David Sims

While Locked Down is an undoubtedly fascinating pop-culture curio, it’s also sloppy and cringe-inducing, and feels like it was made in a hurry.

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.

The action is also visually clean and easy to follow, and the film takes its time to showcase the ancient CGI-generated beasts in their environment. But my praise ends there: This is otherwise a plodding, disenchanting experience that adds some more roaring dinosaurs in exchange for any memorable characters or narrative stakes. It has little reason to exist, beyond cashing in at the summer box office.

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.

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.

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

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

In Life Itself, everyone’s fate is in the hands of Fogelman, and he wields that power with terrible cruelty.

Berlinger’s latest film attempts to reckon with the legacy of a brutal murderer who cynically cultivated his public image to make himself seem more alluring, but the story fails to dig in to the horrifying implications of how Bundy was able to succeed.

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.

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.

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

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.

Howard’s film is nothing more than a sensational snapshot, one that feels even less authentic than many of the think pieces that followed the release of Vance’s book in 2016. To Hollywood, J. D. is just another cookie-cutter hero, one who’s defeated the haziest of villains—adversity itself.

The Gray Man is a completely anonymous viewing experience, a series of set pieces and pithy jokes that’s devoid of personality.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife is derivative but not unwatchable—until the horrible last act.

Rampage is a big, noisy nothing—an action extravaganza that fails at being funny just as hard as it fails at being serious.

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.

It loads up on visceral scares and disturbing imagery in service of a shallow film that feels like a gory theme-park ride showcasing the horrors of slavery.

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.

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.

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.

Any subversive edges have been sanded off this script, which is credited to five people. It doesn’t explore the racial underpinnings of Wilson’s budding relationship with the government, despite its mistreatment of the prior Black Captain America, nor does it reckon with the president’s desire to use him as a patriotic prop.