Bilge Ebiri

The film plays out mostly like an occasionally above-average episode of the show.

It’s not that this new movie has forgotten the fleet-footed charm of the original MIB films; it’s just that it doesn’t quite know how to conjure it again, so it confuses levity with listlessness.

A tired, unscary, incoherent mess.

Ouija is confident, meat-and-potatoes horror, and that’s a lot harder to pull off than it sounds.

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.

Appropriately pulpy — fuss-free and fast.

Chaos Walking retains a tiny bit of its comic spirit, but one does get the sense that maybe, in some distant rough cut or interim screenplay draft, it was a much funnier, more engaging picture. Instead, what we now have is a movie that seems determined to run away from itself.

Mostly uninspired and insipid, but it rallies, and builds up enough comic steam by the end that you might find yourself amused.

Clean, pleasant, and thoroughly unremarkable. It passes the time, but with that cast and that director, it should have been so much more.

They make you wish Haggis would put away the Great Themes, the belabored dialogue, the forced narrative dynamics, and just figure out a way to scale down his scope and tell smaller stories. Maybe it’s not all as connected as he thinks.

The real problem is that the film doesn't know what to do with its depiction of life in the interconnected age. It’s a nothing movie.

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

There's little drama here, but there is a touching sense of reflection.

This is not a rich, novelistic tapestry of humanity; this is a solipsistic world, enclosed on all sides by the director’s ego. But the entrapment is vivid and poignant. Look past all the beautiful people fucking, and you realize that Love is sad in all the right ways.

Whatever its politics, Gimme Shelter fails on multiple levels.

Their movie has its moments, to be sure, and the target evangelical audience may well respond enthusiastically, but, unless your own salvation is riding on it, the film is mostly a slog.

The film does occasionally show a pulse when it tries to reimagine the life of the victim — it turns the tables on the mystery and tries to become a film about love and life instead of doom and death. But it’s too little, too late, and too lame.

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.

Thanks to that cast, and some savvy direction, you might very well enjoy Fist Fight. But don’t be surprised if it also leaves a sour taste in your mouth.

It’s a strange spectacle: a horror film that spends as much time dismantling suspense as it does building it.

A delightfully goofy slapstick cartoon with a surprisingly dark heart.

It feels hurried, generalized, inattentive. There’s no specificity, no immersive sense of people actually living their lives. Again, that’s probably partly intentional. But it sure feels like a miscalculation for a movie about the survival of humanity to have so little humanity in it.

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.

Like most corporate cinematic endeavors, Space Jam: A New Legacy tries to have it both ways, proclaiming to be on the side of the angels while doing the work of the Devil. It criticizes shameless, money-grubbing attempts to synergize and update beloved classics (as LeBron himself puts it, “This idea is just straight-up bad”) … all the while shamelessly synergizing and updating beloved classics.

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.

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.

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

Careens helplessly between the garish and the generic.

Ben Affleck makes for a pretty good jerk, but he can’t pull off outright villainy. That’s probably the main problem with the crime thriller Runner Runner.

The kind of movie you keep wishing would just cut loose and go off the deep end. Nobody goes to these "Fatal Attraction" retreads anymore for serious drama. But this one is a movie torn — too grim and self-important to go truly nuts, but too silly and slipshod to work on a more somber level.

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

The result is maybe more interesting than we might have expected, but it’s not particularly funny.

The more turns Jason Fuchs’s script takes, the more monotonous everything feels. And because Vaughn never drops his fantastical, cartoonish style, “reality” ceases to have any true meaning within the context of the film; he keeps trying to up the stakes even as what we’re watching becomes less and less consequential.

The film never quite reconciles the banality of this love triangle with its far more interesting depiction of the rest of these characters’ lives.

Freed from the shackles of elaborate world-building or jokey, family-friendly tentpole-dom, this is a tight, brisk little over-the-top thriller, with plenty of atmosphere, effective jump scares, and a couple of genuinely moving performances at its heart.

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.

By the time the film works up to its finale, what secrets it wants to reveal to us have become fairly obvious. But they still carry a dark charge; Diablo’s ultimate grisliness is impressive in its own way. And it might have worked, had the film not asked entirely too much of its young lead.

A mostly disposable, occasionally quite funny bromance distinguished at times by its earnestness.

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 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.

The concept promises us a melancholy kind of dread, and there are bits and pieces throughout of the movie The Forest could have been. But any compelling sense of unease is ultimately undone as the film gradually settles for tedious schlock.

I found myself often enraptured by this sad little story. Its weird narrative of faith healing serves as an intriguing diversion from the real matter at hand — the notion that grace lies in the search for help, rather than the finding of it.

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

The amiably bland family comedy The War With Grandpa genuinely surprises with how un-special it is. It’s the kind of film that seems to vanish from the mind even as you’re watching it.

The real problem is that Get Hard’s very idea of edge is itself pretty stale. It feels like a bunch of off-color jokes the filmmakers have been trying to tell for years, and they’ve crammed them all into one film — with tiresome results.

Spirit of Vengeance is so focused and, as a result, so impoverished that you actually feel bad for Cage. The actor tries to bring the weird (though at this point one wonders if he can even do anything else) but the film more often than not leaves him high and dry, saddling him with standard-issue action hero lines and boilerplate action set-pieces.

