Mick LaSalle

Fennell (“Promising Young Woman,” “Saltburn”) is a skilled filmmaker who can put over her ideas. The problem is that all her ideas here are bad — self-defeating, enervating and, in several places, unintentionally hilarious.

At its best, it captures the last-days-of-Pompei feeling that was in the air at the time — a mix of frenetic celebration, paranoia and despair. But alas, the documentary soon derails into bogus history, specious arguments and a self-blinding variety of political bias.

Needless to say, the actors are better than the material.

A House of Dynamite is an attempt to make a white-knuckle thriller, but there’s very little suspense to it. We have a pretty good idea of how it’s all going to end even before the first segment is over. And after that, we really know it, as we’re forced to watch the same events play out two more times.

Daniel Day-Lewis has emerged from retirement to do something he has never done before — make a truly horrible movie.

While the original was serious, Old Guard 2 is merely forlorn. Its story holds little interest and, to make matters worse, it doesn’t even end. Instead, it stops mid-story, promising a sequel that feels less like a promise than a threat.

The movie goes to Vienna, to Egypt and to Italy and was probably more fun to make than watch.

Hartnett is naturally engaging, and one can see why, with the movie plummeting to earth, the filmmakers might decide to pull the humor ripcord. But here it smells of desperation.

Mary is a fictionalized and heavily dramatized account of the life of the Virgin Mary, but the movie’s great and only pleasure is in watching Anthony Hopkins play King Herod as a homicidal maniac.

Either “Nightbitch” shouldn’t have been made or its premise should have been transformed and built upon.

If you’re talking about “Venom: The Last Dance,” you know you’re talking about something unimportant. If you’re writing about it, you know you’re doing something embarrassing. But what about the people who made this movie? What level of awareness do they have?

I can’t imagine who would want to make a movie like this, much less who would want to watch this. It says nothing real about life or death, and it’s not as though it’s telling us something we don’t already know.

The foundational mistake came when someone said, “Hey, let’s make another ‘Alien’ movie.” Newsflash: The alien concept is dead. Leave it alone, and leave poor Ian Holm out of it.

Fly to the Moon is absolutely awful. The only interesting thing about it is how long it takes for a viewer to figure out how bad it really is.

A Family Affair never even makes the case as to why these people should be together.

The best thing that can be said for “Kinds of Kindness” is that it’s never quite boring, despite being 164-minutes long and lacking much of a story.

The tone of “The Exorcism” is deadly serious, but one wonders if the premise might have worked better as a scary comedy rather than as a scary drama.

In “Atlas,” Jennifer Lopez does everything she can to act her way toward a good movie. Unfortunately, she can’t do it well enough to make a difference.

It’s awful. But it could be where movies are going — into a wasteland.

IF may have the sheen and aura of an expensive, important production, with a good cast and lots of famous names in voice roles (Steve Carell, George Clooney, Richard Jenkins), but the movie is a disordered wreck that confuses impulse for inspiration and dissipates any impossibility of impact by constantly switching focus.

There’s no apparent human feeling on display here, just scene after scene of protracted martial arts combat that goes on and on, while providing no rooting interest.

There’s one unalloyed good thing to be said for Damsel: It marks the end of Millie Bobby Brown’s apprenticeship. Her child actress years are over. She’s grown up and ready to star in movies that audiences can take as seriously as she does.

The only thing to take from the wreckage of “Lisa Frankenstein” is the performance of Soberano, in her Hollywood debut. She finds comedy in a weak script and radiates goodness without being boring. Let’s hope she has better movies in her future.

What has gone wrong in director Matthew Vaughn’s process that he can offer up an awful mess like “Argylle” and just hope that nobody will notice? He must notice.

Maybe Glazer’s movie will be of use to people naïve enough to believe that nobody without horns and a pitchfork can be the devil. Everybody else will learn nothing from this film.

The verdict is sad but unavoidable. Poor Things is a 141-minute mistake.

The only surprise is that there are no surprises.

Saltburn is a remarkable combination of smart and stupid. Its problem is that it’s superficially smart and deeply stupid. It’s clever and amusing in 20 different ways, but when it really matters, it descends into ridiculousness.

