Super Mario Bros. has a solid cast of characters who are thrust into a psychedelic smattering of scenes hastily glued together in nearly offensively stupid ways, but it’s also strangely ambitious at times.

The Marksman is perfectly watchable old man reckoning cinema, held together by good performances by Liam Neeson and young Jacob Perez, but it's ultimately not much more than an assembly line of non-surprises.

It's a heartbreaking tragedy, dreamer's comedy, and saucy stumble through double-edged "success" stories, but most of all? It's a bloated, brass-band-swingin' mess.

Though Jessica Chastain delivers a heartfelt performance as Tammy Faye, her faith in the filmmakers can’t save this drama from falling flat.

While there’s plenty of large entertaining set pieces, Sheridan’s intriguing premise withers under its overabundant components.

There are moments in The Unholy that strive for shocking, even sacrilegious. But Spiliotopoulos lacks either the imagination or the guts to create something truly soul-rattling.

Cry Macho has spare moments of charm and tranquility, but mostly it's a dry and unfinished story that fails to hit even the most basic of Story 101 beats.

There's not much to praise here. The script is beyond parody, the jokes fall flat, and it arguably wastes some of Hollywood's biggest names. But if you want to see lots of people getting blown up in some very pretty locations while Salma Hayek and Samuel L Jackson make sweet (gross) love while torturing Ryan Reynolds, then this one's for you.

I couldn’t help but feel like Things Heard & Seen would have been a much better film if they stripped away its ghostly elements in favor of everyday horrors that Pulcini and Berman nailed so effectively in its second act.

Demonic promises a fun and fascinating premise, but its scattered pieces barely coalesce.

Despite the powerful child performance at its center, David Oyelowo’s The Water Man struggles to focus on more than one narrative or visual idea at a time.

Though Chbosky’s staging is uninspired, the songs — both old and new — are nonetheless powerful, which might be enough of a lure for fans of the show or musicals in general. Sadly, Platt’s calamitous casting dooms this adaptation to cringe-worthy awkwardness.

Billy Porter's five fantastic on-screen minutes as the electric "Fab G" are over far too soon. Instead, Cinderella focuses on humor that rarely works (like James Corden’s huge head on a mouse body), an overstuffed, meandering soundtrack, and underwhelming vocals to back it. Ultimately, live-action Cinderella peaked in 1997.

Gunpowder Milkshake does its formidable cast dirty with a bland script, recycled story, and an empty comic book style that does little but shine up a stale outing.

The Last Mercenary has bounding energy and a fun take on star Jean-Claude Van Damme's past exploits as an action star, but the humor is way more miss than hit and the actual nuts-and-bolts spy plot is a trudge.

Sweet Girl is front-loaded with fun action, and it has a great performance by Jason Momoa as a widower seeking vengeance against a pharma CEO. But its story slowly loses steam, before being replaced by an entirely different movie with much sillier political messaging.

Where The Crawdads Sing is only mildly interesting if you look up the accusations against its author.

The movie's full of clunky dialogue, underdeveloped characters, and unbelievable scenarios. When all is said and done, Lang's performance just can't save the follow-up from the trappings of horror sequel mediocrity.

A deeply misguided act of worship, it starts out as a hilariously bizarre showreel of strange visual effects, before devolving into a distant, disconnected retelling of the highlights of Dion’s life.

While not without charm, the biggest factors working against Army of Thieves are a confused hybrid of horror and heist genre stories and an approach making it unclear which audience – other than the most ardent of Zack Snyder fans – it’s aimed at.

Copshop is meaningfully and enjoyably derivative as a patchwork homage to '70s shoot-em-up cinema (even Spaghetti Westerns), but it never quite reaches its potential.

It’s a rare misfire from director Sebastián Lelio, whose approach to his tale of a 19th century English nurse (Florence Pugh) investigating an Irish miracle is far too plain to be mysterious or stirring.

Phil Tippett’s Mad God unleashes decades of pent-up creative darkness into a trippy and troubling ride with astonishing craftsmanship, but little substance.

Moonfall makes its big ideas feel small and unimportant.

