The circumstances of the story might be “timely,” but “Dreams” doesn’t help us understand the situation better, leaving us in the dark about what we’re supposed to take away from this story of sex, violence, money and the state. Anything it suggests we already know.

Scream 7 is an unfortunate tarnish on this otherwise sturdy franchise’s legacy.

There is some excellent location-shooting in downtown Los Angeles during the climax, seen through the lens of a bodycam or quadcopter or drone camera. It’s not enough to save the aesthetic of the entire film, though, which is somehow both gray and nauseating.

It never feels like Brooks has a grasp on the material here, which careens aimlessly through Ella’s harried day-to-day, in a handsomely bland, serviceable style.

Mountainhead is a talky movie and I tend to like talky movies. But at some point in the nearly two-hour running time, it just becomes boring.

It’s such a drag to see Ke Huy Quan undermined so persistently by the script and the role handing him his first lead in a movie.

Red One is the holiday fantasy built on retribution, punishment and crushed hopes we deserve right now.

What’s missing is not simply surprise, or the pleasurable shock of a new kind of ghost comedy. It’s the near-complete absence of verbal wit, all the more frustrating since Keaton is ready to play, and he’s hardly alone.

Reynolds retains his skittery comic timing, and Jackman (while tonally a little lost here) certainly put in his time with a personal trainer. But there isn’t a single shot in Levy’s film that flows excitingly into the next one.

While there’s some payoff in the many visual callbacks to ’80s-and-earlier genre movies, at some point the filmmaker lost sight of how to best serve Goth a third time.

It’s a luxe treatment of some puny satiric ideas, toned up by a cast led by Emma Stone and Lanthimos first-timer Jesse Plemons, who won the best actor prize this year at Cannes. But everything has a chance to go wrong with a movie long before the actors film anything.

If a movie doesn’t care enough about its selling points, aka the stars, to give them decent lines more than twice per hour, the “bad” in “Bad Boys” ends up being the wrong kind of bad. And, in a truly sad way, its own review.

IF reminds us how certain key ingredients — charm, wit, clarity, emotional tact and resonance — cannot be willed into narrative existence, or fixed in post.

It plays like a bland, third-season Marvel series as watched on a 12-year-old TV set playing in the wrong dramatic aspect ratio, which I realize isn’t a real thing. But now it is.

It’s lousy, and a frantic bore, squandering its on-screen talent and making bland visual hash of its preening, recreational slaughter.

A sleek, tight, fastidiously executed nothing.

The action is messy, the geography indiscernible, and a few shots seem stitched together with but a single pixel and a prayer.

To become a true screen action hero outside the “Wonder Woman” realm, Gadot needs better material than this, and only when she gets to square off with Bhatt’s increasingly conflicted superhacker does Heart of Stone suggest a human pulse.

The full-on assault on the audience’s tear ducts in much of “Guardians 3″ may be sincere, but the rhythms and pacing of the film never find the beat. We end up waiting for the reductive punchline, or for another round of wanton slaughter.

Ultraviolence is a funny thing, unless it’s not: Here, watching Martindale’s ranger character getting her face ripped off while being dragged along a gravel road isn’t a sight gag, and it isn’t an effective shock bit. It’s just sour. Composer Mark Mothersbaugh’s consciously ‘80s-vibe score has more personality than what’s on screen.

In a funnier world, Zoë Chao and Tig Notaro are starring in their own romantic comedy together.

Knock at the Cabin is a real load — 100 lugubrious minutes of what is intended as steadily mounting dread and apocalypse prevention seminar.

I found Violent Night to be a joyless slay ride, not to mention verbally witless. There’s not much kick in seeing an R-rated version of “Home Alone,” and even that owed its home-invasion nastiness to Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs.”

Dominik drains the complication and, saddest of all, the screen wiles, from a plainly complicated legend.

Fletch tends to think he’s the smartest guy in the room. So how is that supposed to work when the performance itself is so adrift and unappealing?

Raiff most likely wanted to make a movie about a well-intentioned guy in his early 20s who gradually finds his way to a better life. What undermines his efforts is a creeping smugness and self-regard, positioning every side character as an intern in the Andrew Improvement Program.

