Katie Walsh

If The Black Phone dabbles in crimes that are taboo, even unforgivable in its depiction of brutality against innocent children, Black Phone 2 commits its own unforgivable crime of being dreadfully boring. This movie is a snooze — and not just because all of the action takes place entirely during Gwen’s dreams.

The worst thing about Life Itself is not that it is emotionally sadistic. It's just how much it wants to be emotionally sadistic, while missing the mark by a mile.

In trying to do too much, Halloween Kills ends up doing nothing at all, other than tarnishing this franchise’s good name.

Everything about Gringo, from the storytelling to the comedy to the cinematography is incredibly lackluster. The film is dark and dim, like everything's covered in a layer of dust. Oyelowo is quite endearing and funny as Harold, but he's given very little to work with.

The action is messy, the geography indiscernible, and a few shots seem stitched together with but a single pixel and a prayer.

He (Stewart) bogs down his talented cast with a bewildering plot, tired tropes and embarrassing dialogue. This one, well, it's simply resistible.

While it's fun to watch Garner return to her action roots, the brute force haymaker that is Peppermint is a far cry from the sophisticated thrills of "Alias."

Despite the ever-present layer of cheesiness, every now and again, some of those emotions are just big enough to land a somewhat effective blow right to the heart.

It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but for those who already love it, it’ll be just right.

Freelance is this incredibly goofy jumble of tones, a movie that doesn’t know what it is or what it wants to be, flailing about as it far overstays its welcome.

It feels like any new ideas were jettisoned for the same old schtick. "Zombieland" may have helped to give birth to the zomb-aissance, but "Double Tap" just might be the kill shot.

Ultimately, any sass, sentiment and personality are obliterated in the noisy chaos of the climax, which is a grayish brown blur of flying spaceship parts, whirling turtle shells and shouts of "the beacon!" It's more cacophonous than cinematic, and loses the quirky charm of the cartoon in the avalanche of computer-generated violence.

Birke's script is plainly straightforward, a simple supernatural chase story. It doesn't plumb the depths of what might make Slender Man scary, so Slender Man isn't scary at all.

Stuck in this largely infantilized role, Cowen imbues Angel with as much verve and spunk as she can; she’s often funnier and darker than necessary, offering a refreshing dash of acid to temper the sickly sweetness.

The comedy waffles between nonsensically heightened and realistically grounded, often alternating between the two modes at random, never landing on a tone.

It never feels like Brooks has a grasp on the material here, which careens aimlessly through Ella’s harried day-to-day, in a handsomely bland, serviceable style.

It wants to comment on the algorithms that rule our lives, spewing constantly recycled content at us seemingly at random, but it is exactly the thing that it points to: an upcycled Frankenstein’s monster of intellectual property spraying a stew of Easter eggs and Halloween costumes at the viewer, praying that something sticks.

What’s so maddening about A Quiet Place Part II is the unused potential. Krasinski opens up the world and timeline of the film, but doesn’t utilize it in any meaningful way, introducing new ideas but then jettisoning the opportunity. Again and again he falls back on more of the same old tricks from “A Quiet Place,” which was a bore to begin with.

The real problem is that there isn't enough whimsy in the world to save this unengaging story.

The costumes are giving Halloween, the sets and props are giving Xena: Warrior Princess and the story and performances aren’t giving anything at all. Mortal Kombat II seems destined to go the way of the ‘90s sequel Mortal Kombat: Annihilation — directly into obscurity.

There is some excellent location-shooting in downtown Los Angeles during the climax, seen through the lens of a bodycam or quadcopter or drone camera. It’s not enough to save the aesthetic of the entire film, though, which is somehow both gray and nauseating.

Cool New York City detective John Shaft is back again in, you guessed it, Shaft, with a modern update that goes completely sideways in all the wrong ways. This Shaft is a bad mother all right, and it'd be better if he just shut his mouth.

The changes Bissell makes to the story are overly contrived, and the writing and editing are shaky. Most egregiously, Ann’s perspective is completely underwritten, without any personal history and the single humanizing factor of one daughter, who appears only briefly.

The whole thing might as well all be written in Minions chatter. It's wacky, but somehow dull, kind of like conversing with a Minion.

The whole endeavor is a naked attempt to cash in on the young adult fantasy trend spearheaded by "Harry Potter." There have been many attempts to snatch the Potter crown (and purse) but Artemis Fowl will not be the hot new kiddie fantasy franchise, based on this utterly charmless first entry.

This is your warning that if you have any affinity for the ballet, avoid this at all costs.

With all the songs, gowns and corny jokes, kids under 10 will likely love it, and frankly, that’s who this is for, not the millennials or Gen Z kids who grew up with Brandy or Hillary Duff.

The breathtakingly bad Justice League, with its corny banter and terrible effects just might signify a return to that goofy Batman form.

