Despite its great performances, Next Exit is a mess of a movie that fails to take advantage of its own supernatural premise.

Chinatown had sex, greed and water, Body Heat had sex, greed and high humidity, while Mulholland Falls has alluded-to sex, hats and cigarettes bundled with radiation sickness and anachronistic pop psychology references. (Palminteri spouts endless Sensitive Guy pabulum that's supposed to be ironic. It's not.) It's a mess and a shame, considering all the talent involved.

The Garfield Movie applies some nice animation to an annoying all-ages comedy of product placement, phone jokes, and daddy issues.

Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is noteworthy only for its name, as it turns out that blending slasher blood with Pooh’s honey together is like oil and water: it just doesn’t mix.

No lies; there are a handful of moments that strike a smile. That said, enjoyment is fleeting like the glee of biting into candy only to find, seconds later, that it's black licorice flavor.

After five great seasons, Luther’s feature film adaptation proves to be a major let down, robbing the title character and his loyal fans of the little delights that made the series work.

Part sci-fi satire, part futuristic dramedy, and almost entirely sterile, The Pod Generation seeks to make lofty comments about our world, and the politics of women’s and workers’ autonomy. However, it scarcely has anything to offer beyond the sleek technological designs it tries and fails to critique.

Whenever it dares to display hints of dreamlike abstraction, Carmen quickly returns to its rote formless-ness, as a heatless desert romance about a pair of non-characters on the run. Neither mysterious nor boisterous, it’s one of the most head-scratching musicals in years.

Despite a great ensemble cast, Zack Snyder's space opera is let down by a derivative patchwork script, mediocre action sequences and a superficial story that fails to live up to its expansive promise.

Despite a starry cast and endearing performance from Joey King, A Family Affair is as messy as the conflicting professional and personal relationships it depicts. A convoluted and superficial script and yawning direction fail to deliver character stakes worth getting behind.

The Black Demon barely makes a splash in a pool filled with better shark attack movies, falling victim to a small body count, a grating protagonist, and disappointing digital effects.

This big-screen take on the indie-horror sensation has too much plot and not enough of the game's primal security-cam thrills.

It Lives Inside feels desperate to project specific cultural experiences, but it has neither the tact nor the aesthetic flair to weave a competent horror movie around them.

Knights of the Zodiac fails to inspire enough excitement to meet the prospect of future sequels with its lackluster visual effects and rather clunky storytelling.

The stars are about the only reason to boot up this preposterous thriller, which ends up playing less like a critique of AI technology than another daydream about its power.

Venom: The Last Dance trips over its own tendrils and lets a boring, generic plot, and bad action distract from the surprisingly resilient central relationship between Eddie Brock and his symbiote bestie.

Despite a capable cast and crew, Foe is a muddled mess that feels more like Black Mirror Lite than powerful sci-fi commentary.

Vacation Friends 2 adds a few fresh elements to its too-soon sequelizing, but they can’t change this comedy’s listless, laugh-light trajectory.

Benicio del Toro's understated performance as a soft-spoken detective is about the only interesting thing about this new Netflix thriller, which drowns a thin murder mystery in lots of ominous atmosphere.

Pierre Morel's uninspired work behind the camera goes hand in hand with the film’s nondescript title, dragging viewers through a moodless, toothless action hybrid that, at its best, plays as forgettably inept even with ammunition flying in all directions.

The second part of Zack Snyder's Rebel Moon space opera, The Scargiver, delivers a half-baked conclusion to a well-trodden story with flimsy character studies and lacklustre action.

The End We Start From is a muddy post-apocalyptic drama that fails to nail the human connection at its core.

Olivia Colman is a diamond in the rough, but even she can’t rescue a movie this flat and uninteresting.

Matthew Vaughn’s latest directorial effort doesn’t traffic in the same edgelord button-pushing as his Kingsman series, but as that relief fades, it becomes clear how much Argylle is recycling ideas and imagery from those (and other, better) movies. Bryce Dallas Howard and Sam Rockwell make an endearing pair, but they’re committed to an occasionally loony adventure that lacks the grace necessary to match its stars.

A boring, weightless revenge experiment that quickly goes awry, Silent Night features none of the charm or visual panache that made John Woo one of Hong Kong and Hollywood’s foremost action stylists.

The first chapter in Kevin Costner's epic western series is a meandering, regressive snooze.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Kingdom’s tiresome, bloated plot and expansive roster of characters will leave you out in the cold.

