Michael Phillips

Red One is the holiday fantasy built on retribution, punishment and crushed hopes we deserve right now.

What’s missing is not simply surprise, or the pleasurable shock of a new kind of ghost comedy. It’s the near-complete absence of verbal wit, all the more frustrating since Keaton is ready to play, and he’s hardly alone.

Reynolds retains his skittery comic timing, and Jackman (while tonally a little lost here) certainly put in his time with a personal trainer. But there isn’t a single shot in Levy’s film that flows excitingly into the next one.

While there’s some payoff in the many visual callbacks to ’80s-and-earlier genre movies, at some point the filmmaker lost sight of how to best serve Goth a third time.

It’s a luxe treatment of some puny satiric ideas, toned up by a cast led by Emma Stone and Lanthimos first-timer Jesse Plemons, who won the best actor prize this year at Cannes. But everything has a chance to go wrong with a movie long before the actors film anything.

If a movie doesn’t care enough about its selling points, aka the stars, to give them decent lines more than twice per hour, the “bad” in “Bad Boys” ends up being the wrong kind of bad. And, in a truly sad way, its own review.

IF reminds us how certain key ingredients — charm, wit, clarity, emotional tact and resonance — cannot be willed into narrative existence, or fixed in post.

It plays like a bland, third-season Marvel series as watched on a 12-year-old TV set playing in the wrong dramatic aspect ratio, which I realize isn’t a real thing. But now it is.

It’s lousy, and a frantic bore, squandering its on-screen talent and making bland visual hash of its preening, recreational slaughter.

A sleek, tight, fastidiously executed nothing.

To become a true screen action hero outside the “Wonder Woman” realm, Gadot needs better material than this, and only when she gets to square off with Bhatt’s increasingly conflicted superhacker does Heart of Stone suggest a human pulse.

The full-on assault on the audience’s tear ducts in much of “Guardians 3″ may be sincere, but the rhythms and pacing of the film never find the beat. We end up waiting for the reductive punchline, or for another round of wanton slaughter.

Ultraviolence is a funny thing, unless it’s not: Here, watching Martindale’s ranger character getting her face ripped off while being dragged along a gravel road isn’t a sight gag, and it isn’t an effective shock bit. It’s just sour. Composer Mark Mothersbaugh’s consciously ‘80s-vibe score has more personality than what’s on screen.

In a funnier world, Zoë Chao and Tig Notaro are starring in their own romantic comedy together.

Knock at the Cabin is a real load — 100 lugubrious minutes of what is intended as steadily mounting dread and apocalypse prevention seminar.

I found Violent Night to be a joyless slay ride, not to mention verbally witless. There’s not much kick in seeing an R-rated version of “Home Alone,” and even that owed its home-invasion nastiness to Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs.”

Dominik drains the complication and, saddest of all, the screen wiles, from a plainly complicated legend.

Raiff most likely wanted to make a movie about a well-intentioned guy in his early 20s who gradually finds his way to a better life. What undermines his efforts is a creeping smugness and self-regard, positioning every side character as an intern in the Andrew Improvement Program.

Instead of dramatizing this subject’s life, it dramatizes the extravagance of moviemaking. The script shoves the dicey stuff off to the side: race, infidelity, a complicated figure’s inner demons.

In “Morbius” the actor’s willful disinterest in figuring out the rhythm of a scene, what’s important in it and how to bounce off his scene partners — well, it’s acting in a vacuum. What he needs is a director who can steer him away from his favorite scene partner, i.e., Jared Leto, long enough to activate the material at hand, even if it’s just a third-tier Marvel franchise hopeful.

Green has made so many interesting movies, from “George Washington” to “Snow Angels” to the best bits in “Pineapple Express” and more recent genre exercises. Halloween Kills settles for the reductive, distressingly anonymous hackwork of its title.

It’s tolerable, I suppose, if you don’t have to listen to it. Unfortunately it’s a musical so you have to listen to it.

