Katie Walsh

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.

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.

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.

Two Weeks to Go is not a movie, it’s a sketch of a character study or a possible outline for a future project. It’s most definitely self-indulgent drivel.

The most disappointing thing is that Nine Lives doesn’t even dare to be an audacious mess. It’s a Frankenstein’s monster of Hollywood’s worst instincts, a movie made with a math formula where its vision should have been.

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.

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.

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.

A dirge of unfunny scatological material, techno-anxiety and child endangerment masquerading as familial bonding. Settle in for the "Long Haul," because this is one bumpy, miserable ride.

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

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.

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.

It would still be a stinker even if it wasn't cloaked in a dark shroud of cultural and political relevancy. It's just that bad.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.