William Bibbiani

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

The Meg is a big, dumb shark movie that takes itself a little too seriously, and that’s the point. Jason Statham is perfect for the material, the shark attacks are entertainingly broad, and the supporting cast brings personality to the otherwise straightforward script.

It’s a whole lot of pretty good and not a lot of amazing, but hey, remember how Tyriq Withers also starred in Him? No one can say they got the title wrong.

Beast is a toothsome survival thriller, competently crafted and engagingly realized. There are far worse ways to spend 93 minutes in a movie theater, but audiences hankering for something with some actual substance may be left feeling hungry on mane.

There’s an underlying cynicism to The Fox that gives it heft.

It’s cheap and it’s silly and it has a laughable premise that some people will mistake for terribleness. But it’s also winking and whimsical. It knows what it’s doing and it’s doing it on purpose. Somehow it actually kind of works.

It’s easy to forgive cheap aesthetics and a rushed finale when the middle of the flick, the sharktastic bloodletting where no character is safe, is such a hoot.

Although it’s extremely competent, it fails to add a new perspective to the story, or a distinctive approach to its telling.

It’s a movie about escape rooms that literally kill you, and if you’re willing to buy into that premise, it’s about as good as a movie with that premise could probably be. So, hey, 2019 is looking up.

If you can get swept up in a big old-fashioned war picture, Devotion has some of the goods. It’s an incredibly handsome production, and the central performance by Jonathan Majors, as real-life aviator Jesse L. Brown, is layered and impressive.

It doesn’t glitter, it doesn’t explode. It’s just fluffy and sweet. Bean’s film suffers a bit from minor technical issues and, despite a few improvements, it just doesn’t have the same emotional impact as the original, but it still deserves a good home.

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.

Despite the fundamental problems with any 'Watchmen' adaptation, and the serviceable but not entirely effective visual aesthetic, 'Chapter 1' does a respectable job of retelling this story.

While “Aliens Abducted My Parents” can be a little rote, its greatest function isn’t as a delivery system for drama, or humor, or even coming-of-age clichés. This is one of those movies about young people where, regardless of whether you like it or find it a little bland, you’re grateful that it introduced you to these cast members.

Cronin has an uncanny knack for human mutilation, which would probably be a bad thing in any other context, but if you’re making gross-out horror movies, it’s practically a requirement.

Frankly, big chunks of Master Z: The Legacy of Ip Man are so broad they’re almost goofy. The fights make up for it, and the great ensemble makes this broad world semi-believable. It’s a step down for the “Ip Man” series, but it’s still within punching distance, so don’t take your eyes off it. It’ll get you.

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

What it lacks in intelligence it makes up for with good vibes and great casting.

It’s a stylish and amusing thriller, but a hollow one, with mostly broad-stroke characters populating an otherwise ultra-detailed fictional criminal underworld. Fans of crime movies like John Wick will be entertained by the big ideas and backstories, but they probably won’t form the kind of connection they have to other, better films of its ilk.

It’s remarkable how far McConnell’s film can coast on little more than novelty power, star power, and Doritos, but there’s no denying that “Studio 666” hits a wall after about an hour, and spends the next 50 minutes stumbling around in a daze.

Reitman’s direction may be sharp and professional, but that’s only in the service of familiar material, so it falls to an excellent cast to make the most of a very repetitive situation.

Instead of an instant classic, we get a noble effort. We need more of those. This is a bright and earnest attempt to craft an on-screen fantasy for modern kids, with a practical moral that anyone could appreciate.

If audiences expecting a cute penguin movie are forced to engage with the fact that any government which abducts people for having different political views is evil, and that everyone must do everything in their power to stop that miscarriage of justice, then nobody can say 'The Penguin Lessons' isn’t at the very least well-timed.

It’s probably better to have a mixed-bag remake with real thought put into it than a superficial thriller retread of tired yuppie phobias. 'The Hand That Rocks the Cradle' may not rock, but hey, let’s give it a hand anyway.

The Equalizer 2 makes more-or-less the same impact as “The Equalizer.” It’s a reasonably satisfying mid-budget action thriller, with slick style and an intriguing hero, who only uses violence when necessary, and as a means of redemption for himself and his community.

A sweet, immersive glimpse at two of our futures, and it’s clear-eyed about which aspects of those worlds we want to avoid, and which ones we have to pursue.

Even though 'Whistle' offers nothing new to the supernatural death curse genre, it’s directed by Corin Hardy, and Corin Hardy likes to go hog wild.

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.

Skarsgård is a captivating chaos gremlin, and Montgomery is — in an easily overlooked, but absolutely vital role — an exceptional foil.

