Darren Franich

Deep Water isn't really thrilling or erotic, but it accomplishes a kind of diagonal camp sincerity, plummeting its glamorous characters into ever-tawdrier situations. I wouldn't marry it, but I wouldn't kill it. Remind me, what's the third option?

Nobody could play well for anyone desperate to visit a recently reopened theater, but this is a rather chilly festival of carnage, too rigid to ever really spark to life. It's wickless.

Yet even compared to the glacial Marvel-Netflix Dramas, Zack Snyder's Justice League is a chore. At the end of the rainbow, viewers are left with the promise that the actual cool things will happen next time. This cut is no worse than the theatrical edition, but it sure is longer. "So begins the end," Steppenwolf declares. When he says that, there is one hour left.

We need a new franchise designation for this stumbling, bloodless conglomeration of What Once Was. Rise of the Skywalker isn’t an ending, a sequel, a reboot, or a remix. It’s a zombie.

Doctor Sleep is a mess. It’s way too long, clashing somber sobriety with loony cheap thrills. The Shining homages turn shameless and cheap. The jumpscares are more funny than scary.

At least Dark Fate is frequently bad in a funny way, without the dutiful dullness of the last couple sequels.

Annabelle Comes Home is only a little scary, and too religiously dedicated to its own ongoing cash-printing megafranchise for big laughs. But the best moments in this low-key domestic horror film have a tossed-off quality, like the whole production cycle was a fun weekend for everybody.

International is better than Men in Black II and worse than Men in Black III, and they’re all bad, so erase this sentence from your memory.

The best thing I can say is: This is a mess that makes no sense, so it’s a cure for the common overly architected superhero film.

This manga adaptation is a tired science-fiction odyssey, with bland digital effects piled onto a sappy non-story that feels like a two-hour elevator pitch for a 70-film franchise.

The rare quiet moments in Nutcracker suggest Foy might be a real movie star. Let’s give her a real movie and find out.

Ant-Man and the Wasp is working too hard to look unconvincingly relaxed.

A Wrinkle in Time hits that unfortunate un-sweet spot common to big-budget science-fiction/fantasy, where the spectacle feels more summarized than experienced.

It feels too long, and it’s only 90 minutes. Jigsaw’s lifecoach-gone-mad ruminations have never sounded less threatening: He is become mansplainer, destroyer of drama. But there are lasers. I liked the lasers.

Bad dialogue, lame plot, fine. The bigger issue: How could a film with Elba and McConaughey have so little swagger?

You’d hope that a film like this could put a bold new spin on the superhero story. The reverse is true: Here we are in 2017, and even our nifty low-budget crime movies are building a cinematic universe, and saving the best stuff for the sequel.

In Salt and Fire, a bad movie but an intriguing vacation slideshow, Michael Shannon and Veronica Ferres play “characters” (unconvincing, undimensional) and speak “dialogue” (expository, flat).

Like many DreamWorks movies, The Boss Baby‘s most imaginative moments are the random asides.