Faces of Death is dull and thoughtless, its attempts to smash influencer culture into voyeurism feeling artificial.

The plot and character development remains early-2000s video game level, a fact made even more disappointing because Gans added so much more to the first film.

Seriously, audiences do not need another constant reminder that their lives are slipping away. Just watching Mercy will have them reconsidering their priorities.

By the time the final act slithers on the screen, Gormican has abandoned any sense of originality and just props the film up on nostalgia-manipulating cameos and clumsy, overused needle drops. Those moments barely cover some astoundingly inept filmmaking, from shot composition to editing, that will make you wish you were watching Anaconda 3: Offspring instead. OK, maybe it’s not that bad, but Anaconda – both this film and the whole franchise – should just slip back into the swamp.

The story is both simplistic and telegraphed, which is handy because some startlingly inept filmmaking makes the action almost impossible to follow. There are multiple sequences that make no sense to the eye or brain, and basic design and costume decisions that make it nearly impossible to tell characters apart from each other. The only true horror here is that there’s another couple of hours of this still to come.

The greatest problem is the woeful miscasting of Qualley as Honey. The script by Coen and his wife and sometimes-film editor Tricia Cooke seems to position the gun-free P.I. as a melding of two great noir conventions – the cool gumshoe and the femme fatale – and the camera loves following Qualley in high heels and wrap dresses. Yet there’s nothing much going on beyond those visuals.

It’s the trippy sequences of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas without the queasy self-loathing. It’s the video to “Smack My Bitch Up” by the Prodigy, complete with POV debauchery, running on repeat 20 times. It’s … boring.

Collins and crew follow the well-worn tracks entertainingly enough, running up and down stairs and catching figures just at the corner of the shot and arguing about whether they should keep filming or not, but there’s nothing new.

America undoubtedly needs serious artists to explore the brain worms that the pandemic era gave the body politic, but Eddington most definitely ain’t it.

Jurassic World Rebirth struggles to find a reason to exist, so composer Alexandre Desplat peppers in the original, wonderful Jurassic Park theme by John Williams just enough to remind you that you’re watching a sequel, not a rip-off.

Kids may come out of Karate Kid: Legends crane-kicking in excitement from the handful of fights, and older fans can relish the nostalgia, but for everyone else it’s wax on, nod off.

Holy hell, having to sit through nearly three hours of M:I making like Ethan Hunt is the Messiah is not just exhausting: It’s a total misread of what makes these movies so fun. What a bummer.

That the audience for Ari Aster’s folk horror might find more pleasure in this Snow White than the average child is telling, since it’s almost impossible to work out who this version of the story is aimed at. Children will be bored, teens talked down to, and most adults will wonder where their Snow White is.

Such an important and tender subject as assisted suicide deserves more than this mawkish, soapish nonsense.

In this brightly colored world, Trost makes images pop and vibrate, making this latest in the beloved series easy to watch in a way that seemingly evades most modern multiplex fare. Sadly, that’s one of the few areas of clarity in Sonic the Hedgehog 3.

It’s trashy eurosleaze with none of the sumptuous debauchery.

Madame Web is a fender bender – nothing calamitous, just a time suck. An annoyance. A waste.

If you're going to dig the same shallow grave for the thousandth time, at least have the verve of Eli Roth's shamelessly fun Thanksgiving – or at least make sure the entire cast knows if you're going for tension or comedy.

A shot-for-shot remake would have had more school spirit than this.

Destroy All Neighbors has all the verve of a blood clot.

That edge between emotional incompetence and modern macho hubris is where Waddell finds something interesting to say, but it's too often buried under barely competent filmmaking (please, filmmakers, I am begging you, do not scrimp on your sound mix), stilted performances, and some horribly outdated gags and clumsy stereotypes, all further undermining a rom-com that is rarely romantic nor that comedic.

It’s a shame that Waititi’s return to Indigenous-centered filmmaking is marred by regressive narrative choices and lazy jokes. Otherwise, we might have had a real winner on our hands.

Theologically muddled, narratively simplistic, and somehow pulling off a bigger waste of a legacy character than the near-blasphemous return of Sally Hardesty for 2022's ill-fated Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Exorcist: Believer proves that double the possessions does not mean double the fun.

