Ty Burr

Tost can’t match the oddball inspiration of his influences, and the results simply feel forced.

There’s nothing wrong with a good, dumb comedy, but “Bride Hard” doesn’t even qualify as in-flight entertainment.

Shakespeare this ain’t. In the long, long history of “Romeo and Juliet” movie adaptations, “Juliet & Romeo” lands well below the 1996 Baz Luhrmann version starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes and just above 2011’s “Gnomeo & Juliet,” in which the characters are portrayed as animated garden gnomes.

To paraphrase the T-shirt, everyone here went to the Isle of Capri, and all we got was this lousy movie.

It isn’t even a disaster; that, at least, might be interesting.

If you’ve been committed to the MCU over all these years and iterations, you may find the new movie an acceptable entry in a never-ending saga. I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.

At nearly 2½ hours, the movie is fun to watch until it’s not, and then it becomes a chore.

For a movie about the Great Communicator, “Reagan” communicates surprisingly little.

If you’re already a subscriber to Apple TV Plus and have absolutely nothing else to do, “The Instigators” is worth a look.

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is the cinematic equivalent of trying on your prom suit from 1984. Maybe it still fits, but not in the places it used to, and if you try to moonwalk, you’ll probably get a hernia.

Shyamalan the elder makes suspense-horror dramas that either give a half-baked idea a fully baked cinematic treatment or vice versa; Shyamalan the daughter’s first feature-length film is just half-baked all around.

You know how a pop song from a moment in your past can bring that moment back to life in colors, smells, memories and emotions? “The Greatest Hits” takes that idea and literalizes it right into the ground.

Heading straight to streaming platform Paramount+ without the embarrassment of appearing in theaters first, the movie is both blissfully incoherent and weirdly generic, as if it had been assembled from the spare parts of other movies and glued together with stuntwork.

A stultifying drama based on the 2009 season of the Abilene High Eagles, Lights suffers from sermonizing dialogue, amateurish performances, and an ugly racial blind spot disguised as white savior paternalism.

Even the gunplay, of which there is plenty, feels secondhand.

We’ve been here before and many, many times, and Monday, newly available on demand, doesn’t give us enough reason to be here again.

Cherry is three movies in one, none of them fresh, all of them overlong.

One hundred and thirty-two minutes of shrill, self-satisfied jazz hands, The Prom may be the biggest disappointment of the season.

The scenes with Keaton and Irons, too, rise above the mediocrity-unto-badness of Love, Weddings & Other Disasters on the strength of the actors’ charisma alone. Irons thaws satisfyingly as a snob finding unexpected love, and Keaton remains adorably, engagingly herself, turning her character’s blindness into a la-di-da form of grace. They are diamonds at a garage sale, and they deserve better.

Both writer and director are men, which perhaps explains why much of the talk in Chick Fight about female empowerment and channeling one’s womanly rage comes off as lip service on the way to the next beat-down or snuggle-up.

In trying to play up the naughty, witty side of the rom-com equation, the movie settles for snarky. It’s an acrid fairy tale, if not without a few pleasures, and it arrives on Netflix just in time for — wait, Christmas?

The forced hijinks, sub-John Hughes emotional tropes, and Screenwriting 101 conventions — which include what can only be called Chekhov’s Taser — cut crassly against the grain of a subject that is fundamentally personal and inherently political.

Among other things, An American Pickle is very, very Jewish, and a scene toward the end revolves around Ben finally joining a minyan to say the Mourner’s Kaddish. Better they should have said it for the movie.

Taken as a whole, The Sunlit Night is fey and inconclusive, and whether something of more substance got cut in the post-Sundance re-edit or was never there to begin with is at this point moot. The movie’s up a most beautiful creek without a paddle.

A bad dopey Will Ferrell comedy – overlong, underwritten, as strained as its title, and running on schtick and storylines that are practically rims.

The thrill of watching an Olivier Assayas movie is that you often have no idea where it’s going next. This time out, it seems, neither does he.