As They Made Us is a very forgiving film about seemingly unforgivable pain, which is to say that it has been made with a lot of unconditional love.

The Oath is a film of its time, and that immediacy is both its strength and its downfall.

If you can accept the fact that it’s big, silly and brainless, and nowhere near as good as its obvious influences, and also that it’s shameless propaganda, it’s still possible to have a good time.

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

Screamboat' is not a great movie by any stretch but if Ricky Jay was editing this footage in a scene from 'Boogie Nights,' he’d have to turn to Burt Reynolds and admit: 'It’s a real film.'

Questioning the moral fortitude of these comedies used to be something only critics did [...] Now Roommates is getting in on the act and I respect the film’s sense of introspection. I just wish it had funnier jokes.

The Hummingbird Project is most of a great movie. Amiable performances and a deft pace combine with high-contrast storytelling, and the results are generally engaging. Sometimes funny, sometimes smart, always watchable. But perhaps the film’s dedication to turning a clever tale into something profound was a miscalculation. Perhaps there were simply better ways to spend the time.

There are exactly enough thrills to fill a 90-minute movie, including the closing credits. No more and no less. So thank god 'Elevation' is short or it probably would have stunk.

These above average, slightly forgettable movies may not live forever, but Theron’s badassery might.

The film can’t decide if it wants to be truly bizarre, which is when it’s funniest, or simple and sweet, when it’s the most dramatically effective. These aren’t the worst problems for a movie to have.

Eenie Meanie plays like a decent adaptation of an unpublished Elmore Leonard novel. Even the title looks like it should be on a spinner rack next to Freaky Deaky and Rum Punch.

Wheelman has a few great action sequences and one interesting idea, but is let down by a mediocre screenplay.

The contrast between the impossible events happening on-screen and the hyper-realism of the imagery doesn’t always work in the the movie’s favor.

At its best, All the Money in the World is a rich and exciting story about a woman trapped in a universe of apathetic and powerful men, fighting her way out any which way she can. At its worst it’s a well-shot but ultimately middling thriller.

The best that can be said for 'Day One' is that if this is your first A Quiet Place, you’ll probably get swept up in it, and want to watch the other two.

The Ghost of Peter Sellers is a movie that seems to have been made by Medak, for Medak. It’s a mildly interesting footnote in cinema history, and worth watching for Sellers fans, Medak fans and aficionados of obscure cinema (you know who you are).

It’s a well-intentioned comedy with funny performances and a handful of great humorous set pieces. If it feels as though it’s three or four different movies fighting each other for dominance, then at least those movies are all, in their own separate ways, relatively entertaining and amusing.

Part throwback, part update and a little bit creaky, it’s all-in-all an excellent showcase of Izzard’s wonderful talents.

Minahan has made a film about embracing life when you’re not legally allowed to, and he refuses to make watching it a misery, no matter how rough it gets.

Jason Statham knows how to Jason Statham, and as usual, he Jason Stathams Jason Stathamly.

The familiar story and underdeveloped characters aren't nearly as magical as the animation, but there's still a lot to enjoy in Mary and the Witch's Flower, even if it's not Hiromasa Yonebayashi's best.

Bertino and Fanning are deeply committed to going to dark places, and they take us along for their freaky little ride. Whether it makes sense or not. (Probably not.)

Kudos to everyone here for doing their jobs, and for doing them reasonably well, but the end result of all the effort is a film which, when people talk about How to Train Your Dragon, will eventually be referred to as 'no, not that one.

Joaquin Phoenix gives an admirable performance as an interesting artist, whose life story otherwise gets the short shrift by this conventional drama with a frustratingly narrow focus.

These Greenland films may not always have a coherent point, but when they focus on the nuts and bolts of survival and the toll that surviving takes on these characters, they’re efficient, effectively crafted genre pictures.

Some movies are movies. Other movies are cocoa. A Merry Little Ex-Mas is the latter.

My Dead Friend Zoe' is a noble film, seemingly honest and open. It’s not a terribly exciting one, and it struggles to justify its modest length, but plot isn’t everything.

It’s that rare action movie that succeeds because it’s challenging and intriguing, which is a nice way of saying that maybe it could have kicked slightly more ass.

It’s a shame that The Maze Runner movies are going out on their flattest note, but The Death Cure isn't completely off-key. Wes Ball has directed every entry in the franchise and he’s evolved into a very skilled action filmmaker. Complex set-pieces with an incredible number of moving parts are depicted clearly, excitingly, and with visual panache.

Brothers takes a tediously familiar comedy story structure and hangs some genuinely interesting characters and performances on it. It’s like a Frankenstein monster made out of Raising Arizona and Dumb and Dumber To.

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.

