Clint Worthington

Simply put, Prey at Night sacrifices its own identity to drench horror audiences in throwback familiarity.

In the end, King of the Monsters is too philosophical to be a good dumb movie, and too dumb to be that much fun.

Jimpa is a story that feels like it’s arrived about a decade too late for its intended audience: Queer people want more from their rep than being anthropologically observed from the sidelines, and straight people have watched enough “Drag Race” to already be familiar with the concepts this film treats as novel.

It’s two solid hours of disposable, forgettable action-thriller filmmaking with a competent Cruise performance in the middle.

Winstead may be a bonafide action hero, but the world around her just isn't interesting enough.

Fury of the Gods tries to recapture what made the first Shazam! a disarming breath of fresh air, but it just can’t quite do it.

It may exhaust you, it may offend you; it may guide you through Hell into something more revelatory. And how you receive the film may depend greatly on how you feel about the man who made it.

Gringo’s obvious debt to the works of Tarantino and the Coen brothers give it a tone that’s too arch and haphazard to keep the audience rooted in its characters. The movie’s sense of humor is about twenty years too old, manifesting in glib jabs at other characters’ expense for being fat, or mentally challenged, or poorly-endowed.

There are some marginal but still noticeable stylistic improvements in the sequel. John M. Chu (a veteran of music videos and Justin Bieber: Never Say Never) brings a peppy energy that Louis Leterrier’s first film lacked, especially when showing off the flashy spectacle of the Horsemen’s almost-superheroic magic abilities.

It’s impressive what Jeunet is able to pull off with a shoestring budget, but the ideas and characters underpinning his visual imagination leave a lot to be desired.

When Joy lets us peek in these tiny, intriguing corners of her speculative world, Reminiscence comes alive the most. Otherwise, the rest of it fades like a memory you’d just as soon forget.

IF is a well-intentioned misfire—a kid's movie without laughs and a parent's movie without purpose.

At 90 minutes, one could hardly fault "Doctor Jekyll" for being languorous. But it's often too patient for its own good, content to slow-roll its inevitable outcome without giving us much to chew on besides Izzard and some cornflakes.

Angel Has Fallen is maybe the least objectionable of the Fallen series, but that’s not really saying much, is it?

Literally every ounce of entertainment value you can get out of Willy’s Wonderland comes from thinking about the premise itself: What if Nic Cage fought demonic versions of the mascots from Chuck E. Cheese? But the budget and the talent around Cage just wasn’t there, which robs Willy’s Wonderland of even the dumb, modest thrills promised on the packaging.

There’s a fundamental disconnect between Cherry’s cynicism and Holland’s innate naivete that just makes the whole affair feel wrong somehow, not to mention crushingly long at nearly two and a half hours.

There are plenty of fantastic films with Christian messages, but Miracles From Heaven is more interested in simplistic proselytizing to a heavily evangelical market that just wants their own existing beliefs confirmed. This is what makes the film so frustrating to watch; for the vast majority of its runtime, it’s essentially a good (if not great) family drama.

It’s a big, vulgar, Saturday morning cartoon of a film, to both its benefit and detriment.

Tarzan is too dull to offer consistent pulp excitement, too self-serious to let itself have fun, and too reliant on same-y CG spectacle to truly thrill.

Unfortunately, what The Belko Experiment delivers in face-twisting gore and deliciously taut suspense, it lacks in insight.

It’s difficult to overstate how badly Foe fumbles its heady premise and firecracker cast, a film so dependent on its biggest secret that it’s both predictable and hard to grasp by the time the trigger is finally pulled.

Inferno, much like its predecessors, simply can’t work its way out of the disappointing middle ground between a slick, technically competent thriller and tongue-in-cheek absurdity.

For Yimou’s colors alone, and one particularly striking set piece set in a kaleidoscopic stained-glass tower, The Great Wall may be worth the price of admission.

Ostensibly, it’s a vehicle for Michael Biehn, whom no one else but James Cameron seems to know how to use properly, but everything else about the movie is forgettable.

A sloppy, blinkered epilogue that wastes everyone's time.

Problem is, this doesn’t reinvent the formula as much as follows it by rote, which makes it an enormous step down.

Super Troopers 2 amounts to nothing more than a limp reunion tour where they seem to feel obligated to play the hits.

If Sam Raimi were in the director’s chair, rather than just producing, imagine the kind of fist-pumping schlock feast we could have enjoyed.

Spiral is a frustrating animal: In its first half, it styles itself as a prestige sequel/revamp of a cult horror series, lifting it from its nu-metal origins into a moodier, Se7en-styled police thriller. But despite its promising start, the latter half of Spiral succumbs to formula, like a bloodied Jigsaw victim fainting from their wounds so the blades can finish the job.

The chief appeal of Gans’ Beauty and the Beast is its sumptuous, ornate production and costume design, and the flamboyant glee with which Gans’ camera captures it all.

In an age where “so bad it’s good” has lost much of its meaning in a sea of calculated camp, The Intruder may be one of the few films of recent vintage that truly qualifies.

A perversely fascinating mess from start to finish, Mile 22 is Berg’s most baffling attempt yet to make art out of the most virulent post-9/11 fears about terrorism and international espionage.

As it sits in this passenger’s estimation, “Flight Risk” is a supremely bumpy ride that doesn’t quite justify its logline.

There’s nothing in “Ice Road: Vengeance” that isn’t in any given Redbox/Saban Films Neeson actioner you’ve seen in the last dozen years, and you’ll at least get to the good stuff quicker there.

When it comes down to it, Baywatch’s central sin is that it’s just…not funny.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 is about as unmemorable a movie as you’ll find in 2016. Everything about it, from Vardalos’ screenplay to the limp retreads of the first Greek Wedding’s better moments, stinks of an extended HBO special that somehow made its way to theaters.