A sludgy action thriller with an out-of-shape star, Blood and Money doesn’t have a lot going for it other than its setting: the uncharted north Maine woods in the dead of winter.

And while I understand Downey wanting to make a movie for his kids, the world might be better served if, at long last, he made one for himself.

I truly believe our divided nation can be healed and brought together as one by Cats — the musical, the movie, the disaster. In other news, my eyes are burning. Oh God, my eyes.

The tumultuous emotional, sexual, and literary relationship between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West would make a fascinating movie — it’s a shame that Vita & Virginia isn’t it.

If you doubt that August is the boneyard for movies too poor to release in other months, here’s The Kitchen, an addled and actively unpleasant crime comedy-drama with a high-profile cast and a mean streak a mile wide. Based on a limited-edition comic book and completed in July 2018, the movie’s been sitting on the shelf until enough people are on vacation to not see it.

With a by-the-numbers screenplay by Tripper Clancy and assembly-line direction from Michael Dowse (see his 2013 hockey comedy, “Goon,” instead), Stuber is just the umpteenth iteration of the buddy-cop action drama pioneered by “48 Hrs.” almost 40 years ago.

Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die may not be a gifted filmmaker’s worst movie, but it’s certainly his most cynical — a unique cinematic worldview reduced to schtick.

Powerful stuff, but unpowerfully told.

Maybe if Mapplethorpe hadn’t been commissioned by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, it would have been a batter movie. As it is, this sour, undernourished biopic is a disappointment just shy of a disaster — a portrait of a boundary-destroying artist that stays well within the safe borders of convention.

Isn’t it a bit early for Isabelle Huppert to be entering the late Bette Davis era of her career? Why else on God’s green earth would she be appearing in Greta, a botched attempt to build a camp horror movie around a grand diva of the screen?

This is a story that needs to be told, but McKay turns out to be precisely the wrong man to tell it. By comparison, Oliver Stone is a model of sober restraint.

The tone is almost willfully off-putting. The parts that are supposed to be cute could give you the creeps. The film is almost a Platonic ideal of how to take an emotionally transfixing real-life story and get it wrong.

And that’s what The Girl in the Spider’s Web is: soulless, bloodless product. Subtitled “A Dragon Tattoo Story,” it exists almost solely to drive a stake in the ground for the further franchising of author Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”

Venom, the movie, is a reptilian Marvel mishmash whose touch saps the life force of almost everyone in it.

Garner bulls her way through the film with determination and a minimum of facial expressions, like someone who’s been told to clean up something awful and just wants to get it over with. So what if Charlize Theron did it better in “Atomic Blonde,” last year’s female-led brawler that is in every conceivable way superior to Peppermint?

This feeble excuse for a comedy made me angry, and if you have any cherished cinematic feelings for the quartet of actresses at its center, you may feel angry, too.

After a brisk and promising opening half-hour set in London and Hong Kong, the movie devolves into a Saturday matinee B-movie, and not in a good way. It’s pure product, and a waste of a savvy leading actress.

A movie about ordinary American heroes that stars ordinary American heroes. About 15 minutes of the film concerns the actual heroics. The rest is . . . ordinary.

A by-the-numbers B flick with a preposterous script and a good cast trying their best.

Wonder Wheel, Allen’s new film, is one of the Very Bad Ones. Set in a post-WWII Coney Island that glows with the hues of popsicles at sunset, it’s a strained adultery melodrama that appears to have been written poorly on purpose, as a sour parody of 1950s theatrical clichés.

The cast is earnest and they almost convince us they’re doing important rather than self-important work.

Suburbicon is George Clooney’s sixth feature as a director and the latest spiral downward in terms of quality.

A woozy, wheezy impressionistic take on a woman’s nervous breakdown that aspires to the avant-garde but plays like a bad head-trip movie from the late 1960s. It’s dreadful. Worse, it’s not quite bad enough to be much fun.

Year by the Sea is for audiences who don’t trust the shiftiness of nuance and craft, of messages that rise up from dramatic situations rather than being pasted on top of them, and who would prefer their life lessons stated loudly and for maximum applicability.

