On the one hand, it’s a mediocre genre movie with a title as mundane as it is misleading. . . On the other hand, even as a muddy character study making only the weakest attempts to scare, “The Exorcis-m” is still a bigger treat for fans of “The Exorcis-t” than its recent flop sequel, “The Exorcist: Believer.”

Blindingly overlit, incoherently edited, and rife with baffling plot contrivances, the disappointing “Book Club: The Next Chapter” still manages to maintain the heart of its original story, but that only seems to be thanks to the chemistry of its central foursome.

Assisted by his playful cast, Arteta brings so much clear-eyed, character-driven comic mayhem to every scene that even the wildest script contrivances and most egregious McDonald’s product placements (one scene might as well be sponsored by the McGriddle) are graced with an actual sense of fun.

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

This franchise might not be entirely dead just yet, but its latest resurrection doesn’t make nearly enough good arguments to keep pumping life into it.

It’s an absolute slog to watch Jackman row this way and that in search of something to justify this movie’s labored metaphors.

While The Nun has some veritable scares up its sleeve, it’s also proof that sometimes the most terrifying horrors are the ones we don’t understand.

There may be fewer truly gory moments in Don’t Breathe 2 than in typical slasher fare, but they are just twisted enough to stick in the mind like a festering wound.

What follows is misdirection, flashbacks, visions, and wooden dialogue. At least the action is good, and Brown is game as ever.

Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson from Kelly Marcel's screenplay, the considerable talent behind the camera and a modicum of considerable performances yield a few undeniable guilty pleasures, but most viewers will be seeking a safe word to escape this two-hour-plus mess of half-baked excess.

Despite the focus on such a fertile period, it suffers from a meandering narrative and a jarring pace, particularly as it pushes on into his later years without bothering to age star Nicholas Hoult in the slightest.

Shotgun Wedding falls flat as any kind of explosive or endearing couples comedy, but shines in moments thanks to the women anchoring its pirate antics. Maybe the script should have stayed in 2003, but what a joy to see these timeless leading women jetting off into the sunset.

While this isn’t quite the stuff of vintage Black, it’s close enough that I wouldn’t mind seeing him crank another one out every two years for the next decade.

The situation is dire, and while Centigrade eventually spins off into some well-worn tropes and predictable twists, the strength of its clever introduction keeps it pushing forward into a satisfying end.

A film that often avoids any middle ground, making for a cut-and-dried courtroom tale that desperately wants to be anything but.

Hardy’s grotesque performance doesn’t invite any sympathy for the devil, but it hobbles him in a way that renders Scarface human.

While Earwig and the Witch is far from the ugliest film of its kind, there’s something uniquely perverse about seeing Ghibli’s signature aesthetic suffocated inside a plastic coffin and sapped of its brilliant soul; about seeing the studio’s lush green worlds replaced by lifeless backdrops, and its hyper-expressive character designs swapped out for cheap dolls so devoid of human emotion that even the little kids look Botoxed with an inch of their lives.

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.

Predominantly a failure of tone, Horns has plenty of admirable traits and yet dooms itself from the outset. It's an admirable conceit stuffed into far less subtle material.

Statham remains an appealing summer movie fixture, but sharks deserve better than this.

Those with buy-in might find themselves won over, as, on its own terms, Marcello Mio offers a heartfelt and even occasionally moving show of artistic trust and collaboration, playing as an unambiguous love note from a filmmaker to his favorite star.

Phillips struggles to find a shape for his story without having a Scorsese classic to use as a template, and while a certain degree of narrative torpor might serve “Folie à Deux” on a conceptual level, its turgid symphony of unexpected cameos, mournful cello solos, and implied sexual violence is too dissonant to appreciate even on its own terms.

The rom-com genre lives and dies on its tropes, because we love them and they’re comforting, but the lack of originality smarts here.