Thankfully, the movie clocks in at a mere 105 minutes. The Marvels doesn’t have much to say, but at least it says it quickly.

The Persian Version tries to pivot and fashion itself as a celebration of women’s strength across the generations, but it’s transparently something else — a daughter’s attempt to come to terms with a problematic mother. And it’s an effort in which there can be no suspense because Keshavarz’s strenuous effort to whitewash mom tells us that the movie, and the relationship, can only resolve in one way.

If The Creator were any more slanted, any more in the tank for the coming AI onslaught, you would think it was produced, written and directed by AI.

Gran Turismo is just the same cars, going around and around and around.

Haunted Mansion shouldn’t have been rebooted, but if made, it should have clocked in at a modest 90 minutes.

This film never had any business being stretched into a feature, much less one running 106 minutes. At that length, Biosphere is soporific and repetitive and puts viewers in the position of always being two steps ahead of it.

The Flash gets credit for effort, because this superhero movie isn’t trying to be stupid and convoluted. It gets there by accident.

The only people to feel sorry for in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts are Anthony Ramos (“In the Heights”) and Dominique Fishback (“Swarm”) who play actual humans trying to save the planet, when in real life they’re just humans trying to save a movie. They’re fine, but they can’t make a dent in the awfulness.

After 96 minutes with these people, you’ll care even less than you do now.

Lacking the velocity and excitement of an action movie and the reality of good drama, The Mother is the worst of both worlds.

In her feature debut, Manzoor does something truly bizarre here, and not in a good way. She gets a whole audience rooting for love to triumph but then tries to make a lovable heroine out of the irrational, malevolent character who wants to undermine everything the audience is looking forward to.

Ghosted is repellent without ever quite being obnoxious and worthless without ever being boring.

A structure might have inhibited Aster’s impulse for meaningless excess. Instead, we get a movie that’s all talent and no discipline, which, in practice, is even worse than a movie that’s all discipline and no talent. At least the latter tries to please the audience; the former just pleases the filmmaker.

The formula is tired, and it’s particularly sad to see Shazam! surrender so completely and pathetically to it, when it might have been DC Comics most human superhero franchise.

Watching Inside is like being stuck inside a house, unable to escape. No, it’s worse than that. It’s like being stuck inside a house, unable to escape, and Willem Dafoe is there with you.

Cocaine Bear is a movie that will appeal mostly to people who think it’s hilarious to get their dog stoned. If you’re someone who loves to sit on an old couch with a bong between your legs, crying with laughter as your dog bangs into furniture, “Cocaine Bear” might be your “Citizen Kane.”

“Ant-Man: Quantumania” is a glum, tiresome exercise that follows the pattern of every run-of-the-mill superhero movie ever made.

With the exception of Jessica Lange, who tears into her fairly brief role as a wealthy and wicked former movie star, everyone in Marlowe is directed as if to seem groggy with depression. It’s as if they’re all bored with the story before they tell it, and then they tell it while trying not to fall asleep.

80 for Brady is a good-natured effort, and that good nature keeps it from becoming hateable. But still, it’s fairly awful.

The truth is, “You People” is too confused to be offensive — too inconsequential to merit that level of engagement. But it’s certainly disappointing, virtually from its opening minutes.

The movie’s overall aura of cheapness, the cast of unknowns and the half-baked theology all call to mind the low-budget horror of the 1980s.

The worst failing of Corsage is that it makes Sisi boring and unsympathetic when it’s trying to do the opposite. You kind of catch on that there’s something wrong with a Sisi biopic when you start sympathizing with Franz Joseph, who not only was a lousy husband but helped start World War I.

Women Talking has a remarkable cast — Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, among others — and it’s grounded in dramatic real-life events. But it’s mannered in its conception and wooden in its execution, and has little to do with living, breathing people.

Avatar: The Way of Water is a one-hour story rattling around in a 192-minute bag.

By the time we get to the last 20 minutes, Empire of Light is so scattered, so without impact or focus, that every scene could be the last. Ending it anywhere would make equal sense, because making sense is no longer a possibility. The movie is a glossy wreck.