Instead of dramatizing this subject’s life, it dramatizes the extravagance of moviemaking. The script shoves the dicey stuff off to the side: race, infidelity, a complicated figure’s inner demons.

All the Old Knives settles for all the old tropes.

No one seems particularly good at their jobs, but that’s beside the point. They’re silly and self-absorbed — mildly obnoxious more than anything — but rarely is their desperation funny.

In “Morbius” the actor’s willful disinterest in figuring out the rhythm of a scene, what’s important in it and how to bounce off his scene partners — well, it’s acting in a vacuum. What he needs is a director who can steer him away from his favorite scene partner, i.e., Jared Leto, long enough to activate the material at hand, even if it’s just a third-tier Marvel franchise hopeful.

Green has made so many interesting movies, from “George Washington” to “Snow Angels” to the best bits in “Pineapple Express” and more recent genre exercises. Halloween Kills settles for the reductive, distressingly anonymous hackwork of its title.

It’s tolerable, I suppose, if you don’t have to listen to it. Unfortunately it’s a musical so you have to listen to it.

With all the songs, gowns and corny jokes, kids under 10 will likely love it, and frankly, that’s who this is for, not the millennials or Gen Z kids who grew up with Brandy or Hillary Duff.

This one is strictly a welding job, grabbing parts of “Blade Runner,” a bolt and a nut or two from “Vertigo” (though not as much as “Phoenix” did) and notions of commercially desired fantasies of pasts real and imagined, straight from “Westworld.”

Blunt’s derring-do has its stray moments, and her comic wiles are most welcome. But this is blockbustering from a talented director whose talent has been pounded flat by the dictates of a script in the quality range of Disney’s “Lone Ranger.”

Some may enjoy the cacophonous, raunchy, lowest-common-denominator dreck that The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard has to offer. To those I say, godspeed. But it’s undeniable that the actors, the audiences and the filmmakers all deserve better.

The film doesn’t begin to know what to do with the reincarnation idea beyond a few sharply edited micro-flashbacks. Is the look on Wahlberg’s face the character thinking What is going on? Or is it the actor thinking Am I in the next ‘Matrix’ or the silliest movie of 2021?

What’s so maddening about A Quiet Place Part II is the unused potential. Krasinski opens up the world and timeline of the film, but doesn’t utilize it in any meaningful way, introducing new ideas but then jettisoning the opportunity. Again and again he falls back on more of the same old tricks from “A Quiet Place,” which was a bore to begin with.

The actors take your mind off things when they can: I like the way Hathaway jabs her elbow at the elevator buttons for punctuation, and the ardent commitment to language Ejiofor brings to his character’s public poetry readings. But a movie shouldn’t rely on Hathaway and Ejiofor to shell-game your attention away from the movie itself.

There’s not a thrill to be found in this ostensible thriller, a rote kidnapping exercise taped together with digital blood spatter and an overly dramatic score, vaguely gesturing at global crises from five years ago.

The music is drippy and constant, the wobble from comedy to drama feels off, and the dialects have been reamed in the Irish press. Charm resists calculation; even if actors get some going, even if a writer creates an approximation in or between the lines, deliberately manufactured charm curdles so easily. The one success story of Wild Mountain Thyme belongs to Blunt, who has yet to give a poor or lazily considered performance.

The pretty, empty, emotionally frictionless and touch-free new Rebecca adaptation may suit the pandemic dictates for social distancing, but the drama fails to spark.

Everything happens quickly in Fatal Affair, since it’s all plot and no character. These movies are what they are: disposable; full of shiny, unstained, high-end kitchen countertops.

What is remarkable, though, is just how unbelievably unbelievable this inspired-by-true-life tale is.

He (Stewart) bogs down his talented cast with a bewildering plot, tired tropes and embarrassing dialogue. This one, well, it's simply resistible.

The whole endeavor is a naked attempt to cash in on the young adult fantasy trend spearheaded by "Harry Potter." There have been many attempts to snatch the Potter crown (and purse) but Artemis Fowl will not be the hot new kiddie fantasy franchise, based on this utterly charmless first entry.

