Jacob Oller

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.

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

Patti Cake$ clearly loves music, but fails to translate that into a compelling narrative. It’s an album filled mostly with half-baked skits.

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.

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

A fresh take on how our hyper-connected world observes catastrophe would rightly pick at this scab. But Alex Garland approaches this modern hopelessness with impersonal detachment, dreaming up an empty war filmed for no one.

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.

A standard-issue horror barely making the move from short to feature (it’s only around 80 minutes before credits), The Moogai is a scare-free blunt instrument, imprecise and uninterested in its own genre beyond its potential for metaphor.

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.

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

The resulting film from Eddie Alcazar is shallow and silly pseudo-experimental sci-fi, made by those assured that they were making something edgy and interesting. To err is human, to film it is Divinity.

At times, the throwback goofiness of Ron’s Gone Wrong can be amusingly quaint, but more often the film is humorless, sentimental tripe that couldn’t find its point if it had a dozen B-bots giving GPS directions.

Those unfortunate enough to populate Mr. Harrigan’s Phone must be as dumb as the movie thinks we are. This low opinion of its audience is apparent in every step of its narrative and in some of its stranger creative choices.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Wrecking Crew casts about between genres like driftwood caught by the tide; for two hours, the script cycles between family trauma drama, goofy Hawaiian noir, meathead romp, and wham-bang slugfest. The indecision at least showcases some consistency, though, in that each approach is equally dissatisfying.