Richard Roeper

Alas, the sweet-natured and occasionally moving but surprisingly stiff and slight Cry Macho is most likely destined to be remembered as one of Eastwood’s lesser works.

Jake Gyllenhaal is an A-lister for a reason, but he gives a one-note, screaming performance here and is less than convincing as an unhinged psychopath who seems to have a death wish.

We find it hard to get invested in the fates of any of these characters, despite the talented cast and the undeniably interesting look of the film.

Despite an intriguing premise, some Hitchcockian camerawork and a few effective shock scares, this is a thudding disappointment with surprisingly wooden performances from fine actors, and some of the most excruciatingly awful dialogue in any movie this year.

The Protégé isn’t trying to be anything more than slick, escapist action fare, but when you have the star power of the lead trio, a terrific supporting cast and what appears to be a sizable enough budget, it’s not too much to ask for a little something in the way of a cohesive script. Instead, we get two variations on the same twist, and an ending that’s both murky and irritating. Maggie Q and company deserve better.

Unwise casting choices in two key roles. Increasingly ludicrous plot developments — even for a slick, escapist thriller. Dubious science about the potency of a nuclear warhead. Intellectually lazy pop psychology, much of it heavy on the daddy issues, as character motivation.

Trap is a well-crafted shell with nothing inside.

The overwrought score and the Orwellian themes announce “Barbarians” as a prestige project brimming with Big Ideas, but it’s ultimately stilted and didactic, and more than a bit nasty.

There’s never a moment when the story lulls. Alas, it’s all just so … preposterous, due to that mistrial of a screenplay.

Occasionally creative but mostly distasteful and thuddingly unfunny, this is the kind of story that asks us to take wild leaps of faith at every turn—and then buy into a redemption story arc that is neither plausible nor earned.

As quickly as Thing can snap its fingers, we’ll soon forget our visit with this version of The Addams Family.

Planes moves along quickly at a running time of 92 minutes, occasionally taking flight with some pretty nifty flight sequences. The animation is first-rate, and the Corningware colors are soothing eye candy.

The story fluctuates between the uninspired and the just plain weird — and then gets even weirder. It’s too basic and familiar to keep parents and older children consistently entertained, and too trippy and existential for the little ones.

Reprising his writing/directing chores from the original, Ken Scott gives us an uneven mishmash that alternates between easy gags, shameless sentimentality and some just plain bizarre choices.

Sharp Stick is a rather sour and troublesome film—a strange hybrid that sometimes plays like a Fractured Fairy Tale and is populated by razor-thin characters who behave in an inconsistent manner and exist in a world that alternates between gritty reality and some kind of bizarro alternative world where things just don’t add up.

The scenes between Gleeson and Huppert are rendered in muted tones and are sweet and effective. Subplots involving Sylvia and Paul are flat and uninteresting.

Pfeiffer is delivering one of the best performances of her career as the complex and formidable and deeply sad Frances, but she’s like a world-class basketball player stuck on the court with a bunch of weekend amateurs. There’s no one to give her a decent game.

Thor: Love and Thunder is one of the goofiest and least consequential sagas in MCU history — an allegedly wild and wacky but ultimately disappointing and disjointed chapter in the ongoing story of the God of Thunder, who seems to get more clueless with each passing movie.

F9: The Fast Saga isn’t the worst entry in the long-running and popular Fast & Furious franchise, but it just might be the silliest and the loudest and the most ridiculous — and while that might well have been the filmmakers’ intention, it’s not a compliment.

Clocking in at just 93 minutes and yet still feeling a bit stretched out, “Beast” features a wonderful cast and some gorgeous location photography in South Africa, but the screenplay requires everyone in this story to behave like the dopiest characters in the schlockiest of horror B-movies.

A disappointing and murky mess of a film that feels like an uncompleted project and leaves the viewer frustrated, despite the gritty visuals and a game lead performance by two-time Academy Award winner Hilary Swank.

For a film so aggressively intent on Big Shock Moments (cannibalism and lesbian necrophilia, anyone?), it’s more often stultifying and tedious than provocative.

The entire movie comes across as if the screenwriters had gathered the scripts for dozens of similar films in the genre, dropped them into some sort of software blender — and whipped up one big bland smoothie of a story.

This is a home run swing that results in a strikeout and a long trudge back to the dugout.

While the members of the Broken Lizard comedy group retain their likability, and there’s something kind of endearing about the disjointed, throw-everything-at-the-wall, “Caddyshack” type chaos behind the comedy, there are simply too many dead spots and cheap jokes and flat gags to carry a full-length feature.

Nearly everything in this movie feels borrowed from other movies and ever so slightly reshaped, and almost never for the better.

It’s a shame Eternals devolves into such a run-of-the-mill superhero movie, given it features some groundbreaking and/or relatively unusual elements, including a deaf character, an openly gay character and an actual lovemaking scene between two otherworldly entities (although it’s tamer than what you’d see in a 1950s romance).

The true story of Freddy Heineken’s kidnapping is fascinating, but Kidnapping Mr. Heineken is a disappointingly superficial film in which neither the kidnappers nor their captives are particularly interesting.

Alas, though Ishana Night Shyamalan demonstrates promise as a filmmaker and delivers some arresting visuals and a few good jump-scares, “The Watchers” feels like a cover band’s take on familiar scary movie themes, with little in the way of original ideas or surprises.

Vikander is in nearly every scene in the movie, and she’s absolutely terrific. Endearing and funny in the early scenes in London, easy to root for as she dives into the cartoon of an adventure. Of course Tomb Raider sets the table for future adventures, but if the future chapters are to be this silly and disposable, one hopes Vikander moves on as quickly from this film as I did as a viewer.

Writer-director Amy Miller Gross clearly is a competent director and has a fine ear for dialogue; it feels as if “Sister of the Groom” exists in the real world. Alas, it’s not a world where you’d want to hang out, unless your thing is watching selfish narcissists do verbal and sometimes physical battle over decidedly First World Problems.

