It's possible to allow that Cinderella has its heart in the right place without concluding that the movie works. Credit where it's due for trying to squeeze the material into some new clothes, but hoping isn't enough to make the shoe fit.

Ultimately, The Gray Man is an unintentionally appropriate title to describe a movie that exists within such a narrow band of the cinematic spectrum. While a step up over the Russos’ last streaming effort, the bleak “Cherry,” it’s the equivalent of an old-time “B” movie with an A-level cast and budget.

The movie, however, turns out to be the opposite of its central character -- namely, an underachiever, despite those advantages.

By the standards of Liam Neeson thrillers (and there are a lot from which to choose), Honest Thief is pretty weak tea, a passable, low-octane action movie that doesn't do much more than steal one's time. Like second-tier John Wayne westerns, Neeson offers enough of what his fans want, but a thin script and stilted dialogue make the battle harder than usual.

For those wondering who would build a giant holiday musical-comedy around Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds, the “produced by Will Ferrell” credit provides a helpful clue. “Spirited” tries turning “A Christmas Carol” on its head, and while it’s big and boisterous, the movie (hitting theaters before Apple TV+) isn’t consistently irreverent enough to feel like much more than a streaming stocking stuffer.

What “One Love” doesn’t do, ultimately, is provide enough material to distinguish the movie from the contours of an authorized biography or documentary. In that sense, the film pays tribute to Marley’s work but winds up hampered by a love for its subject that works against its ability to deliver major insights or rock-star-level drama.

A fairly limp documentary.

Granted, the cast is too talented not to conjure a few amusing moments, but it’s hard to escape the sense of a movie that’s sleepwalking through the old neighborhood as opposed to playfully strolling down memory lane.

Like “It,” “Five Nights” wants to milk horror out of something associated with the innocence of childhood, and on that level the quirkiness of the visuals and initial moments of wit likely provide enough of what audiences want to survive, commercially speaking. Even so, the net result is another slice of horror that at best feels a little half-baked.

Call it what you will, but this Chris Farley-David Spade re-teaming might as easily be dubbed "Tommy Boy 2," with a slightly less satisfying mix of broad physical gags and bodily function humor. Riding the recent wave of stupid cinema, Paramount figures to shear off good business among undemanding teen audiences with this fitfully funny entry, seemingly crafted for people who find the new "Saturday Night Live" too intellectually challenging.

Granted, Scoob! appears more into recycling than reinvention -- it's more a snack than a meal -- but it does endeavor to make an old concept fresh and cool again in children's eyes. That might answer the question why the movie exists, but based on the results, nothing here merits an exclamation point.

Who's a good movie? Not "DC League of Super-Pets," a big colorful idea that proves promising in theory -- tailor-made for a two-minute trailer -- but a rather tedious slog as a full-length animated film.

Ultimately, Madame Web might have sounded like an interesting experiment, and it sort of is, but the execution feels less like a fully realized film than an extended prologue for a movie to come.

The Goldfinch has a painting at its center, but despite a classy palette of ingredients conjures a lifeless, disjointed picture. Adapted from a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the movie represents a transparent bid to bring the book's prestige to the screen, but it's another case of literary underpinnings being lost in translation.

A simple-minded strain of giant-robot combat. Much in need of a script tune-up, it’s a less-than-meets-the-eye summer-movie machine, and not a particularly well-oiled one.

"Elvis” has entered the theaters, but in a package that often recalls the excesses associated with his Vegas-residency years: Looking bloated, gaudy and at times bordering on self-parody. Those missteps, courtesy of director Baz Luhrmann and an ill-used Tom Hanks, squander Austin Butler’s brilliant moments in the title role, which deserve a much better movie.

Everything worth seeing in Pokemon Detective Pikachu neatly fits in the coming-attractions trailer, leaving a pretty numbing additional 100 minutes of sound and furry. Those deeply invested in the franchise will likely find bits to like, but in terms of fashioning a memorable live-action version, alas, that's not in the cards.

The sense of violation that this story entails is almost palpable, and "Our Father" certainly conveys that. If only the filmmakers had trusted the audience enough to present it in a more unadorned manner.

Wonder Park feels like the kind of mild attraction that younger kids might enjoy when it hits secondary platforms. It's just not an adventure that's worth the price of a ticket or standing in line to see.

There are no icebergs here, but that doesn't prevent the movie from sinking under its own weight.

