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.