Jesse Hassenger

Most of the movie’s star power has been harnessed without much obvious reason, right down to the movie’s seeming origins as a delivery system for the Elton John catalog.

What this one offers in abundance is facts about golf in its early days. How the movie escaped a Father’s Day release in the U.S. is a mystery.

There’s a sweetness to the movie’s multiple storylines about teenagers earnestly, supportively pining for each other—and a neutered prudishness, too, about how none of these 17-year-olds seem to think about sex for even a second.

There’s liveliness in the conception of Rumble, knocked around and out by the demands of formulas no one has bothered to figure out.

Johnny English Strikes Again might actually come closer to success than its predecessors, if only by default. At very least, it proceeds unencumbered by excess story machinations.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 has just enough laughs to make its shopworn lessons about the value of friendship and (brace yourself) teamwork feel like part of a harmlessly amusing kids’ movie, rather than an insidious way of training kids to expect and even demand franchise bloat.

With its quasi-literary tone and over-calculated concessions to the messiness of real life, the movie settles for coming across like a clumsy amalgamation of the wonderful Amy Bloom short story “Love Is Not A Pie” and the 1998 Sarandon tearjerker "Stepmom." The hollow, unsatisfying feeling the movie leaves behind may be the most authentically funereal thing about it.

The best moments toy with a kind of superhero body horror, but the movie never fully commits to that angle, maybe to appease a ratings board and perceived audience of 13-year-olds (isn’t that who Venom was designed to please?), or maybe because director Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland) is more interested in the comic possibilities than the horrific ones.

Minions has idiosyncratic roots, but it’s a franchise play all the way. Finally, even 5-year-olds have their own movie that mechanically cashes in on something they loved when they were younger.

No matter where he goes, even when he’s working in a subgenre he helped build, Bekmambetov loses himself in the pixels.

In its mad hurry, the movie denies itself its own genre pleasures—chiefly, the ways assembling a ragtag robotics team and an equally ragtag robot might add a little bit of Mission: Impossible or MacGyver dynamics into a sports-style narrative.

While it’s not consistently funny, and is as enamored as any other Sandler movie with making reference to its own limp running gags (including one about donkey shit), there is a certain inclusiveness that harkens back to his earlier work.

It’s just a middling cover of a pretty good old song, adrift in the present day.

The intimate highlights are too few and far between in this distended adaptation.

Fantasy Island isn’t especially scary, but scares don’t usually seem like the point of a Blumhouse horror gimmick. At their best, these movies have the energy and shamelessness of a carnival ride, where the enthusiasm means more than the atmosphere. Fantasy Island knowingly steals from everywhere, and sometimes cleverly incorporates its derivativeness into the filmmaking.

Yet as personal, well-performed, and sometimes lyrical as this material is, Dalio also has a peculiar way of making it all play like a public service announcement—like a feature commissioned for a mental-wellness convention.

The main problem is a dialogue-heavy script by first-time screenwriter Jonathan Perera that mistakes quantity of verbiage for quality.

Rodriguez’s kid movies are always sweet-natured, and do an admirable job of speaking directly to their target audience. But while he can generate countless environments from his Austin studio, the camerawork on these projects, constrained and uninspired, hints at their single-room origins.

There could be something to say here about how comically low society’s expectations for fathers remain. The movie also briefly, incisively captures the new-parent contradiction of desperately needing help while wanting to be left alone, free of unsolicited input. But director and co-writer Paul Weitz (About A Boy) keeps making odd choices for what, in a single father’s life, requires comic or dramatic emphasis.

There’s no revenge, no murder, and no kidnapping. It’s a low-budget New Orleans Cage movie with some dignity. It would be a pleasure to report that The Runner is also good, but this slim if mildly compelling film lands somewhere between character sketch and morality tale.

It isn’t just Harley Quinn fans who will be annoyed and possibly insulted by the filmmaker’s sour whims. The degree to which Phillips undermines fan expectations would be admirable if Joker: Folie À Deux wasn’t also something of a slog—and if its every creative decision didn’t feel strangely affectionless.

The Pickup is entertaining on that most basic of slack-jawed levels: It has likable stars doing movie stuff (car chases, elaborate deceptions) that the movie seems to bank on blurring into memories of other, better capers.

It seems questionable whether this was really intended as a movie in the first place.

Even some of its rawest emotional moments feel studiously cribbed from other movies, which is probably why not a single thing any character does throughout Don’t Make Me Go is genuinely surprising or even slightly unexpected. It’s a movie about the unpredictability and inherent dangers of a life well-lived, and you can set a watch to its screenwriting beats.

The movie feels bloodless, and not just because the gore is muted and computerized to stay within the boundaries of a PG-13 rating.

To his credit, it probably would have been easy to turn this particular book into a quasi-satirical parade of withering takedowns. Turning it into a flavorless, center-less journey of self-discovery was likely a lot more work. That doesn’t make it any easier to watch.