The circumstances of the story might be “timely,” but “Dreams” doesn’t help us understand the situation better, leaving us in the dark about what we’re supposed to take away from this story of sex, violence, money and the state. Anything it suggests we already know.

A jumbled nonsensical mess.

The effort put into making this film work is palpable, but the result is something deeply surreal and strange. Perhaps this story simply can’t work as a film, or perhaps it wasn’t a very good musical to begin with. It’s a question that may be debated for years to come.

Ultimately, all we come away with is a few cheap laughs at online culture, which dates Love Me to its own time and place, an artifact not even of now, but the recent past. This love story isn’t futuristic at all.

Written by Nick Moore, Ruckus Skye and Lane Skye, the script just doesn't give us enough material to care about the story, which is devoid of subtext and keeps everything on the surface.

The Addams Family 2 feels as if it’s lost the spark of the first one. The jokes that felt fresh in the first film are stale here, with the story’s twists glaringly predictable.

The geography and some of the coincidences are as baffling as the messaging. The 96-minute runtime feels cyclical and endless.

It’s a film that dares you to give it a bad review, simply so it can turn around and call you a bully who picks on the people who try. It invites you to giggle at Florence’s horrible singing and then promptly scolds you for laughing, creating a contradiction that goes unreconciled.

The ambitious but unwieldy screenplay suffers from a lack of cohesion and loses control of the nonlinear memories and fantasies of seven people, with some of the characters’ motivations also lost in the shuffle.

It’s a film that ultimately feels less like a celebration and more like further exploitation of the star, leaving us all with much more unsettling questions about Houston’s life and legacy. Sadly, the disappointing “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” doesn’t let Whitney rest in peace.

Unfortunately, despite the interesting history, the film itself is a dry, scattered slog, neutered of all the thorny, contradictory details of the real story.

Somehow, despite the sexist, foul-mouthed rancor, there are messages to be found about the false promises of toxic masculinity and learning to be the person you want to be without repeating the sins of your parents. Though it’s rough going to get there.

Jack’s Apocalypse is unable to convey any realistic stakes or authenticity in its story line.

It ends on a rather strange and unsettling note. Framed in a different context, this story could almost be a horror film.

Jacobs simply can’t make any of it work.

While its heart is in the right place, Welcome to Happiness is too fixated on its twee peccadilloes to truly succeed.

It feels at once overwritten and thematically thin, coasting on a cutesy concept before descending into relentless, and therefore meaningless, violence.

What's offensive about A Bad Moms Christmas (and “Bad Moms”) is just how shoddily made it is.

If there’s one word to describe the girl-power comedy “Like a Boss,” it’s incomprehensible. Structurally, industrially, philosophically and emotionally incomprehensible. What should have been an easy breezy buddy comedy is rather a flabbergasting tone salad.

The film looks amazing, but the writing is painfully pretentious and the acting beyond stiff and amateurish, so it’s impossible to gain a foothold into this story.

Bleeding Steel is a cartoonishly crazy, completely nonsensical cyberpunk action flick that is torturous to behold, and well below Chan’s caliber.

It's a shame that what could have been an intriguing situational thriller devolves into a hateful, arduous drag

There’s enough weirdness for Yoga Hosers to possibly generate some stoner cult appeal, but it’s shoddily slapped together, with a clearly first-draft script, terrible editing (by Smith the elder) and continuity errors.

As Replicas races headlong toward its conclusion, the filmmakers manage to avoid every potentially interesting choice for far dumber, and far more inexplicable, conclusions.

The film is more mood and aesthetic than anything else, and it nails the fictionalized, aspirational high school look — down to the actors who appear to be in their mid-to-late 20s playing 18-year-olds.

No amount of star power can save the script by Brad Desche.

The film's musings on artists and muses tries to be deep but gets bogged down in tiresome booze-soaked mind games.

The story of Here surrounding Richard and Margaret is relatable, entirely predictable and utterly dull.

Techie buzzwords like “hacking” and “bitcoins” fly, but it’s all just for show. It’s not about the tech, despite a convoluted subplot with an FBI agent in pursuit. The real story is of Sam and Josie, but uneasy romance is misguided to be sure.

Every character states their inner motivation out loud, often without prompting, making for a film that loses its intrigue almost immediately.

The whole film is a bizarre exercise in fantasy-building on a budget, from the computer-generated sets to the over-long, predictable story.

The obvious exposition, tortured dialogue and shoddy special effects just make you wish you were watching something else.

The Conway Curve wants to be a world of colorful characters, wacky high jinks and happy endings, but it’s just so stilted and blandly unfunny that it can’t support its own frantic antics.

’Til Death Do Us Part takes on the admirable task of depicting life with an abuser and the very real obstacles to starting over. But its stereotypical writing, which errs on the side of cheesy and hackneyed, rather than deep and psychologically rich, dooms “’Til Death.”

