When the leads are drawn this terribly thin, and Onward is so hopelessly focused on the dad narrative that it can’t help but ignore its creativity in favor of mawkish afternoon special, the product stinks of a bad Amblin ripoff.

The action scenes are tense and well-staged, and the performances are staggeringly effective. On a technical level, it’s a notable work of formal craftsmanship. But to what end?

Fittingly, The Midnight Sky suffers from the same weightlessness as its astronauts — Clooney opens his big, wet soulful eyes, and Alexandre Desplat‘s overly-aggressive score lays on the emotion as thick as syrup, but none of it lands.

Although the movie is warm and affectionate enough, Dean is not very good, and at its worst the film treats its audience as if it is fairly stupid.

Jump scares are all Sandberg seems to have in his bag of tricks, and each is clunkily executed and met with an agonizing, ear-piercing shriek. Watching Lights Out is like standing next to an idiot with an air horn, never quite knowing when it’s about to blow in your ear. It’s a far cry from the freaky grace of his short.

If you’re going to tackle serious subject matter, maybe don’t run it through tacky fluff that amounts to a fleeting sugar high. Sure, this movie will get all the right oohs and aahs, sighs and sobs — it certainly won over the freebie test audience at my screening, good god — but it won’t linger.

It’s vacuous, ugly, unfunny, and, somehow, not a satire. It might be the worst movie of the year.

Which is why Antibirth feels more like an anti-film, a piss-poor assembly of remarkable cult actors and brazen narratives that start off divorced without ever being married.

Watching Twilight, I was floored by how earnest all of this was, how seriously everyone involved took what is clearly a horrible, unhealthy, doomed relationship. And is there anything more teenage than that?

Concussion tries to “tell the truth!” but its filmmaker feels compelled to surround the truth with tales of a man whose life is just not that interesting.

Moondog’s antics aren’t all that funny or captivating, even when divorced from their assholery.

The Prom would be glitzy, high energy, and for the most part, harmless — if not for James Corden’s laughably cliched performance, and the film’s inability to figure out which narrative should take priority.

It’s a miserable experience — a dull, dated copy of something we’ve seen before — and takes way too long to ever get moving. (It never really does.) In the end, an unimaginative script and underutilized actors make The Little Things as trivial as the title implies.

A smarter film would’ve more deeply explored the interpersonal dynamics between these four very different lifelong friends, but Book Club presents its central quartet as a blandly supportive girl group and mines drama from their far less interesting individual romantic storylines instead.

Humor Me is essentially the feature film adaption of writer-director Sam Hoffman‘s web series Old Jews Telling Jokes, and much like ideas that are typically created for a web series, the execution of the material appears to be just a bit too lacking to serve the purpose of a full-length film.

While Plummer tries his damnedest to anchor Remember in the high drama to which it aspires, Egoyan’s latest is best forgotten.

Ghost in the Shell is a visually arresting film, even occasionally an entertaining one, but profound it ain’t. That’s no crime, but dressed up as it is in the trappings of a much smarter film, its significant shortcomings stand out every bit as much as a pair of pert breasts on a supposedly utilitarian body.

The Accountant tallies up its numbers for an achingly long 50 minutes before it starts to finally piece together any semblance of a structured plot.

The real horrors of campus assaults should be examined, and horror makes for a perfect vehicle for that discussion. Yet this remake’s ambitions are too lofty for its own good. The messaging forgoes finesse and grace in favor of blatant lecturing, cramming patriarchy, rape culture, toxic masculinity, and white male rage all in an unsatisfying Christmas horror package.

Bohemian Rhapsody is another lame music biopic, and its failures ultimately lie in the poor creative choices, the gutless approaches to potentially explosive events in the life of this band. We’re not buying this new album. There’s no new material to be found in Bohemian Rhapsody.

Gold is weakly written, predictable, and too placid to achieve any loftier ambitions. It’s just a soft-sold tale of a schemer’s paradise.

Shots are short, oddly made, and shoddily smashed together. There’s no spatial continuity, let alone consistency in time of day, or even a care for any kind of visual coherence. 13 Hours is just chaos. It’s unwatchable, unlikable, and unworthy of respect.

It’s also not all that good, even if it’s hardly the kind of “bad” that most would get riled about. Escape Room is cut from one of Hollywood’s most familiar cloths: the “mall horror” movie.

This wasn’t a movie, it was a boardroom meeting with some poor hapless dreamer strapped to the “directed by” credit like a keelhauled sailor punished for his idealism.

Blair Witch is disappointing on multiple levels, all of which have nothing to do with the franchise.

It’s about as effective as a Walgreens Halloween display, where any terror derives from uninspiring shock value, and given that each and every pop-up scare can be seen from over a mile away, the movie fails in that respect, too. It’s exhausting even.

Wolves is more affecting than it should be by virtue of its cast, who deserve better, but the drama is so schematic that their Herculean efforts leave little impact.

American Assassin never transcends the exploitation at its core.

While it’s a reasonably paced thriller, The Prodigy is almost wholly devoid of real scares.

The 15:17 to Paris is too unfocused, too hard to take seriously, and too short to really get invested in it. It’s an Eastwood misfire.