This one is strictly a welding job, grabbing parts of “Blade Runner,” a bolt and a nut or two from “Vertigo” (though not as much as “Phoenix” did) and notions of commercially desired fantasies of pasts real and imagined, straight from “Westworld.”

Blunt’s derring-do has its stray moments, and her comic wiles are most welcome. But this is blockbustering from a talented director whose talent has been pounded flat by the dictates of a script in the quality range of Disney’s “Lone Ranger.”

The film doesn’t begin to know what to do with the reincarnation idea beyond a few sharply edited micro-flashbacks. Is the look on Wahlberg’s face the character thinking What is going on? Or is it the actor thinking Am I in the next ‘Matrix’ or the silliest movie of 2021?

The actors take your mind off things when they can: I like the way Hathaway jabs her elbow at the elevator buttons for punctuation, and the ardent commitment to language Ejiofor brings to his character’s public poetry readings. But a movie shouldn’t rely on Hathaway and Ejiofor to shell-game your attention away from the movie itself.

The music is drippy and constant, the wobble from comedy to drama feels off, and the dialects have been reamed in the Irish press. Charm resists calculation; even if actors get some going, even if a writer creates an approximation in or between the lines, deliberately manufactured charm curdles so easily. The one success story of Wild Mountain Thyme belongs to Blunt, who has yet to give a poor or lazily considered performance.

The pretty, empty, emotionally frictionless and touch-free new Rebecca adaptation may suit the pandemic dictates for social distancing, but the drama fails to spark.

Everything happens quickly in Fatal Affair, since it’s all plot and no character. These movies are what they are: disposable; full of shiny, unstained, high-end kitchen countertops.

It’s a lame and weaselly thing, made strangely more frustrating by some excellent performers.

Seriously, the running time of Fantasy Island should be listed as “sometime tomorrow."

The problems begin and end with the script, credited to three writers. “Dolittle” turns its title character into an eccentric and wearying blur of tics, tacked onto a character who comports himself like a bullying, egocentric A-lister rather than someone who, you know, actually enjoys the company of animals.

Conceived and developed shortly after Haddish scored, deservedly, with “Girls Trip,”” the movie is a mechanical series of witless yeast infection jokes, or thereabouts. While director Miguel Arteta has made some interesting work in the past, including “The Good Girl” and “Beatriz at Dinner,” his way with low physical comedy here is pretty artless.

Is it the worst film of 2019, or simply the most recent misfire of 2019? Reader, I swear on a stack of pancakes: “Cats” cannot be beat for sheer folly and misjudgment and audience-reaction-to-“Springtime for Hitler”-in-“The Producers” stupefaction.

In a year of mass culture that gave us HBO’s excellent “Chernobyl,” Joker can claim the grimmest depiction of a meltdown.

The new music helps, a little. But the movie is a karaoke act, re-creating the original movie’s story beats beat-by-beat-by-beat.

I mean, whatever with the “X-Men” movies. It’s hard to even rent an opinion on the discrete strengths and weaknesses of a franchise that has devolved to the point of Dark Phoenix, a lavishly brutal chore nearly as violent as the Wolverine movie “Logan,” and a movie featuring more death by impalement and whirling metal than all the “Saw” movies put together.

Well, it’s a dud. Nothing quite clicks.

This movie also offers less: less wit, less charm, and only a few scraps of the old movie’s crucial songs (though “Baby Mine” receives its moment, in a campfire rendition).

The movie delivers, in its chosen way. But it’s a soulless way. The violence may be for laughs, and many Neeson fans will likely respond to the larky brutality of Cold Pursuit, which is very different from the star’s previous mid-winter vehicles (“The Grey” is my favorite). But I don’t get much psychic recreation from this sort of action movie.

The atmosphere in Serenity, by design, imparts a slightly uneasy and hermetic feeling. In Baker Dill, who sounds like a line of gourmet pickles, Knight has the makings of a compellingly messed-up antihero. That’s a start. If movies were all start, then this one might’ve worked.

