"Saw" writer Leigh Whannell mixes metaphors in this limp remake, using gaslighting and privacy fears for his uneven sci-fi horror.

The story of Eternal Spring deserves to be told — but Loftus’ film falls victim to the kind of insidious propaganda members of Falun Gong once tried to fight.

It is surely a failure, but it has twice the soul and passion of many technically successful pictures from lesser artists. If only that were enough.

There are sequences and stand-alone shots that will stick with you long after you’ve washed the insipid narration from memory.

It’s hard to find even ironic enjoyment in something this high on its own supply; something much less interested in how its namesake broke the rules than it is in how its director does, and something tirelessly incapable of finding any meaningful overlap between the two.

Wise Guys proves that a tone deaf, dumb-ass comedy with a bunch of nifty split diopter shots is still a tone deaf, dumb-ass comedy, and for all its frenetic energy it can’t muster much enthusiasm in those watching.

Guided by an over-the-top Nazi hunter played by Judd Hirsch (clearly enjoying himself), Cheyenne begins a road trip through Middle American that goes nowhere, and Penn's mopey has-been routine starts to feel like a bad joke that just keeps getting worse.

Sing is the Platonic ideal of an Illumination movie. It’s a profoundly soulless piece of work that shines a light on the mediocrity they foist upon the children of the world.

Told with the gravitas of a comedy sketch and the edginess of the funny pages, Elvis & Nixon at least has the good sense to appreciate that its namesakes were larger than life, each walled off from the world in their own way.

Domestic violence is one of the primary engines of tension, yet the film doesn’t know how to tell the truth about abuse without making light of it or mining it for artistic effect.

There are late bloomers and then there those who never bloom at all. Unfortunately for Lisa Steen’s feature debut “Late Bloomers,” the film doesn’t open up in time to blossom into something great.

Freaky Tales is Boden and Fleck’s attempt at applying their studio lessons learned circa “Captain Marvel” to something supposedly more personal, but this film just ends up only repeating that one’s most grating tendencies.

Any expectation that Salomon’s profound story might be depicted in grown-up, searching animation that’s still all too rare, is quickly dashed. Instead of being brought to a place of soulful contemplation, Charlotte merely becomes cinematic Ambien. What a tragedy.

Perhaps no other movie has better illustrated the golden rule of CGI: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

It is in the third act that Immaculate delivers a gonzo, rock-smashing, fiery, crucifix-stabbing and all-out bloody good time. Unfortunately, by that point, it’s too late to save the soul of this movie, which is condemned not to go to hell, but remain in dull horror movie purgatory.

The maddening frustration of her first unambiguous misfire — which is worse than bad because it could have been good — is that it feels so much, but conveys so little.

It might be enough to entertain young children or diehard SEGA loyalists, but the rest of us are left to lament that the running time isn’t as fast as its blue protagonist.

It's a familiar mold: the perils of suburban discontent have been so thoroughly explored that The Details plays like a hodgepodge of familiar circumstances on an assembly line to disaster.

Bay’s latest reeks of falsehood veiled as righteousness.

A downcast and thoroughly dreadful supernatural drama that somehow fails to mine even a moment of fun out of a cautionary tale premised on the idea that your smartphone might literally be a portal to hell.

It’s the work of a studio that’s gobbled up the rest of the film industry and is still hungry for more. The Lion King feels less like a remake than a snuff film, and a boring one at that.

Lacking in chemistry, clarity, and conviction, Neon’s latest rendezvous with Perkins hits like a crumbling marriage that would serve everyone involved by ending as soon as possible.

Trapped in some bizarre movie genre hinterland, wholly resistant to veering too far in any direction, this aimless film isn’t dark enough to be scary, funny enough to be a comedy, or smart enough to say anything about the many topics it seems to want to tackle.

What is obvious is that Huang’s Boogie is a 90-minute aimless mess that sets back as much as it saves.

You’re not likely to find a more jarring — and ultimately exhausting — collision of high pretension and low execution at Sundance this year than the crowdsourced YouTube doc Life in a Day 2020.

While the rest of Silent Night is so abysmal that its prologue might as well be the last hour of “Hard Boiled” by comparison, it’s hard to imagine a more appropriate introduction to a movie whose only upside is the vulgar thrill of watching something that feels utterly anonymous and wildly idiosyncratic at the same time.