Without much of a mystery to solve, this young Holmes comes across more like a junior-level Wonder Woman: intelligent and highly trained yet puzzled by this unfamiliar, unfair world of men.

The outline of a snappy relationship comedy is here, and Bell is talented enough to make one. Maybe next time she’ll commit to it.

It’s hard to make a film that’s critical of digital technology without sounding like a square. It’s this uphill battle that The Circle fights for a little while, then loses about halfway through.

The Misfits has moments of silliness that bear glancing resemblance to the kind of enjoyable starry, big-studio shlock Renny Harlin used to make, in between the parts that resemble the lower-rent genre efforts he churns out now.

Though director Nicholas Hytner does his best to enliven the material, Bennett very much comes across as a dull man’s Charlie Kaufman, even more so when the movie ends with flat, unearned whimsicality. Good as she is here, Smith must cede this round to Dench.

Because Hunter’s movie works best in its early, less crazed stretch, there aren’t any really memorable sequences here coming from the director or his distinctive star.

The film calms down a bit in its second half, leaving more room for Bondarchuk’s striking wartime tableaux, making occasional use of its native 3-D cinematography. (The movie, a massive success in Russia last year, will screen primarily in IMAX 3D venues in the U.S.)

Ferrell and Hart are too likable and crowd-pleasing to let the movie collapse around them. But they’re also too talented for something this wan.

It’s hard to hear what All Is By My Side is saying about anything, given how many scenes feature vaguely druggy overlapping dialogue, part of a fussy sound design that’s paired with intentionally choppy editing.

The real Noble accomplished a lot, but the movie insists on giving her achievements a mystical and mythical dimension...without the imagination to carry it off.

The movie’s mock-jaundiced attitude toward social media is itself satirical, and there’s a germ of a funny idea about how principled liberals can get entangled in pointless social media battles and infighting. But it’s eclipsed by an unavoidably moneyed perspective that presumes privileged people are inherently liberal, rather than attacking the hypocrisy of rich liberals in particular.

What’s left is those two strong performances. Bateman is especially funny in the sequence that lands Baxter in the hospital, and Kidman never resorts to shallow-actress clichés when indicating how a life in different kinds of spotlights may have frayed at Annie’s nerves.

This one’s The Irishman for anyone in dire need of new glasses.

Whenever the movie seems prepared to dig a little deeper, it throws another self-actualization party in its own honor.

It’s hard to fault Puzzle for going in a more rigorous, serious-minded direction... until it trudges in that direction with such repetition. Turtletaub and his screenwriters lay the borderline-anachronistic details of their heroine’s oppressive life on so thick that the movie starts to sag.

When this nearly two-hour movie enters its intentionally laughless final stretch, Freakier Friday feels more and more like the extended encore of a reunion concert—not least because that’s essentially where it takes place.

Ultimately, Wood doesn’t have much time to treat the romance between Leah and Blue with any more depth than the characters. It’s a shame. Her final shot would have real power in a richer, more perceptive film.

For the most part, the movie’s ideas about Barnum are incredibly stupid and, at times, kind of sweet in their daftness.

Words And Pictures is supposed to be divided, as equally as its title, between these two characters. But Owen’s performance as a man who values his own faux-sophistication even as he goes to seed overpowers Binoche, leaving the movie lopsided.

Keaton seems to take another hitman part as an opportunity for contemplation, a decision that leaves Knox Goes Away feeling like someone hollowed out a DTV thriller in hopes of finding existential despair in the empty spaces.

Between the movie’s subtext and its new-digital-world distributor, Bay seems to be communicating the frustration of constraint, but why? What has he been barred from doing?

It’s just another piece of well-decorated regal real estate.

On a purely technical level, Effie Gray is fine, if uninspired, with its washed-out color, attention to detail, and lack of heavy-handed moralizing. As an experience, though, it’s a drag without much reward.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie doesn’t really have the patience for character-based conflict, or plotting more complicated (or motivated) than groups of characters showing up to different planets on cue.

It’s still mostly just a time-passer for younger kids — and, absent a strong point of view, as much of a hedged bet as its narration-and-song opening.

Paul and Julia can rescue each other, but they need more help pulling Stung out of "Tremors" and "Party Down"’s combined shadow.

John Krasinski’s second feature has such a milquetoast, melancholy-indie sound that its most arresting and dynamic musical moment comes when three characters unexpectedly break into “Closer To Fine” by the Indigo Girls.

It’s hard to feel energized by a historical epic finding a couple of ways to look cool for a few minutes at a time. Most of The King is just unadorned semi-prestige, with a few gruesome severed heads rolling around for cred.

It’s half-assed in every way but cast retention; almost all the major female characters return.

What keeps Fatale from really working as a noir pastiche (or, dare to dream, a Coens-esque ghoulish comedy of violently incompetent malfeasance) is its gentle, kid-gloved deference to the idea that Derrick is a good guy, rather than a weak-willed dope or even an affable bumbler in over his head.

There are a lot of bad things this movie doesn’t do, which is not quite the same as doing anything particularly well.

