Katie Walsh

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.

Scream 7 is an unfortunate tarnish on this otherwise sturdy franchise’s legacy.

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.

Representationally, Clika is an important and worthy film. Cinematically, it unfortunately can’t find the beat.

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.

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.

While the film’s execution seems expert on the surface, the internal narrative design is unfortunately ham-handed and woefully dull.

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.

Red One is a confounding project that is clearly trying to be for all audiences (it’s weirdly kiddie-oriented, but feels more aimed at adults) and is so bad it ends up being for none.

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

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

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.

Argylle has bone-deep structural issues on a fundamental level, but it is also a failure of directorial execution from top to bottom, resulting in what has to be one of the most expensive worst movies ever made. It’s honestly fascinating — something that should be studied in a lab.

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 is a boring paint-by-numbers ghost movie, a jumble of tropes borrowed from movies like “The Ring,” and a poor facsimile of its influences.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Memory has a decent director in Campbell (“Casino Royale,” “Vertical Limit”) and a great cast (yes, that’s Ray Stevenson as a corrupt cop), but a crippling case of a bad script that can’t manage to make us care about any of these characters.

It feels like a bad parody, a shadow of what a film is, not an actual film itself. The color palette is a dreary mud puddle of grays and browns, and there’s no sense of space or geography. It has no weight, no heft, no texture, no color, no sense of magic or wonder in the least. The story itself has no sense of stakes or resonance, and the actors vary in affect from lifeless to dutiful to pained.

The plot proceeds at a punishing clip but there’s a tediousness to the proceedings, even at a rather tight 97 minutes, because no dramatic weight is given to anything that unfolds.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

Some may enjoy the cacophonous, raunchy, lowest-common-denominator dreck that The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard has to offer. To those I say, godspeed. But it’s undeniable that the actors, the audiences and the filmmakers all deserve better.

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.

A film littered with tired tropes.

There’s not a thrill to be found in this ostensible thriller, a rote kidnapping exercise taped together with digital blood spatter and an overly dramatic score, vaguely gesturing at global crises from five years ago.

What is remarkable, though, is just how unbelievably unbelievable this inspired-by-true-life tale is.

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

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.

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.

An angry, violent and despairing film, without much of a point other than that existence can be angry and despairing and memory is a prison. As a piece of art, entertainment or cultural ephemera, it is indeed bold, but it is significant not for what it says about Capone, but rather what it says about Trank, and the ongoing saga of his career.

Do little? They could not have done less. The only appropriate adjective for this Dolittle is “hasty.” Everything feels slapdash and half-rendered; the plot proceeds in a fashion that could be described only as perfunctory. Everyone on screen seems to be in a stumbling daze, especially Downey as the frazzle-dazzled doctor.

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.

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

Fickman’s directing is uninspired at best, barely competent at worst. The framing and composition is dire; there’s no sense of rhythm or flow, and characters constantly appear and disappear at random. But it’s the writing that truly fails the film and characters.

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.

James Franco’s Pretenders begs the question: is this a film about bohemian artists or a parody of a film about bohemian artists? Because if we’re supposed to take this laughably trite and sexist claptrap seriously, one has to laugh.

Rambo lumbers to the finish line in the flaccid fifth installment, which is a Frankenstein’s monster of badly photocopied references to the previous movies, limply strung together with the laziest of screenplays.

While Moop might appeal to the Burning Man die-hard set, or for aficionados of the tales of doomed, Sisyphean film productions, beyond that, it’s not much more than a minor curio.

While “Mean Girls Apocalypse” sounds like a winning premise, and an incredible thought experiment, the result is something narratively slack and intensely off-putting, which no amount of excellent acting can save.

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

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

There is absolutely no reason to catch a ride with the nasty, brutish and shrill "Stuber," a horror movie about our current American nightmare of late capitalist economics and unchecked law enforcement masquerading as an "action comedy."

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.

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.

Chokehold provides a poorly written and terribly acted framework as a thin context for the action.

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

Eastwood is known for his ruthless efficiency as a filmmaker, but The Mule feels dashed off at best, barely even a movie. It’s a strange rough draft, poorly executed and disastrously performed, despite the starry cast.