Director Karen Cinorre has assembled a cast and production crew who work hard trying to bring life to her frustratingly abstract sketch of an idea that never coalesces into a satisfying narrative, or characters worth caring about.

Encounter is a tense, and stylish thriller with some excellent performances, but it’s dragged down by a lack of focus and pointless tangents.

Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody is yet another music biopic that feels like a checklist of events rather than riveting drama.

Despite a great cast, Needle in a Timestack lets the fuzzy logic time travel tropes trample the characters and our care for them and their plights.

Kate Siegel does her best to elevate a simplistic thriller that follows all the same beats you're accustomed to.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a sloppy and gratuitous killing spree with standout deaths but a poorly written story that ruins the experience.

Men, from Ex Machina and Annihilation director Alex Garland, is a folk-horror movie about gendered trauma that quickly falls apart. It skillfully builds tension in its first half — with the help of brilliant lead performances — only to have that tension dissipate when its inventive metaphors become consumed by traditional staging and literal explanations.

Despite solid performances from Zac Efron and Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Firestarter feels stifled in story and presentation.

Metal Lords is earnest with metal but sloppy with character and story. It delivers a rousing finale but the journey there is uninspired and half-formed.

The Cellar has a cool and creepy set up but then fizzles once the answers start arriving.

An artless retelling of major events, She Said chronicles the investigation into Harvey Weinstein in mechanical fashion, flattening its tale of victimhood, paranoia, and perseverance into a journalism movie checklist.

Hulu’s Crush is a queer coming-of-age movie in which very little happens, and whose characters barely exist outside of their joking lines of dialogue. Its young actors are a delight, but even as a story of teenage crushes, it rarely captures what it feels like to be young and in love.

Operation Mincemeat turns an absurd chapter in World War II history into a dour homework assignment.

Choose or Die boots up a retro-style survival horror that will muster up a few delightful scares for the generation of gamers who grew up with Zork and The Valley of the Minotaur. But beneath this terror-filled glimpse of the ‘80s lies not much more than a bog-standard horror flick.

Don't Make Me Go features excellent performances from John Cho and Mia Isaac, but it stumbles big at the finish line.

Madame Web has the makings of a interesting superhero psychological thriller, but with a script overcrowded with extraneous characters, basic archetypes, and generic dialogue, it fails the talent and the future of its onscreen Spider-Women.

An impression of much better action films, spy thriller The Gray Man (directed by Joe & Anthony Russo) wastes its all-star cast by giving them little to work with beyond quips. While it eventually becomes watchable, it spends most of its runtime being visually and emotionally indecipherable.

Me Time has bursts of energy and vibrancy, mostly involving its two leads and their snappy chemistry, but it's also a hodgepodge of predictable buddy comedy beats that doesn't do much to separate itself from what's come before.

Persuasion is a disappointingly limp adaptation of one of Jane Austen’s great romances. While Dakota Johnson does her best to give director Carrie Cracknell a contemporized, charming version of Austen’s heroine Anne Elliot, the screenplay’s foundational reframing of the character strips away everything that makes the book’s version interesting and quietly heroic.

Aside from an unexpected ending, director Robert Zemeckis is basically doing a paint-by-numbers version of the studio’s much better original, just with modern animation and Tom Hanks. And while Tom always tries his best, even he can’t make this redo memorable on its own merits.

The Reef: Stalked is another middling mid-budget fin flick that’s tonally confused somewhere between Shark Week and Lifetime.

[A] one-note, flat comedy.

Despite game performances by a slew of returning cast members, it doesn’t justify its existence as anything other than a mercenary attempt by Paramount+ to cash in on audience nostalgia for familiar faces.

It’s an odd “rock and a hard place” production about survival of the fittest mentalities that can’t help but indulge soapy relationship dramatics amidst an otherwise dire entrapment, which will probably leave most laughing and irritated at the wrong times.

From its anachronistic homages to its tensionless filmmaking, Pearl — Ti West’s prequel to X — doesn’t have nearly as much to say as its predecessor. Mia Goth gives it her all as a villainess who dreams of stardom, but the film can’t decide what to do with her.

Peter Farrelly's follow-up to Green Book is a war drama with some solid laughs and a great Zac Efron performance, but a manipulative script with ugly optics and boring visuals that never achieve the prestige it clearly wants.