Michael Winterbottom (“The Claim,” “24 Hour Party People,” “Code 46”) is a wonderfully gifted and versatile director, so it comes as no small surprise Greed is such a thudding. one-note takedown of a fictional avaricious fashion mogul.

It’s more exhausting than entertaining, and the multiple conclusions to the interconnecting storylines are more on the level of the dud that was “Rocky V” than the thrills of “Rocky III.”

There might indeed be a fine movie lurking within the pages of that original source material, but “The King’s Daughter” is not that movie.

We’re halfway through the movie when the villain’s identity becomes painfully obvious. Spoiler alert: We’re not wrong. The dialogue is often so painful, it’s almost entertaining on some level.

All the players in The Misogynists sound as if they’ve been handed talking points instead of a screenplay.

It’s like a low-budget, Canadian version of “Ocean’s 11,” with about half as many characters and about one-tenth the charm and style.

Right up until an ending straight out of a mediocre rom-com from the early 2000s, You People never feels like more than a series of stitched-together scenes making some legitimate but obvious points about racial differences.

Paradise is a ringing disappointment. Cody shows some potential as a director, but her own script lets her down.

It’s ugly but not scary. It’s creepy but not chilling. It’s one of the least successful adaptations of a Stephen King story since …The last Pet Sematary.

As a movie, Veronica Mars looks and feels, well, like a glorified TV movie, with just decent production values, mostly unexceptional performances and ridiculous plot developments no more innovative than you’d see on a dozen network TV detective shows.

It’s The Maltese Falcon meets Inception somewhere in the Vanilla Sky on the way to Chinatown in the inventive and ambitious but wildly convoluted and ultimately disappointing sci-fi noir Reminiscence, which careens this way and that, and this way and that, before running off the rails.

[Harris and Franco] bring out the finest in each other as they punch and counter-punch vastly different memories of horrific incidents from the past. It’s great stuff. Unfortunately, much of the rest of the The Adderall Diaries is overwrought, convoluted and irritating.

Despite the fine performances, A Good Person starts off on the wrong foot and never finds a solid stride.

There’s an admirable commitment to absurdity, yet it belies the thoughtful coming-of-age journey for the five teens up until they hit “morphin time.”

Give the Sony Pictures-backed Affirm Films and Risen director and co-writer Kevin Reynolds credit for making a different kind of Biblical semi-epic.

While Mirren and McKellen are as wonderful as you’d expect, especially in the early going when their respective characters are just getting to know one another, even these two legendary talents can’t overcome a convoluted, unfocused and increasingly implausible storyline.

Ben-Hur struggles to find an identity and never really gets there. The well-intentioned efforts to achieve moving, faith-based awakenings are undercut by the casually violent, PG-13 action sequences.

As we pick up Billy/Shazam’s story about four years later, it quickly becomes apparent this is just going to be a by-the-numbers, second-tier adventure with only a few small chuckles and one or two genuinely touching moments. The rest is just noise.

This is a slick-looking film with a gorgeous cast and a sprinkling of funny one-liners, but the dark comedy often falls flat, nearly every character is a one-dimensional cliché and the redemption story defies credibility, even in a well-dressed social satire.

This is an ambitious and sometimes effective but wildly uneven adventure that plays like one extended ego trip for Stiller. It feels like a movie by focus group, struggling to find a place between genuinely creative fantasy and audience-pleasing payoff moments.

Though it crackles with energy and has some impressive albeit gratuitously bloody kill sequences, the Big Picture plot is a dud, up to and including the preposterous final scenes.

Even accepting the increasingly dizzying level of logic-defying, mind-effing, increasingly convoluted time-bending developments in the entertainingly bad (but still bad) Don’t Let Go, I found myself wondering why and how.

A mildly entertaining and sometimes thought-provoking but ultimately ludicrous deep space thriller.

Positive points to the Hotel Artemis for trying to achieve something original, and for the quality of the cast. But after that bloody boldness, the analogies and the life lessons and the moments of closure are all too predictable and familiar.

This is a two-star movie with moments of sheer exuberance and clever good fun — but just as many scenes that had me tilting my head like a dog trying to figure out what the WHAT is taking place before his very eyes.

Everyone slips comfortably into their roles and does what they can with the goofy dialogue and the death-defying, logic-defeating stunt sequences.

One only wishes Walker had stronger, better developed material instead of a promising drama that eventually unravels and seems overlong even with a running time of 96 minutes.

Down a Dark Hall eventually goes Down a Convoluted Tunnel, with some admittedly creepy but also just plain crazy sequences that play like “Eyes Wide Shut” meets “The Shining.”

This is a bloodless, cold, self-congratulatory exercise in style for style’s sake.

To its credit, Dark Night does not exploit or glamorize the gun culture, nor does it attempt to hammer us over the head with social or political views. Sutton is undeniably talented. Better, deeper, richer work is almost sure to follow.

This is an unapologetically violent video-game-turned-movie, filled with gore and also brimming with flat dialogue, whether it’s big-picture speechifying or mostly lame attempts at snappy, action-movie banter. One might reasonably surmise longtime fans of Mortal Kombat would have a better time playing the latest version of the game than watching this origins story.

The talented director Billy Corben swings for the fences and takes a decidedly creative approach, but unfortunately, he devotes far too many at-bats to one particular stylistic choice. Either you’ll find it original and funny and suitably outlandish, or, like me, you’ll grow weary of the technique.

The twist on top of the twist was so amateurish, so hacky, so insulting to the viewer, I’m already thinking about apologizing to you guys for just the one-star demerit.

Even a warmed-over, behind-the-times Woody Allen script is going to contain some choice one-liners, and this is a superb cast that knows how to put the right spin on clever dialogue — even when they’re playing thinly drawn characters in a dated and unnecessary story.

Nothing incendiary to see here, folks. Just a mostly forgettable, slow-season splatter movie.

Force of Nature is more of a nasty little rainstorm than a Category 5 anything.