It’s somehow both less explicit and more blandly lascivious than its nastier counterpart, equally skittish about exploitation and saying anything meaningful about its subject.

Actual kids will probably enjoy The Secret Life Of Pets 2, just as they probably enjoy whatever mini-movies Illumination churns out to supplement its hyper-successful home-entertainment releases. But they might also start to sense just how mini this sequel feels, and start fidgeting after 15 or 20 minutes.

Past Winterbottom films have turned “real life” into both comedy and tragedy. The Face Of An Angel turns it into a directionless skulk.

Disappointments has the strange confidence of a much slicker, more decisive movie, and all of its sort-ofs don’t add up to much.

In a movie as utterly lost as The Turning, everything from the performances to the production design to the music cues amount to one big pile of dirty mirrors and doll parts.

Rather than blazing a new trail for Lego cartoons, this may be the first one to feel like it’s adhering too closely to its instruction booklet.

The stars work hard, and the movie goes slack. It seems like that old adage is true: Behind every Bad Moms is a couple of dudes without any discipline.

Time Lapse provokes thought, but mostly in spite of itself.

There’s a kind of equality at work here: No one is well-served.

Meet Cute has more on its mind than so many mid-2000s rom-coms, and sure looks a hell of a lot better, so it’s all the more crushing when so much of it turns out to be just as gratingly plastic.

When Megan Leavey touches upon the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder in both humans and animals, it looks capable of bringing something novel to the human-and-dog formula. Most of the time, it’s a rote biography of someone a dog really liked.

Horns fumbles with its own powers, too. If its moments of Aja-ian archness blended better with the macabre sincerity that presumably comes from the source material, it might have provided a real autumnal chill. Instead, it’s more ambitious and complex than the horror movies that dutifully clock in to haunt multiplexes around Halloween—without actually being better.

The complexities of those people are diluted in a movie that’s not quite a functional ensemble but not intimate enough to qualify as a character study.

Afterlife wants desperately to summon the spirit of watching the first movie back in 1984. It winds up ghoulish in the wrong way.

The better moments of Color Of Time make use of the ringer cast Franco was able to assemble, however momentarily.

Josh Hartnett does a fine job in Fight or Flight’s intensely physical, one-versus-100 lead role, but the movie doesn’t have much to offer beyond 15 minutes of inventive action and 80 minutes of aggressive mediocrity.

If anything, this is a more meager, timid iteration of Seuss’ story, starting with the characterization of its famous antihero.

Despite undermining its own better qualities, The Longest Ride still qualifies as one of the best Sparks films by virtue of not including any love-ghosts or destructive misinformation about how Alzheimer’s works.

Wonder Park has the unmistakable air of a promising movie no one has taken full responsibility for polishing into a good one.

It’s a simple idea, to take this working-class family and introduce what amounts to a high-tech ray gun, but the hook is so effective that it buys Kin a fair amount of time before the story turns from scrappy to stupid.

In between missteps, Goodbye To All That carves out some of its brief running time for the kind of quiet, low-key dramedy that complements the recessive charm of its leading man.

For a movie that emulates literature, The Age Of Adaline never fits comfortably into a particular form — literary or cinematic.

It’s hard to say what’s odder about Maleficent 2: that Jolie disappears for long stretches of it, or that her elegant, imperious darkness isn’t much missed when she does.

Monster Trucks, in all its stupid, misguided, laughable anti-glory, is difficult to hate. Its stupidity is, at times, vaguely likable, and if not redeemed by strong craft, not harmed by technical deficiencies.

After noble and varied entries like "Jack Reacher," "Hell Or High Water," and "The Old Man & The Gun," The Highwaymen is a crucial reminder that good Dad Movies aren’t as easy to make as they look.

The characters’ overall niceness makes the movie pleasant in the moment—and easy to shrug off as a fantasy.

Despite a top-shelf cast and strong subject matter, Suffragette feels like the product of limitations.

Uncharted spends a lot of time scraping up meager points for what it isn’t, rather than what it is. It isn’t a superhero movie, despite the budget. It isn’t CG’d within an inch of its life; there appears to be some location shooting in the mix.

Hamburg springs some surprises, albeit secondhand ones. More often, he calls his shots from a mile away.

Apart from some slapstick abuse of her fake baby bump (sometimes funny) and the Mrs. Doubtfire-style hustle and bustle of needing to don or repair a pregnancy get-up (less funny), the actual story of Kinda Pregnant winds up feeling like a holding pattern, right down to the predictable punctuation of R-rated raunch talk and gags that gesture toward satire (gender reveal parties! So ridiculous!) without actually scoring any real points.

The movie starts out heedless in its desire to charm, but it winds up feeling constrained by self-consciousness, and more’s the pity.

Redundancy is about all it offers, despite an entirely new set of characters and a story set 40 years after the early 20th-century original.

Ross may not be a great director, but he has written some very good screenplays, none of which sprawl out like this one.

