Hoai-Tran Bui

As charismatic as its stars are, and as refreshing as its period setting is, the wildly inconsistent tone and overstuffed runtime loses whatever was left of the shine of the first "Kingsman."

This is a glorified OVA (Original Video Animation) with an accelerated recap of the show and a few cute Kyo-Tohru scenes stuck on to justify the feature film designation — but the thing is, they only serve to make the whole thing weaker. Because buried in between that messy recap and nostalgia-baiting prologue scene is an imperfect adaptation of one of the best things Natsuki Takaya has written.

Sing 2 feels like a relic from another era. And oddly, a relic that really wants to sell you on U2 songs.

Uncharted has fun moments . . . but its overreliance on unfunny quips and uninspired retreads of the action-adventure genre makes it another disappointing non-MCU outing for Holland, and another spiritless adaptation of a beloved video game.

Its premise is ridiculous, its entire appeal based on the novelty of having a bunch of Lycra-clad strangers thrust their hips at you in the dark. Hooper creates something just as bizarre with his Cats, though not as successfully electrifying. Its flashes of brilliance feel like happy accidents and its uncanny technical choices are never overcome.

Earwig and the Witch feels like a film going through the motions, but not understanding the emotion behind the big narrative beats it’s trying to pull off. It’s a film matched by its flat animation style: incomplete and uninspired.

When there is no actual conflict, the film's already low stakes start to feel meaningless, and the characters' bumbling hijinks around town start to feel tiresome. Conflict is necessary to inject urgency into a film, and as a result, Hocus Pocus 2 starts to really flag halfway through, once the shine of nostalgia starts to fade and Midler, Parker, and Najimy start to run out of musical numbers to perform.

The Gray Man exists "in the gray" of Hollywood action movies — not jaw-droppingly incredibly, not astoundingly bad, just there. It's a movie that's made to be half-watched on Netflix while scrolling on your phone. Its greatest disappointment is that it knows what it has — Gosling, a great cast, a lot of money — and it still ends up being less than the sum of its parts.

The problem with "Persuasion" is it doesn't know what it wants to be. Is it a bold, revisionist take on Austen with progressive colorblind casting and cutesy contemporary slang? Or is it a sentimental period romance that wants to get its audience's hearts fluttering as they sigh over the pining glances shared between Johnson's Anne and Cosmo Jarvis' (an endearingly awkward bright spot in the film) Wentworth? The result is a half-assed attempt at both, which only makes it all the more insulting.

She Said is not as economical in its filmmaking as "Spotlight" nor as robust as "Shattered Glass." Instead, as a journalism movie, it just feels rote. As a biographical drama, it feels too early. And as a Me Too movie, it feels too quiet.

It’s pop art made into a feature film, which is a swell idea — if there’s an emotional core that can carry the audience through the staid surrealism. But Audley and the rest of the cast choose to play their characters like stoic ciphers, barely formed archetypes who glide through the film as if in some kind of permanent dream state themselves, making Strawberry Mansion feel even less anchored to reality.

Everything about Dolittle seems hastily put together — from the whiplash-inducing tonal shifts, to the potty humor, to the poor use of a star-studded cast.

The worst sin a martial arts movie can commit is not properly showing its action. The second sin is casting martial arts superstars and not letting them fight. On both counts, the extraordinarily limp G.I. Joe reboot Snake Eyes is guilty.

Other than a few inventive sequences around the film’s central conceit of “the Noise,” Chaos Walking is a grim retread of the YA dystopian story that offers nothing else but a misguided attempt to elevate the genre through a darker, more “adult” tone. It ends up being little more than a joyless exercise with bad wigs.

The problem is that Eurovision Song Contest can’t dream of capturing the real-life weirdness of Eurovision. And while there’s some chuckles that can be drawn out of McAdams and Ferrell lip syncing a surprisingly catchy song while running through a hamster wheel, there’s only so much fun that can be made of a televised singing contest where weirder things have happened.

It wastes the potential silver screen magic you could have by casting Hawke and McGregor as once-close brothers who are forced together by a death that they both have difficulty grieving.

The romantic comedy is painfully self-aware but rarely clever, instead falling back on rom-com tropes that were creaky back in the modern Shakespeare adaptation heyday of the '90s.

All in all, The Protégé is a dull assassin movie misfire that does no justice by Maggie Q and can’t be saved even by Keaton and Jackson making a meal of their scenes.

Every joke in Easter Sunday lands with a thud, every emotional beat falls flat. It has the sense of humor of a bad TikTok video, and the emotional resonance of that TikTok commercial playing right now where wide-eyed people declare, "I learned it from TikTok!" Visually, it looks like a network TV reject or that one Netflix movie that you put on in the background while doing laundry.