Barry Hertz

That the film – part dark comedy and part cinematic dare – is the most unusual sight you’ll encounter at the movies this year is not up for debate.

The new film is intended to act as several things, none of them particularly admirable. It is a sequel to the underperforming and largely confusing "Prometheus"; it is a prequel to Scott’s own 1979 classic "Alien."

Director Marc Meyers’s sometimes funny, but more often creaky, spin on devil worship, murder and good ol’ fashioned religion has only one or two nifty ideas – all of which are sacrificed early on, leaving about an hour of footage in desperate need of divine intervention.

The film essentially disintegrates before your eyes, with Koreeda displaying little of the quiet elegance he’s built his entire career upon.

The film’s harmless pro-nature message is replaced with a drippy sense of self-congratulatory idealism, turning the film into a home movie by way of humble-brag. And then, by the hour mark, it’s merely a giant commercial for the couple’s 200-acre Apricot Lane Farm in Moorpark, Calif.

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.

Unfortunately no amount of self-confidence can sustain All Is True, Branagh’s stab at filling in the blanks of Shakespeare’s retirement, about which there is little officially known.

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.

Director David Mackenzie (Pine's collaborator on Hell or High Water) dabbles in some interesting aesthetic experiments – including a doozy of a single-take scene in the film's opening minutes – but the narrative is cut, dried and left to rot under the soggy Scottish skies.

While Jason Bourne isn’t half-bad as an action movie, it is a nakedly hollow exercise in resuscitating brand loyalty.

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.

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.

Nearly everyone in this movie, and nearly everything that happens in it, is awful. Vile. Nasty. But it is a nastiness that sticks.

Levinson displays some amazing technical chops – most of which can be traced back to Joseph Kahn, but never mind – and there’s one standout home-invasion sequence toward the end. But some warnings are best heeded.

The characters aren’t compelling, the comedy isn’t energetic, and the narrative surprises that Rey throws at the screen will be obvious to anyone who has ever heard the word “Sundance.”

Each performer tries their best to inject the material with energy and wit and verve, but Rebecca Frayn and Gaby Chiappe’s script has too many threads to weave together, leaving everyone looking a bit stranded.

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.

An unlikely Irish-Cuban co-production, Viva is, like its central subject, beautiful to look at but ultimately lacking depth.

The latest adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 novel is not necessarily a bad film, just an unnecessary one. Given that we’ve already been treated to about a dozen film and TV (and anime!) adaptations, there is little that Munden and his creative team offer that is essential.

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

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

There are some small-time twists in this small-time thriller and, naturally, McHattie does solid work as one of the more slippery characters Saxon encounters in his quest for justice, but DiMarco just can't sustain enough tension or drama to power the film through a plodding 105 minutes.

It’s an entertaining and thrilling tale, if you’ve never seen it before. But you have.

As limp and cold as The Founder is as a movie, it contains one of the finest Keaton performances of his entire career, maybe the one he’s been working his whole life toward.

Wagner Moura (Narcos’s Pablo Escobar himself) does what he can as the sturdy Sergio, and the actor has strong, near-instant chemistry with a love interest played by Ana de Armas.

The Square turns from a sharp art-world satire into something egregiously bonkers, a collision of blunt comic beats and heavy-handed social commentary that's more messy than profound.

The entire movie doesn’t merely tip-toe into the ridiculous, it dives head-first into the shallow end of stupid, cracking its head, and yours, along the way.

The finale is a gut-punch, but it arrives too long after Komasa has already exhausted most of his story's, and leading man's, energy.

This is a movie that cries out for attention, in ways both admirable and grating.

Yet after half an hour in Wendy’s world, it is clear that Zeitlin has exhausted both his visual imagination and whatever narrative interest he had in Barrie’s tale other than “kids, they grow up fast.”

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.

Big, annoying, and mostly pointless.

It all feels arbitrary and aimless, especially when the filmmakers decide to wrap things up with a long, wanly executed shootout whose stakes couldn’t feel lower.

