Bilge Ebiri

You’re left with no real catharsis — religious or emotional. And without that, Captive winds up building to a big nothing.

If we absolutely must have G.I. Joe movies, surely they shouldn’t be this joyless.

To go with its bizarre plotting and shrill performances, the film seems to have been edited in a Cuisinart. But those are the least of its crimes.

With facile plotting — you could fashion a pretty deadly drinking game out of all the scenes in which someone gets knocked out, or is conveniently left for dead — and humdrum action, the lack of depth or dimension becomes fatal.

It’s as if somebody wrote out the basic setup, figured they would flesh out the character bits and plot twists and jokes later … and then never got around to it. It’s dispiriting and infuriating all at once.

No. Nope. Uh-uh.

Consumed by its own chilliness, The Aftermath is an emotionally constipated movie about emotional constipation. That may come off as a glib way to describe something that purports to explore the paralyzing nature of grief, but James Kent’s romantic historical drama falls so flat that any sense of tragedy is lost; it’s all surface, and stasis.

It’s certainly not good. But it’s not entirely dire.

Eventually, the oppressive sameness of everything becomes stultifying — which to me feels like a death blow for something so self-consciously experimental and wannabe visionary.

What’s ultimately so disappointing about Cha Cha Real Smooth is its shallow vision of growing up, which might explain why the protagonist does so little of it.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is an atrocious movie, but it’s atrocious in a way that Marvel movies rarely are.

It should be wilder, funnier, nuttier.

As the grown-up Kya, Edgar-Jones is perhaps best at conveying this young woman’s wounded inner life; that speaks to the actress’s talents. However, she never really feels like someone who emerged from this world, but rather one who was dropped into it; that speaks to the clunky filmmaking.

The film collapses, because it doesn’t convince us on a basic level: The characters are driven by convenience, not behavior, and their actions seem like they’ve been manhandled into place to make the plot work.

An old-fashioned piece of shameless hokum, Sia’s Music might be hilarious if it weren’t so offensive.

Everything dissipates in such a spectacularly unsatisfying fashion that you might wonder if you dreamed the whole thing.

For all of R’s allegedly humorous observations about the wasteland of the undead through which he walks, they feel tacked on — like somebody decided to turn this thing into a comedy at the last second.

Wrath of Man could have been salvaged had it delivered on some decent action sequences, but once such sequences come, they tend to be either lifeless or unintelligible or both.

The pitch-black and paper-thin Galveston not only fails to find a way to reinvent, or at least refresh, that old tired idea, it also piles a few more tired ideas on top of it.

It’s an assemblage of ideas from other popular films that just hangs there with little cohesion. It’s like watching a movie that hasn’t been made yet.

Eventually, you start to wonder if the movie forgot to take its own pills: What starts out as an interesting exploration of identity soon gives way to the uninspired, generic action flick we had feared it always was.

It’s enough to make me wonder if this series might still have a few decent tricks left up its sleeve. We’ll see. This movie’s a bust, but I’ll let myself remain hopeful.

There’s plenty of talent involved here, but the film fails to cohere on a basic level. Yes, it’s a legacyquel, says so right there in the title, but did it have to be so lazy? Especially in a world where Cobra Kai exists?

The zombie sequences are strictly pro-forma; the undead are treated mostly as a nuisance rather than a genuine threat this time around, which is probably intentional. The car chases are debilitatingly fake-looking and try to make up for their flatness with speed, to little effect.

The pieces are in place — detestable villain, likable cast — but Now You Don’t can’t muster up the energy or the wit to make us care one lick about what’s happening onscreen.

The clarity of its aspirations just makes the film’s downfall that much more pathetic, like a baseball player pointing to the home run he’s about to hit and then completely whiffing and landing on his ass.

The look of Ruby Gillman has a TV-cartoon cheapness, but its frames are cluttered with all manner of objects and elements of odd design, almost as if the filmmakers hope we won’t notice how basic and uninspired everything looks.

They Remain wants to unsettle us and invade our brains. Instead, what little power it has vanishes long before the credits roll. What remains is tedium.

Unfortunately, Wish manages to be none of the things it wants to be. It is neither evocative enough of the past to work as a tribute, nor irreverent or inventive or just plain funny enough to justify its constant but half-hearted callouts. It’s the ultimate cop-out — a lifeless, uninspiring mess of bland brand management.

It might have worked as a drama, but as horror, it’s a disaster.

Rosebush Pruning tries to be about something while pretending not to be about anything at all; it’s somehow both too stupid and too cool for the room.

