Natalia Winkelman

A misfire that’s as stilted as it is inert.

Not even the matriarchal link at the story’s center feels satisfying, its good intention strangled by the plotty chaos.

Never mind that Look Both Ways seems to posit that, for women, child rearing and a career are in relative opposition — when Natalie comes to a fork in the road, the movie hardly lets her look both ways. It bulldozes her down one path, and then the other.

Is the film trapped in Disney orthodoxy? If the shoe fits.

The men give Jimpa a warm, intergenerational quality, gesturing at the power of queer family over time. If only the film didn’t ask the audience to invest in so very many subplots; the clutter ends up sucking the air out of all of them.

This jittery drama wants viewers to appreciate the unique burdens facing emergency medical workers. Its approach to achieving this goal, however, involves a profusion of overly literal allusions to the paramedics as arbiters of life and death.

While an early, silly death . . . suggests an exuberant self-awareness a la Quentin Tarantino, other scenes, like those that position Edie and John as star-crossed lovers, indicate that this movie’s melodrama takes itself deadly seriously. But it’s hard for the audience to do so in a story that asks us to not merely suspend disbelief, but slaughter it.

One hopes that such access would yield new insights into the church. But as the events unspool, the film struggles to crystallize more than a handful of compelling points.

Though Yes Day does not lack for energy, the jokes are too broad and the mishaps too safe for the movie to emerge as an honest or imaginative journey through family conflict and compromise.

Some might call it a “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” for fans of European cinema. Others might say it’s a trifle. The film’s ending, however, amounts to a bemused shrug.

What comes next is a case of sensory overload without substance, complete with nondescript pop songs and an array of outfits — each purchasable online! — for Gabby and the gang. Even Wiig, giving it her all as a modern clone of Cruella de Vil, appears somewhat shipwrecked amid the sugary material.

Despite its contemporary New York City setting, The Son seems to have appropriated a midcentury understanding of mental illness, and the emotion on display feels even more artificial than the rooftop vista erected outside the windows of Peter’s industrial-chic Manhattan loft.

Had the movie emerged as a friskier game of eat the rich, it might have had a fighting chance of survival. Instead, it’s middling, morbid pap.

When, and in which picturesque city, Henry and María will acknowledge their mutual affection is the burning question of this romantic comedy trifle, which offers a few laughs and many more exasperated groans.

Far worse than these characters’ grating personalities are the regressive strains underpinning their flirtation.

Even when the movie wants for tension, it brims with playful style.

All the promise of this premise is squandered in Lin’s adaptation, which in style and structure hews to hackneyed convention at every turn.

Suffers from the discord between the real-life conflicts that make up its setting and the cartoonish characters who propel its plot.

Among the countless iterations the story has weathered through the ages, this Cinderella (streaming on Amazon), starring Camila Cabello as the orphaned maiden, is forgettable. It is oddly transfixing, though, as a study in the semiotics of the modernized fairy tale.

Like a magic brew thinned into bouillon, Come Away folds spellbinding storybook tales into a mundane melodrama.

If The Kissing Booth, stacked with regressive relationship dynamics, is Victorian in its views, The Kissing Booth 2 progresses to the midcentury.

Mother of the Bride is directed by Mark Waters (“Mean Girls”) with an apparent allergy to verisimilitude.

Love, Guaranteed, simmering at a low boil, is a short and mostly sweet affair. Its successes are due in large part to Cook who, donning a vast array of snug fall coats, is endearing as a willful working woman with a new crush.

Most egregiously, the world of Kinda Pregnant is filled with dopey men and despairing women whose torments, parental or otherwise, make for a land mine of comedy duds.

One is quick to forgive faulty plot machinations when an action movie really revs; Role Play merely spins its wheels.

Like a scoop of vanilla ice cream atop scoops of chocolate and strawberry, The Kissing Booth 3 rounds out the sugary teen trilogy with a fitting, if bland, finale.

In aiming for a piece of atmospheric sensuality, she instead lands in an erotic no man’s land, where the dramatic but obvious filmmaking — like an orbital shot when Emmanuelle finally reaches orgasm — isn’t surprising or evocative enough to make up for the silly monologues and empty characterizations.

You may chuckle, but it’s hard to tell if the movie is laughing with you.