Jake Cole

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

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

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

The film’s twist ending exists only to retroactively justify writer-director Steven Knight’s feeble stylistic choices.

Terminal's actors are awkward and stiff in trying to project hard-boiled cool, and all while delivering lines that sound as if they had been passed multiple times through an online translation tool.

As soon as LeBron and Dom are sucked into computer space, A New Legacy largely abandons its underlying criticism of soulless corporate regurgitation of art-as-product and instead becomes an exhausting tour through the Warner Bros. catalog.

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.

It’s difficult to imagine a worse time to release Brian Kirk’s 21 Bridges than the present.

For all the emphasis on video game characters who can be swapped out on a whim, it’s the players themselves who come across as the most thinly drawn and interchangeable beneath their avatars.

The film is frequently guilty of the same obsolescence it accuses the characters of embodying.

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

Jonathan and Josh Baker's Kin, a feature that comprises little more than an extended introduction to its characters, resembles a TV pilot that's been released into theaters as a standalone property.

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

In the Blink of an Eye feels less like a film than a commercial for life insurance that got out of hand, or perhaps more accurately one for the kind of hollow Silicon Valley tech optimism that has been thoroughly exposed as a sham by now.

Like the recruited criminals themselves, the film longs to be bad, yet its forced by outside pressures to follow narrow, preset rules.

Every creature here that's intended to burrow themselves into the audience’s nightmares are less wonders of imagination than of size.

The Snowman is missing so much basic connective tissue as to be rendered almost completely inexplicable.

Had the filmmakers taken a more easygoing approach, Locked Down might have landed in the realm of The Thomas Crown Affair.

The film’s occasional gestures toward pseudo-feminist empowerment only compound the hollowness of its protagonist.

The final act's full-tilt embrace of action effectively undermines Tom Hardy's flashes of actorly idiosyncrasy.

It's impossible to even laugh at Inferno given how Ron Howard reduces the material to a dull spectacle of earnest puzzle-solving.

This isn’t an adaptation of a video game so much as an adaptation of a video game’s tutorial level.

For all the attempts to update King Arthur to be cool and sexy, neither the character nor the film around him musters any spark.

The decade-long effort to bring the Dark Tower books to the screen looks like a cheap, unauthorized cash-in.

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

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

The film has the tone and look of a direct-to-video feature, and some shots of Keanu Reeves are so waxen that the actor almost looks rotoscoped.

In spite of its occasionally engaging displays of gnarly brutality, the film too often feels like an adaptation of a player select screen.

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.

Submergence's globetrotting only succeeds at exposing the hollowness of the characters at the film's center.

Guy Ritchie’s live-action remake is content to trace the original’s narrative beats with perfunctory indifference.

Vox Lux sets up its main character as a beneficiary of tragedy, opening up a compellingly macabre narrative about how school shootings are becoming so commonplace that they can effectively serve as launchpads for stardom. But that idea goes nowhere, as Vox Lux proceeds to play Celeste's experience in the music industry mostly straight.

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

The climax’s bizarre left turns culminate in a final image so bewildering that were the film not so relentlessly dour it might have clarified Replicas as an absurdist comedy.

When Mark Wahlberg's Silva isn't wielding run-on sentences as military-grade weapons, he barks out derivative commands and asinine statements that make him sound like a 13-year-old playing Call of Duty.

The final act of The House with a Clock in Its Walls stumbles between awkward, telegraphed jolts and busy, effects-heavy action, completely losing sight of the trauma and grief that was meant to give the film its emotional core.

The sensory overload of Michael Bay's hyperkinetic cinema is such that it eradicates any actual sense of place.

Johnny Depp’s perfunctory gestures and flailing pratfalls befit a film that brings the franchise’s theme-park roots full circle.

The film may leave you wondering what purpose this franchise serves if not to give expression to Michael Bay's nationalist, racist, and misogynistic instincts.

The Mexico of this film is merely a place of abject lawlessness, whose hellishness exists only to stoke our fascination for how the protagonist grows as a person by drawing on her inner strength.

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

This adaptation gets straight to the heart of the material, which is basically two hours of stray cats introducing themselves.

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.

At a time when Americans are constantly bombarded with reports of unpunished police brutality, the film suggests that the true problem with justice in our country is that law enforcement isn't violent enough.