G. Allen Johnson

When you walk out of the theater feeling more empathy for the tortured monster than his Bride, the experiment has failed.

Sirât is a film of impression and feeling, not logic or plot.

It’s a train wreck, but certainly a watchable one that almost plays like fan fiction.

Cameron is such a good filmmaker that even though he seems to be out of ideas, the three-hour, 17-minute running time chugs along efficiently on pure craftsmanship. But is that enough?

It’s not a cookie cutter superhero film or predictable horror film. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s form without enough content.

One reason why “The Conjuring: Last Rites” is so uninteresting is it takes one hour, 21 minutes for the Warrens to agree to enter the haunted house that we all know they’re going to enter from minute one.

By taking the “dark” out of the dark comedy, “The Roses” can’t decide what it wants to be, and becomes as flimsy as its setting: Mendocino is played by a seaside town in Devon, United Kingdom, and it looks more like New England than Northern California.

Cave, who gained notice with much-lauded Hulu feminist horror film “Fresh” (2022), is too busy condescending to her characters to be invested in what happens to them.

The last half-hour of “Opus” is an unbearable slog, with an unsatisfying ending.

All this could work, but Perkins never finds the proper tone in what is almost a spoof of the horror genre.

Complete with cliches and culturally cringe-inducing stereotypes — poor but happy villagers, sweaty villains — Peruvians will hardly use this film in their tourist advertising.

It’s a film that feels instantly antiquated, despite its attempts to capture Gen Z angst.

Moana 2 is finally here, ready to assault audiences this holiday season with one of the most ill-conceived sequels in Disney history. It took three directors to sink this movie — Dana Ledoux Miller, Jason Hand and David Derrick Jr. — and it’s so bad it feels like they did it on purpose.

How can you screw up a movie that has Lady Gaga? Here’s how: Make it claustrophobic, with the first half a brutal prison picture and the second half an excruciatingly dull courtroom drama.

Think of all the ways “Apartment 7A” could have slyly addressed these times, or, conversely, more fully explored the practices of the Castavets’ cult. Instead, it's just a retread, and that’s why it’s bad. The devil is in the details.

The Front Room becomes an exercise in psychological torture porn; it’s a movie you endure rather than enjoy.

A Quiet Place: Day One is about a cancer patient in hospice who hopes to die with dignity. Also, there are terrible monsters threatening humanity. What an odd idea for a horror prequel.

For all the beautiful scenery and Thoreau-like contemplation, Evil Does Not Exist stalls, then implodes.

The only inspired part of “Abigail” is the performance of Weir, a 14-year-old Irish actress best known as the title character in Netflix’s “Matilda the Musical.” She brings verve and joy to her vampire ballerina, dancing circles around the rest of the cast.

The Peasants is filled with sniping, fistfights, brutal violence and sexual assaults and becomes unbearable through its nearly two-hour running time. Most of these characters you wouldn’t want to spend more than five minutes with, if that.

Snoop has obviously made a real-life impact in his community. Too bad he couldn’t make one in reel life as well.

The only thing that keeps Wish afloat is DeBose’s voice, who elevates so-so songs such as “At All Costs” and “This Wish” with a powerful lilt.

The problems with Thanksgiving are many, starting with the awful script by Jeff Rendell. Not only is the story — concocted by Roth and Rendell — predictable, but there is not one clever line of dialogue in the whole 107-minute film. The cast and characters are bland.

The problem with Fingernails is it takes itself too seriously. Co-writer and director Christos Nikou takes a clinical, dramatic approach to such a high-concept, over-the-top and ridiculous premise. He seems so enamored by the concept of the movie that he forgot that the movie was supposed to be about relationships and not the testing.

It seems Joris-Peyrafitte can’t decide what film he is making, and as a result we’re left with a jumbled mess with a slapped-together resolution that will satisfy no one.

Director Sammi Cohen takes an attention-deficit disorder approach to storytelling, in which every feeling and plot twist is punctuated by a current pop song, and any hint of emotion or thoughtfulness is interrupted by a needle drop.

Petzold said he conceived of the film during the pandemic lockdown — that makes sense, considering the sparseness of the setting and small cast — and was inspired by the character studies of French filmmaker Éric Rohmer and Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. Unfortunately, he needed inspiration from another great artist: Christian Petzold.

The Out-Laws is dead on arrival.

Will-o’-the-Wisp, a flight of fancy from Portuguese provocateur João Pedro Rodrigues, has a few ideas, a fun little musical sequence and quite a bit of eye candy. But it seems like a series of tonally different short films mashed together — an art installation rather than a movie.