Captain America: Brave New World feels neither brave, nor all that new.

Goodnight Mommy might be passable as a standalone, but it’s impossible to recommend over the original. Matt Sobel and ​​Kyle Warren venture somewhere new that still doesn’t differentiate nearly enough for its quieter approach.

A muddled mix of '90s teen flicks, curated for a new generation (with a Hitchcock premise swirled in), Do Revenge is a lukewarm high school vengeance tale that never settles on a tone and is barren when it comes to laughs.

What should be a high-spirited family film instead feels leaden and overstuffed, more concerned with laying the groundwork for a hypothetical sequel than spinning a quality mystery. The result has the look and feel of a traditional Sherlock story with a feminist spin, but little of the substance.

The Retaliators tries to transform musical stardom into a rock n’ roll horror epic, but suffers from “too many cooks” syndrome as the end product plays disjointed and can feel like a music video demo reel.

There's nothing uniquely surprising or exceptionally rousing, which is a shame given the unfathomably dreadful predicament and an interesting turn of a performance from Dave Bautista. It's a film without sensation that feels like it's pulling its punches across the board – development is stunted, ideas lack passion, and the camera avoids visible violence – before the ending strolls off into the sunset with barely any goodbye.

Even Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell aren’t charming enough to redeem AppleTV+’s humbug musical adaptation of A Christmas Carol.

While Sharper is visually stylish and is driven by some excellent performances from Sebastian Stan, Julianne Moore, and Brianna Middleton, this con-artist thriller overuses the same plot twists so much that they lose all their impact, and later the initially shrewd characters become too easily bamboozled.

Despite a stellar performance from Willem Dafoe as a contemplative art thief, Inside lacks the smarts and visual panache to make good use of its single location.

Kids vs. Aliens brings gloopy, grotesque practical effects to a childlike sci-fi thriller that fails to shine outside kill sequences and costumes.

Casper Kelly psychotically spoofs the strangest of strange horror titles that turn anything into a murderous entity while unraveling deadly severe social commentaries. It’s abstract art, theater camp, found footage foolishness, hunt-and-stalk depravity — Adult Swim Yule Log is a whole lot of things but, even with a full 90 minutes, few angles feel fully fleshed out.

Sword Art Online Progressive: Scherzo of Deep Night won't woo any new fans into the fold, but it's an enjoyable enough return to the world of Aincrad for longtime viewers to dig into.

Despite a talented cast and great director, Netflix’s Lift proves to be an exceedingly unremarkable heist film.

Heart of Stone is so busy trying to start a franchise that it forgets to be a movie good enough to merit a sequel in the first place.

Netflix’s The Monkey King is an example of a potentially great film that’s undone by poor pacing, uneven animation, and a truly unlikable protagonist.

For a movie about a guy trying to save himself and his kids from a car that might blow up at any moment, it's curiously low on thrills and complications.

All Fun and Games is an appetizer of a movie served as the main course, lacking in creativity when it comes to turning childhood games into pure horror.

Dear David tries its best to scare, but it never quite brings the spookiness it promises. It suffers from trying to do a bit too much with the living characters and not enough with the dead ones. Also, way too much lens flare.

Unfortunately, great performances and reverence for the sport aren’t enough to save a film at odds with itself.

Migration is satisfactory but uninspiring.

Overstuffed and wearisome, pulpy action comedy Boy Kills World proves that there can be too much of a good thing.

PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie feels more like a legitimate feature film than its predecessor, but it’s still well within the realm of distractor cinema rather than something parents would want to watch with their kids.

While Wish is enjoyable, this new Disney fairytale doesn’t measure up to those that came before.

Destroy All Neighbors is a horror-comedy with a fun premise and creative effects but it’s messy in too many ineffective and wrong ways, like listening to a 20-minute jam session that never finds its hook.

Ranbir Kapoor is deeply committed to his brash and ugly protagonist, but in spite of the movie’s explosive action, director Sandeep Reddy Vanga seems more preoccupied with provoking outrage than with telling a coherent story.

