Jacob Oller

Though the simplest pleasures of Favor remain—catty chemistry between Kendrick and Lively, loopy twists, bravura statement outfits—the heat powering the concept has cooled to the extent that, despite the increased body count, the sequel feels as perfunctory as its title. It’s just Another one.

The Conjuring: Last Rites solidifies The Conjuring franchise as the Fast & Furious of horror movies: A conservative, Christian, family-oriented, spin-off and sequel-laden series of adventures that lose the plot and reinvest in the audience’s affection for its familiar beats and cornball leads.

Miguel Wants to Fight is a flyweight comedy with the misfortune of coming out the same year as the similarly style-forward, action-spoofing teen reckoning Polite Society.

While its larger ideas never fully find their feet, The Queen of Black Magic lights a fire beneath the soles thanks to its continuous flow of gags—eventually developing into an almost Hellraiser-esque carnival of punishment.

Good on Paper wasn’t that good as a stand-up segment; as a movie, it should be permanently erased from the memories of anyone unlucky enough to have seen it.

If repetition is the only goal, Lilo & Stitch paints by the numbers. But the Disney Channel Original aesthetic and a handful of wrongheaded decisions make this film just the latest in a string of soulless, cut-rate copies.

Stuffed with motormouths and throwaway gags, the chunky animation can be a little off-putting, but its momentary ugliness feeds into its delightfully dark villains, its underdog heroes and the strange story tying them all together.

The problem isn’t that the film is as shallow as its subject, but that its efforts to find substance beyond the style are handicapped by its broad format.

The Devil Made Me Do It proves that, with The Conjuring franchise at least, the devil you know is far, far better than the one you don’t. Chaves doesn’t quite manage to close the Warren files, but his efforts in the universe are now two of the weakest.

In its lovingly observed, casually bold and uneasily tense coming-of-age drama exists familiar dynamics we’d rather not recognize.

Over Your Dead Body is a gleeful, bloody romp masquerading as a dark marriage comedy, though unsurprisingly the two sides of its genre dynamic have a dysfunctional relationship.

This boneheaded movie’s got a dull point, but at least a lot of rich jerks get murderized by fanged, stab-happy unicorns.

Wolf Man rarely bares its teeth, opting instead for tail-tucked melancholy. Relatively absent of jumpy gotchas or relieving humor—though there is a slightly tongue-in-cheek moment involving a doggy door—the film relies on injecting its Gothic origins with a dose of modern dread. Dangers lurk outside the home, but could just as easily infiltrate it. The march of death could hasten its pace for anyone at any time, rendering those around them impotent.

Directed by Jacqueline Castel in her feature debut, My Animal’s moody dreams are in a territorial brawl with its small-town realism, which in turn barks and snaps at its soapy plot. Its fable eventually hunts down more than a trite analogy for perceived deviance, but its blend of visual and narrative tones favors the laconic over the lycanthropic.

This fable’s push to meet, then fix, your heroes can still sound as saccharine as a solo acoustic set, but it’s smart enough to undercut itself early and often.

While most of the film is simply mediocre-to-bad melodrama with a questionably conservative bent to its messaging, some elements stand out for how downright terrible they are.

But as that film approaches 90 years old, Disney made a remake that looks 100 times worse—and, necessarily, has been updated in an attempt to tell a more human tale. Aside from coating the story in a sickly “live-action remake” sheen, like dipping a juicy red apple in a vat of poison, Snow White also pads out its plot so that the character at the center actually has a character, that her love interest is more than a randy stranger in the woods, and that her foe’s villainy is more political than mythic. But the extra half-hour is just as muddled as the misguided classic elements, all of which forge a tarnished tiara to which Rachel Zegler is the single crown jewel.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra and his fully crewed vessel of writers never sink all the way to the bottom, but the very best they accomplish is keeping their heads above water.

The pulp and action are sold by Statham with the resigned competence of a factory worker clocking in for a shift, and Breathnach’s over-eager performance is balanced out by her expressive face. They’re a decent team to watch go through the motions, running through underworld contacts and old pals who owe one last favor.