The plot is a canvas on which to bludgeon the audience with action sequences that have been shot for maximum overstimulation.

The plot proceeds from the charming to the manipulative to the shameless to the demented in gentle steps that may lull some audiences the way a frog can be boiled to death by degrees.

Unfortunately, Churchill the movie is simply dreadful, a stiff, melodramatic “Great Man” travesty that gets both the larger history and the details wrong while encouraging its star’s most overwrought excesses. What Cox serves in this movie is ham, poorly sliced.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is stupid enough to send you back to the one movie that did the saga right by ripping it to shreds, 1975’s “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

The dialogue is as subtle as a placard, the drama manages to be both cooked-up and dull, and the movie’s fear of brainwashed, tech-addicted millennials is so broad as to be unintentionally funny.

In no way, shape, or fashion does Queen of the Desert qualify as a good movie, but for fans of Werner Herzog — those of us who have followed cinema’s Teutonic imp of the perverse since the 1970s, when he was staging all-dwarf fables and sending conquistadors across mountains — it is fascinating and something close to a must-see.

A new movie based on Roth’s 1997 novel “American Pastoral” offers proof yet again that this writer’s great literary gifts are almost impossible to translate to the screen. Roth is a protean American inner voice. The movies, sad to say, remain better at exteriors.

“Baby” is to Helen Fielding’s original 1996 novel and its 2001 movie adaptation what “Sex and the City 2” was to the HBO series — a cause not for celebration but overdue burial.

The upshot is that Blair Witch comes to the party very late and very tired, and it doesn’t improve from there.

It all might wash in a Johnny Weissmuller “Tarzan” movie from the 1940s. It no longer suffices today. Filmmakers, it’s time to pack up Greystoke Manor. Tarzan is dead.

The movie must be bad, right? Worse, it’s a bore.

To watch Alice Through the Looking Glass is to witness an army of smart, creative people dumbing themselves down into delivering what they think the market wants.

The movie plays like a global-political farce made by people who’ve never left the Upper West Side.

There’s a reason the movie has been pushed off the back of the truck into late February. It’s damaged goods.

This needless sequel amps the silliness to DEFCON-4 levels of frantic surrealism and overstuffs the running time with famous faces. It’s a pop quiz instead of a movie, and it’ll be dated by tomorrow morning.

In the Heart of the Sea plays as if the joke was real and everyone on the production had caved in. The result, as a movie, is a joke.

McAvoy’s performance is a deep, deep shade of gonzo and by far the most enjoyable aspect of Victor Frankenstein — you don’t often see over-acting this enthusiastic or this flecked with spittle.

Rock the Kasbah is a pandering, poorly assembled botch that thinks it’s playing fair by Afghan popular culture but only manages to add insult to the countless other injuries inflicted upon that country. If it were any worse, they’d be screening it as evidence at The Hague.

The Intern is bizarrely retrograde, implying that every working woman only needs a cuddly Yoda daddy to make it in the world of business. It’s soft in the heart — and soft in the head.

Grim, ridiculous, and dull.

What’s interesting about Vacation is that it holds on to the original’s acrid cynicism for the first 40 minutes or so before turning predictable and bland. There are some real, nasty laughs to be had here, but they’re front-loaded.

The movie takes a decent “Twilight Zone” idea -- what if you had a second chance at youth? -- and runs it into the ground with watchable but diminishing returns.

Aloha is as generic as its title. The islands exist solely as an exotic backdrop for the pretty Hollywood haoles to play in. Business as usual, and I never thought I’d say that about a Cameron Crowe movie.

It must have looked great on paper. On screen, it’s a soapy mess that even Joan Crawford in her delusional late-period prime couldn’t save.

Dazzling to behold yet puny of imagination, the movie takes the “Star Wars” formula — hero myths nicked from Joseph Campbell, cutting-edge visual effects, comic-strip dialogue, goofy-looking aliens — and reduces it to generic Big Box shelf product.

