Blake Goble

Outlaw King is like watching prog versus metal. When it’s prog rock – folksy and wooden ­– it’s at its worst. Muted, draggy, earnest, with wee traces of carefully placed humor or commentary on a bygone era? It’s Moody Blues, and even a little Jethro Tull? Hardly worth putting on, unless you like your history slim and bone-dry. But at its best, it’s heavy metal, with swinging axes and church slayings and all sorts of grim goodies.

Patriots Day sits right on the line between exploitation and tribute. The star power is dicey, and the action relentless, but Berg means well and likes the people in his recount.

At 100 minutes, with just enough digital chutzpah to keep everyone reasonably amused and never quite annoyed, Dolittle is tolerably fine.

Marwen is too much, not enough, and yet still deeply watchable. It’s admirable for the wildly different approaches it takes. Only a stylist like Zemeckis could try something like this. Take a real man’s witty, real-life therapy-based photography and attempt to spin it into a mo-cap circus with every genre tool he can think of.

Rio, I Love You is worth a passing look for its pot of talent.

Mowgli is not entirely recommendable, but it’s not a total bust either.

The pleasure of good company is Robin’s occasionally winning quality.

Neil Marshall’s Hellboy is a monster mash, loud and proud. Just bring a mop.

Peterloo is traditional, dryly historical, and all sorts of other Merchant-Ivory slang for stuffy and challenging.

A passion project from the sing-talk god David Byrne, Contemporary Color is a concert film, but a finicky one, unstable and unfocused.

In holiday gift terms, it ain’t coal, and it ain’t a new car. It’s holiday socks, with a big ugly candy cane and some wavy text on it. Noelle’s cute for a minute, but you’re not going come back to this thing after January.

It’s not that funny, and feels like a ripoff of Animal House. Either way, The Wild Life is like the contractually obligated Crowe script that time forgot, his undisciplined id, playing with cheap thrills before he got a chance to express himself like a human storyteller in 1989.

Yesterday is too trusting, too confident in its silly dream, and not fun or passionate enough.

Parents will nap, some kids will be amused, and the nerdiest viewers will have good reason to point out flaws in the movie’s not-so-intelligent designs.

Life of the Party exists in one of those unfortunate places where it’s easy to criticize, but McCarthy still makes you smile, and even laugh.

The movie’s merely the latest A-list comedy of this sort, is happy to live in the middle, and yet it frustratingly outwears its welcome because of a lack of creativity and sloppy structure.

There’s a laziness to The Road Chip, what with its mostly stale or needy jokes and cutesy plotting.

The steam runs out fast with one generic chase after the next, forgettable gunplay, and gory violence. Its ham-fisted double crosses and half-baked moral dilemmas amount to little.

Nominal laughs plus three reliable actresses equals the very mediocre Otherhood.

If for one second you forget the diverging script, the weak direction, and Efron’s limitations, there’s something to be amused by with De Niro’s flagrantly foul-mouthed, horned-up grandfather figure.

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

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

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

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

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.

Many shots fired, all of them misses. This is a film without quality, care, or any real decency.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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