The result is a shallow picture book populated with cutouts where people should be.

It’s hard to care for characters when what they do and say rings so false. The result plays like the kind of sleazy exploitation movie that the first one so studiously avoided becoming.

Not scary enough to thrill, funny enough to charm, or clever enough to convince, I Know What You Did Last Summer isn’t just forgettable. It’s actively irritating.

It’s not spectacular enough to impress us, nor intimate enough to move us. It’s just kind of there — ready to be consumed and forgotten.

Take the Dan Brown out of a Dan Brown movie and all you’re left with is Tom Hanks jogging in mild irritation.

The notion of the self-doubting hero is nothing new. Still, it might have been interesting to pursue, had it been handled here with anything resembling wit, or intelligence, or depth.

Does anybody really find this crap scary anymore?

The real problem with Jackpot! (aside from the inept direction, the unfunny script, and the irritating characters) is that the whole film indulges in a kind of misanthropy that would require a lot more thought and ballsiness to pull off.

A story this dense with incident, character, and history needs to breathe a little — think "The Lives of Others," or "Zodiac" — but Child 44 has no rhythm. It’s blunt, rushed, and scattershot. You're exhausted, bored, and confused by it at the same time.

It would be easy to call Passengers out for its troublesome sexual politics or its way-too-predictable genre contrivances, but really, that’d be giving it too much credit. The problem lies deeper, in the fact that it’s a clever set-up in search of an execution.

This demonic possession story is at times so lame it makes the last "Paranormal Activity" flick look like a masterpiece.

Bana is a likable actor, but he doesn’t bring any vulnerability or transparency to the part; it’s hard to tell what he’s thinking, if he’s thinking anything at all. And so, we move from one bleak, bludgeoning setpiece to another. But with each loud noise, the film loses us more and more.

What’s onscreen — choppy, lifeless, predictable action scenes jutting up against unbaked, middle-school-theater-production-level family drama — is quite damning in its own right.

A tired, unscary, incoherent mess.

It’s just plain offensive — and not all that well made, either. No Escape takes the casual xenophobia of something like Taken, crossbreeds it with something altogether more noxious, then asks us to kick back and enjoy the ride. We don’t. We can’t. And the ride isn’t that great to begin with.

It’s frantic yet lifeless, chaotic yet pro forma. A thorough lack of care emanates from the screen.

Whatever its politics, Gimme Shelter fails on multiple levels.

Familiarity is not always a bad thing, though. "The Conjuring" breathed new life into old clichés; it showed that those creaking doors and possessed closets and white-robed figures still had the power to scare us. But that was a movie made with sensitivity and purpose. The blunt, lifeless Annabelle, on the other hand, sucks that life right back out.

Like being asphyxiated in a ball pit filled with candy, the experience of watching The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is at once kaleidoscopic and nerve-wracking. It pantomimes the hallmarks of a good time, with a fast, forced cheeriness; the flashing lights, bright colors, sparkly design, and subplot-happy narrative are there to hold our attention and charm us, but they accomplish the opposite, instead making us worry about what we’re missing.

A catastrophic miscalculation of a movie, Victor Frankenstein is a perfect example of a Hollywood revision that, in trying to outsmart an original, reveals what worked about said original in the first place.

Careens helplessly between the garish and the generic.

The film absolutely delivers on the scenery-chewing front. And yet the movie is still hollow and joyless.

The Hurricane Heist delivers what it promises on some basic level; it’s got plenty of hurricane, and it’s got plenty of heist. But those looking for Sharknado-style idiocy will probably be disappointed, as will those looking for anything that makes sense. That might be the film’s fundamental problem.

A sad, bad, parade of uninspired cameos and listless violence.

The first Scream skewered Hollywood cynicism. The latest embodies it.

Watching The Last Witch Hunter is like sitting by while someone else plays a game whose coolness eludes us.

Uninterested in competing on the bromance front, or even on the action-thriller front, this new Point Break often plays like an extreme-sports documentary with bits of narrative interstitials to carry us along.

The Mummy turns out to be a drab, nonsensical affair that squanders its potential for humor, atmosphere and sweep.

Love Hurts feels like it might have once been something, but in its current iteration it exists basically as a series of fight scenes stitched together with the thinnest of narratives. That wouldn’t be such a bad thing — indeed, it could have been a great thing — if the action was in any way inventive or engaging.

The actors still give it their all in Allegiant, but there's only so much they can do with such a clunky, verbose script. And on the rare occasion that the film actually quiets its characters down and delivers something resembling action, it's woefully inert.

