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.