Perry’s self-produced soap opera scribble is the kind of hilarious so-bad-it’s-good romp in which the man behind the curtain invites his viewers to roll their eyes.

There's nothing slick or entertaining about the crumbling existence of Pomes' unsalvageable antiheroes.

Free Guy is nothing if not a movie that wins you over in spite of your better judgment and best defenses, but its “be the change you wish to see in the world” energy feels like a micro-transactional smokescreen for a corporate monoculture that only values creativity so far as it can be used to fool us into paying for things we already own.

Maybe Ordinary Angels is so accessible to godless critics and church-going civilians alike because it focuses on a circle of hell that everyone in this country has to enter at some point, no matter what they might believe in: the American healthcare system.

The Reyes family is a fun group, and “Blue Beetle” is at its best whenever it lets them lead the way.

Eisenberg’s performance is left to affirm that art can truly happen anywhere, but when he’s offscreen it doesn’t seem to happen anywhere else.

The volatile friction between the movie’s wildly conflicting energies works as a curious backstop for this cautionary tale about not giving into grief and despair. No matter how grim things get (in life or in Ghost Lab), you never really know for sure what’s going to happen next.

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.

You don’t need to be particularly clever to know how this will all end, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be so boring as it chugs toward cookie-cutter conclusions. Idris Elba fights a lion. It’s genius. So why does “Beast” feel more like a whisper than a roar?

Like all of the best rock docs, it will make you want to listen to the band’s albums. But after the second hour has come and gone, you might decide that you’ve listened enough, after all.

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.

Where Wild Life could have been a nuanced look into how wealth and ecology collide, instead it’s merely just a celebration of these rich people doing the “right thing” with their money. But who really pays?

Damon and Affleck are low-key one of the most perfectly measured duos of the last 25 years . . . so it’s no surprise that they bounce off of each other so well here, but their natural chemistry is more pronounced in the context of a movie where everything around them feels so forced, and their characters’ grounding idiocy is more refreshing in the context of a movie that betrays that realism at every turn.

While it has a few appealing qualities, as a whole it amounts to a well-intentioned bag of missed opportunities.

The problem with this hokey courtroom drama isn’t that it says the right thing in the wrong way, the problem is that it ultimately doesn’t say anything at all.

The action scenes in Machine Gun Preacher work fine on their own, but they cheapen a work that attempts to command great importance.

The directors never quite find the right symmetry between scenes of life and art with those that uncritically glorify violence.

Lightyear is the first movie that Pixar has released in theaters since the start of the pandemic, a return to normal that would probably feel more exciting if Lightyear wasn’t also the first Pixar movie since the start of the pandemic that feels like it only belongs on Disney Plus.

If the film had focused on its set pieces and not made time for dialogue scenes, One Shot would be a helluva ride. But there’s no getting around the fact that these are cardboard characters, even by action movie standards.

Slumberland is nothing if not an exhausting roller-coaster of missed opportunities, virtually all of which stem from the film’s lack of a solid emotional foundation.

As Angie feels caught between many worlds, so does her story. A little bit teen sex romp, a little bit female friendship plug, a little bit Asian American immigrant story, Inbetween Girl has no shortage of things to say. It just needed to trim out the noise so we could hear them.

The film is too close to — and too impressed by — the simple fact of what just happened to see under the surface, or even bother to look that hard.

Anyone who’s hacked through enough “Demon Slayer” to keep pace with “Mugen Train” can surely handle what this movie has to offer. It’s the rest of us who might want to think twice.

The making-of story is well worth hunting down and can make this broadly underwhelming movie almost worth the watch.

Spry enough to sustain its wisp of an idea but too contained in both story and setting to resonate beyond its most basic thrills, Next Door is a pleasantly unfulfilled promise of a debut.

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

Vivo grows increasingly generic and forgettable as the film goes on, and the closer its furry hero gets to finding a silver lining, the more viewers wish that he never went looking for one at all.

There's an undeniable anthropological value to Allen's footage — imagine if one of David Koresh's most-trusted disciples had recorded every second of his time in the Heaven's Gate — but his film is far more compelling as an artifact than it is as a narrative.

An overstuffed espionage thriller that bites off more than it can chew and never manages to find its footing, Olivier Assayas’ Wasp Network is an exceedingly rare gaffe from one of the greatest filmmakers of the last 30 years. Even so, his restless genius can still be felt percolating below the surface and struggling to come up for air.

A blood-soaked, bone-crunching hymn to religious devotion and faith, Hacksaw Ridge doesn’t hum Mel Gibson’s favorite themes; it shouts them.

It isn’t involving enough for you to ever truly care about how these many, many problems will resolve themselves, and not funny enough for the experience to be more enjoyable.

Like so much of The Out-Laws, Brosnan and Barkin are both a little better than they need to be, and also a lot better than their material demands.

The film arrives at its last shot with a sense of purpose, but Cedar’s clumsy plotting and uncharacteristically sterile compositions suggest that he’s charted the least enjoyable route to the film’s satisfying finale.

Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon’s animated The Addams Family introduces the Addams gang to a new generation by way of a retrofitted origin story that shakily attempts to hold fast to its original charms while cramming it inside decidedly modern trappings.

It’s obvious that Robles can inspire people, but the film constantly pokes the audience with explicit reminders of this fact — including a scene where Lopez reads Anthony multiple letters written by children saying that they’re inspired by Robles — that it feels downright insulting.

Split avoids being entirely tedious thanks to McAvoy’s standout performance as he cycles through those personalities, sometimes from line to line.

By the time Apostle arrives at its big reveal, the movie has veered off on so many tangled pathways that the ending can’t resolve them all. Instead, it provides a single, ethereal image that hints at the more imaginative possibilities lurking somewhere inside this bloody mess.

Trocker’s second feature (following 2016’s “The Eremites”) never quite manages to make good on its gamesmanship and only allows itself to have any fun once it’s sure that nobody else is.

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.

In trying to squeeze a half-dozen life stories into its running time, Hands of Stone, the new film about legendary Panamanian boxer Roberto Durán, magnifies that disappointing mistake.

Flashier stuff isn’t up to task, from awkward character design (the adults are, let’s just say, crafted with less care than the kiddos) to shoehorned callbacks and an over-reliance on exposition to push story points that could stand a more artful approach. The mind-bending nature of this series doesn’t help matters. (

Once again excelling, Zellweger has much to do with the safe transition of this new Bridget, maintaining all the old quirks and sweetness, but in a believably more mature shell.

Paranormal Activity 3 hardly adds anything new to the situation; instead, it pretends to fill a gap while basically just heaping on one calculated "boo!" after the other.

The 2020 Call of the Wild isn’t all-out atrocity so much as a question mark, a formulaic adventure story spruced up with cutting-edge technology in search of a purpose.

Intentionally or not, however, Fading Gigolo actually functions as something of a statement on Allen's persona—onscreen and off—as it has been understood in the public eye. And the resulting conclusion, like the movie, is a decidedly mixed bag.

Eventually suffers from a lack of new ideas beyond its initial premise that finds the two brothers inadvertently swapping roles. Once that happens, the movie takes one bland twist after another.

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.

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.

Lone Survivor is a grotesque action movie at times impressively directed by Peter Berg that combines the brute masculinity with the ugliness of the battlefield and viscerally unsettling shock value. But it's less a depiction of courage than a brutish magnification of anger and pain, both of which it conveys a lot better than the high ground that it reaches for.

While the raw material for something twisted and operatic exists here, Leblanc is too committed to putting meters of space between herself and the material to fully absorb the viewer. The motivations for that choice, however arty, are uncertain.

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.

An uneven, intermittently thoughtful but largely preachy overview of WikiLeaks' rising influence that has less of an issue determining Assange's character than it does with telling a compelling story.

There’s a fine line between awe and tedium, and sometimes not even Chris Hemsworth is able to blur it for us.

Despicable Me 4 already feels like six episodes of just such a show, crammed into a single unwieldy, disconnected, and oddly episodic outing.

Although he races through the occasional blasts of gritty action, Roth slows things down whenever Paul corners one of the people who killed his wife, the director sinking his teeth into long torture sequences or terse dialogue scenes that are punctuated with shocking flashes of gore.

The bigger these movies become, the smaller they feel. The more aggressively they reach for greatness, the more clearly they prove that its beyond their grasp. Marvel movies don't get much better than this. The trouble is, they don't want to.

Whatever inherent value there might be in gender-flipping such a generic template is mitigated by the movie’s reluctance to seize on the unique energy that its women bring to the table.

It’s intermittently funny, mopey, and tense, sometimes totally off-base but certainly ambitious in its approach.

Renck’s film leaves [Sandler] quite literally lost in space with nowhere to go, and rather than leave us with new perspectives on space travel or marital discord or an awe-eyed curiosity about either, we leave with a shrug.

Game Over, Man! becomes to “Workaholics” what “Keanu” was to “Key & Peele” — a sporadically funny riff on a formula that worked much better in small doses. You know it’s a Netflix joint, because it almost feels designed to be half-watched in the background; an overly loud piece of muzak.

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.

Nothing about this moodily lit, dinner-party-from-hell film can compete with the real-life drama that unfolded in the middle of the Academy Awards. Or with any other home invasion thriller, for that matter.

McCarthy’s film, based on Lisa Klein’s 2006 novel of the same name, takes its best ideas (and its best performers) and traps them in a cheap narrative that would will likely rank among the worst of many Shakespearean adaptations. It’s such a good idea on paper, rendered totally inert on the screen.

The Search lacks the the credible emotions of the original and never assembles a convincing reason for its existence.

While Beliebers may be titillated by the mundane behind-the-scenes goings-on of the pop brat’s pandemic-era concert on the roof of the Beverly Hilton, there’s little else to invite in new audiences. Still, as a piece of adoring fan service, “Our World” fulfills its function.

