Jacob Oller

Every creative problem White gives himself receives the most boring, trite solution, each chance for artistry stifled by mediocrity.

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

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

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

While there is a literal amount of truth running through the semi-autobiographical Suncoast, its glossy, uncertain cutesiness is as fake as Ron DeSantis’ height.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The sequel sticks Affleck and Jon Bernthal in a sitcom episode surrounded by a Sound Of Freedom-style macho fantasy—call it Gun Sheldon. It’s a terrible combination that buries the rapport of its leads in chaotic action, troubling worldviews, and increasingly generic plotting.

Schmaltz-heavy and wishlist-thin, That Christmas offers very little and doesn’t even have the self-awareness to include the receipt.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.