A tedious picture about a remorseless serial killer, played by Matt Dillon.

Welcome to Marwen is a misjudgment only a first-rate filmmaker could make.

It brings me no joy to relay this: From an irresistible “tell me more!” of a true story, Eastwood and his “Gran Torino” screenwriter Nick Schenk have made a movie that feels dodgy and false at every turn.

Watching this movie is like spending two hours and 27 minutes staring at a gigantic aquarium full of digital sea creatures and actors on wires, pretending to swim.

Life Itself is an emotional mugging, not a movie.

The Happytime Murders is a one-joke movie, minus one joke. The year may cough up a worse film, but probably not a more joyless, witless one, raunchy or otherwise.

Wasikowska struggles to activate a vague notion of female disenfranchisement and victimhood, triumphant. She and Pattinson fill in as many blanks as they can, where they can.

I kind of hate the movie’s mixture of bro comedy, sadistic practical jokes (don’t call it slapstick) and last-ditch pull for the heartstrings.

Rampage is a drag.

For a while, director Roth plays this stuff relatively straight, and Willis periodically reminds us he can act (the grieving Kersey cries a fair bit here).

The cast excels at transcending its material. The script by Justin Haythe matches Francis Lawrence’s direction; it’s workmanlike and steady and pretty flat.

It’s the last thing he wanted, I’m sure, but Eastwood’s latest ends up feeling like a stunt.

As a period ghost story, it’s pretty pallid.

In code, Wonder Wheel dances along the edge of the writer-director’s off-screen life, namely the allegations by Dylan Farrow, Allen’s adopted daughter, of sexual molestation, and Allen’s controversial marriage to Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of Allen’s then-partner Mia Farrow.

Now and then the Mulleavys capture a moment or glimmer of true mystery; more often, and certainly in dramatic terms, Woodshock feels like a movie that never stops buffering.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle offers everything — several bored Oscar winners, two scenes featuring death by meat grinder, Elton John mugging in close-up — except a good time.

Despite the actors hired to deliver the story, the superassassin of American Assassin isn’t quite human. He’s just revenge in a henley T.

The rhythmic assurance of truly bracing screen action, even if it's just a bunch of metal beating up a bunch of other metal, or clobbering humans, never gains traction. The cross-cutting suggests the editors took care of things via group text.

The mayhem in The Mummy feels desperate, mistimed, grueling in the wrong way (the film's violence is infinitely less appropriate for preteens than that of "Wonder Woman").

The movie is all preening and very few laughs, though Daddario and Efron have a few moments, and Johnson remains a supremely likable slab of movie star.

Optimism is nowhere to be found in Ritchie's movie itself. It is a grim and stupid thing, from one of the world's most successful mediocre filmmakers, and if Shakespeare's King Lear were blogging today, he'd supply the blurb quote: "Nothing will come of nothing."

Everyone in The Comedian deserves a better movie than The Comedian.

It's just a mediocre action movie, poorly edited and larded with a terrible musical score, based on a video game. Nothing new there.

This is a franchise with lead weights tied around its ankles.

The movie coasts on a blase, easygoing highway of cynicism regarding how America conducts its business of war. Despite all the Martifications and Scorsese-ing, we're left with virtually nothing, except the feeling that a pretty good anecdote has been inflated into a bubble-headed American Dream morality tale.

But folks, this is a lousy script, blobby like the endlessly beheaded minions of the squad's chief adversary. It's not satisfying storytelling; the flashbacks roll in and out, explaining either too much or too little, and the action may be violent but it's not interesting.

I saw Resurgence an hour and a half ago, and I feel like an alien wiped my memory clean already.

There are comedies that make you double over in laughter, and there are comedies that are eerily unfunny to the point where you start thinking about a class-action suit.

The Boss has zero finesse as a comedy.