Despite thoughtful visual artistry, and a great dramatic performance from Adam Sandler, Johan Renck’s Spaceman ends up too scattered, and too literal, to make its tale of a lonely astronaut feel remotely important.

Blitz's piercing sound design can't make up for its bloodless depiction of World War II, its scattered sense of place, and its saccharine approach to overcoming racial hostility. Saoirse Ronan is captivating in the role of a single white mother to a defiant Black son trying to make his way back home, but the movie can't seem to balance her talents with its own timeline.

Death of a Unicorn features fun fantasy ideas, but suffers from repetitive execution.

Although Holland takes place in a unique setting full of kitschy Midwestern details, even Nicole Kidman in frustrated-housewife mode can’t sustain the sloppily plotted thriller.

The worst thing about Joker: Folie à Deux is its unfulfilled potential. It begins with the promise of a novel approach to the Joker and Harley Quinn, placing them in a world where the opposite of cruelty is musical romance. Unfortunately, the DC sequel gets bogged down by a lengthy courtroom saga, which not only keeps the dazzling Lady Gaga away from the spotlight, but centers the movie entirely around its own predecessor, without doing or saying anything new.

Mia Goth shines as usual, and Ti West's third slasher entry feels more visually polished than its predecessors, but it's also more dramatically sterile, thanks to a story that quickly falls apart and mounting references that add up to very little (if anything at all).

Despite its ferocious source material and lead Amy Adams, Nightbitch is a bloodless tale of maternal doldrums with little payoff.

It would be great to see Peter Farrelly recapture the comedic magic he and his brother achieved in their terrific 1990s run, but he doesn’t do so with Ricky Stanicky. It’s focused on too many un-engaging characters with a lot of would-be comedic banter that falls flat, while the attempts to blend drama with humor feel out of place.

Dev Patel’s diehard sincerity clashes with unwieldy religious imagery in an India-set revenge saga whose tepid action scenes fail to make up for its muddled politics.

Like a human turned into a creature of the night, Salem’s Lot kicks off with a strong sense of identity that slowly gives way to mindless vampire nonsense.

This futuristic sci-fi thriller has some good moments of ambiguous tension, but it’s too scaled back to make much of an impact.

Tron: Ares somehow forgets where it came from and relentlessly revisits the original, only making the latest version of the Grid paler by comparison.

Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon can’t quite salvage You're Cordially Invited, a comedy that's as overcrowded as the dueling nuptials it depicts.

Bugonia is a film that tries to balance barbed sci-fi themes and conspiracy looniness funneled through Lanthimos’ trademark quirks, but it slips off the pommel horse on the dismount.

Less of a movie and more of a series of non sequiturs, Despicable Me 4 is a Minions showcase interrupted by Gru and his family.

A one-angle drama spanning centuries, Robert Zemeckis' comic adaptation Here is experimental in appearance, but highly conventional in approach.

It has no soul or style, and creates no sense of chemistry between lead actors Omar Sy and Nathalie Emmanuel. They try their best to fill the movie's dead air with charm and anguish. Unfortunately, their best isn't enough.

Despite having an interesting take on werewolves, The Beast Within proves to be a middling experience.

Transformers One’s strong central friendship – and a great Brian Tyree Henry performance – aside, this animated origin story could have used some major transforming before rolling out.

There’s a disappointing amount of “same old thing” to Jurassic World Rebirth. Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, and the rest of the cast are intriguing and sympathetic throughout, but Gareth Edwards doesn’t quite recapture his signature flair for grand-scale visuals nor does David Koepp find the magic of his original Jurassic Park screenplay, opting to follow that movie’s structure as more of a remix than a rebirth.

You can admire the ambition of The Life of Chuck while still wondering if such a lightly philosophical story needed to make the leap to the screen – or if turning all of its prose into Nick Offerman voice-over was the best move. It’s less an adaptation, ultimately, than a glorified book on tape from a talented King superfan.

Although it has some delightfully grotesque monsters, Mr. Crocket is a kids’-show horror spoof that isn’t ready for primetime.

Kate Hudson and Hugh Jackman’s performances are a treat in Song Sung Blue. They sing and perform their hearts out, but none of it ends up in service to a coherent vision, let alone one that says something meaningful or profound.