Minions: The Rise of Gru is more Minion compilation than Gru prequel. It wastes its fun ideas and comedic setups in favor of disconnected slapstick gags, which may delight the diaper-wearing crowd, but will end up a chore to anyone forced to comprehend its inert dramatic scenes and ’70s pop culture references.

Though visually engaging, Malignant can’t overcome the genre identity crisis at its core.

The story's lifted a bit by some of the solid comedic actors, and the WWE Superstars who make a run-in, but when the story isn't sloppy, it's paint-by-numbers.

Ultimately, it's bland, not bold, and achingly absent of enchantment.

Ultimately, this storied provocateur deals out shocking imagery and disturbing scenes, but he refuses to lay down a thrilling climax much less anything satisfyingly entertaining.

Hubie Halloween is aggressively stupid, sure, but it's also occasionally endearing (with a guilty chuckle or two).

Despite the efforts of Idris Elba and the cast, Concrete Cowboy never explores its characters or premise in much depth.

The movie plays up sexual innuendo more than a group of junior high school kids, and it comes across almost as juvenile. Some of the jokes are indeed funny, but there aren't enough laughs to propel things through the dry spells.

Try as it might to capture lightning in a bottle, Black Adam never manages to find its spark.

Glenn Close and Amy Adams shine in Ron Howard's new, rather unfocused film about abuse, poverty, and addiction.

Cherry is big on style and features a bouncy, pricey soundtrack but its examination of the grim reality behind the veteran/addiction cycle feels rather routine. Holland breaks down many barriers here, performance-wise, and delivers the goods as a fantastic surrogate for societal ills, but the movie is plodding and, overall, an underwhelming patchwork of previous projects.

Malcolm & Marie is a well-acted but frustrating exploration of art and bad romance.

Rebellious game developer Midway's rise and fall gets a surprisingly tame retelling in the doc Insert Coin.

It’s disappointing to see a triad of talented actors like Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, and Jared Leto wasted in The Little Things, a straightforward and seldom surprising murder-mystery.

Outside the Wire is too long, too impenetrable, and not fun enough to warrant its lofty man vs. machine gimmick. It's fun to watch Anthony Mackie assume the role of a smart, cordial killbot, but the film's occasionally exciting bits of action aren't enough to breathe life into this muddled mess of a story.

The Color Purple strands a passionate cast in a passionless movie musical that’s eager to skip to the end.

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.