Soren Andersen

“The Last Dance” brings nothing new to the series. In fact, it brings less than the previous two movies

The movie’s unrelenting sensory onslaught is exhausting. It’s torture to sit through.

By the end, it’s made glaringly obvious that the people who made Madame Web intended it to be the prelude to sequels featuring the three proto Spider-Women. Spare us.

The game, propelled by twitchy point-of-view camera work and abundant jump scares, is fast-paced. The movie is anything but.

A more self-impressed movie than Dicks: The Musical would be hard to imagine.

Although the sense of being inside a video game is strong, one critical element is lacking: interactivity. Players are always working their controllers to send characters on their complicated journeys. They’re participants. A movie, by its very nature, turns everyone into spectators. We watch, but have no control over what we see. And what we see in “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” is nothing more than empty-calorie visuals.

With scenes of epic destruction uncorked with numbing frequency, the picture drags. It’s two hours and 10 minutes long and you feel every last second.

“I’m tired.” — Overheard from a member of the audience at the end of the seemingly endless closing credit crawl at the critic’s screening for “Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania.” - I hear you, lady. Believe me, I hear you.

Once it gets going, Black Adam feels like a continuous closed loop of destruction where the moments of mayhem blend darn near seamlessly one into the other. And those special effects look incredibly cheesy.

The whole picture is an exercise in obvious effort, try, try, trying really hard to win the audience’s affection. However it only succeeds in trying the audience’s patience. It’s a trial.

Elba, always a powerful presence in whatever role he takes on, does the best he can in Beast, but the threadbare nature of the plotting and dialogue ultimately defeats him.

As terrible as it is — and make no mistake, Moonfall is epically awful — it is also undeniably entertaining. A guilty pleasure, if you will. See it on the biggest screen you can. It’s a, er, riot.

The fight scenes, full of swordplay and gunfire, are choppily edited and somehow lackadaisical. It’s as though Schwentke was operating from a checklist of expected action-movie clichés and hurries through them all.

The first creature feature of the new decade is here, and boy is it dumb.

It’s got a flying carpet. It’s got an enchanted lamp. It’s got a shape-shifting genie. But alas, Aladdin lacks real magic.

The picture’s real weakness is that the reanimated dead display a great deal more vitality than the characters in their pre-killed state.

It seems director James Wan had one overarching goal in making “Aquaman.” His prime directive? Crush the audience into submission.

Mortal Engines hasn’t much in the way of originality, other than its rolling city, to distinguish it from other, better post-apocalyptic tales.

Zombies. Nazis. Clichés. Insane violence. Overlord delivers a whole lot of much too much.

A picture in the running for the dubious distinction of being perhaps the worst Marvel-derived origin story ever.

Director Malcolm D. Lee, whose previous movie, 2017’s raucous “Girls Trip,” gave Haddish her star-making breakout role, does her no favors here. In this mess of a movie, her performance is merely adequate. She, and the audience, deserve better.

Director Corin Hardy lards on the frights so relentlessly that the moments don’t build to any sort of sustained narrative momentum.

A joyless experience.

Watch this movie and you might die, of boredom.

Gringo has no spark, no fizz. Its scenes sag like overstretched taffy. Flavorless taffy.

As long as the third and, one hopes, final installment is, it feels even longer. There’s more of it, much more, yet paradoxically, much less.

[Neeson's] impressive physicality, (a tower among men), his rumbly basso-profundo voice and his impressive demeanor give him a natural gravity that allows him to rise above the most absurd material. And he does exactly that in The Commuter.

Only the super-speedy Flash, played by Ezra Miller, lightens up the proceedings. Miller’s goofy eager-beaver take on the character, very reminiscent of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man, is the picture’s saving grace.

A colossal waste of time and the moviegoer’s dollars. That’s the bottom line of Daddy’s Home 2.

Childhood: courtesy of Mr. King. Filtered through the pedestrian sensibilities of director Andy Muschietti, who seemingly never met a horror-movie cliché he couldn’t incorporate into his adaptation of King’s thousand-page-plus mega-opus.

There is absolutely nothing new under the many suns in Besson’s universe. This is a voyage not worth taking.

