Brian Lowry

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

The resulting movie, however, hits the wrong notes, repeating mundane lyrics without uttering the words that keep coming to mind, which are "precious" and "pretentious."

Strange and more than a little sad, You Cannot Kill David Arquette -- a documentary about the actor's adventures in wrestling -- derives most of its strength from the discomfort associated with watching it. As the son of a showbiz family, the fact that Arquette is reduced to this cry for attention more than anything reflects the enticing lure of the spotlight.

The movie simply doesn't deliver -- living hard, selling hard and, before it's over, finally dying hard.

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.

Resting almost entirely on the shoulders of its young leads, both they and the pic lack the sparkle to sustain what seeks to be a whimsical premise but, except for a few moments, proves ponderous instead.

An understated, uneventful slog of a movie that feels like a misguided merger of "Gran Torino" and "Bronco Billy."

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.

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

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

The Forever Purge's once-over-lightly politics don't merit much of a fuss, playing like a cynical exploitation of real-world issues.

Ultimately, it's a marketing pitch in search of a movie that proves punishingly flat.

The result is a movie with an exceedingly narrow target audience that should test Will Ferrell's appeal among boys maybe ages 12-14 -- about the only demo likely able to endure this laborious mess.

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.

An absurdly stylized action-horror-comedy mashup that somehow makes a satanic cult, wanton violence, and buckets of blood boring.

Two head-chomping symbiotes aren't better than one in Venom: Let There Be Carnage, a mind-numbingly tiresome sequel, filled with uninspired comedy and a CGI monster fight that seems to drag on forever.

After about 15 minutes of The Last Mercenary, though, even if you can't do splits like Van Damme the temptation is to split -- and to paraphrase "Scarface," say goodbye to him and his little friends.

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.

All of which goes to demonstrate that while it's easy enough to slap a colon on a lowbrow cable TV show, additional punctuation by itself isn't sufficient to actually transform it into a movie.

“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.

Look, we get it, people are looking for new stuff to watch, mindless escapism included. Still, in terms of any sort of inspiration or originality, "Kate," the movie, is every bit as D.O.A. as Kate, the character.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Although streaming provides a logical venue for this small-scale film, it's hard to think of a time or platform where this adaptation from British director Joe Wright ("Darkest Hour," "Atonement") would have felt satisfying, with an ill-considered, twisty finish that's a sizable letdown from the already so-so material preceding it.

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

A small-scale movie with a throwback drive-in feel that loses nothing in an at-home setting, and based on its minimal merit, has little to lose in any event.

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

Even kids won't get much of a kick out of this high-energy, low-IQ futuristic slugfest, which plays down to, and in many ways, below the level of some Saturday-morning cartoons.

Spiral, however, doesn't chart its own course as much as simply try to have it both ways. And if the title implies a certain motion, the main direction the movie heads is essentially down the drain.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Debates over LeBron James' greatness compared to Michael Jordan on a basketball court will continue in perpetuity, but "Space Jam: A New Legacy" won't fuel much chatter about who's the better actor. Putting James in Jordan's shoes, as it were, isn't a bad idea in theory, but despite the odd moment of inspired Looney Tune-acy, this reboot shoots a very loud and thudding airball.

In an equally damning commentary on the acting and Roland Emmerich’s direction, Lundgren and Van Damme are both more realistic as stoic cadavers than they are once their memories start to return.

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.

A comedic dud that's aptly titled, since it makes loud noises without really needing to be seen. The one thing unlikely to be heard during this Netflix superhero spoof is a whole lot of laughter.

So episodic and flat it should be a letdown even to those amused by the original.

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.

Director Carl Reiner and writer David O’Malley simply cast their nets too far and wide in this grating sendup, which proves crude without being clever or, for that matter, even remotely funny.

Peaks early -- like, during the first three minutes -- and rapidly goes downhill from there.

Cats isn't quite the unmitigated disaster that some feared -- or perversely hoped -- but it's not good, delivering a mostly incoherent adaptation of the long-running musical. An eclectic roster of stars claw out a few meager moments, but as screen experiences go, this is a memory best forgotten.

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

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.

A bloody mess.

Added together, there are about three minutes of funny material in Happy Gilmore, and pretty much all of them are in the trailer, leaving a sometimes painfully unfunny 90 minutes with which to contend.

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.

A lifeless, workmanlike comedy conceived to provide holiday shoppers an inoffensive respite from the mall.

Style has seldom pummeled substance as severely as in Cool World, a combination funhouse ride/acid trip that will prove an ordeal for most visitors in the form of trial by animation.

The aroma of "Cats" has yet to fade, but Universal follows it up with another animal-related stinker in Dolittle. Robert Downey Jr. produced and stars in the title role, but even charitably taking into account that this was designed for a younger family audience, talking to animals in this retelling is somehow a colossal bore.

Pic is at best a relatively harmless way to enjoy air conditioning for those who admire Williams' ability to riff, even at his most irritating.

A pointless and pretentious drama.

That seed of potential, however, sails away on a tide of numbing stupidity.

Sitting through the picture is an endurance test.

Crude, virtually laughless and aimed at a target audience that's probably never heard of the source material, "Car 54" should have a short patrol of theaters before being towed away to the vacant lot of "10 worst" lists.

Me You Madness serves as a reminder that you can clearly try to be funny, and still produce something that turns out to be kind of a joke.

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.

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