Matt Singer

Why make a Venom movie (much less three of them) if the character will never get to meet Spider-Man? Beyond the fact that it is sort of fun to see Tom Hardy act like a weirdo, I don’t think Sony ever came up with a satisfying answer to that question.

The movie around Jordan is just like Kelly himself: Cold, detached, and brutal.

Sabotage’s mystery component is mostly dead on arrival, and poor Olivia Williams has the thankless job of carrying it as the no-nonsense detective searching for the killer. But as Ayer proved with his previous film, End Of Watch, he has a natural eye and ear for the ecosystem of law enforcement.

Here Today is too peculiar and heartfelt to be truly bad, and it does make an interesting companion piece to Mr. Saturday Night, with Crystal working through same issues from an older perspective. Together, they feel like the work of an artist baring their soul in a sometimes unpleasant way.

It’s a comedy that seems perpetually in search of laughs it almost never finds, as if the filmmakers showed up on the first day of production, looked at the script, and realized they’d forgotten to write any jokes, and then had to scramble to find some on set.

From the first scene to the last, it’s an absolute mess.

The movie is over 90 minutes before the slasher component kicks in — and by that point, I was too bored to find much of anything endearingly silly.

True, Out of the Shadows is an improvement over the last Ninja Turtles movie, but only in the way that a mild cold is an improvement over the flu. It’s not good, but at least it’s not so terrible that it makes you want to lie in bed for a few days.

People routinely label Exorcist II: The Heretic as one of the worst sequels ever made, but at least that movie was going for something. Whatever its flaws, it had some ideas and it is never boring. The Exorcist: Believer commits that sin, and so many more.

Dead Men Tell No Tales is the sort of sequel that’s so bad it makes you retroactively wonder why you liked the original film so much in the first place.

It’s not just that Michael’s portrait of its title character is incomplete. He’s depicted as so pure that he becomes uninteresting; a moonwalking and talking human jukebox with little in the way of a compelling story. The only thing this basic rags-to-riches narrative has going for it is its non-stop parade of Michael Jackson and Jackson 5 hits, music so good it will surely turn Michael into a major box-office hit.

Despite all the fairies and waving of wands, there’s just not much magic here.

Him fumbles a solid premise with a tedious, one-note execution that delivers very few scares and zero insights into either of its central subjects.

The fights and shootouts are too choppy to be clear and too bloody to be fun. It’s basically an over-caffeinated lecture about geopolitics with frequent cutaways to grisly murders. It didn’t necessarily need a page one rewrite, but a better and less hectic edit could have done wonders.

Lee has already made another movie in high frame rate, and seems to have a solid handle on how to use it to his advantage. “HFR” makes water and cityscapes look spectacular, and Gemini Man has plenty of both. And it makes action scenes even more visceral, especially ones that utilize long takes to allow for a lot of movement through the frame towards and away from the camera. There’s a long take of Smith’s character riding a motorcycle in Colombia that will go down in history as one of the coolest bike stunts ever.

The degree to which Men in Black International wastes Hemsworth and Thompson’s talents — and in the process almost makes them seem like bland, uninteresting actors, despite all the previous evidence to the contrary — is almost an accomplishment in and of itself, and the rest of the film is equally useless (not to mention long, at just under 120 minutes).

Chaos Walking isn’t the sort of disaster that inspires so-bad-its-good appreciation, and it’s not quite interesting enough to become a genuine cult object. It’s more of a noble misfire. And I would love to hear its creators’ thoughts on why they made certain choices.

Bates notwithstanding, Bad Santa 2’s supporting cast just isn’t up to snuff.

Trevorrow and his team have steadfastly refused to learn their own film’s message: You should never bring a dead thing back to life, no matter how beautiful or unique it was.

Baywatch’s comedy (credited to six different writers) is second-rate and its action is even worse, with special effects that rank among the absolute worst I’ve seen in a big summer movie in many years.

Until today, I’m not sure I would have believed a movie with this much theoretical “excitement” could be so boring.

Maybe there’s just no time for things like “cohesive character development” or “a compelling story” when you’ve got to service as much Nintendo IP as humanly possible in barely 90 minutes before credits.

If Schrader and Ellis set out to prove that movies are dying or already dead, they might have done their job too well. The Canyons doesn’t play like the cure for a moribund industry, so much as a mildly effective, highly depressing administration of the last rites.

Assassin’s Creed makes you actively work for its pleasures, and it’s heartening to see a film of this scale that’s strange and ambitious and doesn’t spoon-feed viewers every little detail.

A great cast and a fairly clever turn into the realm of horror can’t redeem what otherwise feels like a very familiar, very safe piece of satire.

There’s almost nothing in this movie that hasn’t been seen elsewhere before. And done a whole lot better.

The rare cinematic experience that is both wall-to-wall jokes and wall-to-wall depressing.

If you are going to Venom for cool superhero action — or for compelling characters, pulpy science-fiction, impressive special effects, a parable about corporations run amok, or a single significant connection to Spider-Man — you will be sorely disappointed. If you can look past all of that (and the dreadful first hour), your reward is Hardy, delivering one of the all-time great unhinged performances.