When his zany cast of characters (many but not all played by Perry himself) takes leave of his material, as in Nobody’s Fool, his movie’s faults start to look more congruent with less auteur-driven studio comedies.

The Lucy-Desi material that should be at the heart of the story never really pays off, as if it’s wandered off and found another, secret movie to inhabit.

As a result, this well-meaning puff piece sometimes appears to double as an extended video-dating profile: Generous sexagenarian seeks stable younger woman for procreation.

The implausibilities, cop-movie checkboxes, and mildly wasted talent make Ride Along 2 lazy, but not downright loathsome. If anything, it’s perhaps slightly more amusing and agreeable than the original—a sign of how little that film’s seemingly surefire premise wound up mattering.

It’s harmless bad, not torture bad.

PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie feels more like a legitimate feature film than its predecessor, but it’s still well within the realm of distractor cinema rather than something parents would want to watch with their kids.

If playwright Theresa Rebeck, who receives co-writing and story credit, brought a fresher perspective to this material at some point, it has been slathered in screenwriterly varnish and a sense of take-charge female empowerment best described as EuropaCorpesque.

It’s not especially fair to criticize the movie that could have been made, rather than the one that was actually made. But even on its chosen terms of a family dramedy, People feels lopsided.

It’s like a TV pilot poorly dressed up as a character study.

[Keaton] has the kind of presence that makes you sit up and pay a little more attention to whatever he’s saying, and his restless, punchy manner is unsentimental enough to sell sappy material, even as he appears to sidestep it. Goodrich ultimately requires more sidestepping than one man can handle.

Its unusual structure makes it both novel and ungainly.

What’s supposed to resemble a smart, unnerving sci-fi movie looks more like a lecture about male dominance and deception that keeps foregrounding its least interesting characters.

It offers the bittersweet spectacle of a pretty loony movie trying its best to become a more conventional one. Maybe an outright boondoggle would have been more memorable.

Apart from some stray moments of youthful exuberance, the film version of 13 has been scrubbed as clean as any high school musical, so that it resembles any number of sitcomy streaming programming—erasing the very novelty that made it sing on stage.

Fans of the series will likely bask in the warm feelings, particularly a handful of scenes following a one-year time jump toward the end, like Tolkien devotees reveling in final stretch of Return of the King; agnostics may regard this same section as if it’s, well, the final stretch of Return of the King, playing to the similarly unconverted.

There are plenty of little chuckles throughout, but the movie doesn’t incorporate seemingly throwaway gags into its narrative like an expertly timed Harold-style improv. More often, it feels like the Broken Lizard boys are trying to salvage what works and re-use as much of it as possible.

It’s both a calculated attempt to recapture some of the emotional magic of his successes, and a clinical analysis of how exactly humanistic but effects-driven filmmaking is supposed to work. These qualities make it fascinating, but ineffectual as a narrative — or even as a demo reel. Zemeckis seems to think he’s showing heart. Instead, he’s messily dissecting it.

The movie focuses so intently on technical craft that it sometimes zones right out. Hawley is still stretching boundaries, often literally, while disregarding the human experiences they’re supposed to contain.

Maybe the most baffling thing about Scream 7 is that it’s not an off-the-rails franchise-ending disaster. It’s entertaining enough, with a few fun side performances and the easy prickliness of Sidney and Gale’s friendship. But it’s missing the giddy carnival-ride audience-movie thrills and clever meta-humor of previous entries, and the more serious material simply isn’t insightful enough to take its place (or distract from its craven origins as a corporate patch-job).

The grotesquerie crowds out the movie’s fleeting cuteness.

The world, the movie seems to be saying, expends a lot of energy on blithely incoherent messages to women, based on half-baked ideas rather than their actual experiences. As it turns out, Unicorn Store does the same thing.

Deep Water is more like the movie plenty of people probably assumed Deep Blue Sea would be like in the first place: watchable, forgettable shlock.

Given how unnecessary Rise Of the Damned is, Leyden’s choice to pare down the original RIPD’s summer-movie bombast into an agreeable, swiftly paced supernatural Western qualifies as a rousing success. On the other hand, anyone working in the RIPD universe should also understand the value of just staying dead.

Beyond a handful of vaguely contemporary references – podcasts; crypto; Stormy Daniels – there’s little sense of the present in Spinal Tap II, not even of the band being particularly out of touch with it. It’s been four decades since the first film! Shouldn’t their resentments be pettier, their epic reconvening more desperate?

If you want to make a slasher-level action-mayhem movie, make the damn movie; don’t pretend your excuses for ultraviolence come from a humanist core. Mayhem! yearns to be taken seriously in all the wrong places.

Chalamet and Fanning do okay in Rainy Day, but Selena Gomez is the one who shows surprising facility with tart-tongued romance.

Jenkins brings a little more color and variety to the proceedings, and even a smidgen of royal-family bitchiness in the early dynamics of Mufasa’s adopted family – though the lion who would be Scar, through no fault of Harrison’s, doesn’t exactly give us access to the fullness of his emotional journey.