Written by Nick Moore, Ruckus Skye and Lane Skye, the script just doesn't give us enough material to care about the story, which is devoid of subtext and keeps everything on the surface.

An angry, violent and despairing film, without much of a point other than that existence can be angry and despairing and memory is a prison. As a piece of art, entertainment or cultural ephemera, it is indeed bold, but it is significant not for what it says about Capone, but rather what it says about Trank, and the ongoing saga of his career.

It’s a lame and weaselly thing, made strangely more frustrating by some excellent performers.

Seriously, the running time of Fantasy Island should be listed as “sometime tomorrow."

The problems begin and end with the script, credited to three writers. “Dolittle” turns its title character into an eccentric and wearying blur of tics, tacked onto a character who comports himself like a bullying, egocentric A-lister rather than someone who, you know, actually enjoys the company of animals.

Conceived and developed shortly after Haddish scored, deservedly, with “Girls Trip,”” the movie is a mechanical series of witless yeast infection jokes, or thereabouts. While director Miguel Arteta has made some interesting work in the past, including “The Good Girl” and “Beatriz at Dinner,” his way with low physical comedy here is pretty artless.

Is it the worst film of 2019, or simply the most recent misfire of 2019? Reader, I swear on a stack of pancakes: “Cats” cannot be beat for sheer folly and misjudgment and audience-reaction-to-“Springtime for Hitler”-in-“The Producers” stupefaction.

It feels like any new ideas were jettisoned for the same old schtick. "Zombieland" may have helped to give birth to the zomb-aissance, but "Double Tap" just might be the kill shot.

In a year of mass culture that gave us HBO’s excellent “Chernobyl,” Joker can claim the grimmest depiction of a meltdown.

Rambo lumbers to the finish line in the flaccid fifth installment, which is a Frankenstein’s monster of badly photocopied references to the previous movies, limply strung together with the laziest of screenplays.

The new music helps, a little. But the movie is a karaoke act, re-creating the original movie’s story beats beat-by-beat-by-beat.

There is absolutely no reason to catch a ride with the nasty, brutish and shrill "Stuber," a horror movie about our current American nightmare of late capitalist economics and unchecked law enforcement masquerading as an "action comedy."

Cool New York City detective John Shaft is back again in, you guessed it, Shaft, with a modern update that goes completely sideways in all the wrong ways. This Shaft is a bad mother all right, and it'd be better if he just shut his mouth.

I mean, whatever with the “X-Men” movies. It’s hard to even rent an opinion on the discrete strengths and weaknesses of a franchise that has devolved to the point of Dark Phoenix, a lavishly brutal chore nearly as violent as the Wolverine movie “Logan,” and a movie featuring more death by impalement and whirling metal than all the “Saw” movies put together.

Well, it’s a dud. Nothing quite clicks.

This movie also offers less: less wit, less charm, and only a few scraps of the old movie’s crucial songs (though “Baby Mine” receives its moment, in a campfire rendition).

The movie delivers, in its chosen way. But it’s a soulless way. The violence may be for laughs, and many Neeson fans will likely respond to the larky brutality of Cold Pursuit, which is very different from the star’s previous mid-winter vehicles (“The Grey” is my favorite). But I don’t get much psychic recreation from this sort of action movie.

The atmosphere in Serenity, by design, imparts a slightly uneasy and hermetic feeling. In Baker Dill, who sounds like a line of gourmet pickles, Knight has the makings of a compellingly messed-up antihero. That’s a start. If movies were all start, then this one might’ve worked.

A tedious picture about a remorseless serial killer, played by Matt Dillon.

Welcome to Marwen is a misjudgment only a first-rate filmmaker could make.

It brings me no joy to relay this: From an irresistible “tell me more!” of a true story, Eastwood and his “Gran Torino” screenwriter Nick Schenk have made a movie that feels dodgy and false at every turn.

Watching this movie is like spending two hours and 27 minutes staring at a gigantic aquarium full of digital sea creatures and actors on wires, pretending to swim.

This is your warning that if you have any affinity for the ballet, avoid this at all costs.

