Jesse Hassenger

By its end, No Good Deed becomes troublingly easy to read as a parable about the untrustworthiness of black men. The filmmakers may not have intended it that way, but the movie is so bereft of anything else that its forays into moralistic paranoia stick out.

Though its actual storytelling is pretty arbitrary, The Black Phone has the emotional simplicity of a children’s film, wearing its grit like makeup.

Ana may be attempting to climb the class ladder, but the movie moves between classes with a freedom that feels weakly imagined.

Good intentions or not, it’s a little bit chilling, this fantasy world where “thoughts and prayers” really, truly are the best anyone can offer.

Foster, a novice at suspenseful filmmaking, doesn’t seem to know which screws to tighten or if screws even need tightening at all.

By the end of this movie, its inventive genre cross-breeding feels as worn-out as any other.

On stage, the contrivances might seem less glaring (although the songs truly are terrible). As a movie, The Prom is all-star, feel-good, zazzy nonsense. Long after Murphy’s film drops its cutesy cynicism, it still manages to accidentally produce a damning indictment of Broadway phoniness.

As with Free Guy, Reynolds and Levy have made a movie aimed at the dead center of mainstream geek culture, designed to be described as having so much heart—even though it’s as smooth and featureless as a Funko Pop.

It’s a shame, because the idea of a serial killer approaching his work with a kind of dutiful, world-weary professionalism is funny enough – maybe only comedy-sketch funny, but then again, The Shallow Tale produces a profound longing for the number of laughs that could sustain a five-minute sketch.

All told, there’s hardly a single smile in Lilo & Stitch ’25 not generated through the stolen valor of the earlier screenplay, and hardly a poignant moment that’s not more admirably raw in the G-rated version.

Throughout its slim but slow 83 minutes, Umma piles up missed-opportunity scenes that cry out for a ghoulish sense of humor or an audience-rattling jump.

It’s supposed to be evocative, but in many scenes the characters just look dim and overly backlit, to the point of obscuring the actors’ expressiveness. There might be another metaphor in there somewhere.

Look Both Ways has nothing meaningful to say about any of the subjects it’s supposedly addressing. Even when the filmmakers get little details right (Natalie’s animation references are spot-on and very convincing), the movie is playing the supportive friend to its audience, patting viewers on the back and talking about how everything happens for a reason, and it’ll all turn out great.

As the movie pulls over to look at museum fabrics in vain search of a groove, it turns the audience into its impatient child, threatening to start kicking the back of the car seat any minute now.

If Dog Days were a little weirder, it would just be a smug anti-comedy takedown of a late-period Garry Marshall picture, like "They Came Together" with its biggest laughs edited out.

In its broadest outlines, Book Club: The Next Chapter is a harmless, mildly farcical travelogue for fans of the central actresses, as well as those casually interested in briefly recognizing Andy Garcia, Don Johnson and Craig T. Nelson.

In addition to the latent sexism, unmitigated by Sorvino’s nothing of a mom role, there’s something insidious about the movie’s incompetence, and the accompanying belief that it’s good enough to entertain audiences of any age. It aspires to harmlessness, and fails.

The movie is so poorly staged that it manages to conceal the supposedly important hero/kid bonding elements, while telegraphing early on where the rest of the story is going.

Sleeping Dogs winds up playing like a low-rent Saw sequel without the elaborate traps or gore. It’s all bad cops and worse twists, turning the fragility of human memory into a cheap trick.

Miracles From Heaven is too dramatically inert to oblige Garner with a great character, but it does offer plenty of tearful monologues and mini-monologues.

The movie seems to pre-suppose that in our desperation to spend time with Wahlberg and Berry, any empty stupid simulacra will suffice as an excuse.

Though The Old Guard 2 is only the second installment in this movie series, it’s already far weaker than its predecessor. It does just about everything worse.

Most of the movie is lazily retrofitted for a variety of marketing opportunities. Some kids will probably like it anyway. But some kids also like toy commercials and singing chipmunks. It doesn’t mean they should actually watch them.

Even in Kristin’s quietest, most contemplative moments, Collette can’t stop bugging her eyes or yanking down her mouth – which, to be fair, is a natural reaction to being repeatedly poisoned over the course of 101 endless minutes.

Plenty of romantic comedies lack any demonstrable knowledge of actual human behavior. The Perfect Match lacks any demonstrable knowledge of movie behavior, too.

Padre Pio’s two halves stubbornly, constantly butt heads with each other, stories in catastrophic disharmony.

The whole story hinges on a twist that’s superficially clever on paper but wildly farfetched in practice. Once that hinge has swung, Stone ratchets up the supposed tension with attempted murders, scuffles, chases, and confrontations. Yet as these attempts at excitement emerge, the movie itself flattens out.

It’s not scary, and not goofy enough to be funny.