The movie gets so wrapped up in sorting through the whimsical bureaucracy of discarded IFs that it forgets to create an actual world to hide it under.

Everything’s Going to Be Great just has characters and ideas waiting in the wings to rush in nonsensically.

The Do-Over is a de facto R-rated movie for Sandler, with the attendant bad language and sex jokes, but most of the faux-naughty stuff seems like an afterthought. The jokes that work best fill in the sad details of Charlie’s life.

The movie is at least interestingly confusing until about the halfway mark, when monotony sets in for good.

Playmobil: The Movie isn’t as funny as some of the direct-to-video Lego-related movies, either, and that’s very much the field it competes in, theatrical release or not. As children’s entertainment goes, this is a harmless distractor, but it’s also poorly conceived at every story turn, unable to even stick to a particular generic message to make up for its extremely basic humor.

The movie accumulates much from its betters before it starts to rot from the inside. Eventually, it becomes a distended corpse of a big-ticket blockbuster, washed up on streaming.

Surly and Andie’s second adventure...is less ambitious than the original.... But it’s also more propulsive, which is to say antic.

Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice practically warns the audience against taking it too seriously, even while talking out the other side of its mouth about its own heartfelt themes.

A little of this debunking is cute (“I got nothing against bib overalls or straw hanging out of your mouth,” one of the subjects clarifies about the myths he wants to dispel); the rest of it feels defensive.

Hunt’s writing isn’t exactly knocking off Woody Allen (her characters do send text messages, after all), but it shares with Allen a peculiar, stylized imitation of how New Yorkers supposedly sound.

Despite its rueful musings on the time that passes whether or not you’re properly occupying yourself, and despite the clear passion Rabe and Linklater exhibit for this material, Downtown Owl persists in a kind of circular ramble. It’s so transfixed by the process of muddling through that the movie itself becomes an indistinct muddle of its own.

It is not unusual for an underdog sports picture to be predictable. But The Miracle Season seems downright preordained, and not just in its arc. The movie is constitutionally incapable of surprise even on a moment-to-moment level.

Breathe seems to want nothing more than to be "The Theory Of Everything" for a slightly newer generation.

This is a movie that seems utterly convinced that it’s saying something profound, but proves difficult to actually parse.

The movie’s attempts at ruthless pulp manipulation don’t land; cruelly offing a character whose entire personality is “pregnant” is a cheap bid for John Wick stakes.

Even on its own silly terms, Pixels is not a very good movie; it’s painted up like a Ghostbusters-style fantasy-comedy but plays like so many slapdash Happy Madison productions before it.

Mercy takes a more bombastic approach with more speculative technology, only to chicken out of using that bombast to do anything other than jostle the audience through a series of contrived absurdities. If this is the future of crime thrillers, everyone needs their screentime severely curtailed.

A movie that should be punctuated like a Christmas card sign-off but instead, losing a comma, becomes an off-putting directive. How Robert De Niro didn’t make it to this set is a mystery for the ages.

Throwing in some gnarly gore—and Brightburn indulges a couple of truly gruesome flinches—doesn’t change the plodding inevitability with which Brandon goes super-evil.

Trying to figure it out makes Traffik weirdly compelling, but nowhere near good.

The whole movie falls between stylization, which it mostly lacks, and realism, which it can’t quite claim with its non-teenage teenager spouting non-swearing swears.

In a movie this flat-out dull, even a tasteful lack of direct exploitation feels like a failure of nerve.

For an uncertainly paced and fabricated historical side quest, much of Robert The Bruce is painlessly watchable.

Though its title and general tone lament the stifling atmosphere of the years between childhood and full-fledged teenhood, the movie misses the animal hostility and physical awkwardness of genuine tweens.

The consistent failure of imagination is all that keeps the film’s scenes from feeling like a random selection.

Anything legitimately affecting about the movie bleeds out, and Cage delivering a blood-soaked monologue or simulating the sound of a burned esophagus isn’t enough on its own to turn Arsenal into the gory, borderline rococo thriller it starts aiming for around the halfway mark. It’s the rare case of a bonkers Cage performance counting as too little, too late.

Maybe Vardalos should revisit this material when she’s ready to write "My Big Fat Greek Funeral."

As with "Catfish," Joseph is there with his soulful handheld camera-bobbing, trying to convey the pensive thoughtfulness of a person who may not be thinking all that much. And as with "Catfish," the audience catches on long before anyone on screen.

Rather than inspiring some kind of connection between disparate eras, Leap! uses pop music as a quick fix for kids who might be bored by ballet or orphans.

Here is the problem with making four movies about a middle-schooler who only ages a little and learns sitcom-ready lessons: After a while, it all starts to feel as repetitive and uninspired as any number of more ambitious franchises. The Long Haul has a chance to reimagine the series and only comes up with Vacation Junior.

Most of the time, Mewes’ follows in the later-period footsteps of his friend Smith, steering a what-the-hell production that’s less entertaining than the two buddies just talking.

