Benjamin Lee

Even in an oversaturated genre of increasingly diminished returns, Shelby Oaks is about as dispensable as it gets.

There’s really nothing to see here, just another synthetic simulation of a film and a genre we used to love, less maintenance required and more complete overhaul.

Films like Bride Hard, proudly recycling well-known popcorn plots without any attempt at originality, rely on heavy-lifting star power but there’s just none of that here.

For a film about living, Here is a remarkably lifeless endeavour.

A dull and predictable sunshine noir that wastes the time of those involved as well as ours.

There’s never the satisfying pleasure of problems being solved – just people frantically raising them and things magically coming together, a film that should be about process that doesn’t seem particularly interested in it.

The commentary on gender and age feels easy and unspecific and the world of the Vegas showgirl created from too great of a distance to really ring true.

It’s genuinely startling just how utterly wretched the finished product is and how unfit it is for a wide release.

The uplift of a woman triumphing in a male-dominated Stem world isn’t enough to get us through a mess of grindingly unfunny dialogue, too-broad performances and an utter, movie-killing lack of charm.

There is of course more here to remind us of Lohan’s unwavering charm but that’s not quite enough to distract from just how tired and limply written the whole thing is and how depressing it is to watch her still stuck here.

Aiming for more fun is no bad thing but Imaginary is far too dumb and ungainly to move at the pace required and bring the thrills it should, a theme park ride that should be closed for repairs.

There is nothing gritty or believable about any of it. The film is as dumb and schlocky as the worst of the genre, with lousy network TV effects, uninvolving action and unfunny and inelegant dialogue, its characters drowning in poorly written exposition (even if the much-memed viral line from the trailer is sadly not in the movie itself).

At less than 80 minutes, it’s barely even a movie, more one long montage of bits that never run on long enough to be defined as scenes.

There’s something equally impressive and depressing about the squandered potential of misfiring period comedy Wicked Little Letters, a joyless waste of cast, premise and setting.

The bar was low after the first, a half-assed waste of actors who deserve better, but the sequel is somehow even worse, a maddeningly unfunny string of bad decisions, the worst of which was deciding to make it in the first place.

Ghosted is content dictated by algorithm at its absolute, industry-shaming worst, so carelessly and lifelessly cobbled together that we’re inclined to believe it’s the first film created entirely by AI.

No one here seems to know what they’re doing and, more importantly, why. A strong contender for 2022’s most pointless movie.

There’s something so soulless and ineffectual about the aggressively unnecessary Red Notice that it almost plays like a pastiche of a Hollywood blockbuster, like a bot consumed the last 20 years of studio fare and spat out a facsimile as an experiment.

There’s zero, nay negative, fun to be had here, a potentially interesting, if not exactly original, sub-Manchurian Candidate idea (pre-programmed victims/accomplices are activated by a phone call) taken nowhere of interest.

Don’t Breathe 2 is not only struggling for air but it’s struggling for purpose and meaning and hopefully this weekend, audiences too.

It’s the worst kind of soulless committee-made product, lazy and risk-free, that need never and will never be thought of again. Infinite? Not even close.

It’s all torturously uninteresting, a plodding retread that never once explains or justifies why it made the leap from “what if?” to actual full-length movie.

It’s all so rushed and half-assed, like it was cobbled together on the fly rather than intricately plotted out, stupidly written and worst of all increasingly dull, a fitting end to a rotten pile of guts that’s less book of Saw and more novelisation. Game over.

If the devil did exist then surely he’d have the power to destroy films as dull as this.

A head-smashingly redundant waste of time, talent, energy and resources, a shockingly early yet entirely convincing contender for worst film of the year.

A defiantly unbelievable and drably directed heap of quirk that’s as overstuffed as it is underpowered, a head-scratching failure for all involved.

There are no left turns or bumps along the way, just a smooth straightforward journey from cliche to cliche, boredom setting in fast.

A clumsy, unfunny adaptation of a much-loved literary crime series

It’s so punishingly dull to watch, filled with dry, perfunctory dialogue from Stacey Menear’s consistently uninventive script and shot without even a glimmer of style, that even at a brisk 86 minutes, it feels like unending torture.

It’s an unwieldy and messy thing, drearily directed and boringly written, taking its agenda seriously yet not providing a robust enough framework to surround it.

Rather than screaming for them to go the other way, you'll be urging them to accept fate and die instead.

The Kitchen, a late summer, female-led adaptation of a little-known DC comic, is the worst kind of bad movie. That’s because it has all the ingredients of a good movie, from a juicy premise to a stellar cast, yet it’s assembled with such staggering incompetency that from the very first scene it boils over into one star territory, all promise evaporating from the screen. The boredom and confusion that then follows is backgrounded by an almost angry frustration that someone could get something so potentially thrilling so very, very wrong.

Even outside of the script’s aggressively repetitive bigotry, the shambolic Scooby Doo plot struggles to grab even the slightest amount of attention.

Even die-hard De Palma completists would be better served by forgetting this one exists – a tedious, ugly thriller devoid of anything to say that will serve as a regrettable footnote for a distinguished film-maker who is capable of so much more.

An inevitable yet staggeringly unnecessary follow-up to the surprise horror hit turns a nifty concept into an exhaustingly convoluted mess.

None of it rings remotely true and his insistence on playing out so many scenes at such a high level can make it an excruciating watch.

Life of the Party’s predictable and lethargic box-ticking of scenes (accidentally getting high – check; dance off – check), gives it the unremarkable stench of something you’ve half-watched on cable before.

As usual it’s left entirely up to the beleaguered Johnson to make any of it even remotely watchable. She remains a compelling presence, trying her darnedest with lifeless words, but, again, she’s stranded by the energy-sucking vortex of nothingness that is Jamie Dornan. He’s better than this...but he knows it and his boredom is lazily apparent throughout.

This is carelessly made trash but worse, it’s carelessly made trash that thinks it will spawn not just a franchise but a cinematic universe.

Every single decision made by Hill is bad.

Nothing about the film comes close to authenticity and it’s largely down to Penn’s remarkably amateurish direction.

It’s a film of remarkable idiocy, most notably in the portrayal of the local police who are so incredibly unhelpful that it borders on parody.