Brandon Yu

It is no fun for a viewer to scoff at a film that purports to speak to pain that is real for many. But “Slanted” doesn’t actually have any interest in contending with those experiences seriously, instead using its palely observed traumas as a launchpad for a pastiche of other punchier genre films.

The knight might represent the contagion of human evil, and Anne’s story a journey of proto-feminism, but for all its big themes, the most resonant is the film’s title.

All of its head-spinning action has a stultifying effect. At all times, the film seems afraid that it’ll lose its audience’s attention, barraging us with the mindlessly zany to hold our engagement.

To graft the story of Jesus onto the template of a genre film is, if blasphemous to the faithful, and mainly just silly to everyone else.

You can simply surrender yourself to the bland moral lessons of the movie, but even then, it’s hard not to feel like this was best left as a quirky human interest segment on a slow news day.

Instead of an auteur upgrading his sensibilities with a studio paycheck, “Beautiful Journey” mostly reads as a for-hire job doomed with jumbled writing.

Underneath the blinding lights, the Weeknd has always told us, is a hollow core. In that regard, the movie has mirrored the music.

The writing is stiff and the ensemble is mostly charmless, while the visuals are slapdash.

It’s all a particularly egregious piece of commercial slop — just a little too expensive and passable to qualify for being so bad it’s sort of fun.

In recent years Netflix has become a factory for B-rate Christmas movies, with the occasional cheap comfort to be found in its manufactured holiday romances. This bizarre concoction, not so much.

The twists and pedestrian dramatics are a stiff slog to get to, and Gordon-Levitt’s once innate charisma has vanished altogether here.

Ultimately what this version, directed by Rupert Sanders, is spiritually derived from is neither the film nor the comic, but rather the flattened popular image that the film produced — a Hot Topic-style version of alternative consciousness.

It’s a Garfield movie that strangely doesn’t feel as if Garfield as we know him is really there at all.

The kids in the film are simply too young to make an impact, and Snoop, who is fine enough as an actor, ultimately doesn’t possess the charisma necessary to elevate a lazy script.

Elements that could have made for a somewhat intriguing documentary get lost in what amounts to a tedious piece of agitprop that ultimately regurgitates the dutifully respectful picture of Elizabeth we’ve seen time and time again.

The film is so graceless and bizarre in its attempts at tugging at the viewer’s emotions that it often feels like a work of parody.

Basic storytelling components are also ignored, as if entire scenes are missing, so that One True Loves, directed by Andy Fickman, stumbles even as a piece of Hallmark sappiness.

Most of the movie is told with big, rudimentary handwriting and slathered in clichés.