What could have been a taut and tense thriller is ankled by the inert characters, clunky screenplay and nonexistent back story.

OF: RDG is classic recent Ritchie: star-studded, snarky, and ultimately grating, lousy with weird glasses and bad accents. This thing is so slight, a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of a “Mission: Impossible” that it’s barely a movie.

Bright spots are found in the supporting cast.... They just are not enough to pull "Dirty Grandpa" out of its ill-conceived and poorly executed gutter.

The Trouble With Terkel feels painfully outdated and stale, with rudimentary computer-generated visuals and characters that are potty-mouthed only for the sake of provocation.

Despite what the film might want us to believe, if he walks, talks and acts like a selfish, predatory creep, he is, and there's just no sympathizing with him.

It’s not funny, it’s not satirical, and it’s not worth your time, or Toni Collette’s

My Father Die is all provocation and no substance, and therefore completely meaningless.

The tone is wildly inconsistent, particularly with plucky, lighthearted music accompaniment scoring what is essentially a teen crime spree.

While there’s no shortage of comedy talent on screen in The House, there’s a dire lack of actual laughs to be found in this strange shell of a movie.

The climax is overwrought and cheesy, which doesn't match with the quiet dignity of the Inuit man. He carries a profound and sage warning, but Chloe and Theo just isn't the right dramatic package.

The story on screen comes off as a naive interpretation of the homeless experience as imagined from a place of great privilege.

From a storytelling perspective, the obsession with guns in a movie aimed at children is troubling, in poor taste and is lazy writing to boot.

There are grief dramas, and there are wacky family comedies, and there are films about charming screw-ups, but the degree of difficulty for one film to pull off all three at once is incredibly high. The disjointed “Pretty Broken,” written by Jill Remesnyder and directed by Brett Eichenberger, doesn’t clear the bar.

Ergüven's vision is a wild, melodramatic journey that offers no answers or insights, and by the end it only leaves one feeling, well, completely flabbergasted.

With wooden performances and a lack of character development, Below Her Mouth is more X-rated, late-night cable skin flick than trenchant exploration of female sexuality.

There’s more focus on the dull mystery and predictable story twists, and not nearly enough choreographic ecstasy on-screen.

Despite an energetic supporting cast, including Martin, Alyssa Milano, Danny Aiello and Garry Basaraba, the two leads sleepwalk through this limp and formulaic endeavor.

Nothing on screen is as electrifying or surprising as it was on the page, as semi-fictionally enhanced as the writing was.

The film manages to be exceedingly dull, perhaps because it's too enamored of its own design, concept and location to bother with a captivating story.

What really hampers Miles to Go is its aimless wandering. Many things could be forgiven with some growth or movement in the journey, but ultimately, this one just ends up running in circles.

The story veers off track, and Rokesh can’t cleanly execute the wild tonal shifts and haphazard story beats.

No Letting Go has all the subtlety of an after-school special, and the performances feel like they're from a public service announcement about mental illness.

Queenpins does nothing other than waste your time with bad wigs and poop jokes, and that is the biggest crime of all.

From the homophobic slurs to the lowest common denominator body humor to the stale gender politics, Pitching Tents is all cutesy retro raunchiness without any innovation or comedic payoff. It might have been excusable back in the day, but now it’s just boring.

Despite its best efforts to be thought-provoking, the film is dramatically inert, slow and its revelations aren’t all that politically illuminating, relying on coincidence and worn tropes to obfuscate its lack of ingenuity.

Unable to rise above this internal conflict, it’s a film that’s both dull and disposable. Though it sets up the opportunity for more interconnected franchise filmmaking, this is a beast that needs to be put down.

Everyone here really wants to make something good and moving, but they’re all working so hard to make something out of nothing.

What unfolds on screen over the course of three hours and one minute in Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1 can only be described as a massive boondoggle, a misguided and excruciatingly tedious cinematic experience. That Costner has promised three more installments feels like a threat.

Often, trying too hard to be edgy sails right past offensive and just hits boring. Sherman, amazingly, manages to nail both.

It commits the worst comedy crime of all — there’s no punchline.

For all of Berry’s breathless, screechy effort, Kidnap doesn’t contain any suspense or tension.

Bell jettisons any possibility for radical ideals or emotional poignancy in favor of a hackneyed rom-com ending tacked onto a movie that’s both stale and unpleasantly madcap.

Experimental, yes, but this one wildly overstays its welcome.

Unfortunately, The Syndrome fails to adequately elucidate the many nuances of this complicated subject.

It may be a shoddily made Skittles ad masquerading as a superhero riff, but it’s Levi’s performance that sends it into the stratosphere of cringe.

The cryptic and mysterious story is crammed with overwrought issues — cancer, divorce, fraud, war — which the characters then over-explain.