William Bibbiani

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

Besson’s film feels like a relic by most modern standards: It’s a formulaic thriller from a director who invented this very specific formula, and just about all it’s good for is introducing audiences to Sasha Luss, who carries the film with elegant strength and unleashes a satisfying fury whenever she’s allowed to destroy or humiliate her oppressors.

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.

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.

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

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.

Every once in a while it’s useful to take note of a film that’s technically competent but utterly uninvolving.

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

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.

Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare is what happens when high concepts crash. The audience is here to watch people play a deadly game of Truth or Dare, and yet the film’s truths and dares are unremarkable, and the players are mostly boring.

The lazy gags, wasted supporting cast and unfocused writing make the film an unfunny chore, which evokes but doesn't come close to their earlier comedic outings.

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.

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.

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

There are lots of jokes, even though they’re only sporadically funny. There are lots of action sequences, even though they’re edited haphazardly and sometimes hard to follow. There are lots of monsters, even though the more we learn about them, the harder it is to care.

Despite the film’s good intentions it’s an underwhelming adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, with cute side gags that make more of an impression than the characters or the story.

The Little Stranger has all the disquieting atmosphere of a total void, and like a total void, not a lot happens in it. You might get sucked into the cold, but you’ll grow bored quickly.

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

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.

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

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.

It’s neither funny nor exciting enough to obscure what a miasma of unfocused randomness it is, even though the cast is clearly trying to make something out of all this half-baked material.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

The film’s failure to modulate its tone, its intensity and its messaging makes it a dreary, one-note production.

Writer-director Rockaway (“The Abandoned”) hits all the major bullet points in the gangster’s life but ignores almost all the connective tissue that would make this outline of intriguing anecdotes really come alive.

A formulaic and depressing motion picture that takes meaningful characters and strips them of their reason to exist.

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.

Goodbye June is just hyperemotional tourism. We’re lookie-loos popping our heads in for the saddest moment in this family’s lives. We don’t even get to know them very well.

Tron: Ares has, in no uncertain terms, a great frickin’ soundtrack. The movie, on other hand, completely sucks.

The film undercuts its admiration of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley by judging, harshly, her life choices and reducing her timeless masterpiece to simplistic metaphor for a lousy marriage. Mary Shelley deserves better than Mary Shelley.

A slapdash effort from an otherwise great artist.

The Snowman is a detective vs. serial killer thriller devoid of any thrills.

A superficial illustration of the artist’s allure, interspersed with endless, increasingly comical shots of people watching him perform and smiling beatifically.

The problem with describing a movie like The Nun II is that its many inane moments sound entertaining when you list them all on one page, but they’re so spread out through this movie that the entertainment is usually quite scarce.

Neeson]’s trapped once again in tired tough guy material, bringing gravity to a film that’s already dragging him — and the audience — down.

Anyway, it’s also weird to find a mediocre straight-to-DVD action movie inside of a major movie theater, instead of in the bargain bin at a Big Lots in 2010.

Michael Goi, serving as both director and director of photography, does a better job placing the camera around the claustrophobic location than he does exploring the depths of his actors.

When 'The Banana Splits Movie' got there first, and did it slightly better, you’re in trouble.

A road trip fugitive movie which barely works as a road trip, or as a fugitive movie, or as a movie.

What a superficial and tedious motion picture, never quite bad enough to be campy, never remotely good enough to justify watching it instead of reading the book’s Wikipedia page.

Serenity is a twist in search of a movie, a film noir in search of a purpose, and a great cast in search of better material.

The film has no suspense, wit or shock value. It’s too ploddingly paced to elicit a proper jump scare, and it’s nowhere near insightful enough to get under the skin. The only thing interesting about this disappointing follow-up is how it takes the original film down with it, retroactively hurting the chances of “The Boy” becoming a beloved cult classic.

It’s so divorced from reality that it’s practically grounds for divorce.

Exactly the kind of insipid malarky superhero movies spent the last few decades trying to prove that they’re not.

For thousands of years it’s been believed that laughter is the best medicine. Unfortunately, it appears that the laughs in the new Netflix comedy 'Kinda Pregnant' have been recalled.

They just tried to do the same schtick, but longer and worse, and let’s face it, 'longer and worse' is only the goal if you’re trying to torture somebody.

Domino offers a sloppy screenplay with underdeveloped characters and a half-written plot, pumped full of racist, fear-mongering, one-dimensional villainy. Only the most diehard De Palma fans will find anything to intrigue them, and they’re going to have to sift through a lot of boring junk to find it.

Tim Story takes a classic movie franchise and drains it of all the action, sex and topicality that made it worth revisiting in the first place. Jackson, Roundtree and Usher have star power to spare but they’re asked to perform embarrassing and ignorant comedy routines, and the action is so unremarkable that the movie can’t even rely on that spectacle to compensate.

My Little Pony: The Movie falls apart in the end because it resolves its conflict the way that conventional blockbusters do, and not in the way that My Little Pony does.

Set aside for a moment that the movie is literally hard to look at: it’s also tonally chaotic, and repeatedly trips over its own unspeakable horrors, before falling face-first into bowls of insufferable sugar.

There’s nothing wrong with Disney’s live-action remake of 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' that couldn’t be fixed by making it 26 minutes shorter, 88 years ago and in hand-drawn animation.

When you stifle the emotional simplicity of a story like The Crow to emphasize the plot, the plot had better make sense. And it doesn’t. It’s got perplexing rules and a vague chronology and nothing seems like it matters anymore.

The problem is that not enough of the fun rubs off on us, the audience, to make this experience truly worthwhile.

It’s a frustratingly superficial, judgmental, surface-level thriller that undermines all its scariest moments by getting distracted at all the wrong times.

It lacks character, it lacks morbidity, it lacks subtext, it lacks suspense. It just kinda lays there like Hannah, but without any of her sinister magic.

A shabby low-rent thriller with a few vaguely interesting ideas and an ensemble that deserves better material.

If you were trying to produce a parody of what a Tolkien biopic would look like, you’d get the exact same film.

Ella McCay' is a film about American politics in the same way that Pixar’s 'Cars' is a movie about cars. As in yes, these are definitely films about politics and cars. But no, politics and cars don't work like that.

It’s a film with violence but no edge, just a disturbing idea which plays out to a grim and unsatisfying conclusion, unexplored and uninteresting.

The Strangers: Chapter 2' is an improvement on 'The Strangers: Chapter 1.' Then again, a moderate case of food poisoning is an improvement on a severe one.

This new Anaconda is so busy talking about how silly it is to make a new Anaconda that it never actually makes a good 'Anaconda.

A cheeseburger on Amazon Prime’s value menu, but they left out the cheese. And the meat.