Even when John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson are slumming it, they’re good fun. Not enough to save the movie, but enough to keep you interested when you click across this thing sometime in your future.

Moonfall is the kind of film that doesn’t take itself seriously and yet really doesn’t have a sense of humor about the ludicrous nature of its very existence.

The problem is, despite the efforts of the talented cast, the supposedly lovable former soldiers aren’t all that lovable, the primary human villain is a cocky fool with cloudy motives — and the predators don’t seem all that intimidating compared to a lot of the Earth-loathing alien invaders we see at the movies these days.

Despite its attempts to be racy and of-the-moment and to earn that R rating, Red, White & Blue comes across as contrived and, at its foundation, quite formulaic. Not even the cake gives a convincing performance.

It’s a fractured fairy tale, penned in clunky strokes.

Despite a promising beginning, “Immaculate” relies too much on jump-scares and disturbing imagery for the sake of shock, and flies off the rails with an absolutely bonkers climactic sequence that plays like something out of a cheap horror film.

The performances are strong, even if the characters aren’t given much depth.

How to Make a Killing makes a half-hearted effort to surprise and maybe disturb us with some late developments, but by that point we’ve been numbed by the film committing the unforgivable crime of being dull.

It’s arguably the weakest, lamest and least memorable entry in the history of the franchise. It’s also crass and tone-deaf. And played mostly for laughs that are few and far between.

If you’ve seen “The Big Chill,” you’ve seen this movie, with older grown-ups. Even if you haven’t, you won’t be surprised by much.

The Marvels has a kind of 1990s B-movie vibe throughout and is neither as funny nor as engaging and warm as it tries to be, despite the best efforts of the talented director Nia DaCosta (2021’s “Candyman”) and a trio of gifted and enormously likable leads in Brie Larson, Teyonah Parris and Iman Vellani.

Even though of course we recognize the bravery and selfless heroism of the men on that train who risked their lives to save others, and even though there are a few pulse-quickening moments in The 15:17 to Paris, the movie is slow-paced and feels padded, even with that running time of just over an hour and a half.

While both have Broadway-level pipes, neither has a particularly distinctive, knock-it-out-of-the park voice. It doesn’t help that the songs, while solid, become repetitive in melody. And there’s not a home run in the bunch. I walked out humming … nothing from this movie.

Tessa Thompson’s performance is the best thing in the movie, in part because she’s playing a character who genuinely respects the legacy of the Men (and Women) in Black and is thrilled to be part of the team.

An admittedly distinctive but ultimately mediocre movie that provides far more empty calories of exploitation than genuine food for thought.

The problem is, the story lacks originality and zest.

On the stage, it could be a powerful and moving work. As a movie, it’s a sometimes effective but more often tedious history lesson.

That this is such a well-made production, with passionate and strong performances from the stellar cast, makes it all the more exasperating. What a missed opportunity

This is every bit the international thriller, from the exotic locations to the global political elements to the cast. If only we could get involved in Beckett’s story and truly care about his fate.

The argument about whether Sandler is terrible or talented has long been settled. The answer is both.

The well-intentioned drama never makes the case why a decent man would stay close to his detestable father.

There’s no denying the “John Wick”-type artistry involved in some of the action sequences, but the screenplay invokes far too many gimmicks and eventually takes some wild Act III turns that feel manipulative and borderline ridiculous.

Despite the first-rate production values and the game performances from the cast, “Greta” can’t escape from the formulaic screenplay that dogs it at every turn. It’s almost as if it’s being stalked by mediocrity itself.

Given the unapologetic, sharp-edged tone of Burr’s comedy, it’s surprising that as director, co-writer and star of this vehicle, he played it so safe.

Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is a bold but wildly uneven, bloody mess of a film, sunk in large part by the subpar performances by nearly every major character in nearly every major role.

It’s a well-photographed story with an intriguing setup, but soon we’re mired in a meandering, stilted story with forced dialogue and some surprisingly subpar performances from the talented cast.

Space Cadet wraps itself in the trappings of a female empowerment story, but it actually celebrates using deception and taking shortcuts. Rex Simpson is no Elle Woods, and this story is more “Illegal, Need Bond” than “Legally Blonde.”

An excruciatingly cheesy, hopelessly dated, profoundly unfunny and tone-deaf romantic comedy about an intelligent, hard-working, likable and lovely woman.

Suicide Squad does have its moments of beautiful comic-book visuals.... Those are just tantalizing hints of a better movie that never materialized.

Finch ends exactly as we expect it to end — but what should be an emotional and profound conclusion feels manufactured. You don’t have to be a super-smart robot named Jeff to know when you’re being manipulated.

Problem is, there’s no movie inside this movie. It’s a breezy and intermittently entertaining and super slick work, but it’s filled with so many overly familiar notes and well-worn cliches, and there are so many winking nods to the viewer, it feels as if we’re about two rewrites away from this thing being a flat-out spoof on the level of Airplane! or Hot Shots! or Scary Movie.

Careful What You Wish For is aiming for lusty, lurid, B-movie titillation, but it’s not nearly as sexy nor nearly as clever as it would like to be.

The problem this time around is the plot is particularly idiotic, the supposedly snappy quips are lame and come at some weirdly inappropriate moments — and it’s all delivered in an extremely bloated package.

The individual parts never come close to fully meshing into a quality team effort.

Despite an excellent ensemble cast of comedic treasures as well as veterans of drama taking a walk down a lighter aisle, A.C.O.D (i.e. Adult Children of Divorce) delivers only a few sporadic chuckles amidst a slew of clunky scenes.

There’s no narrator, no interviews, no dramatic re-creations of events—simply an admittedly well-edited but ultimately unenlightening mash-up of archival footage, person-on-the-street interviews from the time, snippets from chat shows and audio and video clips of various newscasters and pundits. We’re left wondering: What. Is. The. Point.

The actual case isn’t all that complex or compelling, and the eventual explanation for what happened is almost an afterthought. By the time all the ghosts and feuds have been put to rest, it’s surprising how little we care about these characters.

