Dominick Suzanne-Mayer

While it’s a reasonably paced thriller, The Prodigy is almost wholly devoid of real scares.

It’s also not all that good, even if it’s hardly the kind of “bad” that most would get riled about. Escape Room is cut from one of Hollywood’s most familiar cloths: the “mall horror” movie.

When people talk about Hollywood movies feeling more and more like product, this is what they’re driving at.

As with any number of popular YA novels-turned-feature films, Mortal Engines has a wealth of possibilities and curious ideas at its disposal. Instead, it tears past them in pursuit of some of the subgenre’s most exhausted narrative tropes, chewing up everything engaging as it grinds along.

There’s nothing particularly memorable about Robin Hood even when you’re laughing at it, and that may be one of the saddest fates a movie can meet.

If Peppermint has one thing going for it, and it’s by and large the only one, it’s Garner.

The first major problem with Slender Man is that it’s not anywhere near as scary as many of the fan-made mockups that can be found online right now, but the second and arguably bigger one is that it’s barely a Slender Man story.

When the film isn’t simply boring, it becomes unintentionally hilarious in its occasionally inept production.

It’s the worst kind of ridiculous: not enough so to be memorably fun, but far too much so to be taken with any degree of gravitas.

That the film never fully gets to the heart of its savage commentaries is probably its greatest disappointment.

Mute has gobs of style to burn, but it’s virtually the textbook definition of sound and fury signifying nothing.

It’s the kind of film that sets up a compelling sandbox in which to play, and then smashes gracelessly through it, cackling all the while.

By now, you likely already know whether or not Jigsaw is for you. The series is nothing if not consistent, but the diminishing returns that led to its near-decade hiatus only continue here.

Geostorm finds itself in the curious position of simultaneously taking itself too seriously and not enough so. It’s a disaster movie far too ridiculous to generate any real gravitas, but it’s also just glum enough to suck any fun out of watching the beaches of Rio de Janeiro freeze over in an instant.

In adapting Death Note for a presumably American audience, Wingard loses the whole of its identity, and never finds a different one with which to replace it.

While the flagrant product placement is dialed back (at least on Bay’s curve) and there’s mercifully 100% less discussion of sexual consent laws this time around, the latest outing suffers from arguably the most fatal flaw a movie about giant fighting robots can: it’s brutally and relentlessly boring from start to finish.

All Eyez on Me is the opposite of an ideal biopic.

It aims for the kind of sprawl that could contain a film with so many big ideas about death and grief and cruelty and salvation, but it’s somehow at once too modest for how bizarre it eventually gets and too excessive to meaningfully deliver on those emotions.

It’s a genuine drag to watch talented actors struggle through tepid material, and Table 19 offers this more readily than it does its laughs or its pathos.

What’s most unfortunate about Fist Fight is the wealth of talent it amasses for little to no discernible purpose.

It’s so spectacularly inept, at so many different points, that it’s hard to imagine anybody will be able to forget it. It’s not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s the kind of bad movie that audiences with the taste for that kind of thing will eat up by the spoonful.

It is not a bad film because of its sincerity of intention. It’s a bad film because it manages to make that sincerity feel disingenuous as it goes on, more and more so with each passing scene.

Mechanic: Resurrection plays in an uncommonly generic key, and the film only makes intermittent attempts to enliven the proceedings.

Hillary’s America is repugnant, and while it exists to get people who stand against it yelled at as much as anything, it’s essential that D’Souza not simply be written off as a hack pandering to a willing and lucrative audience regardless of the moral implications, though he is. D’Souza peddles the kind of “media” that’s become cancerous to the country he unyieldingly purports to worship.

A curiously loud and ugly beast of a sequel.

There is a tone of anger that sneaks out of the film in even its moments of levity.

The Bronze is so satisfied with its own winking crassness that it lets epithets constitute everything it has to say. Between that and the film’s scene-by-scene tonal shifts, what could’ve been an off-kilter curiosity curdles into a dull roar of disappointment.

While Yoga Hosers continues Smith’s quest to push himself into increasingly strange and uncomfortable directions as a filmmaker, it’s either too derivative or too malformed to work the vast majority of the time.