Moira Macdonald

Megalopolis is a misfire from the start.

A film is a different experience from a book, and the movie “It Ends With Us” doesn’t really bring us inside Lily’s head; it simply leaves us puzzled and horrified.

Nyong’o’s prodigious talents are sadly wasted in this noisy, pointless movie, which never approaches the cleverness — or the genuine scariness — of the first two in the franchise.

You watch hoping that the always-splendid Condon, an Oscar nominee last year for “The Banshees of Inisherin,” is getting a really good paycheck, and wondering why writer/director Bryce McGuire saw fit to expand his very effective four-minute 2014 film “Night Swim” into this soggy mess. Don’t go in the water, indeed.

Toula and Ian are sweet and bland; their relatives are predictably wisecracky, and the whole thing just feels like watching someone’s extremely well-produced vacation video.

Amsterdam is not entirely without small pleasures: Emmanuel Lubezki’s sepia-toned cinematography is lovely to look at, and it’s fun to play spot-the-movie-star with the talented cast, and to note with pleasure how Washington’s scratched-velvet voice sounds so much like that of his father Denzel. But ultimately it’s a big disappointment.

You watch wondering what good actors like Lively, Law, Jeffrey and Sterling K. Brown (as a former C.I.A. officer) saw in this muddy screenplay, and why Morano, best known for the Hulu series “The Handmaid’s Tale,” couldn’t find a way to make them spark.

“Cats” the movie is deeply, deeply weird, and not in a good way.

The Dead Don’t Die isn’t just deadpan — it’s dead.

You feel for the actors, who you know are better than this stuff, and you wonder if director F. Gary Gray (“Straight Outta Compton”) just threw up his hands. And you wonder if, somewhere, Smith and Jones are chuckling. At least somebody was.

Hathaway and Wilson, instead of exuding odd-couple comic chemistry, seem to barely be in the same movie; they don’t click, with each other or with a bland Alex Sharp as their tech-bro mark.

Let’s just say that things aren’t always what they seem, and that there is not enough popcorn in the world to make this particular twist go down.

Johnson and Dornan’s performances are wooden and their chemistry nonexistent (particularly in the movie’s more-of-the-same sex scenes), but think of it all as ultra-deadpan entertainment and it kind of works.

It’s just the same movie over and over, until the end of time and everybody dies, in which case “Pitch Perfect 45: A-Ca-Wait-Are-We-Dead?” might be a thing.

It’s just a bad movie; a flat melodrama in which some lovely camerawork and a ferocious central performance from Winslet can’t conceal the rote tiredness of it all.

A deeply uninspired sequel to last year’s surprise (and surprisingly sweet) hit “Bad Moms,” this movie was made in a hurry and it shows.

Sometimes, all the pieces are there, but it just isn’t worth putting the puzzle together. Such is the case with Tomas Alfredson’s The Snowman.

Sadly, Friend Request is not even the first movie to travel that harrowing Dead Girl Who Still Maintains an Active Facebook Presence road.

It’s all instantly forgettable. Except for the tulips — which, for the record, look stellar.

Kidnap has a tossed-together sameness to it, like a salad made up only of tired lettuce.

The whole purpose of this teen horror movie is to show creatively gruesome deaths. If you prefer your horror flicks with a dash of wit or suspense, look elsewhere.

Directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg (“Kon-Tiki”) seem to not have the slightest idea how to make this material sing; instead, it’s mostly a noisy, dark 3D blur in which the characters run around a lot, seemingly looking for the exits

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword” lumbers on for more than two hours, weighed down with oversized elephants, excessively populated action sequences, and weirdly sudden occurrence of slow motion, as if the film is yawning.

It’s not a terribly good idea to base a movie on a book in which almost nothing happens for 500 pages, but that’s what we have here.

Every scene in this film, which stars Robert De Niro as the washed-up title character, is dragged out — kicking and screaming — far longer than it needs to be.

Collateral Beauty is a pretty terrible movie, but it left me with one overarching thought: My life, and surely yours, too, would be vastly improved if only Helen Mirren were perpetually lurking nearby, offering advice.

Should you decide to watch all of Blackway, a decision I cannot endorse, you’ll get to know Lillian (Julia Stiles), a determined if rather personality-free woman who’s moved back to the small Oregon logging town where she grew up.

Eventually, the film muddles its way into a self-indulgent, overlong mess, complete with a flowerlike beating heart, a miraculous new life and a lot of soccer. Long before anyone in Ma Ma expires, the movie does.

Because so few movies focus on stories about women, it’s incredibly frustrating to see this strong cast drifting away on a tide of soap bubbles — there’s no movie here, just scene after scene of melodramatic cliché.

We don’t even see that much of Cuba. Most of the action takes place at Hemingway’s estate there — the actual house, a vanilla-ice-cream-colored mansion (now a Hemingway museum), which gives a restrained, elegant performance. Pity the rest of the movie doesn’t rise to its standard.

It’s a lazy movie that fades from memory the instant the credits start to roll; a blandly pretty cog in a studio wheel. Moms deserve better. So do moviegoers.

The Huntsman is a flabby mess — yet another sequel with no reason to exist.

McCarthy’s trademark blend of chipper likability and treble-voiced rage just isn’t quite enough to carry things through.

In the cast, only Isaac makes a vivid impression, in a swaggery, relaxed turn that seems to imply that he’s in on the joke, or at least having a good time.