Soren Andersen

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

“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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Weirdest. Feminist. Movie. Ever.

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.

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.

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.

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.