Chase Hutchinson

It is a slog of epic proportions that utterly wastes the talents of all involved. Completely lacking in cleverness and without any sense of direction, it is a cinematic drought of entertainment that only has any intrigue in how baffling an artifact it remains. It may not be the worst movie of the year, but it is certainly the most annoying.

A lot is going on all at once, but little of it coheres into anything substantive, let alone actually memorable or meaningful.

It is mostly a drag with some potentially sharper small details never coming together to outweigh the dullness at its core. For those who may come to the film wanting to understand more of who Golda was and her role in history via a well-written character study, they’ll only end up departing it with all of those questions still lingering.

When all the dust settles, The Last Kingdom: Seven Kings Must Die is a flawed yet fitting finale that serves as a send-off to Uhtred of Bebbanburg and the bloody life he did everything to find a way clear of.

Credit where credit is due, Sacrifice ultimately made me seriously consider the prospect of death while watching it. However, this mostly came from a desire for it all to end so we no longer had to keep enduring the inescapably vapid and shallow film unraveling before us.

While Ridley gives her all to a more thoughtful and nuanced performance, The Marsh King's Daughter remains a film on a directionless journey to nowhere. Even with the commitment of its lead, it just gets lost in the woods before falling flat on its face.

The result is a film that’s not just incisive and compassionate, but fully attuned to the rhythms of this modern family.

Rather than come away feeling like you’ve watched something truly daring or inventive, it all feels derivative. It is a film that is too mundane to even get mad at.

There is real passion in DeBose’s vocal performance as she tries to elevate the rote music. I just wish she were in a better movie.

Benjamin provides just the right balance of sincerity and snark to hold this dark action-comedy together. When combined with bloody good action choreography, the film mostly knocks any flaws aside.

It’s a film in search of a character whose sole saving grace may be that it leads its audience to read Sapienza’s work for themselves — because the movie doesn’t do her or her legacy justice.

Until Dawn is more disappointing than deadly, leaving all the promise of the horror game behind for a jumble of horror-movie re-creations.

There are plenty of silly recurring jokes and a collection of quirky characters, but it all exists to cover up just how empty the film itself is at its core.

I see dead people in this film, but their cause of death is simply boredom.

More than the bursts of visceral violence, it’s Refn’s vibrant command of visuals that proves most exhilarating. Even if there was less plot, the consistently dark beauty of the film would be enough to carry it forward.

It can be said the film does indeed provide a full summary of Foreman’s recounting of the major events in his life where he comes out looking pretty great, but that hardly makes for a compelling work of cinema.

Even as Paulson is putting her all into the film and can firmly grab hold of you at some moments as her strong-willed matriarch comes undone, much like the dust that is floating around the confined setting, it all slips through her fingers.

When it then shifts into being about the case itself with the characters trying to get to the bottom of it all, the humor feels like it is mostly coasting off of the chemistry of Sandler and Aniston. This can hold things together for a while as both bounce off each other effectively, but the film soon is revealed to just be a recycling of jokes the first film already did better.

Foe, the beautifully shot yet scattered lo-fi sci-fi mystery thriller starring Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal, is not a good movie. However, it is an interesting one.

Last Days is a film that is so contrived, superficial and misconceived, it does a disservice to the story with every choice it makes.

There is never a sense that Collette is phoning it in, but the entire narrative around her is just too flimsy to hold together for a full feature. In isolation, there are some solid gags and throwaway jokes that connect. The trouble is that they are just increasingly few and far between. It all makes for a film that oddly feels like it is playing it safe, relying on the charisma of its lead and offering little else beyond that.

Though this film does gesture towards urgent issues, like misogyny being endemic to the modern tech industry, and is genuine in how it seeks to talk about them in a more crowd-pleasing package, it never amounts to being more than one note.

It is her performance that ensures every tonal shift lands as it goes from playfully comedic to delightfully dark and back again. Despite how overstuffed and unwieldy it gets, seeing Kidman work her magic at every turn will never not be a joy to see.

In a world that often rewards mediocrity where true artistic greatness is hard to come by, a work like Opus had the potential to be a defining movie of our current moment, but the film’s half-hearted swipes at celebrity culture are never sharp or incisive enough to get under the skin.

It isn’t the worst shark movie out there, but that’s not saying much. By the time we get to the “big final confrontation,” it loses a handle on what it was going for.

The funniest element of what vaguely gestures toward dark comedy is how poorly written this story about writers is.

Though there are movies that are worse than 65, it is part of a select few that manage to utterly and completely squander their own potential.

What could’ve been a fun little sci-fi horror transforms into something that deflates any remaining tension and engagement in one fell swoop.