William Bibbiani

We like to joke about how "this meeting could have been an email" but if all The Devil Wears Prada 2 can offer is Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep, Stanley Tucci and Emily Blunt on-screen together again, then this film could have been a Zoom call.

The pieces of this survival thriller don’t work together in any meaningful way, they just occupy the same space, and that makes 'Apex' less exciting than if the filmmakers had just stuck to one of their guns. Any of them.

The target demographic for Lorne is SNL fans who won’t benefit from a documentary like Lorne.

The Gates' is constantly on the verge of getting better, sometimes on the verge of getting good, but it never quite gets there. It’s a missed opportunity for thrills, social commentary, humor and/or horror.

The pros don’t come from trustworthy sources and the cons require a lot more elaboration.

It’s easy to appreciate the ambition of Gaines’ new take on Dutchman, but the original tale is fighting back, and it’s got the upper hand.

The only way ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ could be more hypocritical, and taken less seriously, is if the characters also yelled “Hypocrisy sucks!” while sitting on Whoopee cushions.

However depressing 'Rosemead' is, and it’s depressing in all italics, it’s just not deep enough to make running this gauntlet worthwhile.

Shallow self-congratulation for American moxie at the expense of everyone and everything around us.

The romantic part of Johnson’s rom-com barely reaches a low simmer, but the comedy part burns a little brighter.

There hasn’t been a pre-planned 'Part Two' this disappointing since the second half of Andy Muschietti’s 'It.' At least nobody projectile vomits on Jeff Goldblum to the tune of Juice Newton’s 'Angel of the Morning.' Then again, that would have been more memorable.

The Carpenter’s Son' is a Biblical horror movie with interesting ideas. They just don’t seem interesting because the perspective is cockeyed, which nullifies the film’s ability to trouble our hearts.

The fact that it's released by Paramount plays like a punchline, and it’s unclear who’s getting punched.

It’s a magic act without the storytelling, so every moment is the prestige, and none of it feels prestigious. It’s goofy and shallow and delightful and in a couple days I’ll forget I ever saw it.

If In Your Dreams was too entertaining it would contradict its own message about the perils of escapism. But it might not be entertaining enough to make audiences want to stay until the message comes through. Call it a design flaw.

Doin’ It' isn’t a great sex comedy. I don’t think I’d even call it a good one, so I won’t. But it sure as hell isn’t lazy. Noble intentions are splattered all over the walls, and the overall message isn’t in dispute.

It’s possible, maybe even likely, that Paul Thomas Anderson has stuffed so much into one movie that a lot of people will find something to take away from it. All I see is the lack of focus.

I admire you for trying to make it work, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, but I think we should both see other films.

The film may be unbridled, unfettered and bold, but sometimes those adjectives aren’t complimentary.

A sword-and-sorcery epic that can’t swing the 'epic' part.

What [Cregger]'s getting at seems a lot less frightening, and a lot more contrived, than it would have had he not invited us to ponder more powerful possibilities for over an hour before tipping his hand.

My Oxford Year is shiny and affable, and if that was the assignment it’d get an 'A' for effort . . . actually that’s going too far, let’s make it a respectable 'B.' But that’s not the assignment.

It’s not bad, guys. But guys, it’s not good.

A few odd touches and one impressively, cathartically violent sequence don’t compensate for the film’s resistance to its own ideas.

You may want to leave the theater, go directly to a bookstore and buy the source material. That’s good! But you may want to leave before the movie’s over. That’s bad.

It’s all about radical acceptance but can only talk about the real-world application of its message in general metaphors, so people who don’t actually accept 'weird,' 'different' kids won’t have to think about how wrong they are.

Kosinski’s antiseptic visual style and Ehren Kruger’s limp screenplay (with a co-story credit by Kosinski himself) make 'F1 The Movie' an incredibly sterile film about virility. It’s so manly it can barely perform.

They’re all trying to make a meal out of starvation rations. The cast’s efforts aren’t in vain, and the film is better for having them, but a thing can get a whole lot of 'better' before it gets 'good.

A potpourri of general genre genericness, never making enough noise to rattle, or even produce an echo.

Fear Street: Prom Queen is not the best Fear Street movie. But to be fair, it’s probably the third best Prom Night.

I would seriously consider cutting off one of my own fingers if it meant I didn’t have to spend two hours alone in a room with John Krasinski’s protagonist from Guy Ritchie’s Fountain of Youth.

Never was a film I’m more likely to forget, than this of Romeo and his Juliet.

If you can’t think of a better way to spend your time, 'Until Dawn' is a thing that exists.

It would be easy to write off 'Sneaks' as a hack job, a sole-less riff on a tired premise, but there’s more afoot here.

Its baseline competence is perfectly watchable. It’s just hard to imagine anyone signing onto this project with the explicitly stated goal of only making it watchable.

The word Competent! rarely makes it into a movie’s marketing materials no matter how accurate it is.

Opus is a Cheeto without the Cheeto dust, so of course we feel cheeted.

We watch The Parenting in blasé curiosity, as we engage in the purely intellectual exercise of sussing out what’s gone wrong.