Bad plotting would be relegated to the realm of incidental if Coffee & Kareem were funnier—isn’t that always the way? Unfortunately, the movie spends a lot of time handing Helms underlined jokes, which he proceeds to underline again with his why-did-I-just-say-that delivery.

After an efficient start, The Possession Of Michael King drags, weighing itself down with genre conventions the filmmakers don’t seem to understand or care about.

Is it better for a Stephen King franchise to burn out or fade away? Firestarter manages to do both at once.

Guzmán has been a delightful presence in countless movies over the years, and it’s neat to see him take on an unambiguously leading role, especially one focusing on two Puerto Rican characters. But the movie’s Luis is a surprisingly dull Ugly American.

The action material in My Spy undermines its would-be cuteness, while remaining questionable on a level of cheap thrills.

It’s exorcism’s greatest hits, if exorcism were a band playing 300 casinos and state fairs a year.

Brave New World doesn’t even seem sure about what it’s selling—just that it has to get a movie-shaped something-or-other to market.

The uncomfortable yet not unwelcome spectacle of De Niro attempting zingers makes this movie an essential subject for future study of the actor’s comic side. Unfortunately, it is essential in no other way.

Adults in charge might want to take a cue from the movie’s penny-pinching, and save some money on movie tickets.

In Infinitely Polar Bear, Ruffalo attempts to put a recognizable, charismatic, slightly worn face on manic depression. Somehow, though, he comes up with a vaguely theatrical, and vaguely wearying, performance.

If anything, Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 ups that sadness quotient, spending much of its opening proving that just because these movies are stupider than "Observe And Report" doesn’t mean they have to be less cripplingly depressing.

In its final hour, The Last Days Of American Crime finally gets down to the business of its big heist, revealing both the propulsive entertainment value the filmmakers have been inexplicably stalling and the thinness of the whole enterprise.

These are not good performances, exactly. Clarke is endearing, but verges on mugging. Claflin is at his best when Will gives in to his competitive urges, which happens exactly once.

Despite the amateurish lack of comic or dramatic timing, Christmas Pageant does have some old-fashioned charm.

Perversely, it’s only after Like Father is in the clear from its potentially ridiculous set-up that it really starts to trade in phony sitcom-movie bullshit.

The one performer in the ensemble capable of making this stuff sound like the good kind of bullshitting is Affleck

Though little about the technical skill of Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero brings to mind Spielberg, it’s hard not to think of "War Horse."

It ends up a whole lot of cute, branded nothing — watchable junk for young adults of tomorrow to look back on with inordinate fondness.

The aggressively secular and gift-based systems of Red One are almost enough to prompt a moist-eyed holiday wish for more piously churchy seasonal entertainment.

So, cross comedy off the list. As fantasy, The Christmas Chronicles Part II has moments that work as a live-action Rankin-Bass special, albeit one that’s designed to inexplicably maximize the number of times the actors have to say “Belsnickel.”

Rio offers the uncomfortable spectacle of 10 different filmmakers mostly failing to produce a sense of place that can be sustained over 10 minutes, much less multiple senses of place that can be stitched into an interesting patchwork.

It’s more tedious than unwatchable, and pint-size Cena fans may be curious to see him in a movie more compatible with his Kids’ Choice Awards hosting gigs than the likes of "Blockers" or "Trainwreck." Sadly, the movie never shows similar curiosity about what its young audience, and subjects, might be thinking or feeling.

The movie’s B-movie flimsiness is pervasive, and paired with an overall lack of B-movie flair, though director Uli Edel makes some game yarn-spinning attempts.

Despite its unconvincing seriousness mixing poorly with its unconvincing dark comedy, 7 Minutes proves difficult to despise outright; it’s watchably swift and somewhat engaging in the moment.

It turns out that Sing’s myriad irritations are a lot more eclectic than its long, long playlist of pop hits.

A once-energetic comic talent (and underrated serious actor) slows down to a pace he must feel matches his audience these days.

There’s a certain perverse brilliance, however accidental, to a movie that creates a longing for a foulmouthed Aubrey Plaza/Robert De Niro romcom.

Jigsaw isn’t a series low point. It’s less aggressively unpleasant than some of the others.

As a babysitter, the movie’s not much different than a brief marathon of episodes. As a family bonding experience, it may qualify for adults as a mild form of psychological torture, presenting storylines that feel ready to wrap up at the 15-minute mark and then must continue on for another hour.

Addicted is basically a social-issue melodrama that, minus some curse words, thrusting, and frequent side nudity, could have emerged sometime in the ’50s.

The movie seems to be conceived as a slow burn, but it's more like a faucet dripping lukewarm water.

In the end, The Pyramid seems designed not for horror, adventure, or action but to provide every possible answer to the question of its found-footage bona fides—yes, no, or maybe, depending on who’s asking. It spends most of its running time hedging uncertainly between trend and backlash, explanations and excuses.