It's all a shell of itself, with Fred Savage on hand to occasionally note how weird this all is.

Woefully inauthentic, milquetoast as a mild breeze and far too tidy for any of its sweeping resolutions to have even the faintest hint of staying power, The Hollars takes 88 minutes to inspire the same warm and fuzzy feeling that a Hallmark card can deliver in a heartbeat.

An insufferable movie that wants to be profound and benign in equal measure.

If you’re going to make an R-rated horror wank about Dracula slurping throats with a smile on his face, make sure that the rest of the movie doesn’t suck as hard as he does.

It's hard to believe that The Devil's Double doesn't intend to be a put-on. Despite a real-life basis of its plot, Lee Tamahori's fierce depiction of hedonistic Saddaam Hussein spawn Uday Hussein relegates the character to a farcical cartoon.

Heimann is so focused on the spectacle of it all that he forgets to do anything with it emotionally or formally, dragging everything to a close, as we return back to the beginning with little of anything meaningful or engaging occurring over the film’s running time.

The poorly wrapped The Christmas Chronicles 2 feels like a last-minute gift that someone bought at a gas station on December 24. By the time a bunch of Pikmin-like elves get sloshed on spiked cocoa and start singing “Who Let the Dogs Out,” it’s clear that children will only remember Columbus’ latest out of resentment at how soulless Christmas movies have become, if they remember it at all.

The problem with At Midnight isn’t the gorgeous scenery or the casual believability of the sparks between Boneta and Barbaro. It’s the production quality — mostly that there is none. Episodes of “Bachelor in Paradise” have better cinematography than this Paramount+ feature, making the streamer seem incapable of competently funding anything that isn’t produced by Taylor Sheridan.

Just as the frequent cutaways from sexual activity tone down the titillation, Lovelace never garners the energy to construct a fully involving melodrama, rarely rising above Lifetime movie standards. Given the material, the irony here is that the filmmakers play it too safe.

Janney makes a great murderous curmudgeon, but the script’s big reveal strands the actress with a “layered” character who’s never given the chance to transcend the most basic aspects of her archetype. Worse: She only gets to kill like three people!

Before the movie came along, the show had an ardent critic in Liam Kennedy, a criminology professor who believes “PAW Patrol” “encourages complicity in a global capitalist system that produces inequalities and causes environmental harms.” While it’s doubtful the humorless dirge of a movie will make enough of an impression to mold young minds in any lasting way, the critique of “PAW Patrol” is useful as an amalgamation of certain favorite Hollywood themes that ought to be retired.

Many of the problems with Closed Circuit stem from a script littered with first-draft exposition...exacerbated by unimaginative staging.

For a movie with so much going on, (not even counting the CGI cougar Bella befriends), A Dog’s Way Home is wildly devoid of meaning or humor.

The pacing is so frenetic that audiences will likely never have more than a millisecond to appreciate the textures or the visual spectacle of a shot before it’s already zipped ahead to the next sequence, always another song and dance to see, even if it’s woefully hard to actually enjoy.

The critical failure of Bohemian Rhapsody is that, 134 minutes after the lights go down, the members of Queen just seem like four blokes who’ve been processed through the rusty machinery of a Hollywood biopic.

From the flat battle sequence that’s shot with all the excitement of folding laundry, to the literal chess match that anchors the underwritten dynamic between Berg and his target, The Catcher Was a Spy shrugs through each bad scene as though it’s biding time for better ones to come.

A junky, paint-by-numbers crime saga that stacks up to The Town like Cats does to Singin’ in the Rain. It pains a lifelong New Yorker to say this, but Boston deserves better.

This miserable chimera — skinned with Black’s wicked sense of humor, but too underdeveloped to survive on its wits alone — should never have been let out of the lab, as it poses a serious threat of boring people to death.

Luck is a terrible idea for a movie, executed poorly, and by someone who used to know better. The best thing I can say about the finished product is that, unlike most forms of bad luck, this one is wonderfully easy to avoid altogether.

No matter how basic Hawkins’ book might be in comparison to some of the ones that came before it, it’s hard to argue that it didn’t deserve better than this, that any story so smartly attuned to the need for women to hear themselves and each other should be reduced to such flavorless swill.