Unfortunately, most of the budget seems to have been spent on the first half, a murky slog through the depths of the meg-infested abyssal depths of the titular Trench where the characters are puddle-deep and the villains so cardboard that their biggest danger isn't being chum but dissolving in water.

The Blackening feels like a cash grab, a film so blatantly made because “horror is so hot right now.” There’s no love for the genre, and if you don’t admire something to some degree, it’s hard to properly satirize it.

This hunk-of-junk piece of IP commodification truly can’t be regarded with any further value other than that: a transactional piece of content.

Maniscalco often talks about his father in his stand-up acts. Watching this film enforces the idea that maybe that’s where this story should have stayed.

It's hard to deny that [Lundgren] deserves better than being the most entertaining element of a poorly executed and infuriatingly predictable fight flick.

But in going to such great lengths to avoid that film’s grim weirdness, the Super Mario Bros. Movie filmmakers have flattened the concept into benign nothingness. They’ve course corrected into the side of a mountain. There’s no heartbeat here.

Wimmer has now twice disproved his ability to rehash old scripts through his terrible updatings of Total Recall and Point Break. Now he exhibits zero visual skill as writer/director of Children of the Corn, an unwatchable reboot of Stephen King's 1977 short story about a blood cult of rural Nebraskan kids who slaughter all adults to the monstrous He Who Walks Behind the Rows.

It is frustrating to watch Fear carelessly oscillate between creature feature, haunted house movie, and folk horror.

The film retroactively makes Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis look like a masterpiece for actually trying to be bedazzling and insane, because Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody is so stale it might as well have been shoved directly onto a streaming platform to wither away forgotten – unlike Houston’s discography, which will be remembered for decades to come.

There are no astute or emotionally resonating takeaways to be had about the pain of depression, just stock melodrama with a cautionary-tale climax that feels desperate to shock.

Maybe they thought that for the amount of time this movie had been gestating it just had to be something special. But for as long as this thing has been cooking, the end result is seriously underbaked.

What we’re left with is a plodding, pompous horror, only memorable for the ways that it completely drops the ball in sidelining its headliner to take a poor shot at turning this into a series about something oh-so-ever important. It’s just as silly as any of the original sequels and is maybe even more egregious given the inherent benefit of hindsight and the fact that this outing seems to think it’s outsmarting the formula.

A swing and a miss is too timid a dismissal. It’s a sumptuously dressed table that ends in a wet fart.

It's a call to action with no banner behind which to rally, sanitized to the point of being anodyne.

Even as a guilty pleasure, Maneater is a particularly rough watch.

The gang's all here for Spin Me Round, and hopefully the ensemble enjoyed the filmmaking process, as the end result is an odd, laughless, meandering comedy that's not entertaining enough to be engaging, or gifted with enough character insight to justify its aimless length.

Between the neutered and uninspired adaptation, the direction that seems satisfied relying on shots that already exist rather than building something new, and the gobsmacking, borderline offensive portrayal of the lead character by Khan, Laal Singh Chaddha is a big miss.

What's fundamentally uninteresting about Love and Thunder is Waititi's inability to recognize any character development over the last decade, or to move Thor forward.

Nothing here really works. Even a surprisingly flat score from horror master John Carpenter (who was originally slated to direct the '84 version) can't save Firestarter from being a colossal misfire.

What really drags it down is the wafer-thin script by Carol Chrest, which neither Sivertson nor a determined if sometimes overblown Ricci can pull past its messy metaphor and undeserved twists.

9 Bullets just constantly misfires, and never gets better than the inadvertent comedy of Worthington pulling a gun on a dog as a negotiating tactic.

There are no insights here, only lavishly budgeted cosplay.

Ross’ script is never able to pull this out of the depths of trite banality, every line and emotional beat clocked from a mile away and cribbed from every other faith-based drama you’ve ever seen.

Yet another clunky thriller predicated on having Liam Neeson afford it some form of legitimacy, this Mark Williams-directed film is part political intrigue, part actioner, part family drama – all destined for the bargain bin.

Moonfall is bad – the wrong kind of bad – because everything in this formula fails to hold up its end of the bargain. The effects are muddled; the supporting cast is terrible. The only thing Moonfall delivers on is the big ideas, but by the time the movie begins to layer in the sci-fi absurdity, the film is already three-quarters of the way home.