It’s poised to become one of the biggest rom-coms of 1998. But barring the invention of time travel, The Rewrite remains tethered to the realities of film releasing in 2015, which means it will get most of its play as a VOD simulation of earlier hits.

It would be easier to buy Jexi’s more intentional absurdities if its reality wasn’t so elastic, stretching to accommodate poorly staged large-scale slapstick.

Kandahar gets the straight face right, but seems woefully convinced that it’s a serious drama, right down to the wailing-woman soundtrack that so many Hollywood and Hollywood-adjacent movies about the Middle East bust out to show they’re down with the anguish.

Greenland 2: Migration takes itself seriously in all the wrong ways; it wants to maintain a safe distance from the real world, while urging the audience to shed a tear over some imagined nobility.

Matthew Vaughn’s latest directorial effort doesn’t traffic in the same edgelord button-pushing as his Kingsman series, but as that relief fades, it becomes clear how much Argylle is recycling ideas and imagery from those (and other, better) movies. Bryce Dallas Howard and Sam Rockwell make an endearing pair, but they’re committed to an occasionally loony adventure that lacks the grace necessary to match its stars.

It’s the kind of movie that could be charitably described as “educational”, though probably not as much as the magazine article that serves as its source material. At least we know Perry is true to history in one major way: today, as was the case back then, these women deserve better.

20 years later Gans still can’t figure out how to escape the open-ended confinement of gameplay, or even give it the forward momentum of a game with a mission.

Halyna Hutchins is the movie’s saving grace. Without her work, it wouldn’t be worth a look at all.

Some of the movie’s cartoon mayhem is fun enough. The rest feels like, well, work.

Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx do their jobs in Back in Action, assuring that it remains mostly watchable. But it’s ultimately a bummer to watch two well-established stars and versatile actors returning to big-budget filmmaking just to make another spies-versus-real-life action-comedy.

The grindhouse thought experiments can be engaging, and a sign that the movie is more interested in speculative fiction than in preaching toward a single specific theme. But the movie rampages too quickly and carelessly to really dig into any of its characters.

Though it’s positioned in the early days of the summer movie reason, Shadow Force winds up as an unintentional advertisement for staying home.

Tran and Gladstone keep the movie watchable, mixing prickliness and warmth in a situation that’s more common than movies often acknowledge: a partnership where one person is far more invested in parenthood than another.

My Spy: The Eternal City is tailor-made for an awkward family movie night: too violent and suggestive for elementary schoolers, too dumb for teenagers, and too confusingly joke-free for adults expecting a comedy.

Role Play wants to be a star-driven caper merging complicated relationship dynamics with exciting espionage action. But despite a few brief signs of life, both sides of the film are woefully unconvincing, as are its stars. Kaley Cuoco goes way too broad, David Oyelowo looks pained, and the whole thing strains to imitate better movies.

Jack Black will be enough to lure both kids and parents to the holiday comedy Dear Santa. But Black can’t carry the whole thing himself, and he’s eventually subdued by some deeply questionable story choices.

By zeroing in on the eldest Addams child, the new Addams Family 2 exposes just how clunky and wrongheaded its take on Wednesday is — and what the animated movies get wrong about the family in general.

The quirkiest thing about it is how much of that time it spends accidentally calling attention to its own overwritten, under-thought weaknesses.

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.

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.

AI may not be advanced enough to make a movie even as crappy as Atlas, but in the meantime, it seems like autocomplete is having a go at it.

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.

Who could have guessed that a simple Smurfs reboot would constitute such an unholy mess?

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.

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.

Flight Risk feels like a free-floating outlet for a little bit of rage and a little bit of shtick, both Mad Mel standbys that he seems unwilling to really examine, within these confines or elsewhere.

It’s no better than it needs to be, and it’s not bad enough to be consistently laughable, either.

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

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

A movie that feels like it’s been machine-learned and reverse-engineered from YouTube fanfic, rather than rooted in any kind of recognizable human experience, behavior, or psychology.

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.

This live-action co-production between Sony and a Japanese animation studio begins with the colorful bounce of Paul W.S. Anderson directing a cosmic X-Men knockoff, and quickly runs out of gas in a way that resembles the worst of Sony’s Screen Gems genre arm.

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.

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.

Madea remains a distinctive, weirdly compelling character. Maybe someday Perry will make a good comedy for her.

Much of Walter’s behavior resembles, at very least, a movie version of mental illness, only to have the story reclassify it as a coping mechanism. This unwittingly makes the character seem as affected as any Sundance stereotype—and the movie disturbing for all the wrong reasons.

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

Agent 47 is just slightly less dull than its disavowed predecessor — or at least its dullness seems less active, because it doesn’t turn anyone as inherently interesting as Olyphant into a dour-faced killing machine.

No Stranger Than Love offers an accidental lesson: Attempts to write poetry ought to be preceded by attempts to read it and, preferably, understand it.

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.

Its scenes aren’t really long or improv-heavy enough to qualify as rambling, but they’re often slow enough to qualify as excruciating.