Role Play wants to be a star-driven caper merging complicated relationship dynamics with exciting espionage action. But despite a few brief signs of life, both sides of the film are woefully unconvincing, as are its stars. Kaley Cuoco goes way too broad, David Oyelowo looks pained, and the whole thing strains to imitate better movies.

Though the celebrity cast is giant, none of the colorful creatures they’re voicing are particularly memorable. And Krasinski favors trite platitudes over any real insights into the adventure of growing up; his dialogue will leave you pining for the strategic, well, quiet of his last onscreen family. What IF lacks is what it champions: the magical imagination of childhood.

The love story between Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry works, or at least meagerly satisfies, on only surface levels, as does most of the movie.

Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx do their jobs in Back in Action, assuring that it remains mostly watchable. But it’s ultimately a bummer to watch two well-established stars and versatile actors returning to big-budget filmmaking just to make another spies-versus-real-life action-comedy.

Andra Day delivers a commendable performance as matriarch Ebony Jackson, but the entire experience is neither scary enough as a horror film nor insightful enough as a drama to leave a mark.

Megamind vs. the Doom Syndicate is nothing more than a lazy, 14-years-too-late cash-in on DreamWorks IP.

But as a comedy, Love Hurts is pretty stale; when not trotting out dopey crime-flick caricatures, it’s simply leaning on the supposed hilarity of a sunny house hunter with a secret talent for breaking bones. You’ve seen many versions of this premise, and better ones, too.

Despite revolving around a group of heroes battling to save existence from total annihilation, the film struggles to build meaningful stakes and establish a sense of dramatic weight. The lack of narrative focus around a single, main protagonist also severely hinders the film.

Crisis on Infinite Earths Part Three closes out DC's Tomorrowverse in big, messy, and forgettable fashion, so much so that it's tough to be enthused about whatever comes next.

My Oni Girl is an anime fantasy that makes you wonder why its cool demon hero would waste any time with a boy so exhaustingly dull.

The premise may be intriguing, but the repetitive approach and nearly identical lead characters renders the Ocean's duo without their signature chemistry and strands them in a distractingly underpopulated criminal underworld.

My Spy: The Eternal City is tailor-made for an awkward family movie night: too violent and suggestive for elementary schoolers, too dumb for teenagers, and too confusingly joke-free for adults expecting a comedy.

While the movie's points are clear, they're also cliché – as is the movie's horror. The director's ambition exceeds his grasp, telling a story about characters who are not well-drawn enough to feel either universal or specific. The result is a fraught romance that should be nerve-wracking but instead is mostly dull.

AI-loving Marvel hitmakers Joe and Anthony Russo join forces again with Netflix to deliver a $300-million sci-fi epic you can safely half-watch while doing the dishes or making dinner.

Overlord: The Sacred Kingdom disappoints by stuffing its long runtime with dull and monotonous chatter, and not enough of the grandiose moments that inspire the newest character in the series.

Jack Black will be enough to lure both kids and parents to the holiday comedy Dear Santa. But Black can’t carry the whole thing himself, and he’s eventually subdued by some deeply questionable story choices.

Even the most ardent defender of Paul W.S. Anderson’s work might think In the Lost Lands is the kind of mess that proves the Resident Evil director’s detractors right. It’s not just a barely comprehensible failure on its own, but an adaptation that takes a character-based drama and turns it into an ugly action flick.

Doug Cockle’s return as Geralt of Rivia is a casting coup worth celebrating. Too bad the movie he stars in is so boilerplate.

What Beat Takeshi’s mob comedy lacks in explosions, it more than makes up for in jokes that bomb.

Benedict Cumberbatch gives it his all in The Thing with Feathers, but the horror movie lives up to neither his performance, nor its own heavy-handed metaphor of a bullying crow-creature representing grief.

A headache-inducing screenlife film that straps Chris Pratt to a chair and holds its audience hostage too, Mercy squanders its potential as a sci-fi thriller about the dangers of entwining justice and artificial intelligence. The result plays less like the tongue-in-cheek mystery-thriller director Timur Bekmambetov seems to be aiming for, and more like an advertisement to tech investors, making the movie chilling in unintended ways.

Fear Street: Prom Queen fails to channel both the outrageous aesthetics and the brutal violence of the films it’s imitating, making this indifferently made exercise in YA horror supremely skippable.

