Robert Daniels

Make no mistake, The Equalizer 3 is hot garbage.

Ultimately, this film attempts to set up the future through Shuri. Wright is a talented actress with the ability to emotionally shoulder a movie when given good material. But she is constantly working against the script here.

Co-written with Krysty Wilson-Cairns (“1917”), Wright’s Last Night in Soho is funny and chaotic, slick and stylish, and falls apart in its confounding second half.

Elvis certainly works as a jukebox, and it does deliver exactly what you’d expect from a Luhrmann movie. But it never gets close to Presley; it never deals with the knotty man inside the jumpsuit; it never grapples with the complications in his legacy. It’s overstuffed, bloated, and succumbs to trite biopic decisions.

The preceding two-plus hours of this 145-minute slog — Tommy’s threadbare hodgepodge of bad impressions, gratuitous filmmaking, and even worse depictions of mental health — isn’t even a shadow of the real natural woman.

Despite the tantalising set up, Immaculate is a dull, predictable affair, composed of far too many inconsequential jump scares in lieu of sturdy storytelling.

Apart from a few quippy anecdotes, the only thing holding Elton John: Never Too Late together is the songs.

[Borgli's] mealy-mouthed timidity in addressing genuinely controversial and provocative subjects, especially those that require a radical kind of empathy, not only renders his supposedly edgy provocations dull. It also makes one wonder if he’s at all interested in women as people.

After the forced bursts of energy, nightmarish dream sequences, and a strained bit of self-absolution recede, you soon realize that writer/director Niclas Larsson’s “Mother, Couch,” a morose, nonsensical family drama is about as interesting as the lint between the cushions.

The Book of Clarence, the religious epic by multi-hyphenate talent Jeymes Samuel, is a handsomely crafted picture that simply loses the plot.

Burdened by its bluster, Extraction 2 is merely a loud, blithering mess masquerading as fulfilling escapism.

Between the eye-catching period details and the warmth of the performances, you want to wrap your arms around “The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat.” But this is a film that seems intent on pushing you away through its ludicrous plotting.

Butcher’s Crossing is unfocused, distant, and flat.

This film is simply a simulation of the genre beats you expect in a story about a man kidnapping a woman in the woods. The cloying setup also leaves much to be desired, as does the anti-climatic ending

Such blunt messaging reduces the onscreen carnage, which relentlessly occurs via this mute machine’s searing lasers, barrage of bombs and kaiju breath, to little more than the human toll required for this particular military man to feel again. Worse yet, the film concludes with hawkish intensity, fashioning itself into a tasteless recruitment video.

It’s a fascinating premise by screenwriter Gregory Poirier, one that is methodically and quietly built, but ultimately loses any grit, atmosphere, suspense, or emotion it could possibly carry because of a few narrative headscratchers. Even Keaton, usually a sure bet, doesn’t land what the movie is selling.

Emancipation becomes an exhaustive, vicious, and stylistically overcooked recounting of a man whose very visage led the abolitionist charge. Emancipation is a hollow piece of genre filmmaking that rarely answers, "Why this story and why now?"

Rather than make the more interesting movie, Chaves and Johnson-McGoldrick kick the can down the road toward the next money-making sequel. Which would be totally welcomed if the The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It weren’t so artistically inert, and oh so boring.

Berry’s Bruised is a familiar comeback tale relying on the inner-city motifs of 1990s hood films to deliver a melodramatic, barely coherent prestige vehicle with very little to say about MMA itself.

Lathan’s film is only a pale imitation of what came before it. But while “On the Come Up” is a major miss, here’s hoping that Lathan returns with a bigger and better directorial effort next time out.

This film, unfortunately, fails to live up to the quality of its influences. Filomarino’s Beckett lacks urgency, wit, and a lead actor capable of pulling together its underwritten themes.

The indelible, unmatched voice of Houston may live on, but I Wanna Dance with Somebody lacks the ingredients of what made Houston a force that permanently altered every person who truly heard her.

Hillbilly Elegy is a prime example of a systemic failure, from script to craft to acting.

My Policeman is surface-level queer representation lacking in visual imagination and begging for better performances. It’s the kind of glacially paced movie that sticks around for two hours and tells its viewer nothing new; a series of moving images without any sense of emotion or wonder. “My Policeman” commits the gravest of crimes—it’s soulless.

It lacks form, edge, politics, coherency, and the grand vision necessary for vast world building. It’s a film that begins on volatile ground only to tumble down a tonally rocky hill before settling on a conclusion so emotionally dissonant that its clang rings louder than the minor laughs the film engenders during its bloated run time.

Schweighöfer’s prequel fails to offer the same level of excitement or gore as Snyder’s film. The heists are all snoozing affairs, and ultimately, the film succumbs to the script’s franchise ambitions.

This Apple TV heist flick is underwritten, dreary, tedious, inert, and without any stakes. I almost hesitate to write too much about it because this soulless dreck feels so unworthy of adding blemishes to the white page.

If you squint you can nearly see the kind of movie Gutto might be aiming for.

The compositions lack clarity, the score of undulating voices is comically clichéd and the visual effects are a dingy, nauseating mess. There are no stakes in a film that not only takes seven royal lives — it snatches several brain cells with them.

Play Dirty is a misanthropic work. Which isn’t inherently a deal breaker, but a stiff Wahlberg lacks the moxie to make the brutal barrage of death amusing or worthwhile.

Neither the tacky ending nor the very existence of this second installment is earned. Instead, it languishes as the squeezing of the final drops of a once bright idea.

