Christy Lemire

Judy Greer assembled a monumental cast for her directing debut, A Happening of Monumental Proportions. Then she stranded her fellow actors with material that doesn’t even begin to tap into their talents.

So of course, Hardy applies that same intensity to the comic-book anti-hero origin story, Venom. And his fully committed performance is pretty much the only reason to see it.

It is the kind of movie you watch on an airplane — perhaps on the way to someplace luxurious and relaxing like the South of France, the film’s setting — while falling in and out of naps.

If The Turning leaves you screaming, it’ll probably be out of frustration over its abrupt, unsatisfying ending and not the actual frights that precede it.

Director/co-writer Chris Dowling infuses his sports drama with a grungy sense of place, making Run the Race feel a bit like a Christian version of “Friday Night Lights.”

Vaguely more tolerable than you might expect – enjoyable, even, in sporadic bursts.

While the performances are stronger and the narrative is more coherent than you’d see in a “Madea” movie, for example, Perry’s latest still features many of the auteur’s trademarks: dizzying tonal swings, awkward blocking, drab lighting, jarring edits and a mixture of the salacious and the puritanical.

No one needs a paycheck this badly. This goes far beyond the one-for-me, one-for-them theory of role choices.

The whole thing ultimately collapses in a heap of unintentionally hilarious melodrama.

That’s one dismayingly archaic trend throughout The Young Messiah: the fiendish characters are also wildly effeminate.

Jackals put me in a foul mood. Maybe that’s the intention of this lean, mean slab of B-horror trash: to set you on edge and keep you there long after it’s over.

Sthers has amassed such a strong cast of veteran actors that they manage to create some resonant moments now and again.

Like A Boss is a movie written and directed by men which bears very little resemblance to how women actually relate to each other.

It’s just dull and hollow — a massive waste of time and money. The characters are flimsy, the dialogue is stilted and the amount of destruction is ridiculous.

This a super-Sorkiny Aaron Sorkin script — full of the kind of well-timed zingers and clever turns of phrase that never occur to us in real life.

I’m also hoping that the game is more emotionally engaging — or at least, you know, fun — than the movie I just saw. Because that thing was a dour mess.

This slick and cheesy Netflix movie only occasionally rises to the potential of its wild premise, thanks mostly to a crazy-eyed, licking-his-chops performance from Jason O’Mara. He knows exactly what kind of material he’s working with here. For the most part, though, “Hypnotic” is dopey, but never quite dopey enough.

There is nothing new, exciting or particularly challenging about what The Secret: Dare to Dream is selling.

In fact, very little here is special, despite the individual charms of Evans and co-star Alice Eve.

Even by the low standards of this type of live-action, family friendly comedy, Show Dogs is especially lame. It’s actually kind of amazing that it’s getting a theatrical release at all.

You will never realize how much you need Guillermo del Toro in your life until you see the reboot of “Hellboy.”

The bar is just so low, people. It’s just hovering there above the ground.

Granted, it’s meant to be a fantasy film, but not a single moment rings true in A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting — not the teen angst, not the little-kid nightmares, and definitely not the sense of fun and camaraderie meant to fuel these Halloween adventures.

It took 20 years for an Artemis Fowl movie to come out, and now that it’s here, the film itself feels like it’s in a hurry to be over already.

It’s meant to be a tale of uplift for faith-based audiences, but instead wears viewers down with a heavy-handed narrative, an overbearing score and voiceover that spells out everything in cringe-inducing, folksy tones.

The Boy Next Door has its share of so-bad-they’re-good moments – and details, and chunks of dialogue – but not nearly enough. Mostly, they’re just bad. And it had such potential too, starting with the casting.

In theory, these actors should be able to just show up, be themselves, tap into their formidable improvisational abilities and let the laughs flow freely. In reality, though, movies require scripts. They require actual characters and dialogue and narratives that evolve in ways that are logical, or at least engaging.

All of these potentially effective elements—as well as a stellar cast that includes Charlize Theron, Kerry Washington, and Michelle Yeoh—get swallowed up by the overwhelming reliance on CGI-infused action sequences. They’re both empty and endless, and too often leave you wondering what’s going on and why we should bother.

Despite a few musical bright spots, you’ll leave humming the costumes.

Mostly, Fifty Shades of Black is exactly what you expect it will be. It hits all the notes of its source material, only it amps them up, and it seems to get the inherent absurdity of this premise even more than Sam Taylor-Johnson’s movie did.

