to the estates of Frank Herbert and H.R. Giger.

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.

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

The only thing stopping Roth's film from being an irredeemable zero-star disaster is its introduction of a dramatic principle that I'm nicknaming Chekhov's Gun Cabinet – but that's hardly justice for such a recklessly criminal cinematic act as Death Wish.

This material might make for a sly, subversive take on the genre, but writer-director Tyson Caron positions Dash as the hero of his story, a fatal flaw.

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

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.

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.

It should not exist, and the fact that it does is a slap in the face of anyone suckered into buying a ticket.

A laughably bad melange of blood, guts and racial stereotypes.

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

A slice of advice, then: Take the film’s 102 minutes to visit the actual Little Italy and enjoy a leisurely meal. Or make your own pie at home. Or stay home and do nothing. Basta!

True appreciation must be paid to Melissa McCarthy, who does a so-very-loud version of her usual shtick – foul-mouthed wrecking-ball – to keep audiences awake when director Brian Henson (yes, son of Muppet creator Jim) resorts to having his puppets drop F-bombs instead of delivering actual jokes.

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.

It is not so much lazy filmmaking as it is a very expensive middle finger to common sense and the basic concept of entertainment.

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

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

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

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

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.

Too tame in its violence to be thrilling, too flat in its gags to be funny, and too PG-minded to be genuinely sexy, Morel’s film arrives and exits like a mild breeze – totally and utterly forgettable. John Cena deserves better. And so do we.

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

There are moments, however fleeting, that suggest there’s a decent Mel Brooks-ian farce hiding amidst the wreckage. Deeply, profoundly hidden moments, but peeking through every now and then, an annoyingly sporadic Christmas miracle.

An awkward, needlessly dark, atrocious mess whose visual tics courtesy of director Tomas Alfredson amount to, basically, snow. So. Much. Snow. Shockingly, a fetish for the white stuff in no way overcomes any clunky narrative obstacles here – and they are legion.

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.

The plot, for instance, doesn’t make all that much sense, what with its heroic space chimps and evil space apes and sly space foxes, all of whom don’t seem to realize what a half-baked narrative they’re operating in.

In this new era of McG movies, you can simply turn his film off, walk a few steps to your bedroom and go to sleep.

One of the worst movies of the year.

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.

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

Its pedestrian execution and the general sense that you’re watching a facsimile of something so much better is overwhelming – meaning it’s beyond underwhelming.

The filmmakers make excellent use of the Manitoba shooting location (perfect for an eerie mood of societal isolation) and the story's key theme – can we be responsible for things that are out of our control? – is a compelling one. Unlike its lead characters, you can safely, if not eagerly, approach Radius without fear of dying.

Any sports film, no matter its scale or handicap, has to land its narrative and aesthetic punches – and Tiger clings to the ropes more often than not.

As is the case with such movies – where every character's passing glance hints at a dark secret – everything is not as it seems, and the story quickly collapses into itself.

A disposable, ultimately best-forgotten movie.

When Jallikattu lets it rip, it’s as exciting and unusual an experience as you’re likely to get this year. Grab it by its horns and don’t dare let go.

The movie gets so, so close to achieving its goal of complete audience seduction and surrender, too. Right before it rips your heart out with a narrative turn that has to be seen to be (dis)believed.

The result is messy, zippy and smart-alecky. But never boring, and occasionally funny enough to warrant a spit-take or three.

If Olson and his game cast weren’t so determined to shade their characters with delicate, sometimes tremendous layers of humanity, Bone Cage’s fatalism might be impossible to digest.

Heartbreaking without being manipulative, compassionate without being overbearing and authentic without being sentimental, Scarborough stands as a shining example of how, when everything lines up just so, our country’s film industry can produce truly powerful works of art that can transform the way that you see the world.

A highly abstract look at family, memory and regret, all filtered through the reality of daily life in the Métis Nation, Ste. Anne makes a big impression.

With one foot in lighthearted romantic comedy and another in also-light political commentary, Gaza Mon Amour never takes a wrong step, exactly, but also feels ambivalent about its final destination. And if that tortured metaphor doesn’t work for you, then the essence of the film, directed by twin brothers Tarzan and Arab Nasser, might feel just as wobbly.

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.

In terms of understanding and confronting the harsh reality that so many Canadians endure today, Attila is remarkable, verging on essential, filmmaking.

While delicate in its tone and thoughtful in its aesthetics, there is a nerve-rattling sense of desperation driving the entire endeavour, the anxiety slowly but surely seeping off the screen until it courses through the audience, head to toe.

Zoopocalypse’s bid to revel in the kiddie-macabre space is admirable.

You will leave the film as hungry for Simpson’s food as you will be full from his emotional journey.

Ultimately, We Forgot to Break Up’s broken social scene offers a lot of hum, but not enough rattle.

The real charm of Boxcutter is just how Dahya and his cinematographer James Klopko capture the city as Rome criss-crosses it. Without jackhammering the point home, the film’s vision of Toronto is one of a city shedding one skin to wear another, in the process forcing all the creative forces who make it so special further and further outside its boundaries.

Moondi’s film feels of a piece with his previous work – films in which relationships are tested and almost pulverized – while also pushing into new, more emotionally complex territory.

Burger and Tateisi don’t quite deliver a film as energetic and unpredictable as their subject.

A Canadian spin on Thelma & Louise, the ambitious new drama Nika & Madison has all the fiery spirit of its made-in-Hollywood inspiration, if not quite the narrative dynamism and endless resources.