Star Trek fans have been waiting nearly a decade to see a proper film in the franchise since 2016’s sorely underappreciated Kelvinverse entry “Star Trek Beyond.” “Section 31,” a cynical whimper of a Trek adventure, isn’t likely to scratch that itch.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie moves through you so briskly that you’ll get whiplash by the time the film reaches its deeply abrupt ending. But maybe that’s the point—after all, this is not a movie to be scrutinized, but to allow beleaguered elder millennial dads to sit their tots down for a precious two hours (if you count the trailers) and get some much-needed rest. It’s cute, and breezy, and rock-stupid, and will probably make a billion dollars again.

To be honest, Venom’s almost worth watching for Hardy’s bizarre accent and whirling-dervish mania alone, but it’s a shame he’s not surrounded by a better, more exciting film.

While it’s probably got some of the best production value since the last theatrically-released entry in the series (1997’s Home Alone 3), and is replete with a cast of genuinely funny actors, there’s something rotten at the core of Home Sweet Home Alone that makes it harder to swallow than a pool ball to the kisser.

Unfortunately, The Mummy’s true curse is that it’s doomed to sacrifice its moments of fun, breezy spectacle for overwrought world-building.

The Bubble works in fits and spurts, especially in its first half. The cast is game, and even the respective branches of the Apatow family tree get plenty of chances to prod at the validity and privilege of Hollywood actors finally enduring a crumb of suffering. But it suffers from the same issues as most Apatow pictures; it’s too long and aimless, swimming around its critiques of Tinseltown without really nailing a concrete target for its satire.

As with Collateral Beauty, Loeb piles on the ridiculous narrative twists to eye-rolling effect. The last twenty minutes of The Space Between Us are a rollercoaster ride of changing motivations, baffling character reveals, and overblown dramatic gestures that completely defy belief.

This is a warmed-over remix of crime comedy and thriller tropes, as awkwardly paced as it is murkily shot.

Unfortunately, Game Over, Man! sacrifices all the brusque cleverness of their hit show for a warmed-over Die Hard parody that’s too self-indulgent to entertain anyone but the four goofballs who made it.

Sure, it commits wholeheartedly to its bone-dead stupidity more than the first film. But it leaves a final product so scattered and uninspired that, less than 24 hours after seeing it, the vast majority of it escapes my memory.

In its current shape, Rebel Moon isn’t just boring; it feels hopelessly compromised.

Honestly, points go to Chaves and crew for trying something different with The Devil Made Me Do It: perhaps recognizing the formula was getting stale, they decided to try balancing it with some new procedural tricks. But all it ends up doing is scattering the film’s sense of identity even further; we still get the scares, but they don’t work as well, mostly because they deal with people we don’t care about.

Daddy’s Home 2 wants points for exploring the ever-expanding family tree in a Christmas comedy, but it only barely succeeds. Lithgow’s delightful grandpa offers a welcome diversion from the madness, but those moments are as fleeting as the plate of cookies left out for Santa on Christmas Eve.

Hurry Up Tomorrow takes its star’s caterwauling about how hard it is to be famous and heartbroken for granted, and expects its audience to roll with every self-inflicted wound. It’s vapid, meandering, and insistent on its own profundity as a tale of an artist reckoning with fame.

It becomes clear all too quickly that “puppets say swears” is all the film has to offer, so it’s a slog to sit through the remaining seventy minutes of that same joke, repeated ad nauseam.

The sitcommy scenes of family arguments and droll wisecracks clash with the grimmer aesthetic Carnahan wants to give it, so “Shadow Force” feels like an action film serving two masters and fulfilling neither’s needs. It’s laughable, all right, but in all the wrong ways.

Drawing from a host of late-nineties influences but doing nothing with them, Terminal is little more than a shallow exercise in dated crime movie pastiche.

For a film that hinges so much on the chemistry and charm of its two leads, it’s tough to recommend The Choice on even those grounds.

Gods of Egypt is a dull, meandering, plastic mess of pre-2002 CGI and performances as flat as the green screens behind them.

There’s something particularly galling about the laziness of this one — its flimsy gestures toward topicality, the piecemeal nature of the whole thing — that makes its failures acutely horrifying.

Every second grates and confuses in equal measure, with nary a thrill of inventive, exciting action filmmaking to break up the monotony.

Whatever you think about Adam Sandler right now, The Ridiculous 6 won’t change your mind. If you love him, you’ll love this; if you hate him, you’ll get plenty of ammo here.

In What Drives Us, Grohl reminds us of the transcendent, transformative power of live music on both sides of the stage and makes the itch to get back in the pit that much more tantalizing. It gets lost a few times along the way to its destination, but the journey is certainly a lot of fun.

It's your standard warm, fuzzy tale of Christian love that plays to the church set in ways that are hardly objectionable, even as it plays those notes straight down the middle with little finesse.

The personal doc can often feel stifling and self-congratulatory; Tavel makes it feel personal and disarming, an earnest and sincere attempt to understand herself through the father she never got to know, and the big, plastic box of wires that might bring him closer, even if just a little bit.

Párvulos remains a largely successful, if sometimes too idiosyncratic, take on the zombie story. The creature prosthetics remain grisly fun, and even among the washed-out cinematography, the blood thrums with crimson terror in one gory sequence after another.

While there’s a lot to like about “Everything to Me” (Abigail Donaghy’s performance, in particular), Lacob’s heart-on-sleeve script and uncertain direction often leave the whole thing feeling a bit scattered.

The evil that men do, a character says near the end, “tethers us to proof of the divine.” That Crowley packages these ideas in such a bleak, bloody curiosity as this is something to celebrate.

An intriguing doc that juggles ’90s nostalgia with an optimism for student journalism that avoids over-sentimentality.