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.