With whispers of another film already looming at Warner Bros., McQuoid’s best defense might be tapping out — before he’s tasked with delivering an even more insufferable cinematic fatality.

A cute, simple, and very colorful fable of a film that will almost exclusively appeal to the youngest of kids.

Admirable as it is that Deep Water tries to play things straight, Harlin’s film would have benefited enormously from a neurologically enhanced super Jaws in the third act.

Fine enough, really, but if the first film was the kind of thing that never goes out of style, “The Devil Wears Prada 2” will last a season. That’s all.

I couldn’t help but try to read a bit deeper into how these characters rhyme with each other, especially since Egerton is so game to go nuts, and Theron — ever the reliable action star, radiating strength through a clenched vulnerability — is as human as he is cartoonish.

The movie’s endless middle is so dull and uneventful that Desert Warrior can’t help but belie its true purpose at every turn, as whatever momentum its hyper-fictionalized story was able to conjure at the start begins to sour into the stuff of a glorified commercial.

This could be entertaining in the right hands. Here, it just feels smug.

That “Michael” skirts around the controversies, legal troubles, and horrifying allegations that marked the entertainer’s later years — and, for so many, have forever marred his legacy — isn’t a shock, as the film was supported and financially backed by Jackson’s estate. What does rankle, however, is that that by glossing over such matters, the final film has been mostly stripped of any humanity, good and bad.

Roommates has a real chance at being a formative experience for someone, which is more than a lot of movies can say. But those of us who have already been sufficiently formed? We can find better things to stream this weekend.

The film is somehow both glancing and melodramatic, a strange and underwhelming cocktail of blasé Euro sleekness and TV-movie drama. Ah well. At least the clothes are nice.

A lot of jokes have been made at the director’s expense because of it, but if Lee Cronin’s “The Mummy” hadn’t been released as “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy,” it would be extremely difficult to tell who made it. Maybe the wet gore would give it away? The word “slop” doesn’t come to mind for once (bland as it is, Cronin’s film is far too effortful for that), but goop is its only defining touch.

More shark action would be welcome in this film about sharks. As a basic disaster flick? Thrash works, and offers up less than 90 minutes of admirably silly and occasionally chilling action, even if it could stand to take a bigger bite out of the story.

Erratic, petulant, and shot with a humor-killing hyper-saturation that smothers its Apatowian improv scenes under the sickly patina of a Gaspar Noé drug trip (the film was lensed by “Climax” and “Enter the Void” DP Benoît Debie), Outcome is nominally about a repentant soul trying to make amends with the people he’s wronged, but it seems more interested in focusing on the people who’ve wronged its hero in return.

A wish fulfillment in feature-film-shaped form and little else, “You, Me & Tuscany” isn’t especially memorable or surprising, but there’s a soothing, smoothed-over quality to this film — which was shot on-location in Tuscany, so points for that — that makes it a suitable candidate for your next airplane viewing.

The film’s surplus of action and chase scenes follows the same rigid formula of swooping camera movements and game power-up deus ex machinas that no sequence ever proves particularly exciting. If anything, the film only loses energy as it goes on, with the final confrontation proving particularly anemic and rushed, as if the film is hurrying along to avoid having to delve into its storylines with more than a surface skim.

Alloway’s debut is a beautiful disaster that even at its weakest points has just enough glamor and guts to justify most genre girlies taking the journey eventually. Just don’t expect to find anything especially ripe, or rotten, once you check it out.

All you’re left with is the echo of what was better before. You watch only able to wish Weaving was given more to work with than this, or, at the very least, greater room for her iconic scream to rattle you once more.

The film runs on an engine at the altar of memory, itself a facile idea since prolific writers who produce feted work don’t wholly rely on retroactive synthesis. The film is then only memorable in some sequences. Magical, it is not.

Though imperfect, if it were the Peaky Blinders’ last hurrah, it’s certainly a spectacular way to go.

The Bride! is full of rage and feeling, striking an anarchic pose against oppression. But who it’s yelling at, who it’s yelling on behalf of, remains out of focus, the mystery of whatever Elsa Lanchester’s Bride might’ve been thinking left unanswered.

Popov is meditating on relevant themes, but what she diagnoses about the superficiality of the self-serving media and fashion worlds is already received wisdom, rather than the lethal satire she’s aiming for.

Late Shift is carried on Benesch’s shoulders, and she impresses. It’s just a shame she isn’t given more of a movie to act in.

The film suffers from a pair of unfortunate missteps, the first of which is plain from the start and only gets worse as the film drags on.

The movie’s narrow focus on the pre-existing conditions that fed into the cable car crisis does more to flatten the people involved than it does to bring new dimension to their ordeal.

