Richard Whittaker

It's easy to see this coming out in 1998 with Ashley Judd as Rebecca, and Carey Elwes under Victor's tattooed skin. However, this midbudget drama doesn't have quite that star power, and it definitely lacks the visual flair of that era's overdriven and weird procedurals.

Combined with the glacially slow and uneventful narrative, the end result feels like a feature by a small, cheap animation studio in 2010 trying to make a Miyazaki-esque cartoon.

Horror is built on moms wanting to protect their kids, and Come Play falls down because Sarah just never really seems to connect with Oliver.

Jenkins had an opportunity to build on the flawed but rousing headlining debut of DC's greatest woman warrior. Instead, she delivered the modern DC Extended Universe's Superman III. It's a lumpen mass of half-ideas and glaring fan service, topped by a horrendous montage ending that is clearly designed to inspire hope, courage, and kindness, but will more likely make everyone wonder if that was why they waited two and a half hours.

Rønning doesn’t seem confident in his storytelling acumen, relying instead on running narration provided by real-life TV anchors cold-reading the least convincing announcements this side of a Fox News host talking about Portland.

Too slight to be intriguing, too overstretched to be absorbing, too predictable to be surprising, L’autre Laurens doesn’t exactly waste its potential but does little with it.

Peeking its head out from this pile of trash is the ghost of one of the year’s most wildly entertaining movies.

The episodic nature of Beau's misadventures serves as both distraction and bloat, a metaphorical cavalcade that lacks the acerbic agility of many of its predecessor.

The narrative is too flat, too drily filmed by César-nominated cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie (8 Women) to induce much emotion or debate about Anne’s hypocrisy and abuse of power.

For a film with such weighty aspirations, I.S.S. lacks gravity.

Taking its title from her second and final critically-acclaimed blockbuster album, music biopic Back to Black gives you all those details you’ll recognize – but not much beyond that.

Howard, mercifully, dumps most of Vance's political cant in favor of a maudlin, slow, rehab drama, carried on the backs of a cavalcade of wafer-thin characters.

This is still Dragon Ball, with all its quirks so well established that they're just part of the process now.

Between the half-formed romance, the uneven comedy, and the observations that stop just short of real insight, it's a wedding invite that's easy to skip.

With neither the grandiosity of pagan vision that illuminated The Green Knight, or the subversive forest horror of Ben Wheatley's In the Earth, Garland's Men is never quite a joke, but maybe that would have made it a more pointed parable.

That it has so little new to say, and replaces spirited fantasy with an overbearing glumness, is just disappointing.

The Sword Art Online – Progressive films were intended to give fans something new, something a little more meaningful, and while Scherzo doesn't completely deliver, it's at least intriguing enough to make you think, "Well, maybe one more level."

Who do you cast when you've got a mid-tier supernatural thriller that needs a low-key but charismatic, talented but not showboaty, and recognizable actor to play one of the leads? Guy Pearce, of course, and without him under Peter's decidedly unpriestly demeanor then middling supernatural chiller The Seventh Day would barely raise a flutter of attention, never mind a spirit.

If only Fight or Flight knew that what it does best is hectic mayhem then maybe it wouldn’t be such a bumpy ride.

Max Reload isn't for everyone, but it's not trying to be. It's a pizza-and-soda Saturday night gamer film for serious gamers - not the kind that just grind through bug releases, but can name a developer other than Hideo Kojima.

Heavy-handed and stuffed with cardboard characters, everything about Twisters save for Powell feels like a pale imitation of what made the original such an unexpected smash of a disaster movie. Lightning definitely does not strike twice.

There’s an important message in here, especially when it comes to the financial inequality between men and women in sports. But rather than using the 17-year-old Shields’ pugnacious attitude to really explore how she landed body blows on the sexist establishment, The Fire Inside just ends up shadow boxing.

Insert Coin doesn’t tell gamers anything they didn’t already know, and non-gamers won’t care – so unless you're a hardcore fan, maybe just save your quarters.

Unfortunately, what should have naturalistic depth seems oddly superficial, and an attempt to dispose of traditional structure becomes episodic. As with many failed experiments, there are still, at least, some interesting takeaways.