Cinematographer Johnny Derango helps to ensure that the film’s more prosaic moments — of which there are many — are endowed with the same ambient vitality, as the active camerawork and careful framing invite audiences to look for truth in the kind of story that tends to just shove it in your face.

No surprises here, folks; just half-hearted punchlines and unadventurous sentimentality readymade for marketplace consumption.

Like a steady hand holding a straight razor, Argento cuts through the story with clean swipes. Dark Glasses has little room for twists and turns; it holds nothing up its sleeve and asks little more of the viewer than to sit still and enjoy the ride.

It’s the kind of film that even the most devoted cinema purist should be comfortable referring to as “content.” But watching Foxx and Diaz crackle with the age-appropriate chemistry of a couple that still finds each other attractive after 15 years is a reminder that star power is still as important as ever.

Tonally, IF never finds a happy medium. Story-wise, it doesn’t bridge the gap between pure imagination and basic narrative flow. We don’t know what’s happening most of the time, and worst yet, we don’t know how to feel about it, no matter our age. That’s much more than a failure of just imagination.

A satire of sequels, remakes, and (of course) reboots that always happens to be all three of those things, Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is both a flippant look at how the nerd industry is eating itself alive, and a more sincere — if still very stupid — tale about making room for the next generation.

If there’s much about her debut that left me wishing the apple had fallen a little further from the tree, there’s also no denying that the “Unbreakable” filmmaker’s daughter has the skill to follow in her father’s footsteps, which she does here even when the material is begging her to blaze her own trail.

Second Act never recovers from its big reveal, a cataclysmic (and nearly catastrophic) piece of narrative nuttiness that derails every scene, every performance, every subsequent revelation.

Aside from not being very scary, the movie is littered with missed opportunities.

The original Planet of the Apes is a hard act to follow, and Beneath the Planet of the Apes isn’t really up to the challenge.

For a movie so intuitively captivating, so visually extravagant, it very nearly papers over all its emotional weaknesses.

A faithful adaptation that still finds the space to lean into specific cultural influences, deep history, and lovely visuals.

Destination Wedding makes the case that the two-hander isn’t dead, even if it struggles a bit when forced to come to a neat, movie-ready conclusion.

Life of the Party is proof that even the funniest actors need good material, which makes it all the more disappointing that McCarthy wrote the script with director Ben Falcone, who is also her husband.

While Grant’s film nails certain elements necessary to the genre (like casting a pair of likable, capable stars who generate some real heat), the film is also prone to falling into just as many bad habits and limp tropes synonymous with big screen romance.

The exorcism itself is the least entertaining thing about the movie, even though it eats up a sizable and unbroken chunk of the 68-minute running time.

In a movie world crowded with everyone eager to make their own special superhero stand out, this one doesn’t pack much of a punch.

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.

It’s enough to make you long for the days when blockbusters of this scale weren’t afraid to make strong choices, especially the ones about how we’re all going to die if we don’t.

The scariest aspect of The Boy is the extent to which Macneill makes it possible to sympathize with the troubled protagonist — even as its haunting final shot hints at the horrors yet to come.

In American Assassin, the violence is surprising and brutal. However, its impact is stymied by a predictable script and action sequences that feel like a watered-down version of “John Wick.”

The Son is too suffocated by the severity of its writing and the sterility of its environments for the film’s characters to grow beyond the scenarios they represent.

Perhaps the film’s Walmart approach to its action would’ve been more forgivable if the Uncharted games weren’t so frequently suffused with Spielbergian flair, just as the film’s archetypal characters may have been less underwhelming had the games not managed to establish 10 times the pathos with none of the same flesh and blood.

The mystical allure of this long-awaited "lesbian werewolf movie" turns out to have more value than the real thing.

The filmmakers’ decisive presentation is enjoyable enough as an entrée served straight to streaming.

While this film probably needed more time in the storytelling doghouse, Landry Jones’ performance is a lovely watch.