A wholly forgettable movie, most likely to be remembered, lamentably, for its contributing role in Neeson landing in hot water.

Director James Wan again fills the screen with spectacle, some of it unevenly rendered, though even eye-popping digital effects couldn’t compensate for the frequent flatness of the dialogue and situations.

“Rebel Moon” might look big and splashy, even on a TV screen, but in terms of working as drama, it’s less a rebel yell than a low-key rebel grunt.

For anyone wondering why "The Princess" is premiering on Hulu in the US, not sister service Disney+, the movie answers that in the first five minutes, when the title character brutally dispatches a pair of guards sent into the tower where she's being held. While the timing seems right for a princess who rescues herself, there's precious little substance to this violent fantasy, featuring Joey King figuratively letting down her hair.

Simply put, Neeson has been in a bit of a rut, one that Ice Road exemplifies almost literally, since at several points in the movie the challenge involves extricating big trucks from slushy situations.

The Secret: Dare to Dream at best feels like a tepid distraction even for those receptive to its blueprint, far from the stuff that dreams are made of.

Writer-director Sam Levinson spends a good deal of time in Malcolm & Marie complaining about critics, which feels like a boxer leading with his chin. Pairing Zendaya and John David Washington, the movie -- quickly and stealthily shot during the pandemic -- wins points for ingenuity, then loses them with its shrill tone and the uneven hairpin turns of its writing.

M. Night Shyamalan is up to his old tricks in "Old," but after his heralded breakthrough with "Split," he's back on a downward trajectory. While the premise again has an eerie "Twilight Zone"-type quality, the long journey to a payoff -- littered with pretty awful dialogue -- might be picturesque, but it's no walk on the beach.

As much as the movie appears to yearn to jump-start the franchise, it seems to have forgotten to bother with a coherent script, leaving one to wonder how a film with this much action somehow manages to be so boring.

A warmed-over collection of cinematic cliches that misses its shot what could have been a fertile premise, in don't-quit-your-day-job fashion.

The film goes from Shark Week to shark weak – from playfully amusing to just plain stupid, eliciting enough laughs in the wrong places to make an advance screening virtually interactive.

Choose Love strains the storytelling to fit the gimmick, in a special that does its central character no favors by making her race through the trio of suitors suddenly in her life.

I laughed out loud a few times during The Big Lebowski, and Jeff Bridges, as always, is very good, but after I write this review, I'll probably never think about the movie again. And I spend way too much time thinking about movies.

The problem is that those pulling Child's Play's strings don't consistently commit to anything other than the gore.

Hellraiser is obviously operating within fairly well-defined parameters, and leveraging 35 years of screen history, delivers on the most basic level in terms of special effects and gore, without – the “reimagining” claim notwithstanding – bringing much freshness to the formula.

Far from a passion project, this Netflix film distinctly feels – as one of its writers says in the production notes – like a punchline in search of a movie, built on a soggy parade of sugary cameos that doesn’t provide much snap, crackle and pop.

Yet for all its high-octane action this tenth film is really just revving its engine for more sequels to come, kicking off a multi-part story that offers an appropriately bloated way to bring this very loud enterprise to a (no doubt temporary) finish.

Even grading on a curve, though, Murder Mystery is a tired, bordering on tiresome endeavor -- feeling like the pilot for a not-very-good TV show -- as well as a reminder that Netflix's content buffet caters to all kinds of tastes.

The best thing that "Sonic" has going for it, by leaps and bounds, is the infusion of manic energy that it receives from an unleashed Jim Carrey as the villain, Dr. Robotnik, basically a mad scientist out to capture or kill the little alien. Everything else, though, is a rather tedious slog.

Watching Chris Pratt fight to save the future has a certain appeal, but in the here and now, he can't even save the movie.

A movie that emphasizes its experiential and 3D qualities but lacks depth on every other front.

For the most part, America: The Motion Picture seems too pleased with itself, an indulgence in silliness that feels woefully stretched at close to 100 minutes.

The bottom line is a plot intended to make one consider life's big issues merely reminds us it's too short to sit through movies as muddled as this.

Once you get past admiring de Armas’ immersion into the role, that’s the only itch that Blonde seems to know how to scratch.

Mortal Kombat is within its rights taking the material semi-seriously, but does so by taking itself a little too seriously, given the rote nature of translating the game -- whatever its ongoing popularity in that form -- to the screen.

