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.