This limp, lifeless, one-joke action comedy sequel, directed by David Kerr, comes 15 years after the 2003 "Johnny English," and manages to overstay its welcome, even at a scant 88 minutes, mostly because writer William Davies didn't bother to write anything other than "Johnny English is bad at spying."

Life Itself is an emotional mugging, not a movie.

While it's fun to watch Garner return to her action roots, the brute force haymaker that is Peppermint is a far cry from the sophisticated thrills of "Alias."

The Happytime Murders is a one-joke movie, minus one joke. The year may cough up a worse film, but probably not a more joyless, witless one, raunchy or otherwise.

Birke's script is plainly straightforward, a simple supernatural chase story. It doesn't plumb the depths of what might make Slender Man scary, so Slender Man isn't scary at all.

Wasikowska struggles to activate a vague notion of female disenfranchisement and victimhood, triumphant. She and Pattinson fill in as many blanks as they can, where they can.

I kind of hate the movie’s mixture of bro comedy, sadistic practical jokes (don’t call it slapstick) and last-ditch pull for the heartstrings.

Rampage is a drag.

Despite the ever-present layer of cheesiness, every now and again, some of those emotions are just big enough to land a somewhat effective blow right to the heart.

Everything about Gringo, from the storytelling to the comedy to the cinematography is incredibly lackluster. The film is dark and dim, like everything's covered in a layer of dust. Oyelowo is quite endearing and funny as Harold, but he's given very little to work with.

For a while, director Roth plays this stuff relatively straight, and Willis periodically reminds us he can act (the grieving Kersey cries a fair bit here).

The cast excels at transcending its material. The script by Justin Haythe matches Francis Lawrence’s direction; it’s workmanlike and steady and pretty flat.

It’s the last thing he wanted, I’m sure, but Eastwood’s latest ends up feeling like a stunt.

As a period ghost story, it’s pretty pallid.

Father Figures is a movie, ostensibly. I'm pretty sure it is. Moving images were projected, along with recorded sound, which indicates it is a movie, but the effect was so listless, low-energy and profoundly unentertaining that I jotted down in my notes "what even IS this?" It would be more accurate to describe the experience as a nearly two-hour borderline hostage situation, with torture involving bad, offensive and unfunny "comedy."

In code, Wonder Wheel dances along the edge of the writer-director’s off-screen life, namely the allegations by Dylan Farrow, Allen’s adopted daughter, of sexual molestation, and Allen’s controversial marriage to Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of Allen’s then-partner Mia Farrow.

The breathtakingly bad Justice League, with its corny banter and terrible effects just might signify a return to that goofy Batman form.

Ultimately Suburbicon is woefully underwritten. Gardner and Maggie are mere sketches, a set of facial tics and accessories masquerading as real characters.

A jumbled nonsensical mess.

Now and then the Mulleavys capture a moment or glimmer of true mystery; more often, and certainly in dramatic terms, Woodshock feels like a movie that never stops buffering.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle offers everything — several bored Oscar winners, two scenes featuring death by meat grinder, Elton John mugging in close-up — except a good time.

Despite the actors hired to deliver the story, the superassassin of American Assassin isn’t quite human. He’s just revenge in a henley T.

The Emoji Movie could not be more meh.

Wish Upon isn't over-the-top wacky or campy, and in fact, feels slightly low-energy at times, but it's the kind of simple filmmaking coupled with absolutely insane writing and plot points that make it an ideal candidate for so-bad-it's-good viewing.

Unlike Richard Pryor, whose rough language adds an important rhythmic punctuation to his monologues, Murphy uses vulgarity to shock and divide his audience.

The whole thing might as well all be written in Minions chatter. It's wacky, but somehow dull, kind of like conversing with a Minion.

The rhythmic assurance of truly bracing screen action, even if it's just a bunch of metal beating up a bunch of other metal, or clobbering humans, never gains traction. The cross-cutting suggests the editors took care of things via group text.

The mayhem in The Mummy feels desperate, mistimed, grueling in the wrong way (the film's violence is infinitely less appropriate for preteens than that of "Wonder Woman").

The movie is all preening and very few laughs, though Daddario and Efron have a few moments, and Johnson remains a supremely likable slab of movie star.