825 Forest Road is a stodgy paranormal thriller that doesn’t boast enough character or intensity to reach the heights of its director’s Hell House LLC movies.

With Eddington, Ari Aster tries his hand at political satire and turns in his first bad movie.

Justin Tipping’s flimsy football horror movie Him is papered over with colorful lighting but underscored by bland ideas. Despite Marlon Wayans’ bravura performance, it makes very little visceral impact while en route to one of the most confounding third acts of any horror movie this year.

Pete Davidson does solid enough work in a more dramatic role and the supporting cast does the best they can with the material, but The Home collapses under its muddled messaging, overly familiar and sometimes ridiculously heavy-handed imagery, and a lack of tension.

Please Don’t Feed the Children has a few things going for it – namely capable lead performers Michelle Dockery and Zoe Colletti – but Destry Allyn Spielberg’s boring, predictable first feature definitely doesn’t feel like it comes from a descendant of filmmaking royalty.

Osiris is an Aliens retread that brings the firepower and little else.

Anaconda is a disappointing follow-up for Gormican, who cannot crack the code on Sony's bewildering aquatic not-really-horror reboot. A cast of proven funny people are lost in a thick brush of hacky bits and ineffective storytelling, unable to machete their way through to a redeeming climax. There are brief bursts of creature-feature excitement and belly-tickling humor, but way more stretches of bafflingly unclear ambitions that feel like they're struggling to keep the "movie within a movie" gimmick afloat. It's Anaconda without the aqua-horror chills, throwback practical effects, and midnight-movie entertainment—what an odd choice.

Iron Lung has terrible pacing and very low energy from the start. The scenarios that Fischbach has put his character in just aren’t compelling enough to watch unfold, with scenes that drag on and on.

In the Blink of an Eye is a disaster of its own making, living in the shadow of far better sci-fi films of old, and never doing anything interesting with any of the ideas it throws out.

Psycho Killer may "have a Hulk," but it's also a parade of missteps and missed opportunities.

The Snowman is a detective vs. serial killer thriller devoid of any thrills.

The Nut Job 2 is one of those rare examples in which the sequel is technically better than the original, but it’s still not a compliment.

My Little Pony: The Movie falls apart in the end because it resolves its conflict the way that conventional blockbusters do, and not in the way that My Little Pony does.

There are a few occasionally effective scares along the way, but the cliched characters and downright idiotic motivations make 47 Meters Below sink before it even has the chance to swim.

Killing Gunther is an astonishingly unfunny film considering the level of sheer comedic talent involved in it. Its lack of energy or character development keeps the film from ever finding its groove.

Tim Story takes a classic movie franchise and drains it of all the action, sex and topicality that made it worth revisiting in the first place. Jackson, Roundtree and Usher have star power to spare but they’re asked to perform embarrassing and ignorant comedy routines, and the action is so unremarkable that the movie can’t even rely on that spectacle to compensate.

So, to sum it up, Superman IV: The Quest For Peace is only slightly better than being trapped in a bear hug with Jan DeBont, and several steps below having an esoteric conversation with the Ghoulies.

Fifty Shades Freed concludes the trilogy as it began, with a romance you can’t believe in, endless montages of affluence, lousy dialogue, weak plotting, and - admittedly - a heck of a lot of sex.

Expend4bles is a crushing disappointment that lacks any of the nostalgia, charisma, and charm that made the franchise appealing in the first place. Perhaps worst of all, this failed mission is boring. There is no pleasure taken in saying this once highly entertaining action franchise is well past its AARPrime. It would have been great to have rounded the series off with a fifth entry, but after this flat and uninspired effort, the franchise doesn’t deserve that last hoorah.

The talents of Robert Downey Jr. and the all-star voice cast are wasted in the disastrous mess that is Dolittle.

Death Wish takes the serious topic of vigilante violence and reduces it to melodramatic hero worship, and it’s not even particularly good at that. The action is forgettable and the plot barely holds together.

Roger Moore's second outing as 007 does not do the subject matter justice. Or the character. Or any paying member of the audience.

The movie is frantic in fits and starts, but still remarkably tedious for such a slapstick comedy. It expends an astounding amount of time and energy setting up both its jokes and physical comedy routines, many of which are tired, watered-down iterations of material done better by Sellers.

There are a couple of entertaining action sequences, including the climactic battle between the cop and the Predator. The special effects, all shot on film, and the makeup effects, are top-notch for the time they appeared, so as a historical record the movie is interesting. But it just doesn't have enough meat to sate a hungry hunter.

