David Rooney

Sadly, there’s no trace here of the authentic fondness for his characters that illuminated Hill’s directing debut, Mid90s. Just a load of solipsistic L.A. brain rot trying to pass for satire.

The actors are all game for anything, but this is thankless work, in which the mix of live action and animatronics has no magic. The same goes for the talented voice cast, which also includes Colman Domingo and Hank Azaria in small roles.

Punishingly dull.

This is a high-concept, CG-saturated bore that lacks heart and infectious humor, even if it huffs and puffs its way to a little poignancy in the end.

The Crow is a sluggish, overly self-serious gloomfest that never takes wing.

Roth’s messy storytelling is so anxious to get to the next blast of rote action — amped up by Steve Jablonsky’s hard-working synth and orchestral score and lots of shoddy CGI — that the characters have scant opportunity to form real bonds.

A sad demonstration that what was once considered outrageous, transgressive and anarchic now just seems crass, tired and witless.

Young audiences may well be enchanted, but I’m sad to report I found the whole confection sickly sweet and hopelessly twee.

The contestants just lack dimension. And Lawrence’s journeyman handling of the more character-driven drama provides sputtering momentum at best.

It’s full of flashy technique and ostentatious stylistic flourishes but has almost nothing of note to say about the supposed burdens of privilege.

She Came to Me is a movie whose strained eccentricity gets positively goopy, conveying so little genuine feeling that the stakes for any of the characters never feel terribly high.

This sub-Hallmark dreck made by a bunch of hacks that don’t deserve to be named is the first film out of Lohan’s Netflix deal and her first feature in three years. Not to beat up on a former child star who has overcome more than her share of demons, but if this is the best vehicle she could find, waiting another three might not have been a bad idea.

This is a uniquely tiresome slog — madly over-plotted, thuddingly derivative, insanely overlong and slathered in a big symphonic score that strives to infuse momentum into a saga with minimal emotional stakes.

For a movie with so much volatile physicality and bruising punishment, there’s an inertia about the whole thing, a soullessness that makes every contrived smirk grate. We don’t care about who gets pounded to a pulp or shot to pieces because there are no characters to root for — good guys or bad.

This utterly toothless, glorified Hallmark movie for Paramount+ proves the director is only as good as his material.

Whatever goodwill superfan director Colin Trevorrow earned with 2015’s enjoyable reboot, Jurassic World, he pulverizes it here with overplotted chaos, somehow managing to marginalize characters from both the new and original trilogies as well as the prehistoric creatures they go up against in one routine challenge after another. Evolution has passed this bloated monster by.

What this twisty espionage thriller ... doesn’t have enough of is character depth or storytelling coherence.

Lyne’s take on the material, scripted without distinction by Zach Helm and Sam Levinson, manages to drain all the subtlety and psychological complexity from Highsmith’s story of marital warfare, transgression and obsession.

The result is neither funny nor thrilling, just exhausting.

A cynical, insufferably smug satire stuffed to the gills with stars that purports to comment on political and media inattention to the climate crisis but really just trivializes it. Dr. Strangelove it ain’t.

This is a story so crusty and antiquated in its conveniently resolved conflicts, contrivances and drippy sentimentality that it should have been left on the shelf.

For all its high style and aestheticized visuals, this is a work of self-conscious posturing with nothing to say.

The movie, with its numbing overload of pastels and prayer, is too tonally uncertain to yield any fun. It’s a depressing window into the worst excesses of faith racketeering that has little to offer in the way of commentary.

In a movie this overloaded with plot, the revelations are like a leaky faucet, just like that purple voiceover. In fact, there’s so much going on, much of it behind the literal curtain of memory, that Joy leaves little room for the characters to establish themselves in the here and now.

The film trades the agreeably limber storytelling and seeming spontaneity of Leon’s previous work for a narrative both aimless and inert.

Infinite is a soulless grind. Juiced up with a succession of CG-enhanced accelerated chases and fight action interspersed with numbing bursts of high-concept geek speak, Antoine Fuqua’s sci-fi thriller isn’t helped by a lead performance from Mark Wahlberg at his most inexpressive.

The characters are uninvolving, the emotional stakes never fully take hold and the physical action invariably promises more than it delivers.