A private eye who's "a sex machine to all the chicks," as the song went back in 1971, isn't exactly tailor-made to 2019. The new "Shaft" plays with that tension but yields mixed results, in an action comedy that's neither consistently funny nor especially exciting, despite Samuel L. Jackson's second stab at the part.

An animated, comic-book-inspired opening turns out to be the best part of Samaritan, a very by-the-numbers superhero tale that casts Sylvester Stallone as the long-retired title character, and otherwise feels like and exhibits the production values of a 1990s TV pilot. While tolerable on its own terms, the charitable thing to do critically speaking would probably be to ignore it.

A tired, disjointed medley of madcap visual gags, the animated film yields roughly as many legitimate laughs as can be counted on a Minion’s three-digit hand.

Taken on its terms, the movie isn't terrible strictly as mindless escapism. But beyond the most basic, visceral thrills, Wrath of Man's bitter fruit yields a slim harvest.

6 Underground proves so uneven in its tone and unrelenting in its volume that it's hard to imagine a hole deep enough in which to bury its silliness.

The main problem is there's a whole lot of scary out there this time of year, and Books of Blood winds up in a sort-of creative no-man's land. Even for undemanding souls, this is a pretty skeletal construct.

The Laundromat makes a pointed political statement, while spinning out a garbled mess of a movie. In the process, director Steven Soderbergh mostly squanders a cast toplined by Meryl Streep, in a Netflix film that plays like a darkly satiric connection of vignettes that lost something -- mostly, a coherent narrative -- in the rinse cycle.

These two Paramount+ projects ultimately feel pretty toothless.

A self-conscious effort to build a spy franchise around Gal Gadot, Heart of Stone plays like a poor woman’s “Mission: Impossible,” mostly thwarting even its star’s Wonder-ful charisma. Despite solid action moments scattered over its two hours, this Netflix movie plays like an inoffensive but lifeless addition to the “You might like” feature that, alas, you probably won’t.

The Current War is a fascinating story, badly told.

Pretty easy to tune out.

Too many of the points the story earns for ambition get deducted for execution in this jumble of ideas.

Fittingly, for a story about wandering around in a field, it winds up going nowhere.

The tragedy associated with such stories could provide fertile territory, theoretically, for a good drama about what went wrong and who's ultimately responsible. That movie might get made someday, but Crisis isn't it.

A half-baked mob drama.

In the charitable spirit of the season, Candy Cane Lane serves as a passable addition to the annual parade of holiday movies trotted out each year. Yet even by that unexacting standard, there’s barely enough juice here to keep the lights on.

Home Sweet Home Alone is a very odd duck -- a movie that basically replicates the three-decades-old "Home Alone" template, but in a way that feels slightly weird and ill-conceived. Dropping on Disney+ in connection with the streaming service's two-year anniversary, it's a reminder that not all well-known intellectual property ought to be let out of the house.

There’s something unfortunately symbolic about Jurassic World: Dominion, which combines old and new DNA from the near-three-decade-old franchise and generates a pretty mindless mess … an XL-sized mediocrity out of the gene pool’s shallow end.

It’s the kind of star-driven vehicle that yields obvious benefits to Netflix even if, qualitatively speaking, it doesn’t deserve to see the light of day.

Again rated R after softening the rougher edges the last time, the body count is certainly off-the-charts high, but the action – under the guidance of stunt coordinator-turned-director Scott Waugh (“Need for Speed”) – is about as generic as these things get.

Horror movies are no strangers to social commentary, or the desire to be cathartic in how they use violence. Yet the latest example of those impulses, They/Them, illustrates how tricky that proposition can be, in a story that at various times feels creepy, exploitative and preachy, without becoming particularly tense or scary.

This is one of those movies that’s forgotten almost as soon as it ends, and it doesn’t even require any chemical intervention in order to erase the memory.

Watching The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe serves as a reminder, to paraphrase Elton John’s musical tribute, that her candle burned out long before the exploitation of her ever did.

The kill count generally provides the requisite thrills, but everything else seems stitched together from genre clichés.

Debates over LeBron James' greatness compared to Michael Jordan on a basketball court will continue in perpetuity, but "Space Jam: A New Legacy" won't fuel much chatter about who's the better actor. Putting James in Jordan's shoes, as it were, isn't a bad idea in theory, but despite the odd moment of inspired Looney Tune-acy, this reboot shoots a very loud and thudding airball.