It’s a grim slog through the wastelands of human civilization, which makes a big deal about the generic parts and glosses over all the thrilling weirdness.

I’ve spent over two paragraphs now talking about the various movie trivia Cleaner reminded me of, since Cleaner doesn’t provide much other food for thought.

If this is just one bullet point in your Valentine’s Day to-do list, an excuse to hold hands or neck in a darkened theater, or maybe as a litmus test for your date’s artistic tastes, it’s a harmless, mostly generic action rom-com.

It’s not so much a movie as it is multimillion dollar background noise while you stare at your phone.

It’s hard not to feel a bit scammed, like you just bought a brand-new AAA game and found out most of its content is still locked behind an additional paywall.

The fourth best animated Lord of the Rings feature, which sounds pretty good until you remember there are only four of them.

There’s nothing particularly terrible about Moana 2, but the fact that it’s necessary to write 'there’s nothing particularly terrible about Moana 2' means something still went wrong.

One emerges from the theater thinking we may have just had a good time, but the more it sits with you, the more you realize that no matter how epic the battles were — and they certainly were epic — they didn’t have anywhere near the same impact as the original.

Red One might not save Christmas but at least it saves face.

This isn’t the first sequel to desperately transplant its characters into a tropical or jungle locale, and it isn’t the best. Then again, the competition includes Weekend at Bernie’s II, Speed 2: Cruise Control and Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise, so it isn’t the worst either.

The time travel stuff is mined for funny jokes for a few minutes and then the film shows zero interest in all the worms it’s uncanned. It’s a whole lot of “what ifs” and not a lot of “then whats.”

All that effort and innovation and ambition amounts, in Zemeckis’ film, to little more than a mawkish intergenerational drama. Here genuinely seems to believe that the history of the world peaked with the possibility of mom and dad getting a divorce.

An ordinary feature that could have been extraordinary as a series of three shorts. Instead, this is what we’ve got: a vaguely watchable animated Christmas movie that only works in fits and starts.

The story isn’t so hot. At least the leads are. That’s not enough to make Lonely Planet a good film, but it might be enough to get through all 94 minutes without clicking on something else instead. Maybe

It may freak you out a little bit, and that may be enough for some people, but it only briefly grabs hold of something significant. Then it lets go.

Sadly, I’d rather watch any of Smith’s fake movies than The 4:30 Movie, because at least they seem enjoyably weird.

If an algorithm recommends The Emoji Movie, Weitz’s film argues, there’s something very, very wrong with that algorithm — and there’s no denying that logic.

It’s good to know that John Woo still thinks the only reason motorcycles were invented was to be shot and exploded in mid-air, but most of this action is merely satisfactory, and even after years of experimentation, CGI bullet hits still look faker than an old-fashioned squib

There’s nothing really to recommend The Union except the fact that it exists and you can watch it. It’s a harmless waste of time because it’s a serious waste of a good idea.

All the edges have been sanded down so it can be safe and mainstream, but they went too far and there’s almost nothing left. It’s technically a movie based on 'Borderlands.' Not much else.

It’s a mostly harmless time-waster of a motion picture; functionally a movie but without too much of that pesky depth or entertainment getting in the way.

Isn’t so much a movie as it is a corporate merger with stabbings and wiener jokes. A shameless piece of self-congratulation, fueled by self-cannibalism.

If all you want is another Beverly Hills Cop, here it is. If you want a great new Beverly Hills Cop, keep waiting.

It’s almost worth watching for Zac Efron and Nicole Kidman’s magnetism alone. If by 'almost' you mean 'not really.

Summer Camp is not a particularly good movie but it’s the kind of movie that makes a film critic wonder what 'good' really is, anyway."

The Watchers' isn’t very scary and it’s only interesting for as long as it’s an intellectual curiosity, and it’s not intellectual curiosity for the full 102-minute running time.

Hidden somewhere beneath all the generic dialogue, embarrassing plot, mediocre action and oddly ineffective performances, there’s a good idea in Brad Peyton’s Atlas. It’s a shame the filmmakers never found it.

When I say The Garfield Movie is the best Garfield movie, it’s going to sound like faint praise. Because it is. But faint praise is still praise.

Krasinski’s film is a vague celebration of imagination and wonder, but it can’t imagine a world that makes sense or entertains, and that’s just not wonderful.

It’s a horror movie for people who want to watch a scary movie but are hanging out with someone who gets scared very easily, and so they decide to compromise. Not too scary, not too silly, not much of anything really, but not much to complain about either.

A hodgepodge of exuberant stylistic flourishes and pop culture references, and while it’s often briefly entertaining, it’s never consistently anything except manic.

Even if a superior version of 'Rebel Moon' does come out eventually, that doesn’t make these versions any better, and they’re the only versions we have right now. They’re both shallow and generic space operas, distractingly derivative of better films while adding very little to the mix.

Tells the story of Amy Winehouse but shows no passion in telling it and has nothing to say about the events that transpire. It’s the utter minimum of what a biopic can be.