If logic had anything to do with it, that would mean 'Thrash' was a bad movie. But logic has no place in these soggy halls. 'Thrash' may be arbitrary but it’s too energetic to be bad.

It’s impressive to see Orley mask the shiny simplicity of Big Time Adolescence in finely-calibrated performances and observant, mostly realistic dialogue, but the disguise falls apart after a while.

Christina Milian and Devale Ellis are adorable. That’s the whole movie in a nutshell. Nothing else has to work in order to get what we need out of it. Pentatonix can’t even play themselves convincingly, at all, and it still doesn’t hurt this thing.

Whether you find it exciting or troubling might vary from person to person, but either way Jennifer Garner delivers a standout performance that demands recognition, and will hopefully lead to better action movie roles for the actor in the future.

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

On one hand this reads like a Chaucer story, albeit a modern one that tackles topics even Chaucer would have struggled with. On the other, arch is still arch, so it may be hard for some audiences to appreciate Jackman’s wavelength.

As a scary movie, 'The Conjuring: Last Rites' is a generic film, neither good nor bad. It’s practically begging audiences to judge it on a 'pass/fail' basis. As the conclusion of the 'Conjuring' series, it’s a little more successful, but not much.

Medieval struggles as a work of historical fiction, but when the action mounts, it’s immersive and exciting.

he Secret Life of Pets 2 is a fast-paced string of mostly mediocre jokes that younger audiences will enjoy, but aside from a few centerpieces, there's not much here to capture the attention if you're older than the intended audience.

The original Aladdin was an innovative motion picture, heralding a new era of CG-assisted animation and celebrity stunt-casting. It was bold and exciting. The remake rehashes the original in a pleasing but perfunctory way.

Widows is so severe and reserved a picture that it never quite works as a thriller, but it’s so mired in conventional thriller storytelling that it never completely works as a serious drama either. But there’s no denying the power of that cast and the particular vision of McQueen, who turns Widows into something truly distinctive… if not necessarily effective.

Whether you laugh with I Love My Dad or never shake the queasy feeling in your stomach, Morosini’s film is remarkably sensitive and eerily confessional.

The Bluff isn’t a bad pirate movie. If anything, it has so little competition these days that it’s probably 'the best pirate movie in years' by default. But that’s damning the film with faint praise, or possibly praising it with faint damnation.

Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria is an interesting intellectual exercise, too ambitious to be ignored yet too overbearing to be enjoyed. Despite moments of genuine terror the film is less interesting in being scary than it is in humanizing what scares us, but once we know more about the witches in Suspiria, the less intriguing they are.

Not Without Hope never completely comes together but when it works, it’s absorbing disaster filmmaking."

It never quite kicks into high gear, and plays a lot more like a TV movie from the 1990s — a very good decade for historical TV movies — than a major feature in the 2020s.

It’s hard to imagine Mark Wahlberg as Parker, even after you just watched him play Parker for two hours.

When Shazam! Fury of the Gods tries to look like a big blockbuster action movie it comes across as perfunctory and soulless. The fury signifies nothing. The heart is where this movie’s home is.

Insidious: The Last Key may be somewhat engaging but it’s also sloppy and doesn’t amount to much.

A decently made but unsurprising thriller.

It’s impossible not to root for President Viola Davis as she takes down incompetent, mediocre white guys who want to crash the world economy. She stares down this generic production and walks away with another victory under her belt.

It’s only the plot that runs into trouble, since it leads Slanted to carefully tackle some serious issues, but overlook or airball some others. When viewed from different angles the film is either a fascinating success or a gigantic misfire.

It’s a difficult world out there, so once in a while it sure is nice to just sit down with the family to watch a wholesome movie about a wholesome man, his wholesome dog, and their tireless, never-ending hunt for human corpses.

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

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

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.

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

Jungle eventually leads to an exciting survival story with an intense performance by Daniel Radcliffe and suspenseful scenes that might make you squirm. But it might not be worth the journey it takes to get there.

Arctic Dogs is a functional, distracting kids flick that’s only remarkable in how unremarkable it is.

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.

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

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.

Like many of Emmerich’s movies, even the better ones, Midway loses sight of the humanity inside its vast vistas of devastation. It’s a giant film with a very small impact.

Without a strong guiding hand we’re left with a finely acted, but only adequate biopic, which brushes against greatness and then paints over it.

Green Book lacks the depth it aspires to, and only works on a very superficial level. Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali give exceptional performances but this message movie fumbles its message.

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

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.

Mackie does a decent job of articulating his anger, and the filmmakers clearly care about the issues, but The Banker doesn’t take the narrative risks necessary to tell its story powerfully. Competence is all we get instead, and competence isn’t quite enough.