Even taking it as a given that Disney’s animated classics will all receive live-action makeovers eventually, Pinocchio feels like an unnecessary exercise – a movie so flat that it never sparks to life, and barely feels as if it’s making the leap into a different medium.

Cats isn't quite the unmitigated disaster that some feared -- or perversely hoped -- but it's not good, delivering a mostly incoherent adaptation of the long-running musical. An eclectic roster of stars claw out a few meager moments, but as screen experiences go, this is a memory best forgotten.

An understated, uneventful slog of a movie that feels like a misguided merger of "Gran Torino" and "Bronco Billy."

Splitting the movie into three chapters seems appropriate, since the film delivers a trifecta: overwrought, overacted, and overlong.

For Cox, a veteran actor with no mountains left to climb and few concerns about speaking his mind, Prisoner’s Daughter plays like one of those movies where you just take the money and run.

While some might find it possible to have fun by surrendering to the silliness, this bad moon doesn't quite rise even to the level of a guilty pleasure.

If the previous movie conjured a bit of excitement by eradicating everything that had transpired after the original, that sense of novelty has quickly worn off.

Even for an action comedy, this Lopez-produced effort is inordinately skewed toward putting everything that might entice someone to watch in the trailer, beginning with the shot of Coolidge hoisting an automatic weapon to defend the wedding party. As hot as she is off “The White Lotus,” she can’t redeem the tiresome execution.

The near-four-year gap between movies does help in one respect, allowing people to largely forget what left them unimpressed about the original.

The Forever Purge's once-over-lightly politics don't merit much of a fuss, playing like a cynical exploitation of real-world issues.

Apatow serves up some clever lines, but they're mostly lost in the overall noise and manic tone. While it's not necessarily too soon for a funny Covid movie, The Bubble labors to achieve a sought-after level of zaniness right up until the ending.

A sort-of psychological, semi-erotic drama that, despite its literary pretensions, possesses roughly the intellectual heft of a perfume ad.

Spiral, however, doesn't chart its own course as much as simply try to have it both ways. And if the title implies a certain motion, the main direction the movie heads is essentially down the drain.

Although streaming provides a logical venue for this small-scale film, it's hard to think of a time or platform where this adaptation from British director Joe Wright ("Darkest Hour," "Atonement") would have felt satisfying, with an ill-considered, twisty finish that's a sizable letdown from the already so-so material preceding it.

A new do-over that can barely generate enough heat to qualify as a thriller.

65 represents such an uninspired effort as to look like a fossil even before the credits roll.

Forty-four years, 13 movies and innumerable corpses later, it sounds naïve to think “Halloween Ends” will really mark the end of anything, but like the holiday for which it’s named, it’s fun to pretend. The producers do seek to bring finality to this latest trilogy featuring Jamie Lee Curtis, although that turns out to be the only original idea they conjure in an odd, tedious film.

The resulting movie, however, hits the wrong notes, repeating mundane lyrics without uttering the words that keep coming to mind, which are "precious" and "pretentious."

Strange and more than a little sad, You Cannot Kill David Arquette -- a documentary about the actor's adventures in wrestling -- derives most of its strength from the discomfort associated with watching it. As the son of a showbiz family, the fact that Arquette is reduced to this cry for attention more than anything reflects the enticing lure of the spotlight.

That seed of potential, however, sails away on a tide of numbing stupidity.

While ‘Resurrections’ again offers a choice between the red pill and blue pill, the one thing that won't be necessary -- especially for those choosing the home-viewing option -- is a sleeping pill.

Zombies 3 is creatively dead on arrival, reviving the concept at least once too often.

Part heist movie, part family reunion, the film draws upon the most salient characteristics of the flabby feline, but mostly as an excuse to build a story that seems to crawl further from its origins with every passing frame.

Look, we get it, people are looking for new stuff to watch, mindless escapism included. Still, in terms of any sort of inspiration or originality, "Kate," the movie, is every bit as D.O.A. as Kate, the character.

Most notable as a vehicle for Jason Momoa, this wannabe spectacle from “The Hunger Games” director Francis Lawrence serves up lots of special effects desperately in search of a story.

“Godzilla vs. Kong” director Adam Wingard and a trio of credited writers probably make the right decision in treating all this with grave earnestness, which doesn’t render most of the situations, dialogue and the climactic encounter any less laughable.

A bloody mess.

The star’s latest film should attract flies, all right, not with honey, but rather the stale aroma of its inane premise.