The new movie’s twists can only exist if they don’t contradict the previous films, so only a few surprises are even possible and those surprises can only happen in unsurprising ways.

It takes a farcical premise and tries to find something meaningful to say about it. It doesn’t succeed, but the effort is worth analyzing.

It just never goes far enough with its ridiculousness to reach pure entertainment, and it certainly can’t be taken seriously enough to justify its melodrama.

It is simply what it is, and that is a hugely expensive but uninspired “Star Wars” knockoff with some thrilling action sequences, and some truly ugly moments that taint the entire thing.

Admittedly, it’s pretty easy to consume Wonka. After all, it’s just a piece of candy. But it’s the kind of candy that would make Willy Wonka sick to his stomach. Wonka is the sort of safe and corporate product that the hero of Wonka says we shouldn’t settle for.

There is a scene in 'The Exorcist' where the soul of Regan MacNeil writes 'Help me' in her own flesh, begging someone to save her from an exploitative entity. I suspect if you look closely enough at Green’s film you can see the soul of 'The Exorcist' crying out the same way.

It’s hard to imagine a film with less strength of conviction than The Flash, a time travel movie about why it’s bad to retcon the past, but which exists entirely to convince the audience that retconning the past, present and (potentially) the future of the DC superhero franchise is a super cool thing to do.

No matter how frightening the individual moments may be, and no matter how impressive it is that we only ever see enough of the monster to excite our imagination, and no matter how exceptionally the eerie sound design turns out to be, The Boogeyman never quite gets under the skin.

It’s a mismatched buddy comedy which tries — and sometimes succeeds — to tell an emotional story about processing failure and shame, but it doesn’t have anything terribly interesting to say about it.

The Amazing Maurice just has a frustrating way of making smart ideas seem uninspired and funny jokes not funny. It’s all in the execution, and the executioner has their hood on backwards and keeps swinging the axe anyway.

Hyams’ film doesn’t make the most of its concept but, although it’s not a particularly interesting slasher, it is an efficient one. Fans of the genre will no doubt have a little fun with it. The fun just isn’t infectious.

Most of this new House Party is relatively uninspired, a modest and mediocre comedy that relies more on its high-concept plot to capture the audience’s attention than on interesting characters or, you know, jokes.

Puss in Boots isn’t on a rousing adventure; he’s performing the fairy-tale equivalent of grasping at miracle cures while he’s dying from a terminal illness. And although the film is funny in fits and starts, and exciting in fits and starts, the ultimate takeaway is weirdly sobering.

The film eventually provides some memorable gore but the ultimate conclusion is unconvincing and perfunctory.

Zombie’s film, though clearly sweet and well-intentioned, seems only partially formed, a Frankenstein monster with only half the parts.

Although the film takes place in a dystopian near future, the story rarely reveals any meaningful information about how society functions after an environmental collapse, or indeed portrays hardly any scene as though it could take place only within the confines of Mondocane.

While many of the subplots of “Secrets” fall flat or go nowhere (usually both), there are globetrotting sequences of political intrigue that sometimes make Yates’ latest foray play out like an exciting, fantastical espionage thriller.

Sincere but uneven, professionally acted but amateurishly presented — there’s a lot to like about Family Squares, but there’s always something getting in the way of its intended impact.

The first two courses of this three-course meal were on the bland side. The third course is exciting, but by that point our appetite has waned, our interest in the company has dissipated, and we’re pretty much ready to go home.

Ali and Harris give Swan Song a powerful emotional honesty that’s consistently undermined by the film’s poorly developed intellectual conceits, but their combined talents are almost enough to justify this film’s existence alone.

There are some potent shocks here, but the strongest aspect of the film is the unmistakable odor of squandered potential.

Surge captures the protagonist’s collapse but shies away from catharsis, judgment, or context. Karia’s film lives in the moment and no matter how overwhelming it may seem, the moment is fleeting.

At the end of the day, “DASHCAM” actually doesn’t seem to have much of a point to make. It’s a mean little joke of a horror movie, one where the worst people seem to live longest and endure no consequences, and if that’s what “DASHCAM” has to say about life itself then fair enough, but it’s not presented with cleverness or pointed satire. Savage’s film just keeps digging a hole and somehow it never reaches any depth.

When viewed with both eyes open, Worth is a thematically confusing motion picture, no matter how good the acting is. If the film exists to sell us on how great the fund was, it blew it, because we’re left with troubling and unanswered questions. If the film exists to raise those questions, it cops out by resorting to treacly melodrama. And it cannot effectively do both.

Don’t Breathe 2 may not be the first horror movie sequel to try to transform the monster into an antihero, but it’s hard to think of another one that whiffs it this hard.

Disney may be in the process of updating Jungle Cruise, the ride, but Jungle Cruise, the movie, isn’t trying to reinvent much of anything.

The drama is muddled, the action is murky, and the storyline can’t help but get goofier and goofier until, by the end, every attempt this movie makes to ground the “G.I. Joe” series gets blown up. It’s hardly the worst film the “G.I. Joe” series has delivered, but it’s certainly the least interesting.