Jake Coyle

What distinguishes The Nun is its silky, sumptuous shadows. Directed by British filmmaker Corin Hardy (“The Hallows”) and shot by Maxime Alexander (who was also cinematographer on the “Conjuring” spinoff “Annabelle: Creation,” The Nun shrouds itself so much in darkness that it at times verges on becoming a nightmarish abstraction. You almost lose sense of what exactly is going on, as Sister Irene falls into a labyrinthine abyss.

The Meg is best when it acknowledges its derivativeness, just one more silly shark movie in an ocean full of them.

It’s not surprising that “Folie à Deux” originated in concept as a stage show. It’s stuck in place, with only Phoenix’s dazzling contortions to marvel at.

McKay, director of The Lego Movie, is most at home in humor, and The Tomorrow War can be funny. It’s less adept at some of the operatic notes it tries to strike, but, well, aliens can be tricky.

The buddy movie balance of “Uncharted” never clicks. Wahlberg, who was once attached to play Holland’s part, plays Sully like Nathan’s roguish, less tech-savvy elder. But they lack the needed chemistry and the script, by Rafe Lee Judkins, Matt Holloway and Art Marcum, doesn’t give them enough comic material to do much with.

A hopelessly bland and bizarrely self-serious monster movie.

All the pieces here are fine but nothing is distinct from dozens of films before it. You would swear that the movie’s star AI wrote it — and even gave itself first billing, too.

Like its predecessor, Murder Mystery 2 is built on old-fashioned star power and the interplay between Sandler and Aniston. They’re good company to be in, and sometimes that’s enough.

Bloodshot is just smart enough to be more than trash, and just trashy enough to be less than smart. It will do fine if you’re looking for a lesser simulation of a good movie.

Though “One Love” drifts into increasingly conventional biopic scenes, its spirit remains fairly true to Marley — enough, at least, that you overlook some of its faults.

The greatest tension in Larsson’s “Millennium” series is how Salander so bristles with unease in the world, even while she expertly manipulates everything in it. No such conflict is found in The Girl in the Spider’s Web, a commonplace thriller for an uncommon heroine.

It’s starting to seem like every franchise film, when in search of a story, throws a battle against the wall and hopes something sticks. Not only has this gotten tiresome, but it also sacrifices what we came here for in the first place: Jolie and Pfeiffer glowering at each other.

Like countless studio comedies of the past few years, Night School is a straightforward concept that relies too much on the charisma of its performers to carry a weak script.

"Scooby Doo” was never the most unpredictable of shows but Scoob! has merely swapped the original’s blueprint for that of a superhero movie. You’ll be left mournfully munching a bag of Scooby Snacks while wondering, “Scooby-Dooby-Doo, where are you?”

The movie’s premise is one long Uber ad, but it’s a clever enough buddy comedy setup, and both Nanjiani and Bautista are good comic performers. So what’s missing here?

Locked Down is inevitably, and intentionally, of the moment. But I hope some of its off-the-cuff spirit lasts after the pandemic. So much Hollywood moviemaking is laboriously preordained.

It’s Tassone’s perspective that Finley largely keeps to, which — if you don’t know the true story — lets Bad Education unspool if not surprisingly at least captivatingly.

Mostly, Jackpot! is an action-comedy vehicle that pairs Awkwafina and John Cena for a romp through a few clever economic inequality gags and a lot of cartoonish mayhem.

Pearce, sweaty and grungy, steadies Memory; it’s his film as much as Neeson’s.

I kept rooting for the surprisingly lifeless “The Last Dance” to pull way back on its save-the-world plot (and its CGI) and lean more into its most potent effect: Hardy’s split-personality double act.

As much as Neeson might seem to have the special set of skills required to play Marlowe, his detective feels hollow and maybe a little too tired.

While Super Troopers 2...may be just enough to satiate any remaining die-hards, it’s not likely to convert many new moviegoers to their syrup-swilling, “meow”-ing ways.

This limp, half-hearted, breezy remake makes some modest improvements. The film, directed by Calmatic, bounces to a hip-hop beat and the gameplay action is smoother. But the drop off in personality from that original trio is like going from the Lakers to the G-League.

It’s a manic movie in a familiarly corporate kind of way that provides kids with a computer-generated candy rush. The movie’s own business imperatives occasionally show through like a leaky diaper.

The Exorcist: Believer never manages anything like the deep terror of the original, and the film’s climactic scenes pass by with a lifeless predictability. Been there, exhumed that.

For much of the film, it’s difficult not to imagine the Saturday Night Live sketch that’s probably already being written. More than the age difference, though, Platt’s performance is a constant reminder of Broadway artificiality in a movie striving for something real.

The nostalgia of “Michael” is for more than Michael Jackson. But blindly believing only in that celebrity, in that fantasy, is repeating a sad history all over again.

The best reason to see “Pinocchio” is, unsurprisingly, Hanks, who brings a soulful melancholy to Geppetto.

If the issue of some thrillers is that they have nothing to say, the problem with “Him” is that it has exactly one thing to say, which it does again and again and again. “Him” does have some style, though.

The plotting is clunky and haphazard. But when together, Thompson, Hemsworth and Nanjiani turn Men In Black: International into something funny and silly: a pleasant enough lark in formal wear.

Like any good high-concept comedy, Kinda Pregnant is predominantly a far-fetched way for its star and co-writer, Schumer, to riff frankly on her chosen topic.

Velvet Buzzsaw doesn’t lead anywhere inward; it becomes just a litany of (exquisite) death scenes for art-world caricatures. Still, what caricatures they are.

For a movie centered on brotherhood, it’s remarkably empty of any sense of kinship.

The film’s off-kilter schizophrenia gives it a madcap appeal. While Fleischer seems to have a darker, moodier film in mind, Hardy has the good sense to steer Venom in a more over-the-top direction, even if the movie around him can’t catch up.

Criss-crossing patterns of ridiculousness and self-satisfaction run through “Argylle,” a tiresome meta movie that puts an awful lot of zest into an awfully empty high-concept story.

Red One comes off a little like the holiday version of “Cowboys and Aliens” — enough so to make you nostalgic for leaner tales about folkloric figures starring Johnson, like “The Tooth Fairy.”

Rihanna voices Smurfette and supplies a new song, giving a half-hearted injection of star power to an otherwise uninspired, modestly scaled, kiddo-friendly cartoon feature.

For those who have spent the last few months hungering for a big-spectacle mess (they are, after all, a feature of summer moviegoering), now you can take in a big-budget flop from the comfort of your own home.

It’s almost reassuring that in today’s often sanitized, assembly-line mainstream moviemaking that a film can be as crude, as off-brand and as bad as The Happytime Murders. Almost.