Candy Cane Lane is harmless but teeters on the brink of being quite terrible.

Crimson Peak is a gorgeous mediocrity.

The great Jared Harris does what he can with an underwritten role.

Things Heard & Seen has the requisite horror-movie look (deep shades of brown and orange, low camera angles, repeated glimpses of effectively creepy paintings and haunting photographs, religious symbolism everywhere) and Norton in particular is a hoot as just the worst person in the world — but still, Things Heard & Seen should be neither of those things.

Unlocked has the DNA of many a 21st century late summer release: It’s a well-made but terribly uneven film that’s been sitting on a shelf for two years, despite the credentials of the veteran director and a star-studded cast.

Poker Face has a lean, cool look, and there are some effective dramatic moments, mostly due to the weight-of-the-old weariness in Crowe’s powerful performance. Unfortunately, Paul Tassone’s over-the-top theatrics as the main villain border on the cartoonish, as the psychological gamesmanship gives way to standard action movie stuff, and the cards and the chips have long been forgotten.

Tired, uninspired and meandering, Wrath of Man is a step backward for Ritchie, a step sideways for the stoic-for-life Jason Statham (reteaming with Ritchie for the first time in 16 years) and a misstep for anyone who invests their time and money on 118 minutes of such convoluted and forgettable nonsense.

There’s not a bad performance in this movie. De Niro, Keaton and Sarandon are particularly good, what a surprise. But it feels as if all the guests at “The Big Wedding” are wearing ID tags telling us their one Plot Point.

Sure, these guys now have a budget to work with and they can pull off some elaborate stunts, but we’ve seen so much viral, backyard Jackassery through the years, the shock value has dissipated and all that remains is the cringe factor and a growing feeling of restlessness as the gags become repetitive and tiresome.

On the Basis of Sex is almost always solid. But “solid” is about as high as it goes.

This is an artist’s coming-of-age story featuring a wonderful actress who’s unfortunately not right for the role; a shambling screenplay that has characters wandering in and out of the story as if in search of their own movie, and not one but two of the most off-putting patriarchal figures in recent memory.

In the bland and outdated and curiously tame would-be sex rom-com “A Nice Girl Like You,” Hale once again tries her gosh-darndest to sell the material — but even though this toothless yawner is based on a real-life memoir, every single frame feels artificial and forced.

Pitch Perfect 2 strains to find some plot conflicts while balancing the line between satire and rousing musical numbers.

This is a shoddy-looking, superficial and cliché-embracing effort that misses the mark at every turn.

To call this a Netflix Original movie is only half-correct. True, it’s on Netflix, but no, there’s nothing original about this uninspired knockoff of “Fatal Attraction” (even the title and the poster borrow from that 1987 classic of the genre), which is marred by stilted dialogue, predictable plot turns and surprisingly halfhearted performances from a talented cast that acts as if they know this is slick garbage and they’re just trying to make it through the shoot so they can call their respective agents and say, “We need to talk.”

Almost nothing about Illicit rings true — but thanks to the likable, earnest and attractive cast, and the semi-salacious, soap-opera vibe to the proceedings, my attention never wandered, and I’ll admit I was mildly curious about how everything would play out.

The putatively provocative and wannabe-controversial erotic thriller “Miller’s Girl” is a sordid little tale that isn’t nearly as clever and literary as it tries to be, nor is it as deliberately campy as 20th century entries in the genre such as “Wild Things” or even “Poison Ivy.”

The acting is actually pretty solid. These characters are never in the same room, so the performances amount to a collection of solo scenes. But these kids aren’t likable. Perhaps director Gabriadze and writer Nelson Greaves intended to create a Social Media “Scream” and a commentary on cyber-bullying, but Unfriended comes across as disdainful of millennials.

There’s gratuitous nudity, lots of partying, zippy camera moves, plenty of product placement and did we mention all those celebrity cameos? It all feels more like a rerun than a fully formed, stand-alone movie.

A gorgeous but plodding and borderline ludicrous period-piece weeper.

What might have been a slick, smash-mouth, fast-paced piece of entertainment clocking in at 90 or 100 minutes somehow turns into a bloated, half-baked pie that drags on for 2 hours and 20 minutes.

The result is just a bigger, louder, more special effects-laden extension of a franchise that skated on pretty thin ice the first two times around.

The fine actors onscreen are mere accessories to the computerized puppets thrashing and slashing and stabbing and biting and roaring and breaking stuff all over the place before only one of them is left standing. Sigh.

McKinnon has so much energy and creativity she nearly jumps out of the frame. It’s an uneven performance with mixed results — but we’re left hoping she’ll be matched up with a better film role sometime soon, one that makes full use of her unique talents.

This is a classic example of a well-made, big-budget action movie that is less than the sum of its parts.

This forgettable film is too rough for younger kids and too stupid for the grown-ups.

From start to finish, Hunter Killer is all wet.

It’s fascinating and boring, intriguing and exasperating, but ultimately it felt like a jambalaya of ideas that didn’t quite mesh into a satisfying experience.

After an initially promising first half-hour, it’s a long and tedious slog to the finish line as we follow a group of paper-thin caricatures who are only mildly interesting and intermittently funny.

Hart delivers a sincere and relatively low-key performance as Dell, but he’s playing an all-too-familiar movie stereotype.

Russell Crowe is an A-list star in a B-movie, but to his credit it never feels as if he’s slumming it.

Despite some interesting performances and impressive art direction, director Luca Guadagnino’s take on the 1977, cult-favorite, supernatural horror film by Dario Argento is an arduous, overstuffed, convoluted and trashy piece — bloated and graphically blood-soaked, guaranteed to make you cringe at times, but not the least bit chilling or haunting.

While it’s wonderful to see Michelle Yeoh return as Yu Shu-Lien and there are a few moments of soaring majesty, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny is an unnecessary and underwhelming experience that plays like a B-movie knockoff/follow-up of the original.