Snyder is not without skills, or ideas, but when a critic finds himself at odds with almost every aspect of a director’s visual approach to material like this, material like this becomes pretty joyless.

It's a pretty dull picture, I must say, because it's my duty to say it. And it's a pretty dull picture, I must say, because something about its particular grade of dullness may cause memory loss.

The film, with its wearying gamer-style rounds of death, is routine at best.

Call it "Clash of the Whitans," and call it a folly that doesn't have the energy or delirium to qualify as entertaining crap. It's just crap.

Compared to so many varied and skillful female-driven hits such as "Bridesmaids," or this summer's "Trainwreck" and "Spy," Sisters isn't worth talking about.

Strange as it seems, if you choose to set aside the female roles in The Ridiculous 6 reducing women to cleavage or to mute humiliation, the movie is a long, long way from the worst Sandler movie ever made.

Star vehicles this rickety have a way of making the world unsafe for comic democracy.

The most joyless revisionism since Disney's "The Lone Ranger.

Because Stonewall turns everyone into a sentimental or suffocating "type" instead of a dimensional character, the results are sheer noise.

From Miles Teller to Kate Mara to Reg E. Cathey, everyone on screen in Fantastic Four speaks in a flat, earnest monotone with a determinedly low-keyed air bordering on openly not giving a rip.

If any of this was surprising or cleverly timed, you'd laugh and then cringe. In Vacation you cringe first and ask questions later.

Everything's at stake yet nothing comes to much in Terminator Genisys.

Director Monteverde, whose previous feature, "Bella," came out nine years ago, clearly meant his film to lift up everyone and condescend to no one, least of all Pepper and Hashimoto. But Little Boy comes off as a picture-postcard fake.

Broken Horses raises the question of what is cockamamie, and what is cockamamie and outlandish and ridiculous yet a perfectly swell time for those very reasons. This one's just cockamamie without the swell part.

It's a mystery why two bona fide comic stars, working very, very hard to keep this thing from tanking, couldn't pressure their collaborators for another rewrite or three.

A misjudgment from metallic head to titanium toe.

Silly, sadistic and finally a little galling, Kingsman: The Secret Service answers the question: What would Colin Firth have been like if he'd played James Bond?

It's passable.

Black or White may not be racist, exactly, but it patronizes its African-American characters up, down and sideways, and audiences of every ethnicity, background, hue and predilection can find something to dislike.

I wish The Boy Next Door were a different, zingier sort of mediocrity, but whenever it threatens to go the full Zalman King "Two Moon Junction" route, it pulls back and behaves itself and settles for a grindingly predictable series of escalations.

The overall vibe of this folly is curdled and utterly blase; it's a 118-minute foregone conclusion, finesse-free and perilously low on the simple performance pleasures we look for in any musical, of any period.

A lot of the rougher stuff, depicting Ig's late-inning vengeance, is sadistically misjudged. It's hard to jerk tears a beat or two after gleeful rounds of brutality, even if it happens to, or because of, dear wee Daniel Radcliffe.

Cage is going for manly, if conflicted, family-guy confidence in this role, but somehow it comes off as nuttier than the events surrounding him.

Playing the title role as well as the Dream role, real-life Elvis tribute artist Blake Rayne is more convincing when he's singing than when he isn't. But he has little to explore beyond bashful smiles.

Nobody watches a disaster movie starring digital tornadoes expecting Oscar Wilde. But Into the Storm, directed with bland efficiency by Steven Quayle of "Final Destination 5," reminds us that unless a movie establishes certain base-line levels of human interest, it runs the not-unentertaining risk of coming out squarely in favor of its own bad weather.

The slapstick is awful; the pathos isn't much better, though it's far more plentiful.

Sex Tape settles for violence when violent slapstick, a lot harder to finesse, was the implicit goal of the picture.

How much of what we see in Third Person is the novelist's invention is part of the guessing game that goes on and on. And. On.