The resulting 119-minute pileup of showdowns and one-liners is an undeniably tighter, more engaging experience. It’s also a tired, conventional attempt to play by the rules, with “hold for laughs” moments shoehorned between rapid-fire action — a begrudging concession that the Marvel formula works, and a shameless attempt to replicate it.

If The Platform 2 iterates on the original idea in a way that proves this property’s franchise potential, it falls apart in almost the exact same way as the previous film, abandoning the broadly representational nature of its premise in favor of the maddeningly specific mythology of its silly non-characters.

It’s a real credit to Black’s irrepressibly unique comic energy that “A Minecraft Movie” never feels quite as hypocritical as it should.

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

Unforgettable treats this central struggle over the heart of a family in the same way that a recent Ken Watanabe character does, by surveying the battlefield and coming to a simple, definitive conclusion: “Let them fight.”

A slasher movie could be a compelling framework through which to subvert the (timeless but super Twitter-ified) temptation to reduce people to the worst thing they’ve ever done, but There’s Someone Inside Your House isn’t sharp enough to meaningfully subvert our bloodlust or eviscerate our need for blame.

For an homage boasting a far more fatal outlook than Varda’s original, it’s frustrating and kind of perverse that Blue Night should be so gentle.

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

If, for all of its godawful men, “Brimstone” has a hard time sewing its feminist fervor into anything more than a thin shawl over its bleak spectacle, this disturbingly watchable religious Western makes a solid case that hell is a place on Earth.

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.

At times, [Deutch's] performance is perhaps even too strong for the film that’s cobbled together around it, as the actress so convincingly indicates at Erica’s vibrant and complex inner life that she embarrasses the script’s feeble attempts to diagnose and solve her character.

The pace picks up when the slashing finally begins in the third act, but it’s too little, too late to get the blood going.

Unable to neatly reconcile its two narrative premises, the film loses momentum, pushing well past the brisk runtime and zippy pace this kind of material usually depends on. That overextension also affects tone, as Salvadori never quite settles on how sharp the film should be.

The film is littered with jump scares, but most of them offer up shocking twists that land with genuine payoff: the score winds up, the framing gets tighter, the shots linger for longer, and when a different film might serve up a jump scare with a giddy “oh, it was nothing!” laugh, The Prodigy delivers something truly distressing.

Eastwood remains a deeply purposeful filmmaker, and The 15:17 to Paris clearly has a plan — it builds to a riveting showdown, with a unique kind of payoff enhanced by the authenticity of its design. It’s a fascinating gamble even when it doesn’t hold together.

Lively makes off with one of her best performances ever, and one that makes an unexpected case for giving the actress a real action franchise next time around. One of contemporary cinema’s most underrated chameleons, Lively throws herself into the role with real gusto.

A handsome little biopic that’s sopping wet with the same clichés that its whiny hero so adamantly disavows, Mark Gill’s England Is Mine distills the early days of one Steven Patrick Morrissey into an anonymous coming-of-age story that — if not for its keen sense of place — could really be about any mopey white boy whose talents are dulled by torpor.

It’s a film that seemingly aims to be average, but unlike so many other remakes, it actually achieves that goal.

It feels fair to say that The Age of Disclosure makes a more serious argument for the idea that we’ve had close encounters with the third kind than any documentary that preceded it.

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.

With Vermont jokes that read like the musings of someone who’s only ever been for ski season, and the embarrassingly half-baked attempt to critique sexism by writing a kind-hearted womanizer, every stroke of Paint misses the mark. Bob Ross deserved better.

Jason Reitman’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife hits the reboot button once more, this time carrying a familial cinematic legacy. Yet with all the nostalgia packed into the picture, its own refurbished identity is slightly compromised, functioning as a mimeograph of what came before it.

The film’s paradoxical obsession with preserving the humanity of warfare is compelling enough to keep things moving even when everything around it feels bland and gray, and the po-faced goofiness of the whole endeavor — emboldened by Mikael Håfström’s (“Escape Plan”) resourceful direction — is consistent in a way that makes you want to focus on the movie’s pulpy extrapolation of Asimovian concepts instead of how it beats them into the ground.