Pee-wee is still a startling and original and strangely endearing creation. He just deserved a funnier, more intriguing holiday.

You can see the big twist coming an hour in advance. And the big epic showdown is resolved in a manner that defies even the most cursory of examinations. There’s something almost depressing about how often this movie takes the easy, lazy way out.

Directed by Peter Farrelly from a story/screenplay credited to a total of eight writers (rarely a hopeful sign), “Ricky Stanicky” has the cheerfully offensive and goofy offbeat flavor of 1990s Farrelly Brothers comedies such as “Dumb and Dumber,” “Kingpin” and “There’s Something About Mary,” only with most of the laughs and much of the charm MIA.

An artfully shot and occasionally provocative but ultimately underwhelming and self-indulgent film.

It’s bigger, louder and dumber than the original—filled with cartoon violence, only occasionally funny dialogue and a group of suspects/victims not nearly as intriguing as the bunch from the first film.

The Amazon Prime original movie Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse has to be considered one of the more disappointing films of 2021 so far, given the long and rich history of entertaining adaptations of Clancy’s work and the vibrant star power of its leading man.

This is a lightweight, cliché-riddled origins story that veers between inside-joke comedy, ponderous redemption story lines and admittedly nifty CGI sequences that still seem relatively insignificant compared to the high stakes and city-shattering destruction that take place in most of the “Avengers” movies.

Writer/director Carey clearly has some talent, and she and Plaza deserve credit for never pulling their comedic punches. They’re all in. Problem is, it’s mostly a bluff.

Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland is a great-looking, old-fashioned, at times soaring adventure ultimately brought down by a needlessly convoluted plot, some surprisingly casual violence and heavy-handed lectures about how we’re our own worst enemy and we’re going to destroy the planet if we don’t get it together.

The ruling on the field is this is an incomplete pass.

The dialogue in As They Made Us rings authentic and the performances are universally strong, but there’s a dour air to the proceedings, and we wind up thinking Abigail would have been better off if she, too, had left home the moment it was possible and had never looked back.

This is one of those comedies that could have been a brilliant short film on “Funny or Die” or “Saturday Night Live,” but wears out its welcome as a feature-length film.

Blockers becomes less interesting and less funny as the onscreen hijinks grow more outlandish and stupid and demeaning and crotch-oriented.

As the plot grows increasingly convoluted and borderline laughable, Chastain is steady as she goes, playing a character who’s worthy of a film franchise in a movie nowhere near deserving a sequel. Odds are we’ll never see Ava again, and that’s a shame because, with a better script and more inspired direction, she could have been a contender.

But so much of the humor and so many of the situations in Second Act feel like warmed-over Second Helpings of a dinner from long ago...A dinner that wasn’t all that memorable in the first place.

This is a murky-looking, CGI-heavy dud.

Final Portrait has the feel of a work that might be quite effective on a modest stage in a small theater. As a film, it’s well-made and the performances are fine, but it feels slight and thin and inconsequential — quite the opposite of the work Alberto Giacometti left behind.

My thoughts turn to the Giant CGI Anacondas in “Snake Eyes” and what their lives are like in between meals — and if that sounds ridiculous and outlandish and weird, welcome to this bombastic, slick, convoluted and unnecessary second-tier action franchise reboot.

Eva Longoria’s Flamin’ Hot is a well-made but overly conventional and borderline corny (pardon the pun) biopic chronicling the rags-to-riches tale of one Richard Montañez, a maintenance worker at Frito-Lay who invented the globally popular Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, forever changing the snack-food game.

Goodbye Christopher Robin is a film of rough edges and jagged twists, at times beautiful to behold but more often shot in jarring close-ups that make Christopher Robin’s parents look like the villains in a gothic horror film.

The Finest Hours feels stitched together. None of the three main plot lines is particularly powerful or moving.

It’s an occasionally interesting, well-acted mess.

Despite the frequent verbal confrontation scenes in which characters lash out at one another, soap opera style, for lying or serving their selfish interests, Dark Phoenix doesn’t come close to carrying the emotional impact of so many Marvel Universe films where the characters come across as complicated, relatable and three-dimensional.

The dance scenes are admittedly well-choreographed and filmed (that Soderbergh kid knows what he’s doing behind the camera), but “Last Dance” isn’t nearly as raw and sexy as the original.

A visually underwhelming saga that tests (and fails) our patience with a whopping 2-hour-and-37-minute running time — and even with all that storytelling room, engages in some whiplash changes of character in the final act that make little sense and feel forced and contrived, as if the filmmakers suddenly remembered they had to draw a connection between this story and subsequent events the audience already knows about.

We’re not supposed to think about a movie like Skyscraper. This is superficial summer popcorn fare, given a PG-13 because when innocents are mowed down, the camera lingers on the smugly smiling sociopathic villains, not the carnage.

This is a noble effort, but ultimately Mary Magdalene isn’t much less of a mystery than she was at the start of the journey.

This is one good-looking, occasionally titillating, mostly soapy and dull snooze-fest.

From the moment Rachael and Stefan look into each other’s eyes while we roll OUR eyes, The Aftermath is a runaway train of cornball cliches.

It’s well-made and well-acted, but it’s also a grotesque, self-indulgent and ultimately tiresome satire that leaves behind an unpleasant stench.

The star power trio of Samuel L. Jackson, Selma Hayek and Ryan Reynolds have a few funny exchanges, and there are a couple of physical shtick routines so over the top it’s as if they dusted off the Monty Python playbook for a modern-day action film — but there are far more misfires than direct comedic/dramatic hits in this blood-drenched, explosion-riddled, live-action cartoon of a film.

This isn’t so much a traditional musical drama a la “Wicked” as it is a turgid, heavy-handed and preachy melodrama interspersed with musical numbers that are serviceable but hardly memorable.

Problem is, the more we know about these two, the less we care about what happens to them.