The movie is weighed down by too many secondary characters, which only serve to dissipate their flickering charms. No one in the film, even our heroine, gets more than a hint of backstory as the single-minded plot careens toward its predictable conclusion.

The film mistakes stiff, literally buttoned up acting — you’ve never seen so many starched and fully done up dress shirts in one film in your entire life — as somehow being clever, but there’s scarcely a moment of Morgan that is genuinely shocking (though the undercurrents with Amy are at least unnerving).

Series fans will feel cheated by such a chintzy and incurious take on something they love, while the rest of us will be left wondering how the source material earned itself any fans in the first place.

I Saw the Light doesn't just fail to illuminate Williams' complicated life and his prodigious talent; it can't even capture the dark corners of a man with more than enough to peer into.

It’s every cheap, fast, loose, pointless joke in the book, and barely any of them can clear a solid laugh.

Zemeckis has made some unsuccessful films over the last 20 years, but The Witches is the most frustrating of them all because it feels like it could’ve been made by somebody else. Anybody else.

It takes a special talent to turn the romantic lyricism of Zola and turn it into chick-lit.

We used to watch movies and wonder “How did they do that?” The problem with Now You See Me 2 isn’t that we already know the answer, it’s that we’re not even inspired to ask the question.

If "Extremely Loud" came out in the weeks or months following 9/11, more audiences (and critics) might find an excuse to appreciate the way its soul-searching protagonist works through his grief. Ten years later, his struggle actually feels outrageously old-fashioned.

Save for dashes of Jeunet’s bespoke visual flair and an enthusiastic cast of actors whose go-for-broke performances scream for stronger material, Bigbug doesn’t resemble a late-career misstep from a beloved auteur so much as it does the product of a neural network that was simultaneously forced to binge-watch “The Terminator” and “The Dinner Game” until it spat out a shooting script.

Lee Daniels' The Paperboy is a rare case of serious commitment to outright silliness.

A sugar-addled My Neighbor Totoro ripoff with a beautiful message and a hideous everything else.

Sud’s film is a master class in bad decision-making, improbable choices, and overwrought acting.

It’s almost impressive that Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World is so dull.

Pairing up talented comedians like Hawn and Schumer with a wacky plotline to match should spell comedy gold, but Snatched is about as cheap and disposable as a tourist trap tchotchke.

Angel Has Fallen is the kind of movie that leaves you feeling restless and thinking about dinner long before the third act, but anyone who sticks it out until the bitter end will be rewarded with one of the greatest mid-credits sequences ever devised.

What does Rampage have? No satisfying action beats, no memorable images, and so little to say that it’s virtually impossible to say anything about it in return. It’s not a movie for critics, that much is clear. The problem is that it’s not for anyone else, either.

Cherry sometimes feels like more of a live-action comic book than any of the Avengers movies ever did.

This runaway train of a biopic renders an iconoclast in the most generic of terms, straining Mapplethorpe’s brief life into a series of bullet-points that feed into each other with all the drama of a Wikipedia page, and a fraction of the context.

Don’t be fooled by the lack of spandex: The Legend of Tarzan turns the Lord of the Apes into just another superhero, the newest movie about fiction’s greatest wild man memorable only for the dull irony of how housebroken it feels.

The Emoji Movie might have been a boring and brazenly cynical piece of corporate propaganda, but at least it had the courtesy to be offensive. Kidnap, on the other hand, doesn’t have the the courtesy to be much of anything.

Despite being rife with crime, sex and darkness, Manhattan Night feels increasingly like a cheap ripoff of the genre it so very much wants to fit into.

This “Mortal Kombat” is more broadly watchable than the 1995 version ever was, but it’s hard to shake the dull sensation that video game movies are now playing us.

For a comedy of such misjudged tones, Rauch is best when she plays up Hope's dramatic tendencies rather than her comedic side.

Hulu’s dull and exasperatingly basic “The Princess” wastes a slew of talent on a straight-to-streaming cheapo so undercooked that it feels like an AMC psy-op designed to make you run to the nearest multiplex and beg for a ticket to whatever’s showing next.

Even among Gerard Butler vehicles, this one sinks right to the bottom.