The obnoxious enthusiasm of Rise of the Gamers (which literally calls the day traders “heroes”) misses the point that those day traders are playing the same game as the big hedge fund managers.

A Hallmark movie with a major dose of God thrown in, I’m sure there’s an audience out there for Redeeming Love. After all, 3 million people who bought the book can’t be wrong (they can, it’s trash). Think Little House on the Prairie on Cialis.

The story and screenplay by Cameron Larsen and Jose Prendes, respectively, take a significant liberty with the legend for the purpose of a last-minute revelation that’s more a yawner than anything. But even if the disclosure had worked, the film offers little authentic horror (the one jump scare doesn’t count) and its suspense is negligible, though some creepy imagery, such as scorched dismembered doll arms, may momentarily get under your skin.

All the broad humor of the original film is gone, replaced by clunky and often tasteless gags, and the attempts to extract pathos from genuine tragedies vary from tacky to insulting.

There’s a hollowness to its beauty, as much as there is with its messaging.

There’s been an urge to excuse the director and blame the studio, arguing that Zhao just didn’t fit into the strictures of the MCU. Yet that doesn’t explain how weak the script she co-wrote is, or why it’s so insufferably long, or why it almost completely fails to tackle its own core conceits of blind loyalty, of the perils of immortality, of rebellion against faith.

It's this overstuffed storytelling, mixed with lackluster pacing, that renders No Time to Die a torturous misfire, and an utterly disappointing exit for Craig's Bond. I hate to say it, but this is Bond's Rise of Skywalker.

With the exception of Kroll’s gravelly-intoned Uncle Fester, the voicework is sketchy, with Theron’s Seven-Sisters elocution bordering on sacrilege.

While this approach might make for an exciting celebration of the genre, it unfortunately leads to a rather lackluster and repetitive documentary unlikely to capture the interest of anyone other than devout followers of Christian music.

Dear Evan Hansen is a rare musical that must be seen to be believed. Few shows are less equipped to grapple with their subject matter; watching someone Wikipedia the plot synopsis of the musical in real time remains one of the last true pleasures available to us as a society.

The Protégé suffers from its predictability and lack of nuance. Despite a somewhat promising if well-worn plot, the characters and performances can’t seem to catch up.

Habit is so desperate to be edgy that it loops all the way back around to derivative, and wastes any potential Thorne might have brought to play.

Don’t Breathe 2 is a horrific and delusional sequel to its predecessor, a tight thriller that had grounded, down on their luck characters, and a film that knew when to pull out the big guns so the audience would root for its unlikeable lead.

Rising Wolf gets so caught up in the idea of a supposed potential franchise that it forgets to make you care about the film you’re currently watching.

To be fair, at least Old captures the sense of time passing past too fast: Rarely have I felt more like my life was slipping away in the cinema.

By halftime of this two hour piece of dreck, you’ll wonder why you weren’t more appreciative that the first one only wasted 80 minutes of your life.

The film struggles to carve out a distinct aesthetic for its violence, alternating between crass comedy and cartoonish violence with no sense of how to combine these two into something sustainable.

Endless errors aside, The House Next Door: Meet the Blacks 2 might bring forth a laugh or two and that’s about it. The moment the material sits long enough to settle, it becomes a horror-comedy casualty with little-to-nothing making it worth the 90 minute mayhem.

There is no denying that being parentless during the Great Depression called for a lot of resilience, but 12 Mighty Orphans’ underdog story unfortunately plays out to farce levels of entertainment.

Unfortunately, it's also graceless and predictable, with absolutely no surprises between the start of the family's off-road adventure and their inevitable rescue by park rangers.

Those obsessed with first-person and screenlife films may want to explore Profile from a strictly technical standpoint, and they are welcome to do so. Everyone else can avoid it entirely.

It’s as if Finding You was written by a computer program that studied 2000s rom-coms, taking the worst tropes and clunkily blending them together.

Both Glenn Close and Mila Kunis are very talented actors, but Four Good Days gives them absolutely nothing interesting to say or do.

The Resort is an unfortunate mess of a first film that at one point in time would have maybe found a second life on a video store shelf next to the likes of Turistas and The Ruins, but is destined to be swallowed up by the endless abyss of VOD.