After the wearying sameness of so many recent American features, You Can (Not) Redo is as shocking and energizing as the slap a Zen master would administer to a student.

Greedy People is consistently funny, endearingly acted, competently directed, sufficiently twisty, and more than entertaining enough to pass an afternoon when it’s too hot to go outside but too early to distract one’s self with copious amounts of football.

A strange, bifurcated tale of love and espionage, with Judi Dench stuck in a thankless role that does nothing to capitalize on her talents. The film is worse for it.

Fire Walk with Me isn’t what many wanted it to be, it’s easy to accept the film for what it is: a bracing look at incest and rape.

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.

If they can look past their own internal biases, The Mother should satisfy even the most diehard action fans, while leaving the door to some new ones.

Seance doesn’t just grow more mysterious, gory, and spiky as it goes on, it also grows more convoluted. Yes, many things can be true at once, but “Seance” might benefit from being pared to a more streamlined story.

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.

This Italian post-apocalyptic film from director Alessandro Celli angles for child soldier depravity without any of the heart.

Focusing on cultural references and social cues, About Alex fails to give us a big picture compelling enough to overlook its flaws.

Shot and directed like a sitcom episode, The Parenting runs on (good, awkward, creepy) vibes, which is probably why Parker Posey, who plays the home’s “mysterious” owner and exposition dispenser, injects energy into the film just by being her off-kilter self. . . Unfortunately, The Parenting isn’t a hangout movie where tone can reign supreme.

Spread thin between that father-son drama and the jolts intended to galvanize it, Wilson’s creaky debut underdelivers on both.

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

Co-written by John Quester, von Heinz’s script tends to operate more like a wrecking ball than a controlled demolition, but Fry and Dunham endow their scenes with a brick-by-brick specificity that brings their characters to their life — the former in spite of Edek’s general buffoonery, and the latter in spite of the humorlessness that Ruth has developed as a reaction to it.

Salt and Fire is by no means the most willfully obtuse film that Herzog has ever made — it seems as broad as a blockbuster when compared to the likes of “The Wild Blue Yonder” and “Lessons of Darkness” — but it’s the only one of his works in which his curiosity has completely eclipsed his insight.

Whereas "The Apostle" was a passionate effort for Duvall that he spent years pulling together, Wild Horses feels more like a vanity project that eschews polished storytelling for half-baked conceits.

For all of its surprising relevance, Power Rangers feels hopelessly lost in time. There is an audience for this movie, but this movie has no idea who that audience might be.

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.

In A Million Ways to Die in the West, MacFarlane loads up enough zaniness to make for a generally enjoyable mashup, particularly because the genial plot affords him a solid backdrop.

Too adult for kids, too childlike for adults, and too muddled for the motley lot of misfits and dreamers who just want to think different.

If superhero movies have unsurprisingly managed to outlive Stan Lee, a film as functional and flavorless as The Marksman suggests that Eastwoodism will die along with the man who inspired it.

It’s fun, but it’s blockbuster overkill after an already-crowded summer season.

Jordan Scott’s film, adapted from Nicholas Hogg’s novel “Tokyo Nobody” and produced by her father Ridley, isn’t quite as interesting as the towering questions that it asks. But the fact that it bothers to ask them at all puts the film in a rarified class above many of its Hollywood counterparts.

Even if the film‘s ridiculous premise is at least chuckle-inducing — and sold rather convincingly by a cast that all seems to be on the same page about how stupid it is — its convoluted MacGuffin and predictable twists ensure that no amount of expensive action sequences from director Julian Farino or genuine chemistry between Wahlberg and Berry can elevate “The Union” into something worth watching.

In practice, City of Lies is so understandably overwhelmed by the sprawling mystery at its core that it never figures out what to ask of either history or itself. Or how.