Maybe Halloween Kills will make more sense when the finale of the trilogy, Halloween Ends, gives those themes some context. But as a sequel to the deliciously absurd 2018 resurrection, it’s a ponderous bore, far-too-intermittently broken up by spurts of the franchise’s signature gore.

As a trilogy capper, The Last Dance is barely a shuffle and a shimmy.

For all of Elordi’s mutton-chopped brooding and Robbie’s vamping, there’s something shallow and glib about “Wuthering Heights.” Yet again, the psychosexual classic tragedy has been turned into a well-crafted mass-market potboiler.

Operation Fortune is just one long series of heist sequences that run at the same speed, at the same tone, and all flatly shot by Ritchie's new regular cinematographer, Alan Stewart.

Coast is undeniably empathetic towards the inner lives of kids living in the bland nothingness of California’s Central Coast, but it’s also not got a lot new to add.

Luck feels overthought and overwritten. There's a lithe, fun, bright, and much shorter movie in here somewhere.

Just because you can shove a bunch of IPs together, should you? Especially when the motivation is a 90-minute joke about beloved TV series, with a lot of cheese-as-cocaine gags. Who is it for? People who still laugh at uncanny valley jokes. For those that don't, no reason to worry, because most of the references will be explained to you.

The story Surgal tells is ultimately fascinating but dry, deep but limited, and a lesson more than an experience.

Even if you like Snyder's non-superhero work, this feels like a serious step down.

There are flashes of greatness, especially when Gyllenhaal and cinematographer Lawrence Sher capture some of the film’s wilder set-pieces. But then the narrative messiness undercuts the beauty of those images.

Unfortunately, it's also graceless and predictable, with absolutely no surprises between the start of the family's off-road adventure and their inevitable rescue by park rangers.

It's a call to action with no banner behind which to rally, sanitized to the point of being anodyne.

It's hard to deny that [Lundgren] deserves better than being the most entertaining element of a poorly executed and infuriatingly predictable fight flick.

The plot and character development remains early-2000s video game level, a fact made even more disappointing because Gans added so much more to the first film.

The tonal disconnect between the subtext and the delivery leaves this Animal Farm wobbling like the first time Napoleon tries to walk on two legs.

There’s been an urge to excuse the director and blame the studio, arguing that Zhao just didn’t fit into the strictures of the MCU. Yet that doesn’t explain how weak the script she co-wrote is, or why it’s so insufferably long, or why it almost completely fails to tackle its own core conceits of blind loyalty, of the perils of immortality, of rebellion against faith.

Jurassic World Rebirth struggles to find a reason to exist, so composer Alexandre Desplat peppers in the original, wonderful Jurassic Park theme by John Williams just enough to remind you that you’re watching a sequel, not a rip-off.

Such an important and tender subject as assisted suicide deserves more than this mawkish, soapish nonsense.

That edge between emotional incompetence and modern macho hubris is where Waddell finds something interesting to say, but it's too often buried under barely competent filmmaking (please, filmmakers, I am begging you, do not scrimp on your sound mix), stilted performances, and some horribly outdated gags and clumsy stereotypes, all further undermining a rom-com that is rarely romantic nor that comedic.

Kids may come out of Karate Kid: Legends crane-kicking in excitement from the handful of fights, and older fans can relish the nostalgia, but for everyone else it’s wax on, nod off.

Unfortunately, most of the budget seems to have been spent on the first half, a murky slog through the depths of the meg-infested abyssal depths of the titular Trench where the characters are puddle-deep and the villains so cardboard that their biggest danger isn't being chum but dissolving in water.

Collins and crew follow the well-worn tracks entertainingly enough, running up and down stairs and catching figures just at the corner of the shot and arguing about whether they should keep filming or not, but there’s nothing new.

What really drags it down is the wafer-thin script by Carol Chrest, which neither Sivertson nor a determined if sometimes overblown Ricci can pull past its messy metaphor and undeserved twists.

Theologically muddled, narratively simplistic, and somehow pulling off a bigger waste of a legacy character than the near-blasphemous return of Sally Hardesty for 2022's ill-fated Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Exorcist: Believer proves that double the possessions does not mean double the fun.