Perhaps just as disappointing as the haphazard storytelling is the squandering of a top-flight voice ensemble.

It’s hard to understand why Doremus, whose Sundance-winning “Like Crazy” was an effective reminder that emotion can be a narrative unto itself, would regress towards a story in which he renders that idea redundantly literal.

Lee’s proven talent for mixing broad situational humor with sly character work is almost completely missing in action here.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is miscalculated as a romance and a fantasy, and while I’m loath to blame a craftsman as intelligent as Kogonada entirely for the outcome, he did, after all, agree to direct this lousy script. A big, bold, beautiful bore indeed.

It just sort of happens, and not even the movie itself seems to know why.

What is the meaning of life? Are we here for a reason? Is there a point to any of this? We may never know, but knowing this movie exists may bring some viewers one step closer to giving up on the whole damn thing.

If a tired retelling of a serial killer thriller premieres in theaters and nobody sees it, did it actually happen? Unfortunately, yes.

Without the star power of Mandy Moore and the relative sophistication of the single location predicament, 47 Meters Down: Uncaged is just the last gasp of a shark saga that didn’t need to come up for air.

Like any office Christmas party you’ve ever been forced to attend, it kind of feels a little bit too much like work to be fun, and — like any office Christmas party you’ve ever been forced to attend — it’s just a tiny bit too diverting for you to storm out before the whole thing crawls to its sad conclusion.

Unfrosted sprinkles in a few choice examples of Seinfeld’s observational schtick (“the magic of cereal is that you’re eating and drinking at the same time with one hand”), but it mostly sees him using the film’s Boomer milieu as a backdrop for an uninspired mishmash of contrived sight gags and anachronistic cultural references.

Though the movie is clearly enamored with its own creativity, it’s not fun for anyone else. The title alone has already inspired titters online, and the movie is just as clunky and overwrought.

What’s most deadly about Taylor’s latest isn’t a miscast Swank or her character’s demented arc, or even the uncomfortable Ealy and his character’s insane idiocy, it’s the sense that this sub-genre should still be able to have plenty of naughty fun doing very bad things. Just not this kind of bad.

The most tragic part of the entire debacle is the realization that Hasbro saw this movie as an opportunity to introduce grander storytelling ambitions.

The Current War forces viewers to spend so much time wading through its aesthetic that it becomes easy to lose track of its ideas, or grow too bored of them to bother following along.

Part of the problem is that films like Marauders have become so synonymous with cut-rate mediocrity that their awfulness is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Even in the weak signal that is the January movie season, xXx: The Return of Xander Cage hardly registers.

A bad movie by any culture’s standards, The Great Wall mostly goes to show that if the future of the business lies with Hollywood -China alliances, it doesn’t bode well for either side.

Dosunmu’s airless directing and Waithe’s thin script only amount to loud allegory that never goes anywhere and drowns out any compelling ideas that might be worth singing.

Like most of Netflix’s seasonal assembly line of yuletide fare, “Love Hard” is both too well-cast for the Hallmark Channel and too half-assed for movie theaters. It’s likewise adrift between rom-com nostalgia, reckoning with the anxieties of dating in the digital age, and simply hitting enough data points to give the algorithm what it wants for Christmas.

Pattinson portrays the monotonous Georges Duroy in two equally dry modes: scowls and smirks.

Night Teeth lacks much more than bite. It’s incoherent to boot.

Sight is a perfect film to watch if you want your eyeballs to glaze over.

The problem isn’t that Johnson can’t act — he definitely can! — the problem is that he doesn’t want to. He still wants the simple idolatry that a kid might have for their favorite athlete. He wants to be larger than life. But even the biggest of movie stars need to be a little smaller than that in order to give people something to watch, and not just look up to.

Faster than you can say, “Alexa, show me a piece of streaming content that crystallizes the grim future of feature-length comedies that have to satisfy an algorithm but not a theatrical audience,” you’re watching a lifeless, laugh-free slab of nothing like Superintelligence, which starts with “what if Skynet, but with jokes?” and then just gasps for air for the next 105 minutes.

The same video game aesthetic that facilitated his earlier B-movies has otherwise entombed this new one in a generic mess of C++.

A blockbuster as big and hollow as the Moon itself; one small step for bland, one giant leap for bland-kind.