Perhaps Nemes was hoping to let the precision of his intricately staged images artfully clash with the absurdity of a chaotic plot. But the result is more tedious than tense.

I could watch the background environmental action here for hours. But then the second thought of my Frozen 2 experience hit: I really wish I was listening to Let it Go right now.

So much of Ready Player One is assembled from the detritus of our past that it is less a film and more an overstuffed cultural recycling bin. A shiny, expensive, well-cast and professionally assembled recycling bin, sure, but a trash heap all the same.

Perhaps sensing that the rest of his story - mostly focusing around the earnest do-goodery of Golja's aide - falls emotionally flat, Navarretta lavishes attention on his two marquee players, creating tiny moments of poignancy.

A crusty screed against many facets of modern life – the internet, smartphones, insurance companies, pecans – but kinda ho-hum on the subject of drug violence, Clint Eastwood’s The Mule is one of the more confounding films of the year.

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.

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.

Timberlake fares fine enough in his strong-and-mostly-silent role, displaying genuine chemistry with Wainwright (though let’s not bring in whatever the tabloids and gossip sites have to say about the matter). Allen is delightful in that refreshing way that only newcomers can be. And in terms of Apple TV+’s bid to become a more family-friendly competitor to Netflix, Palmer makes good, decent sense.

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.

Never before have the demands of my inner man-child been so stirred, though, than while experiencing Deadpool 2, a movie that feels scribbled in pencil crayon, drenched in Jolt cola and coated with the dust of a thousand discarded bags of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.

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 concept might work for especially patient gamers, but rendered cinematically by director Genki Kawamura, the result is a frustrating and ultimately boring exercise in audience endurance.

Over the Moon is far more interesting than its animated contemporaries, if only for the parsing of its back story.

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).

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.

As Laurel and Hardy learn by the end of the film, every gig is an opportunity. Good on Coogan and Reilly for possessing the same workhorse mentality – and better luck next time, boys.

Finally, a big and shiny studio-backed holiday movie targeted to queer audiences that is just as sappy, cheesy and predictable as the many groan-inducing films that have been chucked toward straight moviegoers all these years.

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.

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.

The movie – a messy and frequently bloody blend of Shakespeare’s Henriad plays, but devoid of their language, scope and, well, drama – is forgettable.

While Atkinson’s intentions are good, his methods are shaky, resulting in a surface-skimming film that raises issues without ever approaching a solution. What’s worse is his shaky narrative framing and rookie pacing, all of which undermine what is a deadly serious issue deserving of a polished and powerful dissection.

There is a strange emotional detachment to Felix van Groeningen’s adaptation, which renders the tale needlessly cold.

This Altman-esque drama about the rise and fast fall of the 1988 presidential hopeful has a lot on its mind – morality in public office, the state of journalism, the often paradoxical nature of running a campaign based on lies – but spends too little energy dissecting those thoughts.

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.

Hikari’s work is well-meaning, and Kayama delivers an affecting, but not affected, performance that almost holds the story together. Eventually, though, the film loses confidence in itself.

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.

Writer-director Drew Pearce’s Hotel Artemis, however, manages to make the most intriguingly bonkers premise a boring and flat exercise.

So much of Poor Things, both in its conception and maturation, feels self-satisfyingly provocative instead of imaginatively profound.

So much of its script is frustratingly trite, its perspective on grief never rising above grade-school emotions, with thin characters forced to carry its surface-level themes.

This is a movie that so badly wants to be as cool as its source material that it trips over itself, in backward Chevy Chase style, into something so old-fashioned and dully familiar that no amount of retro sheen can boost its cool bona fides.

Eternals is shockingly, depressingly lifeless.

While Nicholas Hytner’s new film The Choral is, above all, exceedingly polite, there is no need to be genteel about the movie’s qualities. This is a period piece of insignificant impact and distressingly drippy intentions, its filmmakers so concerned with their project being considered handsome and respectable that they fail to spark any emotional response beyond the most passive of shoulder shrugs.