It Lives Inside shows that a generic, uncertain script isn’t improved with a single coat of paint, especially if the ugly original is bleeding through the patchy, translucent renovation.

None of The Gray Man’s still-Bourne thrills are executed with the precise elegance of John Wick, the winking doggery of James Bond or the joyful craftsmanship of Mission: Impossible. Rather, its chaotic Grand Theft Auto filmmaking skates by with the sloppy sufficiency of its own protagonist.

At the center of it all is Powell, making the same face for an hour and 45 minutes, too unflappable to root for, too smug to magnetize as an inhuman American Psycho. And How To Make A Killing needed to pick a side, either of clownish class comedy or of bitter sociopathic satire.

Even when it’s not selling its past self, Good Burger 2 is selling something. It’s what makes it a hard movie to root for, even when it lucks into saying the right things: It tosses one money-grubbing trend in the trash while ordering all the others directly off the menu.

The film’s highlight is the swaggering Sorvino. More charming with age, like wine or scoundrels, he manages to enrapture without pandering, entertain without sacrifice or compromise.

The Twits is exactly what one might imagine a Netflix Dahl adaptation to be: Diluted, simplistic animation, as cloying and feckless and smoothed over as anything from the last decade of Illumination films.

Jolt’s generic results are so far removed from its high-concept electrical premise that you have to wonder: Watt the hell happened?

As Rowling continues submerging her magical world into the same hellish and disreputable bog as her personal legacy, I wish she’d kept The Secrets of Dumbledore to herself.

Salem’s Lot isn’t a disaster (far worse horror films have made plenty of money at the box office), but a bloodless and frail version of the story drained of its vitality.

The documentary—with the pretentious full title of And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine, after the British monarch whose coronation Georges Méliès staged and filmed—is a bad undergrad media studies paper, given shape and movement by directors Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck.

It’s because Mortal Kombat II is neither campy enough to revel in its violent bad taste, nor earnest enough to pull off its sprawling ambitions that it most resembles a late-stage Marvel entry.

Is it a tragedy of genre saturation, both movie-haltingly flashy and deeply unimpressive. Everything is constantly moving and you don’t feel a thing.

The terrible script so often steals the spotlight that the gory, by-the-numbers filmmaking putting it into action is almost besides the point. Sandberg, for his part, can stage an effective horror sequence.

Dog Years’ lack of faith in its audience makes its over-explanation and hackneyed groaners unshakable weights on a story that only needed to let Reynolds do his thing.

Medieval’s best quality is that it might make you do your reading, but as a film about Jan Žižka and his exciting, catalytic moment in history, it’s less interesting than the dozen Wikipedia tabs it might cause you to open.

Berger’s skill with middlebrow crowdpleasers succumbs to empty spectacle; he can still frame a bluntly powerful shot, and he knocks off a few nice Ocean’s Eleven images, but most are just blunt.

It’s a lightweight film befitting its premise’s “good vibes only” origins—and its uninspiring construction makes its solid performances a pleasant surprise rather than a compliment to an already good movie—but you could do a lot worse than say “Yes” to Yes Day.

A film about nostalgic escape play-acting an old-fashioned genre has plenty of meta potential to comment upon the entertainment industry’s IP obsession and monetization of arrested development. Reminiscence isn’t quite assured enough for either. Instead, it’s pulp that hasn’t been boiled hard enough, its ideas slowly replaced by machinery.

Salinger’s world doesn’t feel real, but like an amusement park ride taking visitors through the major stops of an author’s legacy, each moment a checkmark before the literary splashdown. It’s almost stubbornly mediocre.

The result is too serious to ever go full B-movie bonkers and too silly to ever actually scare, let alone say something meaningful.

A mix of blatant formula and complete oddity, the film is a failed recipe with plenty of seasoning.

There are two movies here, and the actors handle that duality well. But the brooding darkness lurking inside these characters needs a drama of its own.