Walker's story no doubt is grounded in a very real milieu that reflects the grim existence of countless Americans returning from active duty to a country blighted by economic downturn, shrinking opportunity and substance abuse. But the only reality Cherry reflects with numbing insistence is that of co-directors getting high on their own high style.

A lo-fi treatment of a high-concept crime rom-com deficient in sexual chemistry, laughs and suspense, this is a grating stunt in which actors who ought to know better, led by Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor, play synthetically movie-ish characters meant to tickle us with the all-too-real trials of the COVID era. If you still think frozen screens and kids disrupting Zoom business calls are a hoot, it's all yours.

The light touch, the structural economy and lyrical voice that buoyed the gentle four-character piece on stage become cloying and strained in this clumsy expansion.

What's most notable about Kyle Rankin's slick and compulsively watchable genre entry Run Hide Fight is the utter shallowness of its psychological perspective.

Michael Polish (Big Sur, Amnesiac) directs with his foot nailed to the accelerator, but all the manic energy in the world can't stave off the boredom of Cory Miller's script, which is a deadly combination of convoluted and thin.

It's almost unfathomable that this one made it through all the preliminary production meetings without someone sensibly calling a halt to the process by saying, "Wait a minute, those kitties are damn creepy!"

The movie aims to make Daphne's journey raw and real, but mostly it's just insipid.

Well-intentioned but heavy-handed ... To be fair, while Parker's film lacks finesse and the writing too readily slides into bullet-point didacticism and self-righteous speechifying, it does go to some lengths to give both sides a voice, even if it inevitably stacks the deck.

As a supposed snapshot of life in the unaccommodating big city, and of the humane gestures that can soften that harshness, it feels utterly synthetic, not to mention a romantically "European" view of New York that's sheer nonsense.

It's a Frankenstein's monster. It lacks the captivating charms of Disney's live-action remakes of "Cinderella" and "Beauty and the Beast," or the fabulous distraction of Angelina Jolie that kept the revisionist "Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent," semi-entertaining.

It’s contrived at every turn and talky like a French film, though 100 percent American indie in its earnest conviction that it’s saying something of substance about the unpredictable roller coaster of life and love.

Despite Barrett's careful attention to creating an unsettling mood of existential horror by loading the soundtrack with ambient dread, and his depiction of New York as a breeding ground for overstimulated instability, Brain on Fire just sits there, inert and uninvolving.

This ersatz portrait of American big-top tent impresario P.T. Barnum is all smoke and mirrors, no substance. It hammers pedestrian themes of family, friendship and inclusivity while neglecting the fundaments of character and story.

This is a shallow snapshot of First World problems and feeble conflicts that makes you despair for the state of gay-themed drama, perhaps even more so because it's capably acted and assembled with a slick sheen.

The movie morphs from sluggishness to confused ludicrousness, as it turns into a thrill-deprived thriller.

[A] stunningly self-important but numbingly empty cocktail of romance and insulting refugee porn.

The film is well-intentioned but dramatically unconvincing, full of clichéd situations and on-the-nose dialogue about kids getting their shot and living their dream.

This posturing, airless exercise is wearing rather than exciting.

A gay auto mechanic comes out to his straight buddies in Fourth Man Out, but the shortage of dramatic texture, psychological insight or credible sexual tension in this toothless brom-com means he might as well be telling them he has a cold.

There's little sense of personal investment from the director, but Egoyan does what he can to keep the story moving forward, without getting bogged down in its implausibilities, which are too many to count.

If you’re going to make an ultra-naturalistic, two-character, walking-and-talking romance that tips its hat to Before Sunrise, the film that began Richard Linklater’s exquisite trilogy, then it’s best to avoid a script loaded with contrived situations and overwritten dialogue.

There's neither topicality nor bite in this bland pseudo-thriller, which lathers on composer H. Scott Salinas' high-suspense score like shower gel after sweaty sex, yet rarely musters an ounce of genuine tension.

For all its manic energy, there aren't enough recreational drugs in the world to make Yakuza Apocalypse anything but a bloody silly bore.

While director Martin keeps the film moving, its implausibilities turn from holes into canyons.