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

When Ben Wheatley is having a laugh, he can make for a perversely pleasant genre tour-guide. When he starts to get high off his own supply, though, it’s best to hike back to civilization.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Silent Night is all needlessly protracted foreplay, a true “when are they going to get to the fireworks factory?” tease of an action movie. And when Woo finally does light things up with only 15 minutes to go, the result is a limp pop of sparks, easily extinguishable.

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.

If you’re going to make a movie in which a psycho slices away at both campers and counsellors in direct homage to the age of Jason Voorhees, you need to go scuzzy or go home. A proper slasher movie should make you want to take a shower. Here, I felt sparkling clean.

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

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.

While there are several moments in the film, including two extended monologues, that remind audiences just how ferociously committed a performer Daniel can be, so much of Anemone feels a few dozen workshops away from being camera-ready.

The worst side effect of Hall’s thin and sizzle-free script is that it encourages Johnson and Penn to go overboard in a bid to compensate.

Sound the alarm, hide the children and lock the doors: another Purge movie is here. And it’s deadlier, and dumber, than ever.

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.

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.

The result is an indecisive and shapeless drama that never seems confident in the characters or situations it has created.

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

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.

Alternately tedious, cacophonous and stultifying, the latest show of force from writer-director Alex Garland following last year’s equally frustrating Civil War just might be the most unnecessarily unpleasant cinematic experience you will endure this year.

For all the behind-the-scenes footage and ostensible opportunities to grill Michaels about everything and anything, Neville’s film walks away with the impression and insight that anyone paying even half-attention to network television over the past few decades already knows.

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 .

Starring De Niro and Bobby Cannavale as two generations of “whaddya talking about!?” Noo Yawkers and directed by sometimes actor Tony Goldwyn, so much of Ezra feels like a “favour” film – a good excuse for a well-liked director to persuade friends to hang out with each other for a few weeks of shooting, without delivering something worthy of their collected talents.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

When you combine the megawattage of Gyllenhaal and Adams with Ford’s directorial … well, “prowess” would be too strong a word, so let’s go with “vision.” So, when you combine those two actors with Ford’s vision, what you get is a ridiculous, high-camp mess that could easily be mistaken for substance, if it weren’t so irredeemably silly.

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

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.

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."

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.

By this point in his career, star Nicolas Cage does crazy like no one else, but his descent into insanity here – not too far from how his character acts at the beginning of the film, really – can't elevate Taylor's juvenile take on adulthood.

It's a jumbled mess, to put it mildly.

If that wasn’t enough, there is something even more dispiriting about Doctor Strange beyond its halfhearted visual and narrative ambitions – an issue that made a brief blip on the cultural radar when the film was first announced but has distressingly gone unheard of since: This is a movie that revels in whitewashing.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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.”

The director’s pedestrian tactics are most evident in his command, or lack thereof, over his cast. While Parker knows how to expertly play to the camera – he all but winks at the audience, so confident is he in his admittedly captivating lead performance – he abandons his fellow actors, allowing them to exploit their worst instincts: hammy accents, wild gesticulating, uneasy line readings.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

There are good intentions lurking here, especially in star Louis Garrel’s performance, but the film consistently fails to engage on an even basic level.

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.

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?).

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!

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

Complete Unknown is the perfect case study of what happens when bad movies rope in good actors. In this case, it’s Rachel Weisz and Michael Shannon, two of the most talented performers working today, who get sucked into writer-director Joshua Marston’s vortex of nothingness.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Miracles from Heaven is mostly an embarrassment.

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.

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.

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.

Condescending, self-righteous and sloppy, Truth is simply a bad film for which there are no excuses.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Ostensibly an homage to Woody Allen’s Manhattan, Louis C.K.’s “secret” movie – it comes to TIFF only a few months after it was shot, with no prior publicity – is more an overlong rebuke to allegations of the filmmaker’s own sexual misconduct.

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.)

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

One of the worst movies of the year.

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

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

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.