There is not one line of dialogue or one sight gag in About My Father that can’t be found in other bad comedies, and Maniscalco . . . and director Laura Terruso seem to believe the path to humor is to go as far over the top as possible.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves feels like Daley and Goldstein, who also co-wrote with Michael Gilio, asked ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI: “Write a Marvel movie except with ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ characters.” Seconds later, this spit out.

It could be considered an achievement that a full-length feature movie with a talented ensemble cast, led by Kristen Bell and Allison Janney, couldn’t create a single character that you would want to spend more than five minutes with, but there it is. Not even picturesque London can save this witless comedy.

Raymond & Ray aims for the kind of gentle, offbeat wistfulness of a “Little Miss Sunshine” or “Sunshine Cleaning,” but with uncomfortable awkwardness instead of eccentric ingenuity.

A final word about Bardem: He’s simply terrific. With his shaggy curly hair, exaggerated showmanship, athletic dance moves and operatic gestures, Hector is part Willy Wonka and part Gene Kelly — it’s Bardem’s most off-the-rails performance since his turn as a James Bond villain in “Skyfall.”

Like Disney’s tepid 2019 live-action remake of “The Lion King,” it’s virtually a beat-by-beat remake of the original, but without the original’s energy and movement.

There’s more to life than just stories and really, Djinn and Alithea just need to get a life.

With “After Yang,” the distinctive filmmaker Kogonada has made a movie that is at once ambitious yet timid, asking big questions but providing no answers, not even clues. It’s a thought experiment, but a thought that meanders.

So it’s not my bag, but I went into Jackass Forever with the best intentions.

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is provocative and irritating — and intentionally so. That makes it particularly annoying, because even as you’re provoked and irritated, you are also aware that writer-director Radu Jude wanted you to feel that way.

The “Paranormal Activity” films, to their credit, build slowly, backloading the chills in the second half. That means, to get through that first hour, the characters have to be interesting, but these self-absorbed Gen Z wannabe filmmakers are anything but.

But Eastwood is undercut by the unbearably weak screenplay by Nick Schenk, who adapts a 1975 novel by N. Richard Nash. Schenk has turned in good work for Eastwood before, including “Gran Torino” and “The Mule,” but here his strategy seems to be having his characters explain everything that they’re doing and feeling, much of which should be delivered visually. Action is character, after all.

There’s one big problem about No Ordinary Man: The Billy Tipton Documentary: It’s not really about Billy Tipton. Instead, it’s about how transgender representation is perceived in the media, chiefly between 1989, when Tipton died, and current times.

Anyone wondering what 1960s TV show Ironside would have been like if Raymond Burr had been a dirty cop gets their answer courtesy of Morgan Freeman in the dreadful new thriller Vanquish.

A movie that seems to have been made by people who don’t understand the history, true nature or appeal of their iconic characters.

Freaky is, dare we say, soul-sucking?

The One and Only Ivan has within it a much more interesting film waiting to break out that really could have been for the whole family, but alas it is trapped within the cement walls of Disney’s cookie-cutter formula.

Even worse, Deerlaken, Wis., is supposed to be the “real” America, but Stewart has little interest in depicting an honest version of Midwesterners, or their problems. No actual issues that affect the town are discussed. (I have no idea what the economy of the town is, if people are struggling or what.)

Scooby-Doo, where are you? The real one, I mean. The rest of this mess is just a series of nonsensical action sequences.

Most of Arkansas — Duke’s home state, by the way — just falls flat, despite individual scenes here and there that work.

Because there’s nary a situation that seems reality-based and uncontrived in this movie that has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, filled with over-the-top cardboard characters that seem sneered upon by their creator. If Mirabella-Davis doesn’t believe in his characters, why should we?

The biggest betrayal of The Traitor is its crime against the usually compelling Mafia movie genre. This is an offer you can refuse.

Chinese Portrait is a great art installation, but a thoroughly unsatisfying film.

It’s essentially an animated film, fronted by a live-action Downey and Michael Sheen’s one-note villain. Only Antonio Banderas, in a small role, truly seems to be having a great time.

Just an odd mess of a movie. That you feel anything at all is a tribute to the acting talent of Dinklage and Goggins, who occasionally make us care.

The fact is that too much time is spent with the British characters in the film, time that could have been spent really getting into Rani’s story. She was fighting for the independence of India, but the filmmakers lost their own colonial battle.

A soul-killing sequel that gets its kicks torturing and murdering children and offers little hope or redemption. King has long wanted to commit “Redrum” on the reputation of Kubrick’s film, which he openly despises. Nearly 40 years later, this adaptation of King’s 2013 book “Doctor Sleep” doesn’t so much tarnish Kubrick as embarrass itself.

