Jake Coyle

It’s a empty chamber for movie spectacle and nothing else, where the only option is to pile elements on top of each other until you have, you know, a giant evil ape swinging a vertebrae like a lasso while riding a kaiju controlled by a crystal.

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.

Plane is as broadly sketched as its title. Puerto Rico doubles here for Philippines, and most of the story elements, too, feel like they’re stand-ins for basic plot conventions.

Arteta (The Good Girl, Cedar Rapids) has an underrated ability at crafting comic, humanistic movies out of commercial concepts. But Yes Day slides too often into contrived, loudly scored montages of “fun” that don’t transfer to those of us watching. And while Garner and Ramirez are both very fine actors, neither of them is funny.

It can be divertingly bonkers, but ends up a rather grim and slipshod “John Wick” ripoff.

Abominable is sweet and simple enough, but its emotionality always feels thin and, like much of the film, paint by numbers.

That a movie called “The Sheep Detectives” tries to impart lessons of morality and mindfulness is, of course, laudable. A wide swath of entertainment aimed at children makes no such attempt. But “The Sheep Detectives” could have used more slapstick and less CGI sincerity.

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.

For the big tonal swings in A Simple Favor to work, the characters needed to be more plausibly grounded. Lively and Kendrick’s early scenes ping-pong nicely with odd-couple chemistry, but “A Simple Favor” loses the thread, and never shakes the feeling of a rushed Gillian Flynn knockoff.

Jon Favreau’s The Lion King, so abundant with realistic simulations of the natural world, is curiously lifeless.

Six films in and with more on the way, too much of a good thing is becoming more of a pressing question in “Despicable Me 4,” a silly and breezy installment from Illumination Entertainment that passes by with about as much to remember it as a Saturday morning cartoon.

The real heist of Crime 101 is an old one: If you’re going to steal, steal from the best.

The craft and thick Gothic atmosphere of The Devil all the Time is impressive. The movie has such fine-wrought texture that it holds you in its cold grasp. But it’s also somewhat oppressive.

It’s a goof, and there’s something to be said for watching Grohl and the gang having so much fun.

The Secrets of Dumbledore, lacking in much magic, is a bit of a bore.

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 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.

Productions of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull almost always tip too far into farce or wade too deeply into tragedy, unable to sustain the play’s elusive balancing act. Michael Mayer’s lush and lively big-screen adaption is unfortunately no exception.

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.

With handsome period craft, “Munich — Edge of War” makes for a watchable, engrossing historical thriller with fictional characters situated like spies around political leaders at a profoundly tense, and ultimately woefully misjudged, moment in time.

If any narrative thread holds the movie together, it’s each character dealing with their own version of anxiety, fear and stage fright as performers. While a laudable message for a kids movie, it’s drowned out by the movie’s commercialized blare.

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.

As a B-movie with a couple of A-listers, “The Rip” will probably go down as a minor and flawed genre exercise. But even in their lesser efforts, the sincerity of Damon and Affleck’s buddy routine remains winning.

As cinematography, Malcolm & Marie (shot by Marcell Rév) is great. As cinema, not so much.

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

Bird may go down as a rare miss for Arnold but you can still see the keenness of her eye and the nimbleness of her camera, with her regular cinematographer Robbie Ryan. And that’s true never so much as when the camera is on Adams, a talent, whose melancholy eyes say more than all the theatrics around her.

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.

The only time Bohemian Rhapsody works is when it finally retreats from not just the standard biopic narrative but from storytelling altogether.