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.

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.

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.

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

As directed by Ari Sendal (“The Duff”), the film keeps its low-key, harmless energy at a steady simmer. Every once in a while a joke is funnier than you might expect, or a monster looks surprisingly spooky, but overall this is a safe, by the numbers Halloween family film.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

While there are some creepy ideas in this surprise Netflix-Blumhouse offering, the quality of Mercy Black is strained.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

It’s a spooky, entertaining, but totally goofy entry in “The Conjure-verse.”

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Trier manages to make a movie about passion that feels almost completely detached, right to the end. It’s an approach that gives Thelma, the movie, the appearance of portent without fully exploring the fascinating themes, characters or storylines that might actually have justified that self-serious tone.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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."

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.

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.

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’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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich almost works. The dialogue and performances are unusually good for this kind of material, and the gore effects are shocking. But the changes the filmmakers made to this franchise have unpleasant consequences, which dramatically reduce the film's entertainment value, and arguably rob these iconic puppets of the very characteristics that made them special.

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

Flatliners had every opportunity to improve on the original, and it doesn’t take most of them. It falls flat as a horror movie but the cast is good enough, and the sci-fi concepts are interesting enough, to keep it from crashing completely.

Scott Cooper directs Hostiles with an eye for quote-unquote “greatness” but the actual material simply isn’t deep enough to justify the solemn presentation. It’s not entertaining, it’s not illuminating, it’s not even complicated. It’s mostly just a bummer.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

It’s not very funny, it’s not very dramatic. There’s a spark of intelligence here, a valid critique of doomsday culture and escapism, but it’s the sort of message you can easily get off of a cocktail napkin.

It’s got at least one excellent performance, but as a whole it contributes little to the “Frankenstein” tradition, other than a reminder that this has all been done before, mostly better, with more nuance and excitement.

For documentary fans, it’s a haphazardly paced and awkwardly structured film that struggles to organically incorporate each facet of the tragic “Ren & Stimpy” story, ultimately giving too short a shrift to the greatest tragedy of all.

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.

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.

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.

You won't lose yourself in this haunted house, even though that was supposed to be the whole point. A film about a labyrinth filled with ghosts quickly becomes methodical and familiar, stranding a great cast in an inert supernatural thriller.

The Prodigy may offer some shocks to those susceptible to this genre, or who have never seen it before, but to horror fans it will probably seem unremarkable and even bland.

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.

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.

It scrolls past thoughtful ideas, too quickly to fully process them, and the experience is as cacophonous as the typical social media feed. I’ll grant you it’s thematically appropriate but it’s not cohesive filmmaking.

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.

Berg’s life is a natural for the movies, but it’s difficult to imagine how the film we got out of it turned out so dramatically inert.

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.

At its best, Out of Blue captures a slightly intoxicated “eureka” sensation, as the whole detective genre transforms elegantly into a philosophical awakening, and as the greatest threat comes not from a murderer but from our protagonist’s sense of self (or lack thereof). At its worst, which is most of the time, it’s a conventional detective story that resorts to lengthy scientific-namedropping when it probably should be getting on with it instead.

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.

The first half is a drowsy day at the office, full of complex paperwork minutiae that, too much of the time, doesn’t even pan out by the end of the movie. The second half is more horrifying to think about but less scrupulously presented and, as such, harder to believe.

The Babysitter had potential but director McG treats this material like it’s one of the lamer American Pie sequels. The broadness of the humor detracts from the characters and the story and the horror, instead of complementing them.

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.

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.

A film that could have been taken seriously as a drama — a politically one-sided but nonetheless competent drama — devolves into ghoulish sideshow grotesquery.

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.

The cynicism of Donnybrook is overpowering, but unfocused. It’s easy to see why some people would react strongly to its ugly tale of misery and violence, and yet without context and contrast, without making statements beyond “the world sure does suck,” Sutton’s film feels frustratingly hollow. It makes an impact but leaves no impression.

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.

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.

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.

All the human strife, all the political squabbling, comes across like an excuse to be “badass” but high-minded about it. The film’s shootouts are “cool” but lack anything resembling a meaningful perspective, so when the characters talk about the political rationales for their violence, it rings hollow. And when the bullets fly, nothing else seems like it ever mattered.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Bernard and Huey isn’t particularly funny, although the script does tend to pump out a zinger once in a while. It isn’t particularly tragic, because the plight of these characters is well-earned.

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.

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.

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.

It gets through its storyline and makes its underscrutinized points about fidelity — it’s right there in a title — and then it’s over, and the only thing we have to show for it is a missed opportunity to let these characters reveal their inner selves for more than three minutes.

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

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 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.