Matt Singer

Haunted Mansion does at least represent a small measure of progress for Hollywood. People always complain that studios remake beloved movies — which do not need improvement — when it would be wiser to remake a movie that contained the kernel of a good idea but failed in the execution. Haunted Mansion is absolutely a remake of a bad movie, and it does represent a slight improvement over the previous version.

Never Go Back could have used a bit more personality in the bad guy department, and the middle section sags a bit before the inevitable (and satisfying) denouement. But everyone involved seems to understand exactly what kind of movie they’re trying to make, and they deliver on just about every promise made by the title Jack Reacher: Never Go Back.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard is not the best movie of the summer, but it is easily its most pleasant surprise. An unapologetically violent and vulgar buddy action comedy, it updates the template set forth by Lethal Weapon and particularly Midnight Run for a new era.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire serves one valuable purpose: It proves once and for all that bigger is not better.

When all is said and done, The Alto Knights imparts very little about these two men that couldn’t be gleaned by reading their respective Wikipedia pages, and it does it at a sluggish pace and with little visual flair. Some of the biggest and best names to ever work in gangster movies contributed to this film; De Niro and Pileggi, obviously, but also producer Irwin Winkler and director Barry Levinson. Despite their many contributions to this genre in the past, they’ve got nothing new to say here. And they provide zero evidence that casting De Niro in both lead roles is anything more than a gimmick.

Blair Witch does deliver the requisite shocks demanded of a horror movie for a multiplex audience, but maybe it’s time for filmmakers to stay out of these woods for a while — at least until there’s a new technology for the Blair Witch to mess with.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods is just sort of there, coasting on the residual good vibes and talented cast of its much-superior predecessor.

For a couple minutes, it starts to feel like the film is building on top of the Super Mario mythology rather than simply regurgitating it. The rest reminded me of the attract mode that would automatically start to play on old arcade games if no one pressed start: A bunch of computerized images going through the motions over and over.

The movie around him is a mess at the best of times and a disaster at the worst, but Aykroyd always looks like he’s having fun, even if no one else is.

In Mortal Kombat II I truly did not care who lived or died for a single second — mostly because the film made it very clear that death is basically meaningless in this story.

Like director Jon Turteltaub’s underrated National Treasure movies, The Meg has an innate understanding of its own absurdity, and is at its best when it embraces and amplifies that impulse.

At pretty much every step Folie à Deux feels like one big middle finger to fans of the original movie. I just wish it was less of a middle finger to the rest of us at the same time.

It’s a movie that loudly yells at audiences they need to have some fun, while not actually providing any fun itself.

Justice League is a collection of missed opportunities and flubbed ideas.

Rampage won’t set the world on fire (our world, at least; it sets plenty of its world on fire when George and his two giant pals arrive in Chicago), but it does exactly what it says on the tin: It’s a big, goofy romp about creatures who lay waste to a major American city while the Rock cracks jokes in a light brown shirt.

This isn’t quite solid-gold filmmaking. But it might be gold-plated.

The Legend of Tarzan is too boring to be truly offensive. In spite of some impressive hand and brow acting, Skarsgard’s Tarzan is a frustrating blank and Margot Robbie’s Jane is a simple damsel in distress.

The first half of the film setting up the characters’ meager backstories and conflicts is boring. The second half is livelier but dumber, with the kaiju rising yet again from the depths of the Pacific to rampage through some extremely computer-generated cityscapes. There isn’t a single second where anything involving the jaegers or the kaiju looks real.

It’s got more than its share of disturbing sequences, and a string of brutal murders. It’s also got surprisingly decent special effects for a movie that was surely made on a fraction of the budget of a DC Comics film. And it has a perfectly cast Jackson A. Dunn as Brandon.

I never would have thought I could get so little amusement out of a film where Hugo Weaving dramatically intones nonsense like “Prepare to ingest!”

In Snyder’s formulation, protecting the world from evil isn’t a gift or a calling; it’s a burden. And that feeling is reflected in the movie itself, a burdensome 150-minute slog about two men fighting over who is in the right when both are very clearly in the wrong.

Frankly, the original Mortal Kombat arcade game had a better sense of narrative momentum; at least there the fights progressed toward a final showdown with the big bosses. Without spoiling this Mortal Kombat, it mostly feels like a giant prologue to something else. Still, for sheer visual panache, intricate fight scenes, and the fact that it’s not an out-and-out embarrassment, Mortal Kombat rates very highly on the list of video game movies.

Hollywood has gotten so good at boiling down comics mythologies that it’s easy to forget how hard it can be to distill a sprawling adventure stretched across decades of stories into two entertaining hours. Bloodshot serves as a painful reminder of that fact.

The whole movie hinges on Jean Grey, a character we hardly know (the Sophie Turner version was introduced in a minor role in X-Men: Apocalypse) and her relationships to a team of heroes we’ve hardly seen.

It takes the most popular G.I. Joe character and totally demystifies him until all that’s left is a blandly hunky dude with a sword.

Given the visual and intellectual sophistication in the superhero movies Hollywood now churns out at a regular clip, Glass just doesn’t cut it.

In a world where the lacerating corporate filmmaking satire The Studio already exists, broad jokes about wacky animal trainers and ego-driven actors trying to influence their projects to benefit their own roles just won’t cut it.

The movie just doesn’t seem that interested in doing anything with them beyond polishing up some dusty IP for another shot at the mainstream.