William Bibbiani

It’s a pat retread of all the violence from the original film, with no emotional investment and no creativity in the mayhem department.

Michael Damian’s film has no nutritional value, but that’s by design: It’s a flaky dessert for the mind, and it’s irresistibly decadent.

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

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.

It’s just a disappointingly average superhero flick, with a familiar story, disinterested actors, some cool action sequences, and a whole lot of missed opportunities.

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.

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.

If you thought Jerry Seinfeld’s funniest moments were in his American Express ads, then Unfrosted is the film for you.

Logic, be damned! And begone! Everything about the new 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' strains credulity until credulity breaks open and spills fake blood and candy everywhere. And that’s for the best.

It’s impossible to watch a film in which Jesus Christ says it’s wrong to profit from religion and then watch the filmmakers panhandle for profit at the end. At least, not without imagining the screen getting struck by lightning.

The cast does the best they can to save the weak material, and it’s interesting to see how the filmmakers are trying to make this off-putting concept work. But it's not funny enough, or even weird enough, to get away with it.

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

There’s nothing brave about this movie. There’s nothing new either. And sure, it technically takes place in the world, but one out of three is bad.

A few sharp moments can’t compensate for a film that feels half-developed, and only half-heartedly told. Like its protagonist, Bad Samaritan isn’t quite as bad as it could have been, but it’s not good either.

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

Breaking In is a clever twist not the home invasion genre, with a dynamic lead performance by Gabrielle Union as a mother protecting her family. It’s a crowd-pleasing thriller, good but never quite great, because the story collapses under scrutiny. The film is trying to be clever and yet it relies on big, and obvious gaps in logic, but those flaws probably won't ruin the experience.

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.

If you can get past the many bizarre inconsistencies, The Star is a relatively decent film for young Christian audiences. The writing, voice-acting and animation are unremarkable, but they get the job done, and the film’s heart seems to be in the right place.

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.

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

It’s a film that’s full of love, but it’s an unhealthy love that’s detached from reality and the movie seems detached as well. It’s too maudlin to convey its own moral complexity and too foreboding to be sentimental.

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.

Absurd as it is, Moonfall represents yet another bold stroke of maximalist grandeur from a filmmaker who excels at making overwhelming chaos look beautiful.

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

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.

Even though they sometimes land a great joke, the troopers aren’t inherently amusing or even all that likable this time around. They’re undeniably corrupt cops, even if they are relatively benign about it. Super Troopers 2 still manages to be funny quite a bit of the time, but the word “funny” needs an asterisk next to it, warning that the laughs might carry with them a certain amount of guilt.

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."

Yes, the movie looks scary. So scary it could almost be confused for a scary movie. Almost. But only if you’re not paying attention, and miss how shallow, derivative and underwritten it is.

A rock musical like 'O’Dessa' only works if it sufficiently rocks, and 'O’Dessa' somewhat rocks.

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.

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.

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.

Fireworks takes you on that little journey. It may affect you deeply, or it may just come and go, a fizzling sentimental aside in an otherwise hectic day. But it’s hard to deny that it approaches its fantastical story with maturity and grace, and a thoughtfulness about what it would truly mean to leap into a “what if” and seriously consider never coming out again.

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.

Beneath Us never lets the exploitation cinema elements get in the way of the serious conversation about actual, real-life exploitation. That makes it frightening, and that makes it bold.

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 screenplay captures the grizzled-cop-movie tone and draws some memorable characters, but the storyline is rote, the mystery is frustratingly predictable, and the imaginative deaths are less imaginative than ever. Spiral sacrifices entertainment value for respectability and in the process doesn’t quite achieve either.

Leatherface is the worst Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie ever.

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.

Jigsaw barely feels like a part of the Saw franchise. It has deathtraps, but takes no pleasure in presenting them. It ignores most of the ongoing storyline. If it wasn’t part of the official franchise it would play like a knockoff.

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.

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

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.

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 Darkest Minds is smart. It has a lot to convey to its young audience, and the strong cast does everything in their power to illustrate those themes and to bring their characters to earnest, believable life. But it’s not quite thrilling enough to sneak its mission statements under anyone’s noses, so it plays a bit more like a manifesto than a sci-fi thriller.

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 just feature-length publicity, and it plays like damage control.

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.

You learn about as much from the movie as you do from the trailer, and the trailer is free to watch and saves you a lot of time.