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

Oxygen is the sort of sly exercise in cinematic anxiety that demands a certain suspension of disbelief, and earns just enough of it to entertain.

Preoccupied with the idea that a lack of self-knowledge is what makes people mysterious, Parthenope denies its namesake any real interiority, convinced that depriving us the chance to appreciate her perspective might somehow enhance her rhetorical value.

Victoria & Abdul is an otherwise benignly toothless, pleasantly glossy affair, but it does force us to confront one tricky question: When treating a subject as fraught as British imperial rule, when does a film’s benign inoffensiveness become offensive in and of itself?

This material could make for a powerful work, but Viceroy’s House is certainly not it.

The whole thing is a fairly yawn-a-rific affair until the vengeful prologue establishes a wicked role reversal, hinting at the better movie that filmmakers more interested in storytelling would have made.

Borrowing from a dozen better movies as it tries to blur the line between a forgery and a masterpiece, Capotondi’s film manages to undercut its thesis with each new stroke.

At least it aspires to mine a fresh experience from the all too familiar tedium of watching Hollywood pick a franchise dry, even if it ultimately falls well short of that goal.

Costner is fully in traditionalist mode here, painting a quote-unquote sweeping American saga that feels like an expensive miniseries compressed into feature form.

Two decades and half a dozen films later, everything that made his debut film feel fresh has now curdled like bad milk with his latest pitch black comedy Riff Raff.

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.

In a world that often rewards mediocrity where true artistic greatness is hard to come by, a work like Opus had the potential to be a defining movie of our current moment, but the film’s half-hearted swipes at celebrity culture are never sharp or incisive enough to get under the skin.

The power of the Camps’ story is hard to deny, but it would almost be impossible to make it seem more hollow.

Ultimately, “Golda” holds three firm beliefs: That Meir is a leader to admire, that Mirren is an actress to adore, and that all interactions must be reverse engineered to fit this limited scope. It makes for a superficial biopic and blinkered bit of history, but does give the venerable performer a new accent to chew on and the chance to blow some smoke.

The result is an aggravating missed opportunity to tell a story that absolutely needs to be told to an audience that needs to hear it.

What kind of picture is it? Big, certainly: IMAX-scaled, and a hefty 150 minutes even after a visibly ruthless edit. It’s clever, too — yes, the palindromic title has some narrative correlation — albeit in an exhausting, rather joyless way. As second comings go, Tenet is like witnessing a Sermon on the Mount preached by a savior who speaks exclusively in dour, drawn-out riddles. Any awe is flattened by follow-up questions.

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.

Noelle is the sort of film destined to be discarded, a cheap holiday tchotchke with no staying power.

Naked Singularity is the work of an untested filmmaker who knows how to streamline but lacks the chutzpah to swing for the fences.

As the action progresses, the film seems more concerned with the hitting beats of the story than sending its characters on an emotional journey.

A peevish and self-satisfied procedural that unravels the Dreyfus Affair with all the journalistic doggedness of “Spotlight,” but none of the same integrity.

Even in this vision (this panorama!), Lopez only goes so far when it comes to excavating her own heart and its mysteries. Perhaps that’s why she eventually kickstarts that heart with a magical pink rose, the most expected piece of romantic paraphernalia, a symbol, but not an actual story.

The King of Kings does offer a theologically accurate message that’s largely about being kind and helping the needy. If you fast-forwarded through all of the Dickens nonsense, it would make an adequate introduction for a young child looking to learn the basics of the Christian faith.

The debut feature from writer-director Vanessa Filho is a trite story about a walking disaster and the daughter caught her in path, the tedious melodrama only finding a heartbeat when it abandons the lead character and searches for change.

Rather than making his own movie, Gosling has composed a messy love letter to countless others.

It’s dull and low-energy stuff to begin with, but that a story premised on the infinite potential of a child’s imagination should end by cribbing from the most creatively bankrupt stuff of modern cinema is a perfect microcosm of how far Harold and the Purple Crayon misses the mark. Saldanha and his writers had the entire world at their disposal, and they ended up drawing a total blank.

Repetition grinds Lizzie to a halt, and the film lacks anything resembling energy, cycling through the same beats until something happens only because it has to.

As a critic who’s professionally obligated to reckon with the latest trends in Christian cinema, I have to admit that Wahlberg’s R-rated conception of godly entertainment seems almost divine when compared to the culture war militance of “God’s Not Dead” or the Sunday school hokeyness of “I Still Believe.”

While Moriarty’s novel functioned as a compelling story about two women from different backgrounds converging during a pivotal time in American history, Engler’s film turns much of its attention to Norma’s story, jettisoning the very best part of the film along the way.

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.

The film suffers enormously from its slippery grasp of history, all of its narrative thrust slipping through the cracks between fact and fiction.

Nothing connects, nothing gels, and every thread is lost.

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.