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.