Todd Gilchrist

Audiences get a collection of great performances, led by a truly exceptional one, in search of a script that’s worthy of them in a movie with so much to offer that disappointingly, but bafflingly, seems determined to add up to less than the sum of its parts.

No one has ever accused a Gerard Butler action movie of being too smart, but “Angel Has Fallen” operates on such a level of half-considered logic and improbable motivations that even moderately well-mounted action can’t distract audiences from how dumb it is.

Ultimately, The Miracle Season mistakes an inspiring true story for one that needs or deserves to be told cinematically; it isn’t awful, but it’s not a film, it’s a tribute, and unfortunately, one to the memory of a young woman who would be better honored by people actually “living like Line” than watching a formulaic, fictionalized retelling of her community learning what that means.

Vaughn’s third installment in this series is ultimately a pretty lousy movie; again, better than the last one, but that isn’t much of a compliment.

A pastiche of almost too many movies to count as a remake of just one, Total Recall is mindless, middling fare that fails to utilize – much less expand – the provocative concepts at the core of its iconic 1990 predecessor.

Where “In A World…” felt intimate and focused, delightfully dysfunctional but relentlessly hopeful, “I Do” is noisy and meandering.

Roberts populates convincingly elaborate underwater sets with a suitably appealing cast for a claustrophobic adventure that manages to deliver some real terror before it somewhat inevitably levels up into absurdity.

Even as a welcome offering to audiences from a broad variety of ethnic and economic backgrounds, Overboard ultimately feels like one of the dinners that Kate assigns Leo to cook for his newfound family — a good effort with a few new surprises to spice up a familiar dish, but nothing special enough to truly transform it into more than a routine meal.

Despite Guy Ritchie’s herculean efforts to combine a whole lot of immediately familiar elements into a brisk, occasionally imaginative “adventure movie” potpourri, screenwriter James Vanderbilt’s reinvention of footnotes from his real-life family history never quite achieves the consistent balance between real-world seriousness and buoyant escapism demanded of a globe-trotting treasure hunt like this.

Written, produced and directed by Jade Halley Bartlett, the film is both impressively erudite and unrelentingly self-aware, a combination it bravely attempts but doesn’t quite fully balance.

The Grudge 2020 is a prestige drama sidelined by lackluster, incoherent horror, ruining the scares and undercutting the humanity of its characters.

Anchored by another in a series of committed performances from Adam Driver and an ensemble of suitably menacing prehistoric beasts that chase him for just over 90 minutes, Beck and Woods’ adventure delivers requisite thrills even if its creativity seems stuck in the distant cinematic past.

Director Calmatic’s 2023 remake not only fails to recapture the energy of the first film but seems to misunderstand the cinematic language of streetball, and is largely uninterested in utilizing stars Sinqua Walls and Jack Harlow except as delivery systems for exposition.

Leatherface is second only to Rob Zombie’s “Halloween” remake in horror’s pantheon of terrible origin stories.

Maniscalco hasn’t quite proven he can carry a movie that’s not inspired by or “about” him, but this first effort is charming and earnest enough to encourage viewers to meet him where he’s currently at in his career.

Ultimately, there are few filmmakers whose work I admire more for its sophistication and undeniable humanity than that of Brooks, but this film isn’t just bad — it’s unbearable.

A crude, unimaginative, suspenseless adventure whose tension mostly derives from deciding which of its three main characters will prove the most unlikable by the time it ends.

There are four or five “so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should” jokes to make here that would suffice as a perfect encapsulation not only of this film, but of the totality of the franchise, but suffice it to say you would be better served by going outside and using your imagination to explore dinosaur-themed ideas than watching how these people spent the hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal to use theirs.

The Words fails to surpass dramatically the bland lack of specificity in its title while still offering a solid roundup of performances from its talented ensemble cast.

It’s kind of hard to know where to begin with what’s wrong in Traffik, a movie where every scene takes about twice as long as it feels like it should, and the characters far too often make an escalating series of implausible and/or stupid decisions.

Atlas is predictable, overlong and bland, the kind of experience it’s hard to get excited about when the star player seems to be perfunctorily running the bases.

Set in a world where every door creaks and there isn’t a single well-lit location, Tarot is little more than a clearinghouse of horror clichés.

It never feels complete or thought through enough, either as a story or more crucially, an emotional experience — which is exactly what audiences would need in order to want to see more.

Director Daniel Espinoza stacks vampire cliches with horror classic visuals in a lackluster, but hardly disastrous, Spider-Man spinoff.

Overall, Chandrasekhar's first tentative venture towards something slightly more sincere is undermined by, quite frankly, his irresistible urge to take the piss out of every sequence that might have been played even remotely seriously.

Peppermint ultimately possesses the stale predictability of an unwrapped candy discovered at the bottom of a purse.

Hurry Up Tomorrow bears all the signs of pop star hubris masquerading as artistic candor, despite game performances by Jenna Ortega and Barry Keogan to prop up the budding thespian.

There may be no more unexpected (or damning) faint praise for David Ayer’s new movie Bright than this: It made me wish I was watching “Suicide Squad” instead.