Our Father’s failures aren’t in its lurid source material, but in its leering execution.

While the Russos and Holland clearly want to break out of their professional boxes, pulverizing this film with their big swings, Cherry is a bomb.

Heart of Stone is murky, drab and always going the wrong speed. It’s either motionless, allowing exposition scene after exposition scene to lay out the boring details of what might happen if the wrong folks get control of The Heart, or erratic, dicing its badly remixed action sequences like it was trying to avoid a copyright strike from the movies it steals from.

And as far as criticism goes, the tedious and trite, regressive and ridiculous Voyagers doesn’t need any more than it’s already going to get.

It might not fix videogame movies overnight, but Mortal Kombat might finally deliver their sweepingly bad reputation a devastating fatality.

Wish Upon’s plotting is all too arbitrary to be earnestly enjoyable.

The sparse action scenes are useless jumbles, tossing bodies in misblocked blurs of messy motion—like a human game of 52-card pickup—or encased in total darkness. If we can’t see anything, this gamble suggests, maybe we won’t think that what we see is bad.

There’s a very scary, thrilling, insightful movie to be made about these kinds of accidents and the people they happen to. Silo isn’t it.

Where the Crawdads Sing is shallow, predictable and just broad enough that you can understand why it sold so well as a half-lurid paperback. Newman’s work adapting it makes its derivative elements as obvious as a bad accent, but its chart-topping, tone-deaf mediocrity is faithfully replicated.

Locked Down is a crushing miscalculation on every level that should’ve stayed locked up.

Making it just a little bit smarter—taking out perhaps just one of its multiple, intelligence-insulting ending clichés—could make its plot simply boring rather than asinine, which would make the film dangerously forgettable, able to inflict 100-minute gaps into moviegoers’ memories at distances of up to 500 yards.

It’s both more and less than “Taken: Mom Edition,” another boneheaded poking of conservative’s self-inflicted wounds around human trafficking with a title just as deluded as its content.

Sometimes it’s so bad it’s almost entertaining, but mostly you can hardly see the screen because each frame induces an eye-squeezing cringe.

It takes dedication to make a dull movie where Nicolas Cage plays Joseph and Jesus gets into a fistfight with Satan, but The Carpenter’s Son sets to its task with devotion, if little else.

The confused comedy waddles onto the court as confidently as a kid in an oversized hand-me-down jersey. But why would this derivative filmmaking aspire to anything else? It’s all just set dressing for Jack Harlow’s brick of a big-screen debut.

Spiral might have rhetorical wrinkles that set it apart from its predecessors, but this franchise is still going around in circles.

Orienteering from an unsure script, Slumberland’s uninventive visual language dithers around in unreality while leaving its feet firmly planted in the saddest parts of the real world.

The Deliverance is alternatingly dull and totally nuts. It is never scary, and only sometimes holds your attention.

I could dig into any number of the movie’s unfortunate choices, bad decisions or downright detestable elements—sprinkling in faint praise like, hey, the Tony-winning Platt might be acting through five layers of bullsh*t, but he can still sing—and I’d still never capture all the reasons Dear Evan Hansen fails.

Beyond its desperate gestures towards better movies and its countless regifted plot points, Oh. What. Fun. does end up looking a lot like a familiar Christmas fixture: a garbage bag full of torn wrapping paper.

The Jurassic World franchise may have willingly chosen extinction with this final entry, but Dominion would’ve killed it off anyways.

Though the film acknowledges its performative nastiness at every opportunity—setting its killers and victims in windows, mind ballets, stages, and jail door slits, having them directly address the camera—acknowledgement doesn’t mean subversion, satisfaction or novelty. Even the most dedicated gorehounds should look elsewhere.

An irreverent mix of genres taken completely seriously but with no small amount of fun, Devil’s Gate wears its script’s stupidity on its sleeve and allows its creature effects and committed cast to carry it throughout.

The veteran-comes-home revenger Trigger Warning is thoroughly idiotic and deathly slow, filled with so much ugly camp that it could stand in as the first Lifetime Original action movie.

