Blake Goble

The dispiriting thing is that Tom & Jerry is far from the worst family film in the world. It’s just a familiar, by-the-books, vertically integrated product to ensure continued IP visibility for the film and television arm of a corporate portfolio. Here’s the latest and laziest IP for you to become disenchanted by, should you feel so inclined.

Adam Mason’s Songbird is about boring people getting mad that they’re stuck inside, and the government is oppressing them, and they’ll soon fly free or whatever.

Hillbilly Elegy does not bring out the best in its cast, and Howard fails to bring the intensity or depth that might make something meaningful. His approach is all after-school special, all the time.

Another lump of coal in Gibson’s rapidly declining filmography. Fatman has no gifts to speak of. It’s kind of cheap. It’s fairly cynical and/or mean-spirited. It’s not fun. No good. Lumpy in execution. Deeply archaic in its thinking. Ho ho ho-hum.

When the leads are drawn this terribly thin, and Onward is so hopelessly focused on the dad narrative that it can’t help but ignore its creativity in favor of mawkish afternoon special, the product stinks of a bad Amblin ripoff.

A tonal miss and technical meh, Gemini Man arrives looking and feeling self-defeated.

Like the Hollywood it tries to lampoon, in its way, The Fanatic comes across as shallow. It is, as they say in the biz, a flop.

Murder Mystery is a dud, stained with slack humor and a total unwillingness to play within its own chosen genre.

IO is dull, it drags, and it’ll beg the question: When will this, all of this, be over?

Bohemian Rhapsody is another lame music biopic, and its failures ultimately lie in the poor creative choices, the gutless approaches to potentially explosive events in the life of this band. We’re not buying this new album. There’s no new material to be found in Bohemian Rhapsody.

This film is all easy beats, predictive familiarities, and absolutely zero heart, soul, or silliness anywhere to be found.

It’s clichéd, distant, afraid to truly immerse itself in anything but long looks, but at least it looks good. And that’s that.

The 15:17 to Paris is too unfocused, too hard to take seriously, and too short to really get invested in it. It’s an Eastwood misfire.

The end result is a finished product which smacks of Universal optioning a hot Scandi novel, losing enthusiasm for it during development and production, and leaving audiences with the remaining carrots and coal.

It’s insulting. Unfunny. Blunt. It’ll leave a hell of a bitter taste in the mouths of general audiences and horror nuts alike.

There’s no voice, no style, and no real intrigue on hand. It’s all a slow sail to the next outsized setpiece.

Gold is weakly written, predictable, and too placid to achieve any loftier ambitions. It’s just a soft-sold tale of a schemer’s paradise.

It’s damnable with faint praise. It’s too cheap to be thrilling, and too earnest to be all that offensive. Mired in clichés. Mostly flat. A weak Spy. Only Kevin James diehards need apply.

This is another bad Perry film, but a curiously verbose one with jokes piled atop more jokes.

The film’s a fundamental fiasco of tone and timing.

Jones slaves to make something of the material, and to his credit, or rather his profoundly large cast and crew’s credit, the craft is certainly visible in Warcraft. It feels rude not to compliment the hard work of the makeup, costume, production design, and visual effects teams.

It should come as no surprise that The Angry Birds Movie is a loud and dumb children’s film, but for what it’s worth, there are plenty of cinematic commercial ventures that are louder and dumber and so on than the well-meaning and slickly sold Birds.

Zoolander No. 2 invokes that old Simpsons headline: “old man yells at modern culture.”

Marlon Wayans is clearly getting off on the gags, but the lazy, hard humor, and elastic joke-making eventually has a numbing effect.