Unfortunately, by the time the movie gets around to the parts that might have dazzled us, Emancipation already lost its audience.

Even when it tries to be funny, there’s never any point of connection. The emotions in White Noise are neither real nor meant to be real. The audience is always watching from a distance — until, finally, it starts wondering why it’s watching at all.

Spirited was never going to be any good, but it would have been slightly better — and a change of pace — if Reynolds and Ferrell had switched roles.

The experience of seeing Causeway isn’t what you’d imagine while trying to decide whether to watch a 92-minute movie about a veteran’s slow recovery. It feels more like moving in with her — invisible — for weeks, and watching as she makes a sandwich or stares into space. That isn’t drama. That’s practically audience abuse.

Going into Armageddon Time, I had no interest in James Gray’s childhood. But that was to be expected. What I didn’t expect was to have even less interest going out.

Seriously, don’t see Black Adam. Don’t encourage this. I don’t even want to admit that it’s an actual movie, but assuming it is, it’s the worst of the year — and one of the worst I’ve ever seen.

Efron makes what he can of an impossible role. He’s watchable, that helps.

Ana de Armas is inspired and flawless as Marilyn Monroe, and yet “Blonde” is a total bomb. Intuitively, that would seem impossible, for someone to be that good in a failed picture. Here’s something else that would seem impossible: “Blonde” has seriousness of purpose and a strong director, Andrew Dominik, who clearly made the movie he wanted to make. It’s still bad.

The banter, often Smith’s strong suit, is witless and tiresome, mostly obsessive conversations about minor characters in “Star Wars” and other aspects of pop culture. It’s probably not Smith’s intention, but we end up feeling sorry for the characters, that they inhabit such a tiny mental landscape.

Ultimately, “Mija” fails almost totally, and two main things tank it: (1) the lack of complete access to the subjects, who should have been grateful for the exposure, and (2) too much collaboration between the director and her subjects. There are documentaries and there are promotional films. A documentarian needs to keep those categories rigorously separate.

It’s not like bad Tarantino. That would be too kind. It’s like an imitation of a bad imitation of Tarantino — violent, unfelt and witless, and straining to be funny.

Every so often an obviously talented person makes a bad movie, and that’s what we have in Nope. The talent is there, the movie is dead on the screen.

Most of Thor: Love and Thunder is a mess, pleased with itself and tonally everywhere. As bad as one of the better “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, but that’s still pretty horrible.

The Black Phone has better-than-average acting, an interesting period setting and well-developed characters. But it runs out of story less than halfway through, forcing the filmmakers to repeat the same kinds of actions, over and over, in order to stretch it to feature length.

Ultimately, the people who made “Lightyear” bet too much on the appeal of Buzz, when they really needed to be deepening him and transforming him. Buzz is no Woody, and to sustain an entire movie, he pretty much had to be.

The ultimate failure of Jurassic World: Dominion is not only that it relies too much on action, but that the action is lousy.

As writer and director, Cronenberg devises for himself a compelling situation, but a situation is not the same as a story. Within 20 minutes, Cronenberg has written himself into a hole, one populated entirely by passive characters who do nothing but get cut up or watch other people get cut up.

There are all kinds of dull movies. There’s check-your-watch (or phone) dull. There’s run-into-the-bathroom-to-splash-water-on-your-face dull. And then there’s Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, which is standing-up dull.

Think of The Bubble as part of a pattern we could have anticipated. Pandemic movies almost can’t be any good at this point. The pandemic won’t be funny, interesting or anything anybody wants to think about until we’re safely beyond it by a few years. So, filmmakers, set your watches for pandemic nostalgia to commence circa 2027, and between now and then, just put it out of your minds.

Filmmakers can’t depend on funny actors to go out there cold and bring back laughs. They have to be given funny things to do.

In the end, about the only thing that could have saved “Windfall” was a really good ending. But what we get is something gimmicky that makes no psychological sense and that the actors cannot make work.

Nothing that works here adds up to anything worth a long slog in a movie theater, watching Pattinson punching guys and knocking guns out of their hands. From start to finish, The Batman is mostly just a collection of bad ideas.