This is the kind of movie that keeps the great Ellen Barkin literally in the shadows as a criminal mastermind, and relegates the wonderful Kaley Cuoco to an embarrassing supporting role as a man-hungry best girlfriend who might as well have stepped out of a cheesy 1970s rom-com. Is anybody even trying here?

Clocking in at a brisk 88 minutes, Assassin reaches a heartfelt but ludicrous conclusion, and you’ll start to forget it moments after the final credits.

The callbacks to “Taxi Driver” and, on a lesser level, “Fight Club” are many in South African writer-director John Trengrove’s well-shot but heavy-handed and depressingly obvious Manodrome, a blunt indictment of toxic masculinity that strikes mere glancing blows and packs a relatively soft punch.

Many scenes are bathed in a sickly green, as if we’re watching everything through cheap night-vision goggles; others are tinted blood-red. No matter what filters are used, there’s no disguising this is garbage wrapped in a glossy package.

Admission has some sublime moments, most of them involving Fey and Rudd dancing around their inevitable romance. The problem is in the foundation.

This is a conventional-looking films with a screenplay from brothers David and Alex Pastor that raises some fascinating issues and offers a tease or two of a better movie before devolving into a medley of chases and shootouts.

It’s hard to make a case for being a timely, provocative thriller when so many characters are regressive caricatures.

What a wasted opportunity.

Everything unfolds pretty much as we anticipate, and at times “Operation Finale” IS gripping and involving — but more often, the story slows to a crawl and actually becomes less involving just when we should be holding our breath. This is a well-made but formulaic, by-the-numbers drama.

This is a star-studded extravaganza light on character development and heavy on battle spectacle, resulting in an impressive-looking but dramatically underwhelming story.

I’m not going to spoil the epilogue in the slick but trashy and quite dumb Jennifer Lopez action movie The Mother, but I will say it’s so insanely off the rails, so bat-bleep crazy that I almost want you to watch The Mother just so you’ll know what I’m talking about. Almost.

The Lost City breezes along in predictable fashion, touching all the familiar bases of this genre, as the scowling Abigail and his helpless henchmen pursue Loretta and Alan, and oh, there’s a volcano that’s about to erupt. If only Loretta and Alan could have unearthed a more interesting story, we might have had something.

Director Adam Robitel knows how to scare us with the classic, sudden-appearance-of-a-scary-thing-accompanied-by-a-loud-music-sting trick, which of course has been utilized a thousand times in hundreds of movies.

Even the world-class cast can’t save this one from teetering into the abyss.

Stars at Noon is all sweaty style with very little true substance.

The deeper we go into Dana Nachman’s unquestioning, feature-length cheerleading film, the more uncomfortable I felt about the reaction of one person to that magical and overwhelming day. Miles.

Godzilla x King Kong: The New Empire is the definition of an old-fashioned (with new technology) popcorn movie and there’s certainly no harm in that, but at the end of the day, it feels like the stakes have never been more medium.

Beyond the product placement, Marry Me is a high-concept “elevator pitch” movie that is set in present day but feels like a relic of the mid-1990s.

This is a surprisingly and disappointingly tame film, in which Morris is almost deferential to Bannon.

This particular “Blacklight” is pure, overblown, cliché-riddled fiction.

Knight of Cups is a ponderous affair, never taking 30 seconds to make a point when four minutes is available.

Movie magic is an elusive thing. A Wrinkle in Time is a bold film that takes big chances from start to finish, in a courageous effort to be something special.... But for all its scenes of characters flying and soaring and zooming here and there, it never really takes off.

As earnest and heartfelt as a movie can be, Walking With the Enemy is, unfortunately, a plodding and clunky drama that never misses an opportunity to embrace a cliché.

So many great actors, cast adrift by a script that feels incomplete and a brilliant director delivering one of his lesser works.

The Guilty wants to make a statement about a man who’s trying to save himself through saving others, but the message is delivered with all the subtlety of a frantic 911 call.

There are more than enough ingredients here to cook up one rousing and thought-provoking sci-fi thriller. Except this time around, they’re just serving up overcooked leftovers.

Director Daniel Espinosa’s stylish and at times fantastically gory Life features an A-list, international and diverse cast, a few grotesque surprises and one very cool and labyrinthine spaceship — but eventually crashes and burns due to multiple failures.

Occasionally Winterbottom delivers a haunting, effective moment, giving a hint of a different, more compelling film. But then it’s back to the self-righteous, self-indulgent, muddled metaphors.

While the talented and versatile director Paul Feig (“Freaks and Geeks,” “Bridesmaids,” “A Simple Favor”) displays an admirably ambitious reach, and there are some impressive visuals, The School for Good and Evil never quite finds its footing.

The dry, drab and disappointing would-be crime thriller Heist 88 is a prime example of a movie that has all the right ingredients on the table but fails to create an appetizing entrée at nearly every turn. It’s a film that initially intrigues but quickly loses its way — and ends so abruptly it almost feels like everyone lost interest and decided it was time to go home.

The occasionally clever dialogue and the peppy voice performances are the best things about Scoob!, but not nearly enough to overcome the loud and convoluted overall tone.

A mostly underwhelming film, with underdeveloped characters and supercharged fight scenes that drag on forever and offer nothing new in the way of special-effects creativity.

Alas, with the notable exception of the empathetic Boutella, the cast of “Climax” consists primarily of dancers who are not actors. And as actors, they’re really good dancers.

Rogen does a remarkably fine job in creating two distinct characters.

The Tax Collector is an underachieving, exceedingly violent urban gangster film with a meandering storyline and a contrived final twist.

Ted 2 feels like far too many other sequels: born of box office expectations more than a bona fide reason to return to the characters we loved the first time around.

The main story keeps stalling out in favor of these drive-by interludes that take center stage for a few minutes and then fade into the background, usually never to be heard from again.

The harder everyone tries to wring laughs out of the next hail of bullets or the next ridiculous plot twist or the next comedic decapitation, the duller the edge of the humor.

The Humbling is a jumbled collection of scenes in which fantasy and reality intertwine in a manner I found more maddening than intriguing.