Mile 22 is a straight-to-video action movie that got the big budget treatment, and not in the good, cheesy, fun way. It’s an undercooked story with characters who don’t know how to express themselves without yelling, and it’s full of laughable plot points.

It lacks ambition or depth, but it’s delicious and filling, proving (as if anyone still needed proof) that Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth are two of the most likable movie stars in the galaxy.

So what if it could be a little shorter? The length of the journey makes RZA’s destination more meaningful.

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.

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.

There are no small parts in a Michael Showalter movie. Every actor is a star when they’re on camera.

If Jennifer Westcott’s animated kids’ movie Elliot the Littlest Reindeer was a Christmas gift, it’d be the toothbrush at the bottom of your stocking. It’s well-intentioned, and you might get some use out of it, but let’s just pray it’s not the highlight of your holiday season.

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

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.

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.

It’s just shameless promotion for a book about relationship advice, released on a streaming service that also sells happens to sell the book. It even features lines like, 'This story hit so hard I Amazoned a copy of ‘Relationship Goals’ right away.

So lacking in substance and purpose that after a while you can’t even hear the dialogue over the incessant sound of Aristotle’s ghost punching himself.

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.

Demonic isn’t just a low-budget supernatural–sci-fi thriller; it’s also a shallow one, a boring one, a poorly conceived one — and the characters stink too.

It’s a speedy adventure with diverse action set pieces and a mystery that boasts at least one halfway decent twist.

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.”

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.

All the genre elements play like an afterthought, and that's frustrating because the rest of the movie isn't quite spry enough to stay interesting without action, adventure, or at least little more weirdness.

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.

It’s not that 'Scream 7' is a bad 'Scream' movie. There are no bad 'Scream' movies (yet). Even the worst one is kind of alright, and this is the worst one.

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.

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.

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

To some, a film with undeveloped themes, thin characters, and superficial gore might seem like a bad thing. To connoisseurs of the slasher genre, it’s all part of a well-balanced breakfast. Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s narrative efficiency and tight 81-minute running time make it an ideal delivery system for creative kills and memorable gore.

A textbook example of what happens when movies are treated like content, something to fill a quota, not to be thought about or enjoyed, so that Netflix can tell their subscribers technically they have a new exclusive movie this week, quality be damned. And in this case quality was indeed damned. It was damned straight to hell.

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.

The Dreadful is worth watching for Harden’s perfidious performance alone. And whenever she’s not on-screen it’s worth the wait.

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

The new Firestarter is a lot like the old Firestarter, if the old Firestarter was duller, cheaper, and devoid of almost all meaning.

It’s a straightforward retelling with a confusing design philosophy, disappointing action sequences, weak storytelling and a cast which clearly deserved better material.

Game Over, Man! is a sloppy production, with screaming and bullying used as a placeholder for actual jokes. The characters are such enormous jerks that they probably don’t deserve to succeed, at anything, so it’s hard to want to follow their adventures through an entire film.

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.

Fifty Shades Freed concludes the trilogy as it began, with a romance you can’t believe in, endless montages of affluence, lousy dialogue, weak plotting, and - admittedly - a heck of a lot of sex.

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.

Countdown can never be taken seriously enough to work as a conventional horror thriller, and it’s never quite funny enough to be a great horror comedy. But it’s got just enough eccentricity and self-awareness to entertain despite those obvious deficiencies.

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.

Death Wish takes the serious topic of vigilante violence and reduces it to melodramatic hero worship, and it’s not even particularly good at that. The action is forgettable and the plot barely holds together.

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

Marshall’s Hellboy is a horrifyingly good time. It captures the breathless quality of reading 30 issues of a single comic-book series in one sugar-addled afternoon, shoving as many amazing characters and storylines and images into one film as it can possibly hold. It could have seemed overstuffed and frenetic, but this new “Hellboy” instead comes across as imaginative and freewheeling.

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

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.

It takes extremely familiar plot points and plays them straight, adding nothing new except the premise - a white American joining the Yakuza - which ultimately has very little to do with how the story unfolds. The film might be a functional crime drama but it’s an incredibly unremarkable one.

Daddy’s Home 2 seems like just another cookie-cutter comedy, but its heart is in the wrong place. It’s mean-spirited and half-hearted, and more than that… it’s just not funny.

A-X-L may be a dog, but he’s designed to be a weapon, so he looks like nightmare fuel. And nightmare fuel usually isn’t the best centerpiece for a family-friendly flick.