Five Nights at Freddy’s, the movie, is the kind of hollowed-out exercise in atrociousness that pretty much forces you to mull other things, be they what you’re having for dinner, the decline of American community, or the heat death of the universe.

Perhaps a story like this needed to be a drama. Or maybe, with its constant, almost comical shifting of blame, a dark satire. Instead, it’s wound up as the worst of all possible alternatives: a disposable genre movie that cannot scare, convince, or enlighten.

Ride Along 2, which picks up not long after the first film ended, doesn’t mess much with the formula, except that everything feels more frayed and tired this time around.

The gags are mostly puerile and uninspired — like the film was dreamed up by a bunch of tired, wired 13-year-olds; it has their insistence but little of their invention.

Perhaps what’s most dispiriting about this Firestarter is how visually impoverished it is.

The film feints at comedy with background gags and an occasional broad performance or two, but it’s primarily a dramatic story — and not a focused one at that.

Tom and Jerry is so busy, so desperately unfunny, so clunkily cacophonous that it makes you long for the simple, brain-numbing charms of the one thing it pretty much refuses to give you: a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

The problem here isn’t the writer-director’s politics, but his stifling lack of imagination, his complete refusal to even attempt narrative dexterity.

Crumbling under the weight of its own visionary grandiosity, Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon is a series of amazing-looking sets and costumes and effects looking for a story, characters, emotion — really, anything that might raise the pulse.

Sort of a Flatliners for the sensitive indie-actor set, The Lazarus Effect is a grimy, dopey, confused thriller that wastes a very likable cast.

Seventh Son not only offers no new spin on its bland, by-the-numbers story, it also fails to deliver any generic pleasures; I’m not sure this movie could even keep a young child engaged.

This twisty-turny film seems too enamored of its twisty-turniness to give us characters we can latch onto.

There’s something truly off-putting about The Electric State’s palette of junk and colorless branded robots. By trying to give this world such weight and grit, the filmmakers have doubled down on its ugliness.

Unfortunately, Roland Emmerich is a terrible filmmaker, and his efforts to make his protagonist "relatable" backfire spectacularly.

It tries to repeat everything the original did, and winds up leaving you stone-faced and depressed. I think there were more laughs in Schindler’s List.

In The Best of Me, the melodrama feels so hurried and half-baked that the end result isn’t just disappointing. It’s borderline infuriating.

Hitman: Agent 47, much like its anonymous title, is a film pretending to be an action movie instead of the real thing. It might as well be a commercial. Or, hell, a video game.

A wan little neo-noir whose intricacies inspire more tedium than suspense, The Bag Man is a good example of how to waste a solid cast.

I don’t know, maybe it worked as theater. Onscreen, it’s torture.

A movie like Pixels should be stupid and energetic, not stupid and lifeless.

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Given the level of talent involved both in front of and behind the camera, nobody should feel much joy — no anti-tentpole schadenfreude or blockbuster-busting righteousness — to discover that the latest Fantastic Four film is a catastrophe

Dolittle is a calamity for the ages.

By the time its finale rolls around, The Choice has completely undone its own spell.

This movie feels like it’s been shredded to bits, stripped clean of personality and character and coherence, presumably in an effort to get it short enough to sneak in some additional screening times.

Taken 3 is bad enough that it may just end it.

A weird mix of tired jokes, topicality, and crippling anxiety.

Throughout The Cobbler, Sandler himself seems more invested than he’s been for a long time. But the rest of this ghastly movie lets him down.

Reagan is pure hagiography, but it’s not even one of those convincing hagiographies that pummel you into submission with compelling scenes that reinforce their subject’s greatness. Sean McNamara’s film has slick surfaces, but it’s so shallow and one-note that it actually does Ronald Reagan a disservice.

Performance aside, the film never quite manages to figure out what it’s actually about.

Everything appears to have been thrown together with little attention paid to how it might all work together.

It’s something of a catastrophe.

Rabbit Test’s failure is understandable: It’s pretty much a terrible movie. Directed more like a sitcom than a film and full of dud jokes that feel like they’re waiting for a laugh track to kick in, it’s a good example of how the comedian’s ten-wisecracks-a-second humor didn’t necessarily translate to a narrative medium.

A Haunted House 2 is not a movie. It is a nervous breakdown.

Even if it had been released at a less tense and tender time, this thing would go down like an oversized flaming lead balloon.

Nobody was expecting much from Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, but did it have to be this unimaginative and lifeless?

Left Behind is biblical in its silliness.