Oliver Jones

Some of the visual horror will no doubt be of interest to genre fans, but even there the appeal is limited. In an age when we are awash in efficient and involving horror movies — from "Halloween" to "A Quiet Place" to even "The Nun" (which is not that great but is at least short) — Suspiria comes off as bloated and disconnected.

It is true that with Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Jason has entered the unofficial family business of trying and failing to recreate the inexplicable magic that made the original Ghostbusters such a frothy delight.

Shockingly un-cinematic and utterly devoid of dynamism, the film lacks anything resembling the well-researched insights or sharp-edged comedy that you have come to associate with the former host of The Daily Show.

The humans in the film are blandly generic. But the yetis, while individually distinct, all share a much larger, troubling problem: they don’t have noses.

It is an absurd premise, one made even more so by its execution, which at the hands of veteran Hollywood thriller director Martin Campbell (the one-time director of Bond films who has been in movie jail since 2011’s Green Lantern) is often lackluster and, on occasion, shockingly inept.

The latest jacked up, action extravaganza from stunt man turned director David Leitch (his last film, the not-very-good Bullet Train, is still leagues ahead of this movie in terms of imagination and execution), teems with contempt for the audience it is desperate to win over.

Forget all of it being true; I would have settled for some of it being interesting.

It’s not just emotion and creative innovation that feels MIA in this installment. The film acts as though it’s edgy, but lacks real bite.

As a self-serious horror drama that fictionalizes the real-life exploits of the late author and Catholic priest Father Gabriele Amorth into an absurdly plotted, blood-drenched haunted house movie, The Pope’s Exorcist arrives in theaters Friday the 14 with all the vitality and vivaciousness of a 15th century corpse.

Add to the long-winded title of this film, “…and completely unnecessary.”

The truth is, the film represents a troubling trend in films today, where production and marketing types think they can get by providing shallow examples of things that are popular in the social justice zeitgeist — women being tough-as-nails lead characters, for example — and act like that’s enough. It’s not. Give us real characters; give us good writing; give us a compelling story. Otherwise, don’t bother.

The movie has nary a thought in its red-hooded head, only a lot of blood.

Inheritance has not one iota of the thematic intensity of Bong’s film, nor any of the dynamic relationships that make Succession’s twists and turns impactful. Instead, there is nothing much on Inheritance’s mind, and the relationships end up as underdeveloped as the film’s cliché-ridden dialogue.

By the end, Shazam! feels like a corporate product that’s so thirsty for approval from all quadrants that it never ends up figuring out what it is.

The movie spends the bulk of its largely inert runtime painfully unaware that it is an example of the self-indulgent narcissism it’s intended to send up.

After awhile, Last Blood feels less like a new Rambo movie than the latest installment of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

Rarely will you see a more soul-numbingly empty product of this tragic operation than Halloween Kills, a film that so completely sucks the vitality out of John Carpenter’s and Debra Hill’s original vision that one would be tempted to call it a desecration if that didn’t make it sound like more fun than it actually is.

The best thing about reviewing the new PG-13 horror movie The Turning is that you don’t have to worry about spoiling the ending because it doesn’t have one. It just, sort of, stops.