Although inspired by an interesting post-modern true crime story, and featuring an unexpectedly depressive performance from Jim Carrey, Dark Crimes is a dull, dark, depressing film with very little on its mind.

If you're in the right mood and watching with others who can appreciate the art of a bad movie, A New Beginning is somewhat of a laugh riot.

The movie's inherent flaws and jumble of subplots and side characters barely make a scratch into the stereotypes and cookie-cutter story.

Sliver is a godawful movie - not worth a wank, much less a watch.

Monster Hunter runs just over an hour and a half but feels about twice that long thanks to its listless, meandering plot devoid of a central focus or any meaningful world-building.

The psychological thriller-horror film Antebellum mishandles its sensitive & painful subject matter on multiple levels.

Bad CGI takes away everything real about the relationship between man and dog in this inherently flawed, technically focused adaptation of Jack London’s age-old classic. Not even Harrison Ford, charming as he may be, can rescue this cynically made film from emotional bankruptcy.

Probably the only terrifying thing about this ludicrous excuse for a horror film – besides the fact that it's from the director of The Exorcist – is that Friedkin doesn't seem to realize it's a dreadful picture.

A sequel that hopes to court Saw fans and mainstream audiences alike, Spiral: From the Book of Saw is likely to alienate them both. It’s a hollow imitation of the series, unable to meet its most basic visual and narrative expectations. It’s also a bad film in general, which tries to tell a socially relevant story that it can’t seem to handle.

It’s astonishing that the helmer of The LEGO Batman Movie followed that vibrant, funny, and wildly entertaining offering with an action movie that is such an inane eyesore. And yet that turn still makes more sense than the plot of The Tomorrow War.

The Iron Mask is a mess of cultural ideas that not even Jackie Chan or Arnold Schwarzenegger can make work.

The pacing drags through action set-pieces left obscured by messy compositions and limp, over-stylized visual choices. New Orleans, as the film’s setting, is wasted while the film’s gritty concept fails to deliver the desired intensity.

There's Someone Inside Your House tries to make you think it's got a catchy, viable gimmick when in reality it's empty and unsatisfying.

“Random” aptly summarizes Harold and the Purple Crayon, with its patchy subplots, distracting amount of dialogue added after filming was wrapped, and geographic cluelessness.

Mother/Android tries to bring an emotional heart to the robot uprising genre, but it’s so laden with tropes and short on personality that it’s hard to care about the characters. What little novelty exists comes far too late in the long, slow movie.

Neither polished enough to be engaging drama, nor campy or exploitative enough to be effective horror, They/Them is a plodding, tensionless, and ultimately cowardly movie. Even if it had something worthwhile to say, it would have no idea how to say it.

Maneater proves that shark horror flicks need to be more than just a finned predator in any form and dead bodies — execution matters, especially when your animated shark looks this ugly.

A weak script and boring performances make the Netflix fantasy film Damsel a real slog, torpedoing its attempt to be a subversive spin on classic adventure tales. Any sense of wonder or magic is diluted by cheap-looking CGI and its overly repetitive action sequences.

The Disney+ documentary Stan Lee is a bland work of corporate propaganda that glosses over or outright ignores Marvel’s controversies

The Flood is only tolerable with beers, friends, and low expectations.

Hardcore genre fans might appreciate a few of the gorier moments, but they also might agree that a movie called Beaten to Death should not be as drearily maudlin as this.

The Strangers: Chapter 1 might freak you out if you aren’t old enough to remember The Strangers, but where its predecessor was subtle and interesting, Renny Harlin’s reboot chooses to be ridiculous and boring.

The Strangers – Chapter 2 makes a couple of minor improvements on the first film, but it’s ultimately just as slapdash as its predecessor.

Michael, or Bohemian Jacksody, is a film of listlessness and inhumanity that can’t help but suck the energy out of the room. No matter where you come down on Jackson as a person, this film is entirely the opposite of what he was, both as an iconic performer and a controversial tabloid figure. Who would have thought that such a carefully controlled, estate-permitted biopic might actually do more damage to an artist’s legacy by making him so uninteresting?

Borderlands is an abysmal waste of a beloved franchise that takes a kooky band of murderous misfits and drains the life out of their first adventure together. Eli Roth is no James Gunn, and this film has none of the lovable lunatics, awe-striking sci-fi visuals, and out-of-this-world storytelling of Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy.