Soren Andersen

The CGI is off the leash. The manufactured chaos is unrelenting. Monsters punching monsters. The pyramids are peril. Awesome deconstruction there.

The characters are so thinly sketched that the audience feels little emotional investment in them, and the handheld (or rather head-mounted) cameras produce the same jittery visuals that many viewers found so off-putting in the original.

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.

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

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.

The Addams Family suffers from an acute case of the cutes.

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

The picture’s ultimate destination is marked with an obviousness so bright it can be seen from space.

Originality was on vacation when this picture was made.

Director Michael Cuesta and a platoon of credited screenwriters have dutifully checked all the usual spy-thriller boxes but bring nothing new to the party.

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 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.

Kids will likely be diverted by the colorful excess of A Minecraft Movie, but fans of the game may feel it misses the mark. More creativity, please.

It’s colorful. It’s predictable. And also quickly forgettable. Genuine wonderment is in short supply in Wonder Park.

You wait and you wait, through many overamped special-effects action sequences, for the cavalry to save the day, but by the time it finally appears, the picture has been long dead.

Angel Has Fallen plays out exactly as you would expect from a potboiler of this type. No surprises here, other than that it exists at all. It’s the kind of movie one expects to be released at the shank end of summer. Time to turn the page to fall.

Sequelitis has Vaughn in its grip. The follow-up to his 2014 hyperviolent, boundlessly inventive spy-movie sendup gives the impression it’s trying a little too hard to surpass its predecessor.

Its theme of white man as savior of black Africans is, to say the least, highly anachronistic in these days and times.

Monster-movie fans will certainly get their money’s worth in this one.

Kids will love all the silliness, but oddly the greatest resonance of the Wayback Machine plot will be felt by the kids’ grandparents (if any find themselves in attendance) who were around in those bygone days.

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.

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

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

Hunter Killer grabs the audience by the throat and speeds ahead while disbelief wallows helplessly in its bubbly wake.

The “Dragon Tattoo” series continues with “Spider’s Web,” but it seems as though the franchise is running out of gas and fresh ideas.

Forster gets decent performances from Lively and Clarke, but the overall impression “All I See” leaves is of a picture that fails to live up to its filmmaker’s ambitions.

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.

Phoenix goes off the rails in the second half when Kinberg piles fight scene atop CG-enhanced fight scene, backed by Hans Zimmer’s oppressive pounding score, until the picture devolves into a chaotic mess.

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.

“Link” is fun as far as it goes, but from Laika we expect something with a little more depth.

M. Night Shyamalan has crafted a very effective creepshow with Glass.

Director Caple Jr. takes his time allowing Ramos and Fishback to develop their characters as they fight being marginalized and dismissed in ‘90s New York. They’re no mere cardboard characters but rather fully dimensional individuals, a rarity in “Transformers” movies.

Humongous undersea cities, enormous herds of aquatic creatures and a superabundance of monsters are laid before the viewer. The goal: Make people go, “Wow!” Pardon me, but the overall effect is more like, “eh.”

The chase, chase, chase pace is tiring, not least because it’s not clear who many of these people are and what agendas they’re following. Mixed-up confusion is the result.

Daddy’s Home is a movie with a one-joke premise: Will Ferrell, he’s a pincushion of punishment. Make him screech. Watch him squirm.

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.

With her wonderfully expressive face, Clarke carries the picture, navigating her character’s gradual transformation with grace and conviction.

The Coen brothers’ section, derived from a script they sent to Clooney in the late 1990s, is much more impactful, with Damon giving a performance that renders his character downright chilling and Jupe doing heart-rending work as a child emotionally buffeted by the grievously flawed behavior of the adults who are supposed to love and protect him.

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

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 picture is like an onion. There are layers here, and beneath them more layers. Peeling them back with surgical skill, director Alexandre Aja reveals complicated family dynamics.

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 we have here is a standard-issue comedy-tinged crime thriller indifferently directed by Tim Story (the “Think Like a Man” and “Ride Along” movies). Its nothing-special plot, the product of writers Kenya Barris and Alex Barnow, features ill-defined villains and briefly touches on Islamophobia and military veteran PTSD and drug abuse — and never follows up on any of those issues.

It’s Harley Quinn’s movie and everybody else in Suicide Squad is just a supporting character. No surprise there. That’s the way it is in the comic books, too. It’s all about personality, and Harley has that by the freight carload.

This is a production from producer Michael Bay, master of the cinema of CG run amok. And all we helpless mortals can do is cower and duck as those 3D fists fly.

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

As an homage to Friedkin’s movie, Green’s take is respectful and genuinely scary. Let those tubular bells chime forth in celebration.

Inspiration, old-fashioned style, is the main course being served in Pelé: Birth of a Legend. In essence commissioned by the soccer icon, who is credited as one of the picture’s executive producers, “Pelé” is hagiography. But appealing hagiography.

So there’s not a single surprise along the way. But there is the comfort of familiarity operating in the movie’s favor. And it’s fun.

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.

Mile 22 is one nasty piece of work. It’s an action picture that’s hard-core to the core, populated entirely by killers with nary a truly sympathetic figure among them. But it does deliver.

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.

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

Get out your handkerchiefs, but don’t expect to believe a minute of this vastly improbable tale.

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

What a pestilential little picture is Fist Fight.

The prime attraction of this movie, and its predecessor, is that it envelopes the audience in the Mario world. Every square inch of the screen, from top to bottom, corner to corner, is packed with images derived from the game. Easter eggs abound. Watching it is akin being inside the 2007 Super Mario Galaxy game itself. Which is why it needs to be seen on the big screen. Seeing it on a phone or a laptop wouldn’t do it justice.

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

The picture has an undeniable rough stylishness...but in terms of coherence of storytelling it leaves the audience choking on all that swirling dust.

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.

Watch this movie and you might die, of boredom.

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

Smith, on the other hand, throws himself avidly into his work, communicating a, uh, biting malevolence and sick glee in his portrayal. The picture only truly comes alive when he’s masticating his scenes. Otherwise, “Morbius” is dead at its center.

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

Weaver’s Kay is a fanatic.

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

In the vast canon of King-derived movies, “Tower” belongs in the upper ranks.

Shouting and struggling, poor Pratt vainly tries to give his character dimension and some sense of sympathy. So genial and engaging in the Guardians of the Galaxy series, Pratt flails grouchily and ineffectively in Mercy.

A confused mishmash of plot elements featuring overwrought extraneous characters. Kids likely will love it. Their parents will just have to grin and bear it.

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.

Exposure to Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip may result in the dislocation of eyeballs in viewers over the age of 7 due to uncontrollable rolling of the eyes at the sight of the idiotic antics committed on screen. To avoid eye strain, which is to say, eye sprain, avoid this movie at all costs.

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

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

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

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

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.

Very, very late in ECCO’s two-plus hour running time, answers come. It’s a long wait for clarity. From the viewer, much patience is required.

The Book of Henry launches itself into cloud cuckooland and never returns to Earth.

In the matter of searching for work in a difficult economy, Get a Job traffics in fairy tales that come complete with happily-ever-after endings.

The gunplay is primary though there are some obligatory scenes of martial arts fights.

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

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

The action is pumped up. The destruction is extreme. The whole thing is absurd.

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

A joyless experience.

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.

For a fun time to dispel the gloom of January, Dolittle is just what the doctor ordered.

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.

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

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

No child should be exposed to this.

The Phoenix Incident is an indigestible mess.

The picture’s time shifts are smoothly handled by Kwak. But eventually confusion sets in.

There is advocacy. And then there is propaganda. The Trolley, with its overcooked rhetoric, falls into the latter category.