That the audience for Ari Aster’s folk horror might find more pleasure in this Snow White than the average child is telling, since it’s almost impossible to work out who this version of the story is aimed at. Children will be bored, teens talked down to, and most adults will wonder where their Snow White is.

If you're going to dig the same shallow grave for the thousandth time, at least have the verve of Eli Roth's shamelessly fun Thanksgiving – or at least make sure the entire cast knows if you're going for tension or comedy.

In this brightly colored world, Trost makes images pop and vibrate, making this latest in the beloved series easy to watch in a way that seemingly evades most modern multiplex fare. Sadly, that’s one of the few areas of clarity in Sonic the Hedgehog 3.

What's fundamentally uninteresting about Love and Thunder is Waititi's inability to recognize any character development over the last decade, or to move Thor forward.

The greatest problem is the woeful miscasting of Qualley as Honey. The script by Coen and his wife and sometimes-film editor Tricia Cooke seems to position the gun-free P.I. as a melding of two great noir conventions – the cool gumshoe and the femme fatale – and the camera loves following Qualley in high heels and wrap dresses. Yet there’s nothing much going on beyond those visuals.

The gang's all here for Spin Me Round, and hopefully the ensemble enjoyed the filmmaking process, as the end result is an odd, laughless, meandering comedy that's not entertaining enough to be engaging, or gifted with enough character insight to justify its aimless length.

Somehow All My Life seems oddly lacking in stakes, which is so weird considering the story (the main symptoms of onscreen Chau’s deadly but photogenic disease seem to be a little tiredness and sweatiness).

America undoubtedly needs serious artists to explore the brain worms that the pandemic era gave the body politic, but Eddington most definitely ain’t it.

Habit is so desperate to be edgy that it loops all the way back around to derivative, and wastes any potential Thorne might have brought to play.

Nothing here really works. Even a surprisingly flat score from horror master John Carpenter (who was originally slated to direct the '84 version) can't save Firestarter from being a colossal misfire.

It’s trashy eurosleaze with none of the sumptuous debauchery.

It's this overstuffed storytelling, mixed with lackluster pacing, that renders No Time to Die a torturous misfire, and an utterly disappointing exit for Craig's Bond. I hate to say it, but this is Bond's Rise of Skywalker.

Destroy All Neighbors has all the verve of a blood clot.

Anodyne and asinine in equal measures, The Violent Heart is just brainless.

By the time the final act slithers on the screen, Gormican has abandoned any sense of originality and just props the film up on nostalgia-manipulating cameos and clumsy, overused needle drops. Those moments barely cover some astoundingly inept filmmaking, from shot composition to editing, that will make you wish you were watching Anaconda 3: Offspring instead. OK, maybe it’s not that bad, but Anaconda – both this film and the whole franchise – should just slip back into the swamp.

It’s the trippy sequences of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas without the queasy self-loathing. It’s the video to “Smack My Bitch Up” by the Prodigy, complete with POV debauchery, running on repeat 20 times. It’s … boring.

9 Bullets just constantly misfires, and never gets better than the inadvertent comedy of Worthington pulling a gun on a dog as a negotiating tactic.

Faces of Death is dull and thoughtless, its attempts to smash influencer culture into voyeurism feeling artificial.

To be fair, at least Old captures the sense of time passing past too fast: Rarely have I felt more like my life was slipping away in the cinema.

Wimmer has now twice disproved his ability to rehash old scripts through his terrible updatings of Total Recall and Point Break. Now he exhibits zero visual skill as writer/director of Children of the Corn, an unwatchable reboot of Stephen King's 1977 short story about a blood cult of rural Nebraskan kids who slaughter all adults to the monstrous He Who Walks Behind the Rows.

The story is both simplistic and telegraphed, which is handy because some startlingly inept filmmaking makes the action almost impossible to follow. There are multiple sequences that make no sense to the eye or brain, and basic design and costume decisions that make it nearly impossible to tell characters apart from each other. The only true horror here is that there’s another couple of hours of this still to come.

Seriously, audiences do not need another constant reminder that their lives are slipping away. Just watching Mercy will have them reconsidering their priorities.