The overwrought script is full of dusty old clichés like this, and Mullins and Co. don’t have the chops to sell them. The supporting cast offers wooden line readings, while Mullins is an uncharismatic performer, with a range that extends from dead-eyed to high-pitched yelling.

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

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

This limp, lifeless, one-joke action comedy sequel, directed by David Kerr, comes 15 years after the 2003 "Johnny English," and manages to overstay its welcome, even at a scant 88 minutes, mostly because writer William Davies didn't bother to write anything other than "Johnny English is bad at spying."

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

A meandering, pointless and boring rumination on substances and those who love to abuse them.

This adaptation completely bungles the update.

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.

It’s a chaotic jumble of movie references, cellphone footage, emojis, trigger warnings and edgy teen content. But it’s the fumbled “feminist” commentary that is just embarrassing to watch.

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

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."

All in all, just another boring genre exercise.

The salt in the wound of this painfully out-of-touch film is the footage of real L.A. homeless camps and people, as if the film were saying something trenchant about the issue. What a gross misunderstanding of this glib story about a rich man who steals stories and inspiration from struggling people.

Despite the best efforts of McCarthy, and a winsome Maya Rudolph as Phil’s 1940s-style secretary, Bubbles, The Happytime Murders is more like the “Boringtime Slog.”

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.

The story is wildly melodramatic, the execution amateurish, and the line readings from the supporting cast are stilted at best. Traicos is campy and compelling as the gleefully unhinged Jackie, but she’s the only interesting thing in an otherwise dull film.

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.

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

Everything about this movie seems ripped from the ’80s, including the woefully sexist gender politics. But that’s only one of many reasons that this B-movie dreck should have stayed underwater.

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.

For all of the manic anti-authoritarian energy that Knoxville and pals generate in Action Point, it’s not directed at anything, which renders it meaningless and leaves the film to fizzle out like a deflated balloon.

The whole endeavor is an exercise in trying to do too many things — rehash a nostalgic property, propel Mexican film star Eugenio Derbez to mainstream stardom, revive Anna Faris' film career — but it never actually manages to be a good movie.

A great cast cannot save the dramatically inert and totally inept rom-com "Alex & The List," which is short on both the rom and the com.

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.

Have I changed so much that I can't find this funny anymore? Nah. Broken Lizard hasn't changed enough to keep up with the times, turning in a badly degraded copy of the original. Stale, unfunny and offensive is quite the hat trick.

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.

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.

A Lesson in Cruelty tries to affect a dark comedic tone, but fails spectacularly. There's no comedy, despite Lebrun's over-the-top vamping, and the dark elements are far too disturbing and violent.

Nibali and Galati deliver their lines in matching monotones, in scenes that are simply deadening. None of the trio of leads has the presence to carry the film, though Mihaljevich displays a flicker as the dangerous sociopath Wendel. Alexander's limited style doesn't help these performances either, nor does the wildly underwritten script.

Proud Mary isn't a retro action thriller at all, but a staid family drama, and an incredibly boring one at that.

For all of its incompetency of craft, like a strange bit of outsider art, the film showcases a fascinatingly unrefined look at the very real fear felt by immigrants in Donald Trump's America.

Father Figures is a movie, ostensibly. I'm pretty sure it is. Moving images were projected, along with recorded sound, which indicates it is a movie, but the effect was so listless, low-energy and profoundly unentertaining that I jotted down in my notes "what even IS this?" It would be more accurate to describe the experience as a nearly two-hour borderline hostage situation, with torture involving bad, offensive and unfunny "comedy."

Spent exhausts the audience’s goodwill within the first few minutes of this bizarre project, and requires the utmost patience to endure.

For all of the mini-melodramas that populate this tale, and the repellent ickiness in the central relationship, the worst part about Almost Friends is how incredibly dull and dramatically inert it is.

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

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

Ultimately Suburbicon is woefully underwritten. Gardner and Maggie are mere sketches, a set of facial tics and accessories masquerading as real characters.