Mark Kennedy

If there was a stylish chic in the first film, it’s gone in the second, which sometimes seems cloying in its attempt to recreate the first.

Jenna Ortega’s stark rise as Gen Z’s goth-glam princess takes a pointless, awkward turn in “Miller’s Girl,” a new romantic horror movie about cerebral people that’s simply tiresome.

Kraven the Hunter can climb sheer walls like a gorilla, snatch fish out of streams like a bear and outrun deer. But there’s something this slab of human beef can’t do: Anchor a decent movie.

Black’s filmmaking is old-school, grounded in ’80s humor, reveling at its over-the-topness and often gleefully thumbing its nose at political correctness. That might be refreshing, but it also can lead to questionable decisions.

Showing Up may be a rallying cry to let artists just be artists — Reichardt is famously an artist in residence at Bard College, in large part to have health insurance — but she may have miscalculated how much compassion is generated by a supposed lover of beauty who is as cold and off-putting as her figurines.

Director Julius Onah does well with the action but fumbles the quieter moments and supervises editing that’s the opposite of crisp, not helped by script writers who ape military language — “Negative, the package is the priority” — and grandiose sentiment — “The country is lost.”

The filmmakers — director Daniel Espinosa, hobbled by a meandering script from Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless — simply do not know what to do with this creature once they’ve given us his backstory.

Writer and director Drew Pearce has made an uneven feature film directorial debut. He flaps around for a consistent tone, stunts some potential story lines and kicks out a bunch of cliches. Then, clearly unable to find a rational way to end his film, he adds two massive doses of nonsensical ultra-violence.

Maybe [Borgli's] trolling America but “The Drama” is clearly the worst thing he’s ever done.

The director ends on a righteous note but he’s not earned it.

It’s really a series of violent vignettes strung together, getting more and more outlandish and introducing characters at such a blistering pace that you just want it to stop already.

There’s always something a little off about Father Stu, a sense that the filmmakers have taken a lot of liberties with a real life to make it extra saintly.

The film is apparently supposed to be a meditation on masculinity, with Eastwood’s one-time rodeo star Mike Milo taming and rebuilding his young rebellious charge into an honorable young man. Instead, it’s a meditation on clumsy and predictable filmmaking.

The first thing director Roland Emmerich should do after his latest movie Midway hits theaters is apologize. Apologize to the visual effects crew, the stuntmen, the carpenters, the costumers and artists. He has squandered their considerable visual skill in retelling the crucial World War II battle at Midway by melding some of the best action sequences in years with the most banal of words.

Wandering aimlessly in the well-worn corridors of 1980s puerile frat flicks, Life of the Party wobbles to a predictable end and then sort of finishes without a bang.

Somebody, anybody, should drag Odenkirk away from this nobody franchise.

Henson does as best she can with this material, attempting Lucille Ball-level physical comedy. But she’s laboring and often overshadowed by the one unpredictable spark in the film — provided by Erykah Badu.

It’s not a compelling environmental film or a good drama about racers. Like many of the electric cars on the track that season, it stalls.

As an acting exercise, it’s intriguing — barely any scene partners and all unfolding in real time. As a film, not so much: After a plodding, placid start, it goes from first gear into fifth and never relents as the woes pile on.

Gretel & Hansel is as visually arresting as it is tedious, a 90-minute movie that really should have been a 3-minute music video for Marilyn Manson or Ozzy Osbourne. It’s in the horror genre only loosely. It’s more eerie, if that’s a genre. Actually, it’s like dread for 90 minutes. It’s dreadful.

Few films in memory have squandered so much acting talent in such a cliche-ridden, exploitative and dishonest way.

The saddest thing about “Transformers One” is the wastefulness of another dull outing in a universe geared toward kids just learning to transform themselves.

The tagline for “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is “Some things are meant to stay buried.” That also applies to the misguided “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy,” which should definitely stay deep underground for eternity.

It’s a tedious mess to endure and seemed like way more fun making than watching.

Comedian Sebastian Maniscalco has co-written and stars in this big sloppy Italian American kiss about family that not only leans into stereotypes — working-class Italians on one side, WASPs on the other — but plows the field with them.

The Red Sea Diving Resort is terribly overcooked, turning the real-life drama into a light caper like “Ocean’s 11,” adding cartoonish dialogue from hack superhero films and slathering the whole mess in white savior complex.

Deep Water, despite an all-star team behind it, barely makes a splash. Although it is being billed as an erotic thriller, it’s tedious and clunky. Trips to the supermarket are more exciting.

Director Kyle Marvin fails to build any real tension as he frighteningly shifts from farce to cringe to melancholy, but real footage of the big game is nicely knitted into the second half.

The film somehow manages its own witchcraft in finding the perfect un-sweet spot — it’s too scary for little kids, not scary enough for older ones, not funny or clever enough for their parents, and too redundant for everyone. Poof! Watch the audience disappear.

Put down Orwell’s book and you’ll shiver, convinced to redouble your efforts to protect civil society, stand for dignity and fight for the rule of law. Walk out of this new animated movie and you’ll likely just want to inhale more M&Ms. And fart.

Amsterdam reaches for something contemporary to say about race relations, concentration of wealth, veterans and fascism but ends up with a plodding, mannerist noise.

Caught between PG and R, as well as lost at the crossroads of inadvertent comedy and horror, the PG-13 Five Nights at Freddy’s has to go down as one of the poorest films in any genre this year.

January is often where bad films are stashed, but “The King’s Daughter” isn’t just bad, it’s a cloying, cliched mess that’s not worth even the slightest risk of contacting COVID-19 to see in theaters.

Slack when it should be terrifying, “Wolf Man” suffers from cheap sentimentality, laughably obvious script reveals, poor continuity and a creature that is less predatory than painful. Pity comes to mind.

As for the documentary about the man of the hour, do as the title suggests: Run away.

Honest Thief, co-written and directed by Mark Williams, is a predictable and slack affair, relying on eerie music, dark sets and smoke to create tension. There is no particular set of skills here.

The filmmakers are also clearly trying their hand at satire, but ham-fistedly. Set during the Reagan-era “Just Say No” period, “Cocaine Bear” hopes to remark on the demonization of drugs and it also seems to have something to say about how humans misunderstand the balance of nature. Neither work.

It’s so dated there’s even a mention of Halliburton.

This is pure lazy storytelling, like thinking that just showing us a clip of Bob Ross painting is somehow uproariously funny.

Bride Hard — which combines thrusting male strippers dressed as Vikings as well as deadly automatic weapon fire — isn’t funny or thrilling. It has the kind of lazy pacing you’d usually find on the Hallmark Channel and a level of acting not much better than porn.

There is perhaps an intriguing movie here somewhere — “Who decides what is God’s will?” is one lingering question —but to find it you have to slice away all the bawdy and ultra-violent excesses that are clearly intended to push buttons, like a 5-year-old testing her parents’ patience. Yawn.

But no one emerges unscathed from this funny-when-it-shouldn’t-be mess. The movie’s slogan is the weird “Y’all Need a Pilot?” but it should be “Y’all Need a Filmmaker?”

It’s an incoherent mess, something that, back in the day, would be straight to DVD. Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 has an after-school special vibe with no real horror and no real awareness that it should.