Farrelly’s film wanders aimlessly without being driven by anything absurd or outrageous enough to conjure a Hangover-like reaction, nor anything with enough humanity to justify the occasional heart-to-heart conversations between Brad and Elijah.

All of Uglies feels like a rush job where its creators had the instruction manual but lost the proper parts.

Somewhere between a reboot and a remake, Return To Silent Hill is the worst film of the franchise so far, and a reminder that you can’t go home again—even if your home is the haunted hamlet of Silent Hill.

Love Hurts proves that honest emotions aren’t everything; sometimes you can just buy yourself enough goodwill to get by with last-minute junk.

The Ritual just becomes a bad possession movie that’s not pulling off its hokey scares, rather than a bad possession movie unable to fulfill its more down-to-earth ambitions.

The best that can be said about the film is that The Fault In Our Stars director Josh Boone, well-versed with the teen weepy, sometimes approaches the schlock with a bit of self-deflating slyness—something more attuned to the audience’s eyerolls and the cast’s barely-hidden smirks than to the serious source material.

The main novelty, and the film’s primary pleasure, is the commitment of its cast to its bloody, profane vapidity.

At Borderlands’ best, we see some nice concept art, divorced from the movement or humanity of cinema. At its worst, we see some poor saps clearly wandering through unreality, stuck in a CG hackjob not quite as convincing as a Spy Kids sequel.

Some of these shorts are worth the ten or so minutes they take, but none of them justify wasting time on Rio, I Love You.

Its entire third act is just expectation for a third movie that hopefully never comes. It is a bare minimum branding experiment, a dumb thing designed to be recognized with the hope that enjoyment will simply follow.

The Clapper is just so boring and corny that all the audience can do is either feel bad for Helms or disingenuously applaud his unsuccessful efforts, mimicking his character’s chosen vocation.

The film is intense, making for one of the sniffliest audiences in which I’ve ever been included, so viewer discretion is certainly advised. But with that kind of emotional power too comes the intellectual and statistical weight we need to enact change.

Deliver Us From Evil’s sweaty thrills might be derivative, but they’re far from dead on arrival.

After a rocky start, Miracle Fishing is a gripping journey featuring one of the first great documentary moments of the year.

This revolution may be televised, but aside from the rawness that too rarely brings it near its potential revolt, it’s an underwritten rerun.

True to its genre-defining premise, the Malay actioner doesn’t break much ground during its lackadaisical story of an in-over-his-head gambler attempting to make good, but Bakar shoots it with enough inconsistent, eclectic energy that it’s occasionally more watchable than its ideas deserve.

Clocking in at barely over an hour, What We Left Unfinished feels a bit unfinished itself, and its compelling premise will leave history buffs, media scholars and those simply looking for a good yarn about lost art wanting far more.

When it simply allows us to join the pulsing masses and empathize, eye-level, with the plights of the individuals that comprise them, A La Calle captures the power of the people.

If Sakra wanted to enter into the wuxia canon, its lucid, lovely excess shouldn’t have stopped with its ceasefires.

This inept, unpleasant, cobbled-together debut only reveals its first-time helmer as a Dr. Frankenstein about to lose his license.

Love Machina may want to take a peek behind its own curtain every once in a while for a reality check.

What initially feels like a budget presentation about the issues of being stuck in space and several proposed solutions (explored at various lengths) ends up feeling both too structured and, eventually, too scattered for its fascinating yet still speculative subject matter.

The crossdressing, androgynous heroine, whose internal struggle around binary gender roles still feels fresh, grounds the broad emotions and classic, over-the-top aesthetic permeating the film.

Han Ji-won’s sci-fi romance is caught between its genres.

Even when compared to the recent underwhelming crop of erotic thrillers, topped by the enjoyably escalating silliness of Deep Water, Pretty Thing is especially chaste, abstaining from both sexual titillation and the campy fallout that results from making a series of decisions driven solely by libido.