When words fail in The Last Knight, the crunching and crashing and KLANKing of the special-effects scenes take up the slack. Punishingly overwrought in every aspect, Last Knight is a KLANK! KLANK! KLUNKER.

It’s all just a day at the beach, harmlessly fun and instantly forgettable.

It’s a rare misstep for the usually sure-footed folks behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

It’s all very bizarrely, pointlessly complicated.

In space, everyone can hear you yawn.

What a pestilential little picture is Fist Fight.

The nonstop silliness of this picture leaves one choking on stifled laughter.

xXx: Return of Xander Cage is the movie equivalent of cotton candy: all empty calories. Excessive consumption of this product is likely to give a body the queasies.

The main monster communicates in noises that sound like belches. Appropriate for a picture that’s the equivalent of a cinematic burp: gassy and inconsequential.

What say we tiptoe quietly away and pretend this movie never happened?

Offering only an atmosphere of deepening gloom and a premise of utter hopelessness, Man Down is like movie antimatter: It repels interest.

Weirdest. Feminist. Movie. Ever.

If ever there was a movie that should never have been made, Bad Santa 2 is that movie. It’s vile, like something written by a pen dipped in bile.

Coerced jollity is the order of the day in the kingdom of trolldom in this animated kids movie from DreamWorks. And I do mean order.

Writer-director Ti West brings not an iota of originality to his handling of this material. Plods, the picture does, through its predictable paces.

There’s no problem keeping up with these Joneses. The audience is way ahead of them every step of the way.

The best thing about The Greasy Strangler: that title. The worst thing about The Greasy Strangler: everything that follows that title.

It’s a mishmash in which characters are thrown from dimension to dimension and from dream to dream. The main character, played by Bannister, is forever baffled as to what his actual reality is. His bafflement is shared by the viewer.

There are some genuinely funny bits but, alas, far too few.

All things considered, this pitifully plotted Belgian-French production represents the nadir of animated movies released so far this year, a farrago of frantic action and mindless cacophony.

It quickly becomes apparent that the narrative content of “Kingsglaive” is a barely coherent muddle.

Cheap and cheesy at every level, this Ben-Hur barely qualifies as an epic. It’s a wholly unnecessary addition to the venerable franchise.

It’s pretty. It’s empty. It’s pretty empty.

It’s Honeyglue, a romantic drama, which fittingly, given that title, is sticky with sentimentality.

Paula Patton, playing a half-orc, half-human female warrior, is the most sympathetic character and actually gives something approaching a fully fledged performance, but for the rest of it … ugliness as far as the eye can see.

You loved “The Conjuring” in 2013. Now here’s “2,” with more, more, more of what you adored the first time around.

There’s a problem with Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. It’s attempting to mock something that is beyond mockery.

We can see everything that Manhattan Night has in store from a mile off. Every step of the way it’s predictable. And that predictability makes it tedious.

Mark this one down as a sequel that should never have been made.

Screeching, screaming, bouncing around the galaxy. Insufferable. And seemingly interminable.

Criminal has a strong supporting cast, but the big names aren’t doing much beyond the bare minimum to qualify for a payday.

The Phoenix Incident is an indigestible mess.

A more disagreeable collection of cynical, backstabbing, self-aggrandizing, shallow, vicious and vile specimens of humanity gathered together in a single motion picture would be difficult to conceive of.

Greetings from Moldova. Where surly locals stare sullenly at stupid strangers. Where the traditional regional greeting extended to said strangers is a hatchet in the forehead.

Many decisions...make “Batman v Superman” a joyless slog.

All of it feels warmed over, reprocessed … and, yes, confused.

Board games, threats from Howard and desperate escape planning by Michelle take up most the picture. And then, first-time feature director Dan Trachtenberg and the screenwriters, apparently realizing that not much has been going on so far, ramp up to a full-bore CG explosion extravaganza finale...Too little. Too late.

Imagine the worst costume epic imaginable. Imagine no more. It exists.

This picture stands as the best argument yet that the YA dystopia cycle has passed its sell-by date.

No child should be exposed to this.

The fact that Bracey is the equivalent of a charisma black hole (at the movie’s center, there is no there there) and the further fact that the movie runs out of plot long before it runs out of stunts to showcase, make Point Break a remake that ought not to have been made.