Jason Bailey

A bloodless, musty museum piece stuffed with stars but dull as toast.

Mary Harron is too good a director to make a drab, conventional biopic, so it’s disappointing to report that with Dalíland, she’s done just that. It’s not a complete waste, and she manages to insert a handful of distinctive flourishes and memorable characters. But the picture never escapes the box it’s been placed in or transcends a key, fundamental error in its conception.

There’s little in Respect that one couldn’t glean from a Wikipedia scan, and in terms of her work, time would be better-spent re-watching “Amazing Grace” or revisiting her albums.

Every time Dolan generates a head of steam, he’s betrayed by his script, by the self-conscious formality of the dialogue, or the clunkiness of the structure.

This notion, of the supervillain antihero and the gibberish-spouting minions who serve him, remains an awfully thin premise to hang a movie on – much less five of them.

Tatum and Carolin might have been capable of the light, personality-driven fluff the trailer promises, but not, ultimately, whatever the hell Dog is trying to deliver.

One of those movies that starts off so well, that shows such promise, that its slow unraveling feels less like a disappointment than a betrayal.

Lee knows exactly how it wants to look, yet it has little that’s new or interesting to say.

The new Slumber Party Massacre feels like the last thing a movie with this title should be: safe.

Comedy is all about timing, and the timing here is all off, so the laughs are disturbingly few. What a missed opportunity this is.

There’s not much here for anyone over 10 to focus on, aside from how strange it is that the puppy Clifford looks so much more fake than the giant one.

A fairly vapid and shallow affair, even by the low standards of the celebrity bio-doc subgenre, Wolfgang provides copious archival montages of “the first celebrity chef” (Julia Child apparently didn’t count), but precious little understanding of what actually makes him tick.

With no real thesis or through-line, the movie winds up being little more than a series of revue-style blackout sketches, lengthy digressions and dead ends.

I Love My Dad cannot overcome its off-putting premise. Nothing is out of bounds, of course (especially in comedy), but if there’s an approach to make the material palatable, either played straight or broad, it is left undiscovered here.

If nothing else, Babylon is a giant swing, a three-plus hour orgy (sometimes literally) of sex, drugs, and cinema, a respected young artist reaching for a profound statement about art and commerce and America. He misses it by a country mile, but hey, he sure does take that swing.

Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard is a marginally better movie than “The Hitman’s Bodyguard.” But that’s kind of like saying that getting stabbed in the gut is marginally better than getting stabbed in the neck.

Peter Farrelly’s “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” isn’t so much a bad movie — though it’s certainly that — as an inexplicable one, a comedy/drama set in the Vietnam War that somehow believes it’s saying anything that hasn’t been said a million times already about that conflict, and far more skillfully.

It’s cheap, and crass, and by the conclusion, downright infuriating.

It’s a mighty snoozy affair, in which we discover that Doremus’s cinematic style —intimate, personal, and improvisation — has not so much solidified as cauterized.

First Time Female Director is a tremendous disappointment because Peretti is such a gifted performer; it’s understandable to go in pulling for her (this viewer certainly did), but those layers of goodwill just peel away as scene after scene simply does not work. Too much of what she’s assembled is just half-hearted cringe comedy—much of it without the comedy half of the equation.

Hamm makes himself look bland, which is no small accomplishment. But he’s also smothering much of what makes him an exciting actor.

And the score, again by Carpenter, his son Cody Carpenter, and Daniel Davies, is another banger, often lapping the action onscreen for mood and dread. It almost becomes a provocation, forcing us to long for more active involvement by Carpenter, a filmmaker whose skill and restraint frankly puts Green to shame. Who knows if Halloween Ends will actually conclude the slasher series (let’s not forget that “Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter” was the fourth of twelve installments). But I’ll say this: even as a fan of the franchise, when the title came up at the end of Halloween Ends, I found myself hoping to God they weren’t kidding.

A wildly misbegotten mess, a goulash of incongruent tones and unclear motives.

The movie’s practical and special effects are a rogues’ gallery of gougings, stabbings, shavings, and scalpings; those who like to have their stomachs turned will find much to cheer about. But is it actually scary – suspenseful, tense, trafficking in more than the cheap shock of a jump scare or vivid effect? Not really, no.

Some early, halfhearted attempts at social relevance aside, Thriller is an act of quotation and little else. It’s less a movie than a mix tape.

The de rigueur slapstick scenes for the title characters don’t even play, as the integration of animation and live action is so clunky that it feels like we’re watching special effects demonstrations rather than gags.

It’s tempting to take it easy on Alone Together, because harsh criticism feels somewhat cruel – it’s just such a gosh-darned nice movie, about two nice people who meet up and are nice to each other. But this is one tepid piece of work, a story of bland people doing and saying bland things as the world burns around them.

A joyless, glacially paced compendium of interchangeable scenes of people floating around in their goofy masks and capes, tossing clichéd dialogue and CG lightning bolts, and punching each other into buildings.