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.