Yes, there are funny lines, but nearly all of them are familiar to fans; it’s almost like a greatest hits of “Addams Family” quotables.

Sarsgaard and Jones are good actors, and both are fine. The real star, though, is sound designer Ian Gaffney-Rosenfeld and his team, who bring a depth and dimension to the story that sorely needs it.

The problem with Ready or Not is that directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (“V/H/S”) don’t know what kind of movie they want to make, or what to do with their heroine. There are constant shifts in tone — is it a comedy, like the trapped-in-a-mansion “Murder By Death”? A satire on the rich? A kick-ass revenge picture?

This utterly tasteless crime film about Tokyo’s top madam, a drug dealer and a serial killer is one of the worst films of the year.

Diamantino is one of those movies that looks super fun to make but is mind-numbing to actually watch.

Asako’s only appeal seems to be that she’s very pretty. Her depth of character she apparently keeps to herself.

So politics and social commentary aside, we are left with a crime film. One that isn’t very suspenseful or particularly clever.

UglyDolls is a mind-numbing, low-rent version of “Toy Story,” with saccharine songs and a plot with echoes of, no kidding, the Holocaust. If you’re under 10, you might like it.

Peterloo, despite top-notch set and costume design, is this claustrophobic, interior movie. And despite the wall-to-wall dialogue, there is little character development — everyone seems to be a “type” rather than an actual person. So when the massacre does come at the end of the film, it is oddly underwhelming.

Wonder Park, frankly, isn’t very much fun. It becomes so enslaved with its nonsensical plot that it forgets this is supposed to be about coming to terms with the possible loss of a loved one. It gets lost in its own Rube Goldberg machine.

Welcome to Marwen does not work as a drama of addiction, and frankly it doesn’t work as a celebration of Hogancamp’s creations, which work best as stunning still-photo images.

The already confusing story loses all hope of clarity as day turns to night — the second half of the movie is in near-darkness, making even the stylish visuals hard to decipher. What little interest you have in the characters is effectively extinguished as well.

What starts out as a bottom-feeder noir a la “Breaking Bad” or “Hell or High Water” transitions into scattershot ambitions of being a mythic tragedy.

That Summer leaves me with Beale fatigue. It would seem to appeal to “Grey Gardens” completists only.

It is such a soul-killing exercise in narcissism — and not a very smart thriller, either — that yeah, you can buy into the notion that Tinseltown is a total drag.

Still, I’m not sure Kiarostami really intended this film to be a movie. It seems more like an art installation. Of note is the terrific sound design; the sound is credited to Ensieh Maleki, who captures full, rich, peaceful sounds of nature.

At 2 hours, 21 minutes, feels like a slow death by a thousand cuts.

A horror “comedy” about a deranged 12-year-old boy with a script that feels like it was written by a deranged 12-year-old boy.

A spectacular failure, despite further evidence of the director's keen eye and bold cinematic ideas.

SORRY, SALLY. I didn't like it. I really didn't like it.

It's simply terrible.

No amount of excellent period costuming and brilliant set decoration can substitute for a good story and decent acting.

Spoof both of P.I.s and independent filmmakers is languidly paced and not very funny.

Not much of a plot, but the trouble is that Shana Larsen's script, as directed by Risa Bramon Garcia, isn't very deep. Worse, none of the self-absorbed characters are that likable nor are they funny.

Quickly degenerates into a grueling piece of unpleasantness.

Dead Man on Campus, a supposed black comedy produced by MTV, is simply awful.

In tackling 1000 A.D., (McTiernan)'s suddenly an unwieldy, clunky filmmaker.

The intention is there, but the needed emotional maturity isn't.

What we get are quirky characters who are such cartoons that they undermine the effectiveness of the scare scenes (Brad Dourif's turn as the weird doctor is an example) and well-composed camera angles that mean nothing.

What a cast! What a waste!

It's downright boring.

If only director Luis Llosa and his cast could see the joke and seize upon it; instead, like its computer-morphed snake, the film doesn't have a clever bone in its body.

It's also troublesome that Murphy, a generally charismatic actor, is downright dull here. He and Goldblum are curiously flat in their line readings; they don't seem convinced by the story they're asked to act out, and with good reason.

A downright dumb movie that, with its breathless pace, lack of character development and uninventive gags, might be torture for even the kids to sit through.

Degenerates in the second half.

A terribly bad movie, one of the worst of its kind in recent years.