There are times when China’s brash marriage of national cinema and onscreen largesse can work for foreign audiences – bless you, The Wandering Earth, you madcap delight – but when the approach misses this badly, the results are excruciating. Consider The Rookies an easy miss for even the most dedicated Chinese action cinema fan.

Come True aims to explore the layers of the dreamworld, and the terrifying monsters that lurk in the depths of our minds. Yet the unconscious world writer/director Anthony Scott Burns dissects appears to evade him as well, with layers that lead to empty answers and a leading woman who is paper thin.

Anodyne and asinine in equal measures, The Violent Heart is just brainless.

Completely miscast with uninspired production, this remodeling of Blithe Spirit is a faint shadow of its Coward roots, a resurrected retired poltergeist without its same purpose or vigor.

With way too many tonal shifts and a narrative that trades cohesion for caprice, the film feels like riding shotgun with a toddler attempting to drive a manual transmission.

Somehow All My Life seems oddly lacking in stakes, which is so weird considering the story (the main symptoms of onscreen Chau’s deadly but photogenic disease seem to be a little tiredness and sweatiness).

Less a Nic Cage movie than a movie with an extended cameo by Nic Cage in a “finely crafted” paper hat (!), this Greek/Cypriot co-production mixes mediocre martial artistry with a sci-fi spin and ends up a puzzlement to both genres.

Mortal plods along for most of its running time with the occasional helicopter chase scene and plenty of CGI fulminology: But ultimately Ovredal’s not-so-deep-dive into Norwegian mythos is a too-obvious let down.

Apart from the nowhere storyline devoid of any interesting character development or conflict, the movie feels vaguely exploitative.

The ho-hum practical jokes the two inflict upon the other can be described as Home Alone lite: No concussion-inducing swinging paint cans or burn-inducing doorknobs inspired by Looney Tunes violence here. Which, of course, takes all the fun out of it.

At least this excursion into mediocrity is relatively brief, although, as mentioned, a vastly shorter cut would be much preferred.

Neither inspired enough to work as a fable nor sufficiently grounded to bear up to even an instant of examination, Antebellum is a woeful misfire.

What's saddest is that this was a wasted opportunity to adapt an era-defining comic arc into something with weight, meaning, and visual flair.

It's never a good sign if you're watching a thriller, and your first thought is, "Is this supposed to be funny?" So goes the comically overblown The Vanished.

It's hard to say exactly where all the blame lies, but there's something surprisingly ugly at play in the depiction of middle-aged women as "past it and crazy." That may not be the intention of Chong, Essoe, and director Gayne, but that's where this ends up.

It's not just that this is poorly timed: there would never be any good time for this level of monstrous clumsiness and obviousness.

One wants to reach through the screen at the end of this narcissistic exercise, grasp his shoulders and give him a good shake: “Get a grip, man. You’re Clarence Thomas.”

It doesn’t work, however, and the end result is one long yawn of mediocrity, devoid of any genuine suspense, hobbled by incoherent plotting, and ending on a note of goofy what-the-fuckery.

Everything that made the original series so memorable and succesful - its heart, its weird wit, its adherence to the morality play model - is completely lacking.

This film is a mess. It’s so grim and inept. There are a million plot holes at any given moment, that you must constantly pick up your eyes from rolling on the floor.

It is truly rare to watch a film implode in the final 20 minutes as completely and gallingly as this retelling by director Floria Sigismondi and screenwriting siblings Chad and Carey Hayes. However, they made an astounding number of errors along the way.

While Reality Queen! seeks to parody contemporary culture, the irony here is that it is the very vapid thing it mocks. Ouroboros, eat your heart out (well, I guess it will anyway, endlessly).

Aside from the committee-written script with no coherent perspective, the trouble with Like a Boss is that it never crudely outrages. It’s a bust in so many ways. The halfhearted gender and cultural political incorrectness of Hayek’s ridiculous character makes for halfhearted laughs, and that’s being generous.

Here’s the thing, though: Cats still makes no f.cking sense.

This is a vastly inferior toy-to-film IP expansion, with duller songs, dumber jokes, and forgettable voice work.

This mirthless comedy about a manly crew of smokejumpers helplessly babysitting a trio of rescued brats has more dead air in it than a radio broadcast hosted by a narcoleptic disc jockey.