Mark Kennedy

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.

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

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.

At the film’s center is Q but there is a hollowness there. She can rappel down a staircase using a fire hose, endure waterboarding and use a dinner tray as an assault weapon, but there’s little insight in her inner life or emotions and her backstory appears too late.

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

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

Ron’s Gone Wrong thinks it’s being subversive when its really being very corporate. It wastes its voice cast — including Olivia Colman, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis — and it never really connects, ending as awkwardly as a modern-day seventh-grader with a rock collection.

A satisfying conclusion awaits but, truth be told, it has been a bit of a slog, with soft digressions into social critiques and the meaning of faith grafted onto a setup that, by the third movie in the franchise, shows its seams instantly. Wake up, indeed.

Throughout The King, you can feel Jarecki desperately working, slicing, trying to make connections. What could have been a gentle, personal travelogue is reworked and reworked until it’s often guilty of the last sin of Elvis — excess.

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

This dark, meandering and cliche-ridden bummer starring a trying-hard Jennifer Lawrence tries to reach for a cool and stylish look at contemporary spycraft but often falls victim to cartoon violence and a muddled story. The creators may call it erotic but it’s as erotic as a visit to the dentist.

Credit goes to the film’s visual effects folk, who made fur alive and gave texture to smoke. But retreading this story with a Cumberbatch, should send Hollywood bigwigs into the booby hatch.

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.

A new directing and writing team fails to shock or scare with a color-by-numbers plot and a meandering, languid wannabe frightfest.

A bewildering 90-minute, narrator-less and wordless experiment that’s as audacious as it is infuriating. It’s not clear if everyone was high making it or we should be while watching it.

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.

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

Spenser Confidential is a bit of a mess tonally with a plot that keeps attracting new weird layers, like lint on a sweater. It wants to be funnier than it is. It hopes to be deeper than it is.

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.

The filmmakers employ all kinds of ways to try to keep viewers interested, like split screens, some farce and a surreal dream sequence, but there’s not enough humor or grit or anything other than actors swanning around in period clothing.

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.