Jake Cole

Not even a typically scenery-chewing Christoph Waltz can enliven the proceedings.

For a story that seeks to champion the unpredictability and finite quality of life, Ares ultimately feels trapped by the inertia of working within the parameters set by its no less flimsy predecessors.

The bevy of documentaries, narrative films, and books about Bob Dylan’s breakout, ascent, and impact on the 1960s pop zeitgeist could fill a library, which makes this oversimplified retread of the same topic all the more tedious and superfluous.

Perhaps there are limits on how deeply a film can explore the psyches of people who so nakedly show us their worst qualities.

This remake is absent the far richer character development that made the original as much a melodrama as a shoot-’em-up.

My Spay: The Eternal City is derailed by how readily it succumbs to the ludicrousness of a plot that generates stakes that are far too heavy for the threadbare structure to support.

Like the real Countess du Barry, it’s eventually caught up in the very pomp and splendor that it initially lampoons.

Madame Web grinds to a halt as it gets bogged down in scene after scene of characters, both good and bad, standing around explaining their backgrounds, hang-ups, and desires.

And the more each new twist is revealed and summarily falls flat, the faster the next one is slotted into place to get ahead of the story’s anticlimax, leading to a spiral in which the plot becomes even more meaningless.

The relative grace of A Child of Fire’s action direction only underscores how disjointed and generic the rest of the film is.

The film sprints past its targets, dealing glancing blows to subjects that have already been obliterated by decades’ worth of Tinseltown parodies.

The film frustratingly shrouds Nicholas Cage’s manic intensity in thick blankets of winking irony.

The film subjects its main characters to one indignity after another, and to such a suffocating degree that it crosses the line between representation and exploitation.

The film fails to build on the whimsical foundation of the first film in any way.

Slumberland lacks the sense of danger that Winsor McCay liberally infused into his stories.

Don’t Worry Darling has the swing-for-the-fences ambition that should have at least made it a noble and compelling folly, but its repetitiveness frustratingly undercuts its grandiosity.

Kevin Smith toys with death in Clerks III as a shortcut to bring emotion to a film that otherwise has no meaningful hook.

The film proves again that the modern-day veneration of Jane Austen as the patron saint of the rom-com is also an act of simplification.

Across Taika Waititi’s film, a war against the gods feels like an afterthought to a bad rom-com.

Valérie Lemercier’s film feels at once like a vanity project for its maker and a glorified fan tribute.

The film’s toothless showbiz satire mostly comes down to teasing its characters for their entitlement and self-importance.

The games are fixated on the idea of honor among thieves, but you wouldn’t know that from the antic, meaningless depiction of the betrayals that play out across the film.

The film treats its premise as the backdrop for a trite celebration of empowerment and teamwork among professional women.

The film insists so forcefully that J.R. has lived a topsy-turvy, singular life that it abandons a potentially more rewarding approach of foregrounding how relatable many of his moments of self-discovery really are.

Though flattering through and through, the film is ironically removed from the charms of the worshipped original.

The film charts Louis Wain’s slow, long mental breakdown in ways that tackily oscillate between the pitying and the whimsical.

On the screen, Shang-Chi is rotely defined by the same “gifted kid” impostor syndrome as so many other self-doubting MCU heroes before him.

The tired, tasteless gimmick at the center of the film inadvertently reveals its entire problem of perspective.