David Sims

Justice League feels like a pilot episode—it’s half-formed, overstuffed, and narratively a chore—but at least its gotten all those annoying introductions out of the way. And it only took five movies to get there.

This is a film with genuinely compelling leads, each of whom could support a solo movie, and yet they all seem on autopilot here, dispensing swift kicks and crude bon mots with bored efficiency.

Johnson once excelled at playing anti-heroes you could root for and boo cheerfully all in one breath, but now he’s just another silent grump who’s never allowed to lose a fight.

This movie is little more than a vibrant-looking tableau, a two-dimensional take on an intricate piece of history. It’s a tale that’s been told better before, and Willimon’s modern updates are less enlightened than they initially seem.

For all its energy and vulgarity, The Gentlemen is a slog, a tedious and unnecessarily unpleasant tour of ground that Ritchie’s already covered.

The effort it must have taken to create this movie is apparent in every frame, but that doesn’t mean it’s watchable.

Although Momoa does his best to inject some brash personality, it collides with Black’s more authentic brand of chaos; if either of them is on-screen at any time, rest assured that most of the dialogue is getting yelled. The visuals are similarly obnoxious.

Bayona, the Spanish director who first emerged with his terrific horror film The Orphanage, does his best to inject some more intimate action into a series that usually operates on an epic scale, but he’s working with too absurd a plot for his craft to really matter.

The film suffers from both an excessive faithfulness to its source and a general failure to translate that material into anything close to a gripping onscreen narrative.

This is a film that exists primarily to answer questions nobody would have ever thought to ask about a series of books that already told a very complete story.

Wilde’s film aims to be a feminist parable about how this idealized vision of the past is actually a curdled vision of coupledom. Abstractly, that’s a robust concept; in execution, the movie’s absurdity overpowers its message.

To quote another of the Bard’s royal characters, it ends up feeling like a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Rest assured, in The Girl in the Spider’s Web, Lisbeth Salander saves the day, and she looks cool doing it. But this is a story so slick that she’d be rolling her eyes if she watched it.

The Exorcist: Believer brushes up against an interesting notion—this time, the Catholic Church refuses to approve an official exorcism, citing concerns over the safety of the procedure. But the end result is not much different; it’s still a bunch of adults standing in a room yelling prayers and exhortations at possessed girls.

In short, Bohemian Rhapsody isn’t just prone to music-biopic clichés—it’s practically a monument to them, a greatest-hits collection of every narrative shortcut one can possibly take in summarizing a legendary act’s rise to fame.

The overqualified cast do their best to inject some passion into the proceedings—Fassbender, in particular, is incapable of phoning it in—but the momentum drained out of these X-Men movies long ago. Dark Phoenix should serve as a fittingly perfunctory farewell.

This sequel-slash-spinoff comes across as a lifeless piece of content, bearing a brand name and a glossy look but little else to remember it by.

Almost everything imaginable has gone wrong on the journey from stage to screen, and the result is a film that isn’t even “so bad it’s good,” like some other recent musical movies; mostly, it’s just painful to watch.

Had Suburbicon committed to its primary crime-caper plot, it might have been just another forgettable, uninspired film. But its attempt to haphazardly take on a weightier tale makes Suburbicon a much rarer, and more mesmerizing, kind of catastrophe.

It’s undeniably the worst film Waititi has ever produced, a hash of lazy jokes and “random” humor centered on one of the most uncomfortable lead performances I’ve ever seen in a comedy.

Persuasion at times seems embarrassed by its source material, or at least overeager to spruce it up for audiences that might not be able to handle a gentler pace. The result is harried and forgettable—the complete opposite of Austen’s quietest, noblest heroine.

Morbius is little more than an irritant, a grumpy, one-note CGI beastie who spends most of his movie pondering whether he should go full supervillain.

So what if this movie essentially forgets to have a coherent plot or any real stakes; look at all of the exciting crossovers!

The sweet, coarse sincerity that once made these films sing is gone, replaced with jokes and stunts that feel patched together from earlier, better franchises.

The film sometimes dazzles in its ridiculousness, but there are simply too many appendages sewn on for it to make any coherent sense.

It’s a film that tosses questions at the viewer with no interest in answering them, one that can’t decide if it feels for its subjects or just wants to mock their incompetence.

For all the time Serkis has had to tinker with it, the film feels painfully incomplete, from its frequently told story to its weak visuals.

Neeson himself has done admirable work making mid-budget throwbacks with a little extra grit and gravitas. But it might be time for him to retire that very particular set of skills.