Mark Kennedy

Paramount’s limp, animated remake actually triggers new stereotypes in the service of trying to expose racism for a pre-teen audience. The studio seems to have reached for legitimacy by bringing the venerated Brooks along for the bumpy ride, darkening both legacies. What emerged sits uneasily at the corner of tribute, parody, theft and laziness.

The Jared Hess-directed action-adventure artfully straddles the line between delighting preteen gamers and keeping their parents awake.

Wonder Park has a great premise about a spunky kid engineer and a world she constructs taking flight, but takes a few too many dark loop-de-loops and crashes hard. If you pass this amusement park, skip it.

It is more like half a movie, standing in the shadow of its parent. It is a film made to sell us more lunchboxes.

If the “Insidious” franchise is your jam, by all means go and see the original Fab Four of the Lambert family battle hollow-eyed demons for perhaps the last time. But for everyone else, why not let the past stay in the past?

Overly long, bombastic and poorly focused.

More concrete examples of how mushrooms or dropping acid aided life are sorely needed.

Next Goal Wins isn’t a tale of “woe” or “woah!” but “meh.”

Simon McQuoid does a decent job on his feature directorial debut, giving us a constantly staggered hits of dopamine in the form of controlled violence.

Roberts has clearly been given a bigger budget and it shows in the nicely realized submerged city the poor young women must navigate. He’s saddled with a terrible film title — 47 meters was the depth of the ocean floor in the first film — but none of that matters once the air tanks and masks go on.

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

Look, we hate to break it to you, it’s not going to end well for many of this privileged set, as they hunt whoever is hunting them. Coherence is also stabbed a lot because a clear motive for the mass murder is really hard to understand.

The problem with Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is the same problem faced by all of the installments — balancing the humanity with the metal.

It’s perhaps appropriate that the latest Aquaman movie is about a lost kingdom. In many ways, this mini-franchise is just that, a Jason Momoa kingdom that could just quietly sink below the cinematic waves.

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.”

Washington earns his audience’s tears with an unrushed, unshowy style, letting an adult and very human relationship evolve on camera, skipping back and forth through years as it goes from love, birth, death and acceptance.

Green wobbles as he tries to land this plane and what had been an intriguing premise to talk about fame and the parasitic industries that live off it turns into a gross-out, run-for-it bloodfest and a plot that unravels. It becomes what it intended to satirize — a pop spectacle.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra and the design team do a great job in every department but are let down by a derivative and baggy screenplay by Adam Sztykiel, Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani that goes from one violent scene to another like a video game in order to paper over a plot both undercooked and overcooked.

After a bit of a slow start, “Moonfall” gets absolutely trippy in the last third as it details a mind-blowing alternative history to mankind that spans millennia and distant planets and backs it all up with gorgeous, massive special effects. Logic is abandoned altogether but few will care.

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.

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.

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 Nutcracker and the Four Realms is visually marvelous, inconsistently acted and rather incoherent in that fantasy genre way.

Here fails to connect all these centuries of human experiences, other than to celebrate the human experience in all its messiness, triumph and sadness.

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?”

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.

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.

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.

Lumbering along while fatally wounded, this is a franchise that doesn’t know it is dead, staggering ever onward without an ending in sight.

The first half doesn’t fit with the second half, there are too many distractions and the filmmakers think it’s clever to leave clues but they do it clumsily and at the last minute and it’s really exhausting for the viewer.

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

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.

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.

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.

A curious new animated attempt to monetize the comic icon again by giving him an origin story and then asking him to do things a galaxy away from what he does in the funny pages.

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.

In his attempt to give new life to the cult hero of comics and film, [Sanders has] given us plenty of beauty at the expense of depth or coherence.

Visually and storytelling-wise it’s not a cut above much of what kids can watch on TV these days. This is a franchise that looks like it’s slowly going the way of the dinos, while we drool.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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