Last Knights is so thoroughly mediocre, so dully empty, that it’s difficult to summon the enthusiasm to trash it.

It isn’t creepy, but it isn’t terribly plausible, either. It’s just another movie in which a 30ish white dude finds purpose and learns how to live life again through the love and support of a younger woman who’s more of a concept than a real person.

Even by the standards of raunchy, comic spoofs, director and co-writer Deon Taylor’s film feels especially scattered.

Rio, I Love You feels like little more than an extended tourism promotion video.

Within these oversaturated times for comic book movies, Madame Web is blissfully breezy in its pacing, which helps make it a more enjoyable watch than some of the super-serious, end-of-the-world fare we often see.

A mixture of misplaced gallows humor, wildly over-the-top caricatures and a gimmicky use of animation combine to make My Dead Boyfriend one of the year’s more uncomfortable movie-going experiences.

Playing With Fire tries to be tasteless and crass but also treacly and cheery. It wants to you go: “Ewwww …,” but also: “Awwww ...” You’re more likely to groan, then look at your watch again.

Schiffli’s snarky and snide self-aware tone quickly grows wearisome, and his action sequences have a cheapness about them that’s distancing; they’re almost laughable but never so-bad-they’re-good.

A movie based on a toy should be a whole lot more fun than this.

Time may feel like a flat circle, but the calendar says it’s January, so that means we get shoddy, dumping-ground dreck like the generically titled Redemption Day.

A blandly gritty piece of late-August mayhem that’s as forgettable as its generic title.

Penn’s own humanitarian work is well-documented, including raising millions of dollars for Haitian relief efforts. Clearly, his intentions here are genuine. But his execution is laughably pretentious.

Think of the worst movie you’ve ever seen – a movie that didn’t make you laugh, didn’t make you cry, didn’t move you or change you in any way besides giving you the desperate urge to flee the theater. Think of a movie that was a massive waste of your time and money. Hold that title in your mind. Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 is worse than that.

Christian readers and audiences are the base here, but it’s hard to imagine that this incarnation of the story will persuade anyone else to find the Lord unless they’re sitting in the theater praying for the dialogue or special effects to improve.

The pacing is sluggish, the script is crammed with both incomprehensible technical gobbledygook and lazy, sexist jokes, and the visual effects are laughably cheesy. My kid could make a more dazzling space movie on his iPad.

It's all a dull, repetitive slog of talking heads saying the same thing over and over in slightly different ways, and it never picks up steam.

Dark Meridian ends up being is a generically violent gang drama full of bad guys standing around grungy warehouses, explaining themselves before shooting each other in the head.

Davis’ dialogue remains clunky and he never misses an opportunity to punctuate every feel-good moment with overwhelming, swelling music. He draws stiff performances from most of his actors, whose interactions are often painfully awkward. And as was the case with the original film, the structure is predictably episodic.

Typically reliable actors like David Strathairn and Jeffrey Dean Morgan can only do so much when they’re given so little to work with on the page.

Justice may have a striking screen presence, but she can only do much with material that’s less than heavenly.

Director Tim Sutton, working from a script by Greg Johnson, offers some striking visuals and a couple of compelling performances. But for the most part, this high-concept Western is too much of an empty drag to ever grab you.

At first, the story is fascinating. Soon, it becomes dizzying. Quickly, it turns sickening. And eventually, it’s heartbreaking.

There’s no real tension in this murder mystery (or much mystery, for that matter), the kills aren’t clever, and eventually this part of the story ends up feeling entirely unnecessary.

In directing her first feature, Contreras takes a straightforward approach to documenting the 2022 contest. She follows a handful of conductors from various points on the globe as they get ready for their big moment on the Paris stage. But within this traditional structure, she’s chosen her subjects well. They have a variety of experiences, personalities, and home lives that inform their art.

Weekend in Taipei is a B-movie straight out of the 1990s: a trashy, splashy, knowingly over-the-top action picture in the tradition of Luc Besson, which is fitting, given that Besson himself co-wrote the script with director George Huang.

This sluggish tale of remorse and forgiveness mostly remains bland and distant, like the many generic aerial shots of Rome that it offers.

Shrill, frantic, and hideous to look at, “Gracie & Pedro: Pets to the Rescue” isn’t just one of the worst animated movies of the year—it’s one of the worst movies of the year, period.

Like Father Like Son is at once unintentionally hilarious and borderline reprehensible, and it’s the closest approximation to the disaster of “The Room” since Tommy Wiseau’s cult favorite first graced arthouse theaters over 20 years ago.