So this is the little movie that caused the big fuss. And little it is, a dopey bro-com that piddles along delivering mild laughs until it turns overly, unamusingly bloody in the climactic scenes.

Big Eyes may not be Tim Burton’s absolute worst movie — we’ll always have “Planet of the Apes” — but it’s pretty close to the bottom. It’s also the film that reveals his weaknesses as a director and, by their absence, his strengths. Gaudy, shallow, shrill, smug, the movie proves beyond a whisker of doubt that Burton has little interest in human beings unless they can be reduced to cartoons.

Jackson has marched the modern fantasy-action epic into a thundering blind alley; the movie exhausts your senses without ever engaging your imagination.

It’s been a while since there’s been this much dead air onscreen; over and over, Smith sets up a sequence, lets his actors shpritz, and stands by as the energy fades into giggly catatonia.

The Last of Robin Hood plays like a laboratory control experiment gone wrong: What would happen if you made a movie with a great cast and terrible everything else?

If ever a movie were lost in translation, it’s Mood Indigo, the latest from the scattershot genius Michel Gondry (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “The Science of Sleep”). With his penchant for sad-sack dreamers and gonzo visual gags, Gondry can make a director like Wes Anderson look like a prig, and “Mood” allows him freer access to his fancy than usual.

And So It Goes looks like it was shot on outdated video equipment and has a forced, jokey script by Mark Andrus (”As Good As It Gets,” “Georgia Rule”).

As an actor, Braff does thin-skinned sad-sack quite well. As a writer, he’s hopelessly banal. As a director, he’s a disaster.

Behind the familiar hits, Jersey Boys is a story about the pressures and rewards of professionalism. Far too little of that has made it into this biopic. It’s just too mediocre to be true.

It’s clear what MacFarlane is shooting for — nothing less than the chance to be both the Bob Hope and the Mel Brooks of his generation. Be careful what you wish for.

Regrettably, it’s terrible poetry: a roughly chronological jumble of archival footage, unconvincing period reenactments, gauzy voice-overs, and half-baked ideas that makes one yearn for the stolid dullness of a History Channel documentary.

One of those loud, cringe-y female-empowerment comedies that feels like it was made by people who hate women.

Stupid, sadistic, misogynistic, confusing, and more than a little ridiculous. Here’s the thing, though: It keeps you watching, if only to see how tortured the plot or characters are going to get. I’m not sure that “entertainingly awful” is a recommendation, but the shoe fits.

All that’s missing is Clyde the orangutan from Clint Eastwood’s “Every Which Way But Loose,” which, trust me, this movie could have used.

3 Days to Kill is pretty terrible, but it’s not really Kevin Costner’s fault.

Despite a frisky soundtrack that starts off with James Brown’s “Sex Machine” — trust me, it’s downhill from there — this is the visual equivalent of Muzak. You don’t have to see it to have seen it.

The movie’s a somber affair, but if you see it in the right frame of mind, it’s the guilty-pleasure hoot of the season.

Hirschbiegel and Watts don’t have the nerve for camp. Even a scene of a rejected Diana back at Kensington, forlornly playing Bach at her piano while mascara streams down her face, is played gloomily straight.

The new Carrie is a thoroughly dispiriting remake — “retread” is the appropriate word — that could have been directed by any proficient Hollywood hack.

Carlos Carlei’s Romeo and Juliet is a failure of skill.

When it’s time for the hot sex scene between Timberlake’s ambitious Richie Furst and Rebecca (Gemma Arterton), his boss’s luscious second-in-command, the encounter is as charmless and chemistry-free as the wooden banter that has led up to it. I’ve had dentist’s appointments that were sexier.

Some documentaries are an embarrassment of riches. Salinger is merely an embarrassment.

Writer-director Liz W. Garcia depicts Leigh’s quandary with a heavy hand that gets heavier as the movie goes on, ending with one of those portentous freeze-frames that worked in “The 400 Blows” and never since.