Morbius is like watching an incompetent juggler throw six knives in the air and then get stabbed by each of them on the way down.

The film actually has some solid elements—a couple of appealing supporting performances, a good villain, effective comic relief, and even some awkward but sincere attempts at subtext about its aging cast. But the fact remains: An Expendables movie should be fun, and for long stretches, this one isn’t.

That’s Kraven the Hunter, and all these Sony superhero movies, in a nutshell: Bait and switches designed to maintain a license until the next actual Spider-Man film.

Let me put it this way: When I look back at this franchise in another 30 years, Scream 7 is not going to be one of the installments I’m nostalgic about.

Clichés usually become clichés because they resonate with audiences, and all it takes to freshen one up are a couple of new twists. Proud Mary has just enough of them to make some satisfying out of very familiar material.

If (Re)Assignment played more like a spoof of vintage pulp and less like a tacky rehash of it, that choice could have worked. Instead, it just comes off as clueless — about gender as well as filmmaking.

Even when the movie around him is total garbage nonsense, it is fun to watch Idris Elba; the way he walks, the way he stares at people with eyes blazing with intensity. He is an ideal action hero. He looks like the coolest man who ever lived in his fantasy Western garb, and he moves with a rare combination of grace and force, like the greatest possible combination of Gene Kelly and Chow Yun-Fat. He makes an amazing Gunslinger. Sadly, he’s trapped in a not-very-good Gunslinger movie.

If Zoolander 2 was a party, the guest list alone would make it the greatest ever thrown. But Zoolander 2 is not a party. It is a movie. A bad movie.

The nonsensical story would matter less if The Mummy would get out of Cruise’s way and let him do what he does best. Instead, it buries him beneath punishing dialogue scenes and surrounds him with unconvincing and unoriginal special effects.

Quan remains an extremely likable actor, as well as an impressive martial artist. (Even before Everything Everywhere All at Once, he had worked on several Hollywood productions as a fight choreographer.) It’s great to see him back on the screen, but he’s let down by his material here. When he’s not kicking butt, Love Hurts is downright painful.

Fifty Shades Darker is a very faithful sequel; a milquetoast continuation of a bland romance between two boring people.

Give Age Of Extinction this much credit: Of all the Transformers movies, this is the longest. And save for a few visual centerpieces and a couple of amusing supporting turns, it’s also an endless, incoherent mess.

Independence Day: Resurgence is a bad movie, occasionally in ways that are good for a chuckle, like when people earnestly deliver lines like “Now listen up! They’re going for our molten core!” but mostly just bad in ways that make you wish you hadn’t wasted your money or your time.

Fifty Shades Freed must set a record for the most subplots and supporting characters introduced and then abandoned in film history.

Rebel Moon is the kind of movie that seems overwrought and underbaked all at once. So much care has been given to the style and the design of every little element of the sets, the costumes, and the props; yet so little concern has been given to populating all those background elements with fleshed-out human beings with lives that feel like they exist beyond the edges of Snyder’s immaculately composed frames.

Characters repeatedly yell jokes from offscreen or while their backs are turned to the camera. They are, almost without exception, not funny. And they’re indicative of a movie that feels like it was worked and reworked in the editing room almost to its literal death.

Artemis Fowl is a complete disaster; a hectic mess of worldbuilding that tries to cram a big chunk of an eight-part book series into a movie that runs less than 90 minutes plus credits. From the look of the finished product, a large portion of the story (along with most of the characters’ motivations) were completely removed, leaving only the action sequences and special effects — neither of which are impressive or exciting enough to justify sitting through the film, even one as short as Artemis Fowl.

It is quite literally the company’s biggest disaster to date; a colossal waste of time, money, and effort.

The Last Knight is not, in any conventional sense, entertaining or good, although parts of it are spectacular.

An unpleasant, incoherent mess that feels like it was stitched together from outtakes and reshoots of something that used to look totally different.

After this boring and unsatisfying debut, it doesn’t take clairvoyance to see this franchise has no future.

So many of the decisions by director David Frankel and writer Allan Loeb make absolutely no sense.

The Snowman Killer is one of those ludicrous movie bad guys who is both supernaturally smart and conveniently stupid.

Geostorm is so punishingly bad it makes Independence Day: Resurgence look like Last Year at Marienbad. (Or at least its less well-known sequel, Last Year at Marienbad: Resurgence.)

There’s no issue with De Niro and Efron’s effort; both are game for every disgusting line and ludicrous set-piece. But they have less material to work with than Aubrey Plaza’s costume designer.

As a comedy, this is an unmitigated disaster. As a fever dream of nonsensical non sequiturs, it might be a secret masterpiece.

There are plenty of words that can describe The Emoji Movie. Here are a few of them: Unfunny. Saccharine. Nonsensical. Painful. And, of course, crappy. (If you prefer the poop emoji, that works too.)

Shadow makes an urgent, compelling case for the importance of bright, clear, fluid battles. This movie has everything modern blockbuster spectacles lack: precision, grace, intimacy, stakes, and genuine, gritty excitement.