Putting aside the grating performances, the clumsy direction, the visual ugliness and the haphazard development of story, character and relationships, the movie is hobbled by its intrinsic unsuitability for contemporary retelling.

The film rings false at almost every turn despite its naturalistic performances. Lacking emotional substance, it comes off as far too studied in its subdued intensity.

The plotting here is so hopelessly tangled, clichéd, and bereft of psychological complexity that it's difficult to care what happens to any of these people.

What's most remarkable about this big, dumb exploitation movie is how carefully anything approaching psychological texture appears to have been peeled away.

There’s scant emotional, aesthetic or intellectual gratification in this grainy, flat-looking portrait of the artist as a young nut job.

It falls short on character definition, emotional involvement, narrative drive and originality.

Dripping with floridly phony dialogue that no actor should be forced to speak, this paternity mystery uses the Bosnian conflict as the manipulative backdrop to a preposterously overwrought and overlong melodrama.

Utterly lacking in imagination or suspense, this inane effort is strictly for hardcore Argento cultists.

Both the director and writer show such patchy story sense that a lot of the buildup to the final bloodshed and malevolence registers as suspense-free clutter.

This tonal mess rarely puts a foot right as comedy and makes only marginal improvements when it turns poignant toward the end.

Thematically diffuse, tonally inconsistent and blighted by an inauthentic feel for its story’s time and place, it sits awkwardly between sober human drama and lighter dysfunctional-family turf, constantly striving for unearned emotions.

Beneath gets capsized as much by its knuckleheaded script as by its somewhat risible giant flesh-eating fish.

Everything is spelled out literally and at a stultifying pace, in a story that might have worked onscreen as either heightened melodrama or farcical comedy. Instead Fontaine, who is not exactly blessed with a light touch, opts for misplaced sincerity.

This stiflingly restrained French dirge about morality, guilt and atonement is chilly and constipated, mistaking ponderousness for intensity.

The jittery storytelling and indifference toward illuminating character or plot detail would already be tiresome even without the gratingly actor-y performances, the director herself being the main offender.

Superficially provocative but ultimately pointless, this is one punishing vacation.

A repetitious, borderline-silly vanity project.

Audience patience undergoes a far more brutal butchering than anything onscreen in Delphine Gleize's wildly over-reaching feature debut, Carnage.

Overlong and unwieldy grab-bag of vintage monster-movie elements starts intriguingly as a snowbound deep-woods chiller, but gradually dissolves into a mess of other-worldly invasion and military counter-offensive.

The clear ambition here is to recapture the raw, explosively violent atmosphere of such hallmark 1970s shockers as "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "The Hills Have Eyes." Nice try, but no cigar.

Though it's decidedly for perverse palates, some kind of cult audience seems assured for this one-note onslaught, which exercises a bizarre fascination despite its excesses.

A Lifetime movie on crack, The Quiet dredges up every lurid cliche from the well of teen hormonal havoc in a tale of dysfunctional family meltdown that seems unsure whether to push for suburban-Gothic psychosexual excess or tongue-in-cheek malevolence.

This artless, unpolished venture adds a heavy sex-and-skin factor to a poorly defined game show, lurching awkwardly between exploitative voyeurism, maudlin confessions and self-consciously risque titillation.

Washout. Lacking the mojo even to be offensive in its stereotypical view of gays and women, this excruciating cocktail of sitcom plotting and gross-out humor makes a clunky cheesefest like "The Love Boat" look like breezy, sophisticated fun.

The bad news, however, is that after an intriguing opening stretch, and despite Jeremy Irons' potent lead performance, the overlong film becomes repetitive, flat and often dull.

The execution is so amateurish and the script so witless the filmmakers appear to be having a far better time than the audience.

Already gasping for breath in its opening scenes, picture takes two bleak, unyielding hours to finally expire.

An entirely schematic treatise on maternity and conflicting cultures. A subject perhaps far more suited to documentary treatment, this numbingly earnest effort will be a laborious delivery for IFC.

A staggeringly flat sequel that trades filmdom for the music bizbiz and could hardly be less cool.

May not quite gain entry to the hallowed pantheon of interstellar cheese of a "Battlefield Earth," but it's not far behind.