Grainy establishing shots of the skirmish offer little visual information other than its location on an expressway. Without viewers knowing where, and at whom, the soldiers are firing, the onscreen action is rendered indecipherable. Mackie’s quirky performance — Leo ends every order to Harp with an uncomfortable smile — is likewise baffling.

While what Cline did and the fight his victims took to find justice is a truth worth knowing and learning, Jourdan’s crass documentary isn’t the best vehicle for such weighty material.

These characters possessed far more soul in the prior film: they walked through every scene with centuries of baggage and loss; they spoke of times gone by with wonder and awe; they cared for one another. None of that is present here.

A flattened biopic devoid of a perspective or originality. It follows a long list of musical origin stories that feel designed to sell new pressings of former hits more than tell an engaging story.

Though the filmmakers hoped to balance the historical atrocities of slavery with contemporary racial oppression, Antebellum — yet another unnecessary slave movie — rarely feels like a horror flick. Instead, its needless brutality, ropy character work, and misguided twist make it easily 2020’s worst movie so far.

This movie is anything but brave. It is the most feckless, spineless blockbuster of the last decade.

This lackluster script struggles to build a captivating story to match the allure of its expansive desert setting.

While Sollima tries to rekindle Clancy’s 1990s magic, Without Remorse is rendered as unmemorable schlock due to his inability to map the author’s familiar espionage themes onto a new protagonist with very different story requirements.

Hart possesses neither the charisma of Cruise nor the charm of Redford necessary to shoulder these action movie mechanics, a failure that demonstrates what happens when character actors are told they’re movie stars.

Though The 355 tries to maneuver with the kinetic verve of a globetrotting adventure, the marks of shooting on generic sets are all over this film.

The film is as unimaginative as it is corny, as dull as it is cheap, and as unfulfilling as any cash grab for a well-known property could be.

If Spiral hoped to reinvent the franchise, the dull installment merely amounts to bad fan fiction.

It’s not often you find a film that’s so artless, it feels like one big joke. But “The Home,” James DeMonaco’s silly octogenarian horror flick, is about as hopeless as you can get.

It’s an emotionally manipulative, overlong dirge composed of cloying songs, lackluster vocal performances, and even worse writing.

Antoine Fuqua might’ve had some cameras and microphones on hand to produce moving images and sound for this estate-approved King of Pop biopic. But make no mistake about it: “Michael” isn’t a movie. It’s a filmed playlist in search of a story.

There isn’t a single moment of this film that borders on belief as it winds toward a cheap, bloody final freakout that is tepidly filmed in a way that makes you wonder if Tipping believes the horror he’s selling.

An empty muddle of social commentary with little intensity.

Featuring a trio of supposed movie stars who lack the panache or charisma of true marquee headliners, Red Notice is another visually ghastly bid at building a franchise on the back of breathtakingly boring action sequences.

Trigger Warning is a self-serious, brooding film without the wherewithal to know how righteously dumb it could be if it committed to the bit. Or, at least, the expertise to elevate it to the suspenseful level it so desperately aims to reach.

Naked Singularity isn’t a typical courtroom drama. It’s a heist flick, a sci-fi romp, and a message film all rolled into one. And it’s a pretty terrible example of all three genres.

It’s a shame. Argylle had the potential to be a whissmart parody. It unfortunately just seems to get tired of being the butt of the joke before it can deliver the punchline. But in attempting to avoid becoming a gag—laboring to connect this film with the Kingsman franchise—Vaughn imbues his film with anonymity, making it merely forgettable.

While Hedlund and Macdonald exhibit incredible chemistry, the outlandishness of the twists “Dirt Music” takes makes their performances nearly impossible to appreciate due to their cartoon buggery. Working with “Notebook”-level cheese, here the story’s stale.

Daniel Espinosa’s Morbius, a misbegotten, artistically bankrupt bid by writers Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless to fuse a gothic horror edge to the MCU, is the nadir of comic book cinema.

Director Patrick Hughes’ film should be avoided at all cost.

Despite Quan’s best efforts, there isn’t one square foot of this tepid film worth buying.

It’s unsettling how every minute of this 94-minute flick delivers a new level of boredom. You have to feel for the actors.

There are, to be sure, moments of shock. But they offer very little awe.

Rather than crafting a high-concept science-fiction marvel, Fuqua’s Infinite relies on shoddy VFX and ropey world-building for the worst film of his career.

The film struggles from scene to scene, incoherently tying elongated and repetitive montages of Guy and Sullivan performing together to hagiographic perspectives explaining how giving Guy is or the brightness of Sullivan’s future.

The soft-spoken Epps is frustratingly miscast. The editing by Geofrey Hildrew and Scott Pellet limps lifelessly along, and the direction lacks the necessary pulse for a story line with more twists than a low-budget soap opera.

The sole redeeming quality in this 85-minute swill resides in the makeup and practical effects, which rely on viscous blood and gnarly props that make the kills hard to stomach.

None of these people feel real. They’re the Montgomery Ward catalog of racists common to so many Civil Rights movies, they’ve become noxious cliches, particularly in this drab script, which feels like an AI chatbot wrote it.

Few threats are more pertinent to the earth's future than deep-sea mining. I can think of no documentary as ill-equipped to inform viewers of this peril than director Matthieu Rytz’s scattered and vague documentary Deep Rising.

Though Pakistan is filmed with a sense of grandeur, Ibby’s return to his cultural roots is rushed and superficial. Khan’s lack of screen presence, toothless mixed martial arts sequences and unintelligible editing further knock the film down.

When “Revelations” isn’t investigating signs, it’s a dry, psychologically driven ghost story.

Absolute Dominion is a high-concept sci-fi flick whose many pieces move but rarely settle in satisfying positions.

For the most part, “Long Shadows” is short on reasons to have our attention.