John Semley

Where Song to Song most distinguishes itself among Malick’s uniquely rich filmography is its abiding despair. It is his most pessimistic film since "Badlands."

For its slightness and silliness, its concerns are grander. Here, the undead ghouls represent nothing but the cold prospect of death itself. “This isn’t gonna end well,” Driver’s omniscient copper keeps intoning. And it never does.

Viewed in the despairing environment of the big-budget sci-fi blockbuster, Alita is likely to find a cult of core fans drawn in by the persuasive digital animation, and pick-and-choose, smorgasbord world-building. In the longview, though, it’s likely to enjoy much the same fate as 2000s cine-technological milestone Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. And that, perhaps, is the ultimate case of damning with faint, highly relative praise.

It’s the kind of film that can’t even bother to commit to its own cynicism, which makes it the most deeply cynical kind of film there is.

The 15:17 To Paris, like "Sully," "American Sniper" and (to a lesser extent) "Gran Torino" before it, combines such conceptions of late style: both harmonious and intransigent, resolute and difficult, defined by lively contradiction.

The nature of this fantasy is boringly feel-good and aspirational.

That the plot is totally stupid is Boss Baby’s saving grace. It’s the rare cartoon that actually feels like a cartoon, propelled by its goofiness and sheer energy and rarely bogged down by boring, polemical lesson-learning.

It's an empty, moronic, pandering and utterly forgettable, low-rent "Moulin Rouge" that pays curious tribute to Barnum by similarly hailing its audience as slack-jawed rubes, slobbering for whatever passes as entertainment. It's godawful.

A film so dull, flat, and totally joyless that, in the absence of anything compelling unfolding on screen, one’s mind may be forgiven for turning to the corporate machinations grinding behind it.

Office Christmas Party is a hopeless muddle. A joyless, laughless – that’s right, not even one laugh – affair that proves how indulgent and (worse) boring ensemble comedies such as this become when the ensemble has next to no natural chemistry and even less of a script to riff off of.

It may not have the easy, feel-good family flick sheen to win over the box office, but it’s clever and compassionate enough to pay down a few big-ticket karmic debts.

In its neediness to be liked, the new Shaft – the third of five films in the series to be titled, simply, Shaft – says everything and nothing.

Regrettably, the film’s place-setting opening lays the scene for a different, more exciting film that never really unfolds.

Like the film's punishingly gory set pieces, the storytelling itself is meaty.

Most refreshingly, Johnny English Strikes Again is the rare secret-agent film that feels wholly unself-conscious.

Willie may not have a heart of gold. But he’s got a heart of bloody, barely thumping meat, same as the rest of us. And in this bitter season of unceasing, frostbitten darkness, it’s heart enough.

For faithful and faithless alike, The Shack may seem stupid, laughable, blasphemous, poorly acted and totally banal. And yet there are probably worse things then being told it’s righteous to forgive and that love is good.

It’s not uniquely bad, nor so bad it’s good. It’s factually, quantifiably bad. Overcooked, underdressed, sloppy, indigestible: just your classic crap hamburger of a movie.

Pretty much everything about Rings is incoherent. And the most incoherent thing of all is the film’s arrival a decade and a half after Verbinski’s original remake (if such a term even makes sense).