The best thing in the movie is Schwarzenegger, who delivers the Guardian’s lines with perfect timing and creates an empathetic character, because as we know, nearly all the best movie robots somehow become just a little bit human as time goes on.

Pixels has a few inspired action sequences and a handful of laugh-out-loud moments, but overall the special effects are surprisingly average — and the lazy acting by Adam Sandler, the shameless mugging by Kevin James and the hammy performance by Brian Cox don’t help. Not even Peter Dinklage in a mullet can save the day.

Hickok is not without its corny, borderline-cheesy moments of fun — but it eventually loses steam due to the increasingly cliché-riddled story developments, not to mention the awkwardly edited shootouts that sometimes make it seem as if the combatants filmed their scenes on separate days.

It gets to the point where it hardly matters to us who lives and who dies, because they’re all stone-cold killers.

It clearly aspires to be something more than another story about empty-headed teenagers in a remote cabin who get picked off one by one in gruesome fashion — but at the end of the day, that’s pretty much what we’re getting.

Three Thousand Years of Longing actually ends on a creative high note, but the path to that conclusion is filled with muddled adventures that play like something out of a 1980s B-movie. We find ourselves longing for the credits to roll.

It is an ambitious, dreamlike, beautifully shot movie (with cinematography by the legendary Roger Deakins) that aims for the fences again and again in the course of 149 minutes — but nearly every one of those mighty cuts is a swing and a miss.

The flat and uninspired Addams Family 2 is the wrong kind of “twofer,” in that it’s often too dark and grotesque and bizarre for children, but also profoundly unfunny when it tries to appeal to the grown-ups.

True, Aniston does maybe her best film work to date in Cake. But it’s definitely not her best film.

If we don’t care a whit about the characters and their respective dilemmas, a multiple-vortex tornado ripping through a used car lot is just a multiple-vortex tornado ripping through a used car lot.

Finally, a sci-fi action mega-movie filled with CGI battles in which barely distinguishable foes hurl each other about while delivering unspeakably corny lines, as we hear hip-hop hits on the soundtrack.

The bloated, bombastic and brain-dead Netflix actioner The Gray Man is a depressingly formulaic waste of the talents of the Russo Brothers and the A-list cast — and a complete waste of 2 hours and 2 minutes of your time, unless you’re content to hit the “Recline” button on your theater seat, soak in the exotic locations, jam your arm into a bucket o’ popcorn and laugh at the hackneyed, cartoonishly violent and utterly ridiculous idiocy of the entire exercise.

The modern retelling retains little of the charm and whimsy of the source material, in favor of a cloying story, a most unwelcome new character and some pretty cheesy special effects.

A mixed-bag satire with ambitions that veer wildly from sharp political insight to slapstick farce to inspirational semi-autobiography. It never finds solid ground in any of those genres.

As an often cliché-riddled tale of redemption on the big screen, Burnt is the equivalent of a sleek, well-lit, trendy restaurant serving up a mildly creative dishes on an otherwise predictable menu.

The Longest Ride” treats us to a twist that’s so ridiculous I think we’re almost supposed to laugh. It’s not quite on the “Are you KIDDING ME!?” level of awfulness as the big reveal in “Safe Haven,” but it’s close. It’s close.

The Bubble is ultimately a mediocre movie about the making of an even worse movie.

Now comes Foe, which is set primarily in the year 2065 and envisions a dystopian world in which the delicate and dangerous balance between humans and sentient AI creations is the basis for a pretentious and empty cautionary tales with some interesting ideas — but it’s mostly a pile of hokey claptrap.

Shatner and Smart have a comfortable chemistry, and it IS nice to see a movie romance between two people who remember the 1960s. It’s just too bad they’re in a vehicle that isn’t nearly as impressive as that vintage Porsche.

Ride Along 2 is the movie equivalent of a cover band. We’ve seen it all before, and often in much better films.

It’s often fascinating stuff, but the whole thing comes across as a film new employees would watch on their first day of work, right after filling out all the packets of forms in Human Resources.

There are moments of surprising tenderness in Fading Gigolo, and Turturro gives us some beautiful shots of a city he clearly loves. But this film is all over the map, veering from pathos to absurdist comedy to romance to weirdness for the sake of weirdness.

For all the gorgeous visuals in Brighton and Venice, and the scandalous-for-its-time storyline about a married man carrying on a torrid love affair with another man when being gay was literally a crime, My Policeman never really resonates.

The talented writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour raises the crazy stakes with a well-made, sometimes darkly funny and at times bizarrely entertaining film that eventually falls apart due to directorial self-indulgence, excessive grotesquery, a bloated running time, too many half-baked messages—and let’s not forget the distractingly campy appearances by Keanu Reeves and Jim Carrey.

Everything about “Uglies” is average. Not terrible enough to be campy, not deep or provocative or visually impressive enough to merit further chapters in the story.

Despite some admittedly impressive production design and the star-power presence of Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie, Babylon comes across as a hard-R cartoon that will have you feeling like you need to take a shower once it finally collapses at the finish line with a faux-sentimental, movie-within-the-movie ending that rings hollow.

The only thing more insane and contrived than the Big Reveal is the epilogue, which contains not one but two maddeningly bizarre developments that are beyond strange and inconsistent, even for a movie that’s been strange and inconsistent all along.

Even though it is quite likely the longest romance in movie history in terms of the time period covered, the one-point premise is stretched washi paper-thin over the course of just 92 minutes.

Home Again has a certain charm and polish. It’s hard not to like people who are so … likable. But it’s also hard not to feel a constant sense of disconnect from these characters and their so-called “crises.”

Anything is possible in the world of “The Union.” I mean, anything.

One of the unique things about the original “House Party” from 1990 is while there was an abundance of energetic and exhilarating dancing, the party itself was almost secondary to all the action that took place OUTSIDE the party...Not so much with the massive, bloated, epic, over-the-top bash in the “House Party” reboot, which marks the second time LeBron James has put his enormous clout behind a new take on a beloved 1990s film (after the “Space Jam” reboot) — and the second time the results were underwhelming.