A small, unflashy, borderline incompetent movie like Mr. Church is certainly another sign that Murphy does what he wants. Maybe this guarded performance in a lousy movie is a sign of him wanting to do something better.

It’s a five-day toss-off that’s simultaneously an impressive feat and business as usual.

The movie isn’t as off-the-charts shameless as Sparks, but it lacks the Russian roulette death-guessing game to occupy viewers who get bored.

As broad as Williams goes in these scenes, it’s not really his fault. He’s acting out a screenplay, credited to Daniel Taplitz, that’s peppered with bad writerly flourishes.

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.

Williams made some terrible movies, but he never phoned them in. On both counts, this one’s no exception.

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

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.

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.

There’s certainly an audience for these thrillers, but imagine how big that audience might be for one that really works.

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.

It’s the extreme age-specificity and seeming low effort of Buck Wild that makes it more content than feature film.

It’s more like an extremely confusing and sloppily written chunk of Purge fan-fiction—a tortured use of another movie’s absurd mythology to help make muddled quasi-satirical points, while indulging the apparently fail-safe punchline of saying the word “purge” about once a minute.

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

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

The utter stupidity of Replicas sometimes makes it feel almost daring. It goes to some dark, counterintuitive places out of a seeming obliviousness to both what science fiction audiences might want to see, and how actual people might behave.

Without any actual classicism to accompany Craig’s outdated notions of outrageousness, the movie quickly turns fustier than its edgy posturing lets on. Craig simply watches a bunch of selfish people behave badly in predictable ways, and occasionally has them lunge at each other in anger. How perfectly droll!

Though Stein assembles his early sequences with precision, laying out geography and shorthanding through set design, that sharpness is undermined by basically everything else in the movie, from micro to major.

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.

It misses the painful performance of everyday life, or less Hallmark-friendly emotions, like anger or numbness.

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.

Marc Webb’s new movie, in contrast, uses the song for its title, the name of an in-movie manuscript, and as a late-breaking song cue that doesn’t drop the needle so much as clunk it down with turgid inevitability.

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.

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.

There was a time when the very presence of someone like John Cusack could enliven otherwise normal movies, and lift worthier ones onto a higher plane. But films like Drive Hard are too slapdash to even allow for coherent performances, let alone movie-saving heroics.

As it turns out, EDM is a mere soundtrack for what turns out to be a stalker thriller rife with the kind of details that the filmmakers might call “psychological” and that psychologists might call “insultingly stupid.”

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

Like so many movies designed for believers first and ordinary sinners second, if at all, Gavin Stone has trouble approximating the sensibility of actual entertainment and is particularly deadly as a comedy. Even David Spade movies tend to have more laughs.

Kids don’t need the Chipmunks movies to take them somewhere cheap. They deserve a comedy or a musical or a cartoon — none of which The Road Chip quite is — that’s more than a high-pitched distraction.

It’s the film equivalent of a guy loudly demanding the attention of everyone in a subway car, then refusing to even issue a compellingly strange rant.

There are great L.A. ensembles, like "Short Cuts" "Magnolia," or "Jackie Brown," but writer-director John Herzfeld is an expert in the bad kind, having made "2 Days In The Valley."

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.

This is an interesting idea, executed with a reductive, tin-eared understanding of what constitutes art to go along with a faith-based movie’s reductive, tin-eared understanding of what constitutes entertainment.

Even the occasional funny line grows wearying, because nothing in this movie happens for any real reason. The details that labor to appear random, the big slapstick plot turns, and the predetermined character arcs are all equally meaningless, unchecked byproducts of filmmakers emptying their joke files with Superbad playing on a loop in the background.

Director Kriv Stenders seems to think he’s spun a twisty, delightfully amoral genre riff. Instead, he’s made a brightly colored smirk noir.

The slumming stars actually make the situation worse for everyone; Life On The Line plays like an ego trip without any accompanying fun.

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.

Tarot seems perpetually uncertain about whether it should play its thinly conceived premise for laughs, or actually pursue real scares. It winds up with neither, stumbling around in the dark and turning its small ensemble into a crude means of timekeeping for its surprisingly sluggish 90-minute runtime.

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.

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.

Like a lot of movies, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 has its own souvenir popcorn bucket. This may be the first one where the bucket is more entertaining than the feature.

The movie is 105 minutes long and would feel stretched thin even if cut down to the cutscene bookends of a music video. It is a thing you can see, technically.

Aniston is bad here, but she’s not alone. Marshall allows everyone in the movie to either play to their worst instincts or avert their eyes while skipping through the wreckage.

As if the ravings of a lunatic weren’t dull enough, Septic Man eventually becomes the ravings of an idiot too.

Preaching aside, though, Saving Christmas is a shoddy 80-minute feature that contains approximately 50 minutes of actual moving footage. When Cameron narrates that materialism doesn’t go against Christmas because it celebrates the son of God being made material himself, it sounds like a defense of any kind of cheap, poorly made holiday crap — this movie included.