What garbage. Seriously. What absolute, bereft, witless, unoriginal, unrewarding, soulless garbage that’s 40 years past scaring anybody. The only power this formula retains is the power to make you feel a little sad — at the ugliness, at the cynicism, and at the pathetic waste of your own mind as you watch it.

It’s not boring bad, but flashy bad. It’s not “I’m sick of this, already.” It’s “I can’t believe what I’m looking at.”

So, The King’s Man is a mess, purposeless, pointless, witless. However, it’s not obnoxious. At times, it can even be close to enjoyable watching it squirm and try to make sense of itself. It has a genial idiocy and one genuinely effective sequence, involving mountain climbing. So, to its credit, it’s never actively annoying. It’s just, from start to finish, a disappointment.

Not counting no-budget movies with casts of nonprofessionals, The Humans is one of the worst-directed films in recent memory. It plays like a wicked practical joke or a deliberate act of sabotage.

It takes one of the most gifted screen actresses of her generation and casts her out to sea with nothing to hold onto but a hideous script that’s all attitude without depth or understanding.

Eternals is like a movie about a horse race that concentrates all its attention on characters that neither own a horse nor like to gamble.

A documentary that doesn’t have the stomach to tell the story of what happened on Jan. 6 explicitly, and to express the real threat to American democracy that that day represents, is of no use to anybody.

The artistic signature is unmistakable — 30 seconds in, you’d know you were watching a Wes Anderson movie. But Anderson’s human connection seems to have short-circuited, so that his irony now bypasses the world and becomes an ironic contemplation of his own work. This is a dead-end, and it’s just not interesting.

To say Venom: Let There Be Carnage is not worth seeing is not enough. It’s not worth admitting into your life, even as an option. You’ve read a review of it. That’s enough. Now, never think of it again for the rest of your life.

Director Stephen Chbosky needed to bring this stage musical into greater balance with the film medium. He needed to make Dear Evan Hansen less grandiose. He needed to pick up the pace and chop 10 minutes from the running time. It’s still possible that wouldn’t have saved it, but it might have made it less awful.

Long before the end, audiences will stop worrying about the characters and start worrying about themselves — about when they’ll get to leave.

The film is kindly and well-intended, but it’s also sentimental and lifeless. Swan Song is a rare movie without a single good scene.

To their credit, by the time the movie ends, Blunt and Johnson have made the sale. I believed them and liked seeing them together. They don’t make Jungle Cruise worth seeing or even worth tolerating. But for scattered minutes across this wasteland, they make it less painful.

Black Widow is what happens when movies abandon human values for the emotional deadness and emptiness of the superhero movie.

Everything that’s good about Cruella can’t obscure the fact that it was a very bad idea. The movie makes gestures toward style. It has first-rate costume design. The soundtrack contains a series of well-loved but mostly irrelevant pop songs from the 1960s and ’70s. But we still end up with a movie that should never have been made.

The Woman in the Window is, unfortunately, one of Wright’s amazingly bad movies, and this is a shame, with Amy Adams at the center of it.

Sollima knows how to film violence, so individual moments stand out. What Sollima can’t do is make a good movie from a bad script.

Aside from being annoying, depressing and repulsive, Chaos Walking has a lot going for it. It’s directed by Doug Liman (“Go”) and takes place in a fully imagined other world. Plus, it stars Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley, who are smart and watchable, and the movie does get better as it goes along.

As Baby Boomers continue to dominate the culture through sheer numbers, you can expect more movies about demented parents. But a good rule of thumb for those who’d attempt such a story in the future should be this: If you want us to care about crazy old Dad, show us that he was once something more than an abusive sperm donor. Show us that he was once a decent father.

The goal here was to be absurdist, relentless and light. Well, Barb & Star is light — so light it floats off and vaporizes.

Stevens, Fisher, Mann and Dench are all fine. All have good moments. The problem is the script, the script, the script.

I hated this film. I hated every minute of it, and at times it even made me angry.

So The United States vs. Billie Holiday is a misfire, and what a shame, because Andra Day had it in her to be great in this. The movie just didn’t let her bring it out.