The result is a dated mishmash that makes a credible but halfhearted bid for relevance by triple-underlining the common theme of the much better movies that inspired it: White male bitterness is the most blithely destructive force on Earth.

Sargent shows talent at constructing a down-to-Earth, largely observational character study that admirably doesn’t lean too hard on inspirational pathos or turgid trauma porn to generate drama or emotion. It makes for a very promising first feature, one that unfortunately undercuts itself with an underwhelming, emotionally vapid fantasy of a conclusion.

The Weight could use a tighter edit throughout, but it’s not without one central force pulling the film across its Europe-shot version of the Oregon Trail, and that would be Hawke.

Iron Lung is audacious and at times astonishingly boring. Still, it feels more enthusiastic and celebratory than many blockbuster adaptations built on safer math.

Shlesinger’s leading performance has the stuff of a star-making turn, though the film isn’t distinctive enough from its peers and predecessors to match the actor’s obvious onscreen charisma.

The Gallerist is one of those movies where the actors are having all the fun, clearly enamored with the chance at working together, while they forget to let the audience in on the entertainment.

A smattering of individual moments achieve the kind of madcap insanity that a movie like this needs for momentum, but “The Shitheads” is plagued by stop-and-start plotting that does more to stifle its energy than build to it.

Unfortunately, Undertone is far more interesting as a phenomenon than an actual movie. Tuason and company deserve to be commended for telling a narrative film on such a small scale, but the finished product fails to deliver a conclusion that’s scary enough to justify its lethargic, slow-burn format.

Charli’s version of herself, though, is a fascinating creation — self-deprecating, yes, and laughing at herself, but with the clinical distance of a telescope lasered onto a forming star. See this movie with a crowd of Charli’s friends and collaborators, and you’ll too be in on the joke.

Amid all the barbarity for barbarity’s sake, Jonsson carries the film with a deep well of unspoken regret.

The work of everyone involved — from the sleepy performances to the crew doing an okay but never exemplary job — suggests a first draft, a sense of wanting to get the thing out and move on. At every minute of “Mercy,” you can practically hear the filmmakers saying: “Eh, it’s January. Good enough."

Caught somewhere between “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “The Wire,” this dark genre hybrid has a lot of flaws, but none of them are fatal.

Sure, the jump-scares are wild; the beatings are bananas; and at a certain point, you have to laugh. But Ben deserved better than a cage so primitive and a better owner might’ve really let him run free.

For their part, the Garrity family is asked to carry more weight with less substance, and their non-characters struggle to support the emotional burden of an intimate life-or-death journey, the destination of which is a lot sillier than it was the last time around.

If the emotions in Goodbye June are as transparently manufactured as the fake snow that falls outside of the hospital windows, they’re all bundled up in a warm blanket of truth — the truth of how loss has a gravity that can bring a family closer together if they let it.

Anaconda constricts its premise a little tighter as it moves along (if only because the absurdity ratchets up in a way that forces the film to adopt a clearer sense of itself), and there are some undeniably amusing bits of stupidity along the way.

Alas, it’s not veracity that rules in stories like The Housemaid, but the often mealy delights of Feig’s latest film are routinely thrown into sharp relief by Seyfried’s crisp performance. Motivations, emotions, and machinations might be the building blocks of this sort of housebound thriller, but a genuinely good performance? That’s what can really wipe the floor.

The trouble here has less to do with verisimilitude than engagement; this story about the power and pratfalls of emotional projection simply doesn’t inspire enough feeling for us to see much of anything on either of its two blank screens.

The sensory appeal of the technical limitations only lasts for so long. And as a feature, “Dry Leaf” does feel oh so long once there soon proves to be little variety to the bag of visual tricks over three hours.

Scarlet amounts to a frustrating waste of animating and directorial skill for the price of an excessively ordinary story.

The only people for whom this situation isn’t terrifying are us, the audience, who feel nothing but the purgatorial torpor of sitting through a movie that’s too afraid of its own concept to do anything truly provocative with it.

If You See Something remains urgent in spite of its flaws.

While the moral comes through loud and clear, that’s largely because the film’s bland depiction of slumberland isn’t a fraction as well-realized — or even as fun! — as its portrayal of the middle-class disillusionment that sends its young heroes scrambling into their subconscious’ every night.

Powell is an exceptionally promising filmmaker, but by the time he arranges all of his ducks in a row for the finale, he’s lost track as to whether Lucas is continuing the cycle of vengeance that has poisoned so much of his family, or if he’s breaking it.

Taut and well-acted as this queasy little thriller can be, its unflinching tale of corporate authoritarianism is much too streamlined to reflect the emotional truth of watching totalitarianism in motion. The result is a hollow synecdoche of today’s America that seems timely and ridiculous in equal measure.