It’s the worst kind of ridiculous: not enough so to be memorably fun, but far too much so to be taken with any degree of gravitas.

Literally every ounce of entertainment value you can get out of Willy’s Wonderland comes from thinking about the premise itself: What if Nic Cage fought demonic versions of the mascots from Chuck E. Cheese? But the budget and the talent around Cage just wasn’t there, which robs Willy’s Wonderland of even the dumb, modest thrills promised on the packaging.

There’s a fundamental disconnect between Cherry’s cynicism and Holland’s innate naivete that just makes the whole affair feel wrong somehow, not to mention crushingly long at nearly two and a half hours.

Uprising plods around like the giant robots that occupy so much of its space, moving too quickly to let almost anything resonate emotionally, but not quickly enough to lend much of an adrenaline rush.

It’s difficult to overstate how badly Foe fumbles its heady premise and firecracker cast, a film so dependent on its biggest secret that it’s both predictable and hard to grasp by the time the trigger is finally pulled.

As with any number of popular YA novels-turned-feature films, Mortal Engines has a wealth of possibilities and curious ideas at its disposal. Instead, it tears past them in pursuit of some of the subgenre’s most exhausted narrative tropes, chewing up everything engaging as it grinds along.

The Bronze is so satisfied with its own winking crassness that it lets epithets constitute everything it has to say. Between that and the film’s scene-by-scene tonal shifts, what could’ve been an off-kilter curiosity curdles into a dull roar of disappointment.

Hunter Killer has thrills, but they’re of the cheapest variety.

The film’s a fundamental fiasco of tone and timing.

Antebellum makes every moment meaningful or teachable. And under the strain of making its many, many points, Antebellum forgets to be a good movie, which is ultimately what draws audiences in and allows them to connect the dots for themselves.

It should come as no surprise that The Angry Birds Movie is a loud and dumb children’s film, but for what it’s worth, there are plenty of cinematic commercial ventures that are louder and dumber and so on than the well-meaning and slickly sold Birds.

In adapting Death Note for a presumably American audience, Wingard loses the whole of its identity, and never finds a different one with which to replace it.

Shyamalan comes off so smug by the end of this movie that it’s insufferable — and also kind of jarring. It’s as if he’s learned nothing from his past and still believes he’s pulling a quick one on his audience.

A sloppy, blinkered epilogue that wastes everyone's time.

What we really get is a film made of utter nonsense that’s even less interested in its characters than it is in telling a story.

Many shots fired, all of them misses. This is a film without quality, care, or any real decency.

It’s a paint-by-numbers would-be blockbuster entirely built around the delusional notion that general audiences can’t be scared by anything more thoughtful than recycled jump shocks and derivative monsters.

It’s so spectacularly inept, at so many different points, that it’s hard to imagine anybody will be able to forget it. It’s not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s the kind of bad movie that audiences with the taste for that kind of thing will eat up by the spoonful.

Another lump of coal in Gibson’s rapidly declining filmography. Fatman has no gifts to speak of. It’s kind of cheap. It’s fairly cynical and/or mean-spirited. It’s not fun. No good. Lumpy in execution. Deeply archaic in its thinking. Ho ho ho-hum.

It’s a genuine drag to watch talented actors struggle through tepid material, and Table 19 offers this more readily than it does its laughs or its pathos.

IO is dull, it drags, and it’ll beg the question: When will this, all of this, be over?

While the script is fundamentally flawed, the direction doesn’t help. Young, who previously helmed the brutal 2016 indie Hounds of Love, feels out of his element in the sci-fi action realm.

To his credit, Green makes great use of wide-angle photography so the action feels comprehensible, with surprisingly long shots and effective editing. It’s just a shame the director’s talents are wasted on this brand-stamped mess.

By now, you likely already know whether or not Jigsaw is for you. The series is nothing if not consistent, but the diminishing returns that led to its near-decade hiatus only continue here.

Whatever this film’s intentions may have been, and perhaps they were wholly noble, one thing is abundantly clear: Smokey and the Bandit is still, and without much competition, cinema’s greatest beer run. And that movie managed to deliver a whole truckload of beer without doing any disservice to the Vietnam War.

There’s no voice, no style, and no real intrigue on hand. It’s all a slow sail to the next outsized setpiece.

In an age where “so bad it’s good” has lost much of its meaning in a sea of calculated camp, The Intruder may be one of the few films of recent vintage that truly qualifies.

Don Verdean is the sort of comedy which presumes its own hilarity long before it gets around to telling any actual jokes, or staging anything that might otherwise be considered funny.

Its lack of energy, depth, and pure volume are, at the movie’s best, sanitized. Despite the long wait, The Dirt is nothing more than karaöke Crüe.

A perversely fascinating mess from start to finish, Mile 22 is Berg’s most baffling attempt yet to make art out of the most virulent post-9/11 fears about terrorism and international espionage.

A tonal miss and technical meh, Gemini Man arrives looking and feeling self-defeated.

Mechanic: Resurrection plays in an uncommonly generic key, and the film only makes intermittent attempts to enliven the proceedings.

All Eyez on Me is the opposite of an ideal biopic.