This is a movie that can’t decide on the story it wants to tell, and can’t seem to tell it particularly well, either.

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.

Vacation is lazy, idiotic, and gross — and I laughed my ass off at it.

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.

The heist itself, shot mostly underwater, is actually lots of fun.

The boy is but a shell; it’s the men and women around him who truly come to life in this chaotic, awkward, and sporadically moving film.

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.

There’s a perfectly good melodrama to be made from the plot of Regretting You, which on its surface isn’t so much a twisty-turny soap opera as it is a multicharacter wallow in uncontrolled emotions. It’s how this specific movie presents all the wallowing that made me feel like I was hallucinating.

For all the goodwill generated by its early scenes, by the time The 5th Wave lumbers to its conclusion, you realize you’re not watching a movie but an act of crisis management.

The Longest Ride is actually one of the more competent Sparks films in some years — a far cry from the creaky noir of "Safe Haven," the awkwardly backloaded melodrama of "The Best of Me," or the phony brooding of "The Lucky One." It goes down smoothly, if blandly, like an air-flavored milkshake.

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.

Sinister 2 is far from perfect, but it has a nobility that’s rare in much modern horror cinema.

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.

Stupid, stupid, stupid — and it certainly knows it. You might even chuckle contentedly at its knowing silliness — that’s sort of what this low-rent franchise is here for — but you’ll also miss Jason Statham, whose deadpan self-awareness somehow legitimized the ridiculousness of the previous films.

However you cut it, with all that talent, Charlie Countryman feels like a sad, wasted opportunity.

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.

Largely indistinguishable from any number of bloated superhero spectacles that have already graced our screens. Your kids may not mind it, but it’s more insistent than it is fun.

It’s inert where it should be fast, and cluttered and choppy where it should be rousing. Which is a shame, because Hellboy, as conceived, is one of the more interesting comic book heroes we have. He deserves better than this.

Jessie Nelson’s film sells itself well. There’s care in the details, and the characters often feel like actual people.

A mixture of mild pleasures and deep disappointments.

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.

Let’s Be Cops has its moments, but it in no way distinguishes itself.

If only Ghost Dimension spent more time in the ghost dimension and less time in the people dimension, we might have had something.

Luckily, there is a movie you can watch instead that will give you both fascinating context and awesome dancing. It’s called "Planet B-Boy."

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.

This one never quite decides if it wants to be a big, boisterous epic or a solemn retelling, and it nearly disappears into the crack between the two.

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.

The movie is imprisoned by its Cage’s stiffness. All he gives us is strained, robotic seriousness. I’m not sure he even gives us any rage.

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.

Part of the fun of movies like this is the opportunity for the audience to immerse themselves in the procedural minutiae of these worlds, but there’s precious little of that here. Everything is so empty, so incomplete. Blacklight feels like a synopsis waiting for a story.

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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.

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

Because it’s darker and a bit more intense, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is a slight improvement over the first film, which seemed to mistake family-friendly restraint for abject lifelessness.

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

It's stocked with clichés, but they're arranged in such weird ways that the end result is both predictable and certifiable. If only any of it actually went somewhere.

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

The problem with Strange Magic isn’t so much its derivative story as it is the odd, half-complete way it unfolds. You can sense the weird mixture of tones, influences, ideas — as if the whole thing were still in its planning stages.

It’s both thin and overstuffed, filled with intricate, at times dazzling set-pieces peopled by characters we don’t care about, and an irreverent sense of fun that nevertheless leaves us cold. It tries so hard… and ultimately achieves so little.

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

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.

Yoga Hosers is the best film Kevin Smith has made in a long time, which admittedly isn’t saying much. But this new cult comedy-thriller may well represent a turning point for the writer-director.

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.

Like so many of today’s action films, The Legend of Hercules is too busy peddling slick, stone-faced portent to ever bother making us laugh, or engaging us in any way.

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.

The film is boldly bad, yes, but also boldly boring.

Look past its colorful, smooth surfaces and something corrosive emerges. And it’s not like the film isn’t aware of this. But it doesn’t really know what to do with it.

Beyond being tiresome, Intermezzo is just plain ugly, with seemingly little care given to the image — odd, perhaps, given that the film is so clearly and confrontationally about its own director’s gaze.

All Me You Madness has to offer are poorly written rants, indifferently staged action, and ill-conceived comedy. In the end, it doesn’t even deliver on the madness.

No. Nope. Uh-uh.

The film takes an allegorical, symbolic story and sets it within a milieu that suggests authentic life. But it never quite reconciles the tonal dissonance at the heart of this idea — there's great emotional potential here, but we experience the whole thing at a remove.

It’s a lively, occasionally powerful history lesson, and an essential reclamation project.

Sentinelle is an admirably swift, elegantly filmed spine-snapping action thriller with moments of surprising grace.

The movie gathers force as it proceeds and delivers one final shock toward the end. It’s not a twist, exactly, but rather a development that makes you reconsider what you’ve just seen — suggesting that those who sometimes seem to care the least about the world are, secretly, the ones most overwhelmed by it.

Once Within a Time runs 52 minutes, and it’s so lovely, funny, and charming that it feels like 15. But when it’s over, you feel like you’ve seen the world.