Tucked into the melodrama of Regretting You, there is a sweet story about a mother and daughter trying to figure things out, but the reliance on their outside romances often detracts from it. That’s a shame.

The Hand That Rocks the Cradle is easily at its best whenever it digs into the art of repression — repressed feelings, repressed desires, repressed pain.

The film’s anti-patriarchal thesis is a worthy one that feels oddly undeveloped given that it’s the entire point, the actors here merely reading lines from a script as pat as a canned solicitation to swipe right.

See Fuck My Son! not because it’s good, but rather because it refuses to pretend that it isn’t bad. If only that argument were enough to convince me that it shouldn’t have been better.

The director is so eager to make a spectacle out of this scenario that Good News begins to feel as self-insistent as its characters.

Though often lethargic and listless, Is This Thing On? does stir up a vivid portrait of the New York City underground comedy milieu, even when New York City as a character feels more like the afterthought it isn’t supposed to be.

It might seem a bit showy and cheesy in its final moments, but that kind of over-the-top shock is missing from most of the rest of the film. It’s a thriller missing the thrills, and we’ll take them where we can get them.

Ultimately, The French Italian has far more to say about navigating the mundanities of a stable and pleasant relationship in your thirties than about theatre, revenge, or noisy neighbors.

Leto’s performance works because he’s so utterly believable as a soulless ghoul that it’s easy to buy into the happy-to-be-here warmth of his emergent humanity.

Most of the shorts here try to use holiday goofiness as a gateway to serious terror, but unsurprisingly struggle to make it across that hell-mouth intact; meanwhile, the sole episode that keeps a straight face and taps into some of the real fears that accompany trick-or-treating manages to become the franchise’s most genuinely upsetting short in years.

Some movies suffer because of bad timing. Shell wouldn’t be a very good movie under any circumstances, but it fares especially poorly against Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, a better and more outrageous film that deals in very similar subject matter.

The gags are fun, but like everything else they feel unfinished — the seed of a full joke that will leave you wanting more. There are laughs aplenty, and Singh is completely at ease in a starring role, selling the material even in its weaker moments.

Him asks its characters ad nauseam how far they would go to be great, but this dreadfully compromised movie never even risks enough to be good.

There are a few laughs to be found in the film, little moments of wit or weirdness, but the film is otherwise a mirthless drag rescued only by its bright leads. Maybe let them make the movie next time.

Alex Winter’s amusing but slight film is a wacky romp about intergenerational trauma and cycles of abuse, though that’s pretty obvious from any given promotional image. As crazy as the movie purports to be, there’s never an unexpected moment. Thankfully, this turns out to be less of a problem than it should be.

Despite the film’s introductory text, most of Calle Malaga could happen in any city in the world. Without Maura’s performance, there’d be no specificity to speak of.

This is a movie that would probably be really funny if you were high. The laughs are mostly dry and deadpan, depending on your closeness to and fondness for the material — in other words, very much in line with the mockumentary world of producer Christopher Guest.

In both feel and form, Nuremberg is either classic or staid, depending on your stomach for such films. All of it is necessary. None of it is new.

Eternity does what it can to leverage its heady concept into a heart-stirring tale of love and longing, but the world-building — or lack thereof — invariably gets in the way of the emotion that Freyne is hoping to generate from it.

Canoodling more than we’ve ever seen Ed and Lorraine canoodle before, Wilson and Farmiga also seem to have a blast wrapping up their portrayals in a movie clearly created with their stardom in mind.

In the end, Good Fortune left me skeptical and uneasy, wondering whether the people it depicts with such lightheartedness will only feel objectified instead.

Roofman is more of a slog than a romp, largely because of an extended 119-minute run time that still leaves many of its juiciest elements unexplored.

The devil isn’t just on the screen, it’s in the details, and Latif’s film can’t pull those together.

The film is trying quite hard to be a bracing and immersive depiction of rehabilitation’s hard toil. But “Steve” is instead a pantomime, an offhanded approximation of work that fails to convincingly show us the actual work.

If this sounds like American Sweatshop is trying to have it both ways, that’s because it is. It wants to titillate, and to judge. To show, and to tell. To enrage, and to pacify. Combined with the by-the-numbers direction and unremarkable cinematography, the overall effect is of an after-school special about how social media is bad for you — which it probably is, to be fair.

Despite promising a welcome throwback to the sort of down-and-out milieu that authors like Graham Greene once put on the map, this Lawrence Osborne adaptation winds up feeling like nothing so much as a quintessential Netflix movie: Easy to watch and impossible to care about.

It’s not a thriller, it’s not really a comedy, and it’s unlikely to start a revolution despite a cruel jolt of a final shot.