Everything’s so achingly foul and with zero finesse, which makes for an awful, joyless experience.

Murder Mystery is a dud, stained with slack humor and a total unwillingness to play within its own chosen genre.

Hillbilly Elegy does not bring out the best in its cast, and Howard fails to bring the intensity or depth that might make something meaningful. His approach is all after-school special, all the time.

Given the absurdity of the premise, Cell isn’t nearly as luridly entertaining as it should be.

There’s nothing wrong with melodrama. But in order to break the dishes, movies have to be willing to build tension by holding something back. Mr. Church, however, is all reveal, constantly giving everything away in the most obvious fashion.

When it comes down to it, Baywatch’s central sin is that it’s just…not funny.

What’s most unfortunate about Fist Fight is the wealth of talent it amasses for little to no discernible purpose.

It’s damnable with faint praise. It’s too cheap to be thrilling, and too earnest to be all that offensive. Mired in clichés. Mostly flat. A weak Spy. Only Kevin James diehards need apply.

The film has spent so much time telegraphing its own depth that it forgets to create any, and thus when that wig arrives, we have no reason to view it as anything other than ridiculous.

Unfortunately, the good stuff comes not only too late, but is more or less undone by a head-scratcher of an ending.

Mute has gobs of style to burn, but it’s virtually the textbook definition of sound and fury signifying nothing.

I saw this movie last Wednesday, and I still feel like I’m watching it, like its dry and stuttering dynamic hasn’t yet ended, like I’ll never hear a real Bowie song again. Someone commit me before I’m forced to don my famous alter ego, Lights Camera Jackson, to cope with my insanity.

The mood and atmosphere is appropriately unsettling, and the stellar cast never stops trying to elevate the material, all of which makes it even more upsetting to watch as it slowly unravels and botches the landing.

It’s an unnecessary, monotonous, 102-minute scrapbook of better horror films that fails to muster even a spark of originality.

Once the giddy critical pile-on and hate-watching settles down, the (justified) moral outrage that (re)Assignment tries to thwart will end up being the regrettable and forgettable film’s only lasting legacy.

Zoolander No. 2 invokes that old Simpsons headline: “old man yells at modern culture.”

As with Collateral Beauty, Loeb piles on the ridiculous narrative twists to eye-rolling effect. The last twenty minutes of The Space Between Us are a rollercoaster ride of changing motivations, baffling character reveals, and overblown dramatic gestures that completely defy belief.

Dull at best, damaging at worst, and not worth a moment of your time.

Blakeson and screenwriters Susannah Grant, Akiva Goldsman, and Jeff Pinkner don’t seem to care much about telling the story. They’re just checking off the boxes.

A curiously loud and ugly beast of a sequel.

Jones slaves to make something of the material, and to his credit, or rather his profoundly large cast and crew’s credit, the craft is certainly visible in Warcraft. It feels rude not to compliment the hard work of the makeup, costume, production design, and visual effects teams.

As an adaptation, Cats is declawed, never delving fully into the possibilities offered by its proportion-manipulating trick photography and its animated cast. As a big-budget spectacle, it’s a triumphant disaster, if one at least born from a unique idea.

There’s nothing particularly memorable about Robin Hood even when you’re laughing at it, and that may be one of the saddest fates a movie can meet.

This film is all easy beats, predictive familiarities, and absolutely zero heart, soul, or silliness anywhere to be found.

The dispiriting thing is that Tom & Jerry is far from the worst family film in the world. It’s just a familiar, by-the-books, vertically integrated product to ensure continued IP visibility for the film and television arm of a corporate portfolio. Here’s the latest and laziest IP for you to become disenchanted by, should you feel so inclined.

Unfortunately, Game Over, Man! sacrifices all the brusque cleverness of their hit show for a warmed-over Die Hard parody that’s too self-indulgent to entertain anyone but the four goofballs who made it.

That the film never fully gets to the heart of its savage commentaries is probably its greatest disappointment.

Sure, it commits wholeheartedly to its bone-dead stupidity more than the first film. But it leaves a final product so scattered and uninspired that, less than 24 hours after seeing it, the vast majority of it escapes my memory.

Give or take one excellent joke about the practical applications of handcuffs — delivered with expert awkwardness by Dakota Johnson, who remains the only moderately charming element of the trilogy — the film is as devoid of wit as it is of subtlety, and that combined absence, courtesy of screenwriter Niall Leonard, leads to some of its biggest unintentional laughs.

In its current shape, Rebel Moon isn’t just boring; it feels hopelessly compromised.

There’s something distinctly odious about a storyteller exploiting both a city’s tragic reality and a country’s debate about firearms to make a film that thrives on violence.

It aims for the kind of sprawl that could contain a film with so many big ideas about death and grief and cruelty and salvation, but it’s somehow at once too modest for how bizarre it eventually gets and too excessive to meaningfully deliver on those emotions.

You’ll only lose 90 minutes of your life to this misbegotten mess.

It’s clichéd, distant, afraid to truly immerse itself in anything but long looks, but at least it looks good. And that’s that.

This is another bad Perry film, but a curiously verbose one with jokes piled atop more jokes.