Brian Lowry

Melania fails to yield almost any unguarded moments, so intently focusing on its subject as she walks through venues in high heels as to approximate the feeling of a 104-minute perfume commercial.

Part heist movie, part family reunion, the film draws upon the most salient characteristics of the flabby feline, but mostly as an excuse to build a story that seems to crawl further from its origins with every passing frame.

“Godzilla vs. Kong” director Adam Wingard and a trio of credited writers probably make the right decision in treating all this with grave earnestness, which doesn’t render most of the situations, dialogue and the climactic encounter any less laughable.

A sort-of psychological, semi-erotic drama that, despite its literary pretensions, possesses roughly the intellectual heft of a perfume ad.

The star’s latest film should attract flies, all right, not with honey, but rather the stale aroma of its inane premise.

Splitting the movie into three chapters seems appropriate, since the film delivers a trifecta: overwrought, overacted, and overlong.

Those who fell victim to the over-the-top animosity directed at Amber Heard during the Johnny Depp trial – as chronicled in the docuseries “Depp v. Heard” – will alas have fresh ammunition thanks to “In the Fire,” a pretty awful starring vehicle for the actor that she also produced, a film unlikely to produce many sparks beyond those set off by the morbidly curious.

Again rated R after softening the rougher edges the last time, the body count is certainly off-the-charts high, but the action – under the guidance of stunt coordinator-turned-director Scott Waugh (“Need for Speed”) – is about as generic as these things get.

For Cox, a veteran actor with no mountains left to climb and few concerns about speaking his mind, Prisoner’s Daughter plays like one of those movies where you just take the money and run.

The kill count generally provides the requisite thrills, but everything else seems stitched together from genre clichés.

The near-four-year gap between movies does help in one respect, allowing people to largely forget what left them unimpressed about the original.

65 represents such an uninspired effort as to look like a fossil even before the credits roll.

Even for an action comedy, this Lopez-produced effort is inordinately skewed toward putting everything that might entice someone to watch in the trailer, beginning with the shot of Coolidge hoisting an automatic weapon to defend the wedding party. As hot as she is off “The White Lotus,” she can’t redeem the tiresome execution.

Most notable as a vehicle for Jason Momoa, this wannabe spectacle from “The Hunger Games” director Francis Lawrence serves up lots of special effects desperately in search of a story.

Forty-four years, 13 movies and innumerable corpses later, it sounds naïve to think “Halloween Ends” will really mark the end of anything, but like the holiday for which it’s named, it’s fun to pretend. The producers do seek to bring finality to this latest trilogy featuring Jamie Lee Curtis, although that turns out to be the only original idea they conjure in an odd, tedious film.

Even taking it as a given that Disney’s animated classics will all receive live-action makeovers eventually, Pinocchio feels like an unnecessary exercise – a movie so flat that it never sparks to life, and barely feels as if it’s making the leap into a different medium.

It’s the kind of star-driven vehicle that yields obvious benefits to Netflix even if, qualitatively speaking, it doesn’t deserve to see the light of day.

Horror movies are no strangers to social commentary, or the desire to be cathartic in how they use violence. Yet the latest example of those impulses, They/Them, illustrates how tricky that proposition can be, in a story that at various times feels creepy, exploitative and preachy, without becoming particularly tense or scary.

Zombies 3 is creatively dead on arrival, reviving the concept at least once too often.

This is one of those movies that’s forgotten almost as soon as it ends, and it doesn’t even require any chemical intervention in order to erase the memory.

There’s something unfortunately symbolic about Jurassic World: Dominion, which combines old and new DNA from the near-three-decade-old franchise and generates a pretty mindless mess … an XL-sized mediocrity out of the gene pool’s shallow end.

A new do-over that can barely generate enough heat to qualify as a thriller.

Watching The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe serves as a reminder, to paraphrase Elton John’s musical tribute, that her candle burned out long before the exploitation of her ever did.

Apatow serves up some clever lines, but they're mostly lost in the overall noise and manic tone. While it's not necessarily too soon for a funny Covid movie, The Bubble labors to achieve a sought-after level of zaniness right up until the ending.

While some might find it possible to have fun by surrendering to the silliness, this bad moon doesn't quite rise even to the level of a guilty pleasure.

While ‘Resurrections’ again offers a choice between the red pill and blue pill, the one thing that won't be necessary -- especially for those choosing the home-viewing option -- is a sleeping pill.

Home Sweet Home Alone is a very odd duck -- a movie that basically replicates the three-decades-old "Home Alone" template, but in a way that feels slightly weird and ill-conceived. Dropping on Disney+ in connection with the streaming service's two-year anniversary, it's a reminder that not all well-known intellectual property ought to be let out of the house.

If the previous movie conjured a bit of excitement by eradicating everything that had transpired after the original, that sense of novelty has quickly worn off.