It’s an overintellectualized script that reduces its characters to broad stand-ins and mouthpieces for hot topics, bizarrely retrograde, and a few beats behind the times in interrogating both the post-#MeToo context of how assault charges are handled, reacted to, and also in untangling a tricky identity politics inquiry that brushes against race and gender issues.

Style has always been the vehicle for his substance, and while it’s easy to imagine why an overdone misstep like “Parthenope” might inspire Sorrentino to rein things in a bit for his next feature, it’s funny that said feature turned out to be the story of a man who threatens to unravel from self-doubt at the height of his power.

For all the texture of the film, which was shot in and around a New York City vibrantly retrofitted to the story’s 1998-set specifications (costumes, music, locations, the whole kit), the hammy way important beats and plot points are served up feels out of step. It doesn’t pop, at least until the film’s final act, which finally brings together Aronofsky’s disparate parts and shows an inkling of what the filmmaker was attempting to capture.

Handsomely made but tediously plotted, Kirby is more than deserving of this kind of meaty, she’s-in-every-frame role, but Night Always Comes sunsets long before we get there.

Odenkirk seems decidedly checked out: he, along with almost every other actor in the cast, approaches the material with a complete lack of energy, which can pass for an acting choice to represent Hutch’s exhaustion but slowly begins to resemble a boredom with this character.

As “First Steps” limps to its total nothing of a conclusion, it feels less like a victory than it does a total surrender. You have to walk before you can run, but at this point the MCU is back to crawling on its knees, and at this point it seems like it might be too afraid to ever stand back up again.

Before We Forget may not be in quite the same league as Guadagnino’s work, but fans of the latter will find plenty to long for here, even if the sluggish modern-day components detract from the compelling, sensitive love story they look back upon.

For a movie that’s meant to represent the birth of a brand-new cinematic universe (the DCU), James Gunn’s slight and slaphappy take on Superman doesn’t feel much like the start of anything.

The Old Guard 2 is frustratingly — if also pointedly — rushed for a movie about people who’ve been alive for eons, and it never gives any of its characters the chance to meaningfully hash out how the bonds of friendship might pull tighter as they get twisted over the course of a few hundred decades.

The “Jurassic” sequels were bad enough when they made an effort to evolve — they’re even less worth seeing now that they already come pre-fossilized.

On its own terms, “Ice Road: Vengeance” is not a terrible movie. Neeson’s mediations on finding ways to grieve without putting your entire life on hold offer more emotional depth than you’re likely to find in any direct-to-VOD action movie with “Vengeance” in its title.

A mouth-watering but utterly flavorless documentary about one of the most acclaimed sushi chefs in the world (and arguably the most famous), Matt Tyrnauer’s “Nobu” is such a fawning portrait of Nobu Matsuhisa that it feels like it should only be available to watch on a DVD sold at the gift shops in the restaurateur’s hotels.

While there’s nothing egregiously cynical about the film’s nature or design, its forensic tone belies the familiarity of its evidence, and its subject has already been too well-excavated for the sincerity of Monroe’s efforts to shake off that signature true-crime stink (the pungent stench of a once-proud medium that’s been left to rot on streaming).

Useless narrative threads and too many wasted elements give away M3GAN 2.0 as an amateur effort made by a talented horror filmmaker who has not yet mastered action’s specific visual language or skill set.

The action is hardly dull, but the sheer disconnect between the wowee zowee immediacy of the race footage and the mezzo mezzo excitement it inspires suggests that tuning out the noise isn’t as easy as Sonny Hayes might seem to think.

Elio isn’t a bad time at the theaters — it’s pretty to look at, charming enough, and frequently funny. But by shying away from investing in where its main character is coming from, the movie makes his galactic adventures feel a bit weightless.

While every scene pulls Jerry apart at the seams, “Sovereign” is too vague and scattered to chart a legible path toward his breaking point.

There’s some fun to be had in watching Echo Valley shift into a battle of wits between Moore and Gleeson, as both actors mine devious nuance from the thin gruel of a paperback thriller.

Hot Milk dribbles when it should feel crisper, less torpid, but that’s perhaps to match the inner decay of everyone onscreen, and the metastasis of the most interminable vacation ever known.

In tying its story to the saga of Daniel LaRusso, Karate Kid: Legends resorts to repeating his journey entirely, leading to a martial arts film that has limited new moves compared to what audiences have seen 40 years ago.

It’s a slight work that is too enamored with its own quirkiness to amount to much of anything at all.

While “Succession” was all about delusion, with the Roy children cluelessly thinking the family business needed them while everyone maneuvered around their childish stunts, Mountainhead is all about the cruel intentionality of men who actively choose to burn down our world and just might have the competence to do it.