There are a few chuckles sprinkled here and there, but for a movie about football it doesn’t seem to know all that much about football (certain scenes that transpire during the Super Bowl are cartoonishly implausible), and the four primary characters are rather thinly drawn.

The disappointingly flat and decidedly un-erotic non-thriller Deep Water is the kind of movie that has you thinking about other movies as you tap your toes impatiently, waiting for this great-looking but dumb and bloody mess to swirl around the drain and disappear.

Senior Year doesn’t come across as condescending or cynical; it’s just harmless and sweetly dopey and instantly forgettable.

Infinite has some impressive set pieces combining practical effects and CGI, and the terrific cast approaches the material with grim-faced sincerity, but it’s ultimately a big bag of nonsense wrapped in glossy packaging.

Me Before You is a beautifully filmed and well-intentioned weeper marred by an unfortunate performance from one of the leads, and a plot development that leaves us more angry and frustrated than moved in the final act.

The Drop has the feel of an extended improv exercise while spotlighting characters who are thinly sketched and often as boring as they are wickedly boorish, with the talented cast engaging in hit-and-miss dialogue that often falls flat.

Ford gives a grounded, quietly powerful performance as a reclusive, regret-filled, self-pitying old-timer who crawls out of a bottle and finds a renewed sense of purpose when he sees the world through Buck’s eyes. If only those eyes weren’t so distractingly incongruous.

The adaptation is a curiously strange effort, as director Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower) films the story like an indie drama, with straightforward, realistic, dialogue-driven scenes — and then every 10 minutes or so, a character breaks into song, and it seems much more contrived and jolting than something like La La Land.

Desperate Hour is well-intentioned, and there are flashes of genuine dramatic tension, thanks to Watts’ performance. Mostly, though, it feels contrived and heavy-handed, with nothing really new to say about this well-traveled subject matter.

We’re just watching Jude Law, who gained some 30 pounds for this role, acting his rear end off but also spinning his wheels in a story that never amounts to more than a collection of vignettes about Dom’s life after prison.

The English-language debut from the brilliant talent behind best foreign film picture nominee “Mustang” is a terribly uneven, borderline absurdist jumble that undercuts its own message again and again.

What a waste of some perfectly wonderful legends.

It’s a well-made film with strong performances, and it by no means shies away from some of the more shocking and tragic episodes from Jeannette’s upbringing. But when “The Glass Castle” reaches for late-movie moments of closure and self-revelations and forgiveness...it rings sour and false.

This is a well-made, well-acted and sometimes intriguing but also coldly cynical and manipulative murder mystery.

Painfully long, exceedingly tedious, consistently unimaginative and quite dopey.

Rampage might not be the worst movie of the year so far, but it’s a contender for most pointless.

Underwater breaks no new ground as a sci-fi horror flick — other than as a possible contender for the murkiest movie ever made.

The Hollars is an uneven, ineffective and self-conscious dysfunctional family comedy/drama with a Sundance-y vibe, and scene after scene in which the greatly talented and usually quite likable cast members keep stepping in big piles of wrong choices.

​I’ll tell you what got Taken. A hundred and twelve minutes of my life got Taken.

Stiller the director does a fine job of making Zoolander 2 look like an actual spy movie, but we’ve seen far better takeoffs, including “Spy” and “Kingsman: The Secret Service” in just the last couple of years. As for the jabs at the transient nature of popular culture and the ridiculousness of high fashion world — easy, tired targets.

In the lurid and cheesy and sometimes unintentionally funny political thriller Runner, one of the most intriguing and eclectic casts of the year is wasted in a murky cesspool that comes across as a third-rate version of “House of Cards” with a little bit of “Scandal” thrown in for bad measure.

Zipper might be entertaining enough in a campy way for you to watch it on demand as long as you’ve got a really big bowl of popcorn and an even bigger glass of wine (or the non-alcoholic elixir of your choice) to get you through. Might. Be.

This is an astonishingly uninvolving and at times almost laughably melodramatic effort, marred by overwrought voice-over narration from Theron, a relentless barrage of scenes depicting horrific human suffering and a love story featuring one-dimensional characters we don’t particularly care about.

Tom Hardy is one of the best actors in the world, but as he flounders his way through Venom, we’re reminded even the finest talents can sink under the weight of a terrible movie.

The only thing less satisfying than the build-up is the finale, which goes from mind-boggling to you’ve got to be kidding me.

In the case of David O. Russell’s jaw-droppingly terrible, aggressively tasteless, profoundly unfunny and interminably dull conspiracy thriller and would-be comedy “Amsterdam,” the all-star ensemble has less chemistry than a high school freshman on the first day of class.

Intrusion is a derivative, manipulative, convoluted and dopey story that dishes up one scary movie cliché after another before careening out of control with a late plot development so insanely implausible, so far out of left field, it’s as if someone accidentally deleted 20 pages of the script during production and nobody noticed.

Virtually every big twist and every major reveal in The Commuter is telegraphed well in advance, and from the moment the train leaves the station and the story really begins to kick into gear, we find ourselves rolling our eyes about every 10 minutes.

All the cutting-edge pyrotechnics in the universe can’t overcome the uneven (and ultimately unsatisfying) screenplay.

How bad is “Fallen Kingdom”? How terrible is a movie that pounds us with a pretentious, nearly operatic score while indulging in B-movie clichés and calling for the main characters to make idiotic decisions just to keep the story rolling? I have to dig deep into the Awful Sequel Playbook to draw parallels to this exercise in wretched excess.

Throughout the game, during the action sequences and especially during the timeouts and strategy sessions, the “celebrity” fans are a huge distraction — and making things even more bizarre, their numbers include Pennywise the Clown from “It” and the murderous, rapist gang known as the Droogs from “A Clockwork Orange.” Who in the name of Bugs Bunny thought this was a good idea?