If the first film was ploddingly, airlessly faithful to its source, this follows the second in being frantically paced, chaotic and increasingly exasperating.

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

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.

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.

From beginning to end, The Six Triple Eight never trusts its audience to actually engage with the material beyond its inspiring surface, evidenced by a lengthy coda featuring title cards that literally restate the film’s plot over archival footage of the 6888th Battalion. Unsung heroes deserve better.

Yet another seemingly unassailable combination of story and filmmaker that fails to capitalize on any of its obvious promises.

It’s a simple enough conceit, but one made consistently confusing by a distinct lack of energy, excitement, and cohesive editing. Never before has 83 minutes felt so very long.

Where the previous “Aquaman” was psychedelically high on its own supply and so eager to top itself that it eventually led to Jason Momoa talking to a mythical sea monster who sounded a lot like Julie Andrews, “The Lost Kingdom” becomes more and more formulaic as it digs into its mythos, as if the movie were caught between being its own thing and being nothing at all.

Even Bautista and a genuinely cute kid co-star can’t enliven this predictable and humorless entry into a micro-genre long due for a refresher.

The result is a dull and deeply compromised movie that would rather be a mediocre crime saga than a nuanced character study, but can’t quite bring itself to commit to that choice.

Frank & Lola is scattershot from the start, and never makes a compelling case for why its story is being told.

Passengers refuses to really wrestle with the compelling questions at its core, instead opting to lean on Lawrence and Pratt’s collective charm to keep things ticking amiably along.

The scariest thing about The Devil Made Me Do It is the possibility that it will set the stage for more of this, and less of what made the franchise so compelling in the first place.

Caught in between a love story and a ghost story, the film accidentally disproves the very epigraph that opens it — “Every love story is a ghost story” — because this is one that fails to haunt or to hurt.

As with most films that are eventually suffocated by their own eccentricities, Sometimes Always Never is strange enough to hold our attention for a while.

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

Abrahamson seems so coy about the haunting of the Ayres’ house that he refuses to allow the movie’s strongest aspect to take center stage, and the perils of The Little Stranger hover aimlessly throughout the movie like a specter in search of some elusive white light.

Robert the Bruce seeks to explore the relationship between a ruler and their people, offering intimacy and personal concern as the best defense against a puppet government. Unlike its namesake, however, this cold and slapdash costume party of a film never figures out how to unite its many scattered parts.

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.

It’s not just a film that feels crafted by Mad Libs, but possibly by a middling A.I. with a soft spot for both “Notting Hill” and cinematic artifice that mistakes contrivances for drama and evolution.

El Chicano feels less like a cut-rate version of a comic book movie than it does an insanely over-budgeted pitch video.

Tjahjanto is a talented filmmaker with a penchant for messiness and the power to will his visions to the screen, but May the Devil Take You suggests that it might be time for him to slow down, clean up his act, and focus his abundant energy on movies that puke blood with a little more purpose.

Eventually so generic that it might as well be about anyone, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool creates a foul tension between the paint-by-numbers quality of its approach and the uniqueness of its affair.

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.

If the film’s story is steered by a hard-nosed focus on the large and small of what actually happened, the way Emmerich tells it feels more informed by WWII movies than it does by the war itself.

In the Tall Grass is just a few minutes old before the emptiness beneath its Escherisms creeps up into the soil, and the movie only grows more enervating with each new wrinkle Natali introduces.

If you’re a die-hard James fan, and have a high tolerance for self-congratulatory films, Shooting Stars might be worth the almost two hours of your time.

The only reason to take such a uniquely Japanese story and transplant it to Seattle is to explore how its thorny moral questions might inspire different answers in an American context, so for this retread to all but reduce America to its whiteness indicates an absence of context more than anything else. It’s the most glaring symptom of a film that utterly fails to investigate its premise.

The formulaic approach to presenting each story — which ostensibly track different people Julia herself has studied, though she never interacts with them — is predictable, static, and wholly clinical.

When it works, it’s never better than a loving retread of the pleasures of the first film; when it doesn’t, it’s a head-scratcher of the highest order, a film that exists to push forward a franchise that seems to have already lost its way.

While the gentle mediocrity of it all is somewhat charming at first — even with such tired material, Atkinson is still a reliably sweet and well-intentioned screen presence — it doesn’t take long for the film to wear out its welcome.

The material simply isn’t strong or self-interested enough to support a cast as rich as the one Simien assembles here, a fact made all the more obvious by the director’s natural facility for staging ensemble comedy in the face of mortal danger.

Emmerich takes the story at face value and delivers a film unlike any of his others. That is to say, a boring one.

Dreams of a Life unintentionally amounts to a mean-spirited snooze.

Ultimately, one just gets the sense that “Knox Goes Away” is unsure of what it’s supposed to be. On one hand, it leans into the chillingly gruesome; on the other, it wants to laugh at the grimness of its own scenarios.

The Curse of Bridge Hollow makes no attempt to hide the fact that its only selling point is that it takes place during the holiday audiences are currently celebrating. The combination of autumnal B-roll and nonexistent storytelling ambition results in something that’s more of an addition to your living room’s Halloween decorations than a piece of cinema that commands anyone’s attention.

And you thought fixing Sonic’s teeth would make this movie any less of a nightmare.

Yes, most of the laugh lines in Love Again are stale enough that even just hearing them kind of hurts your teeth, but for all of its blatant ridiculousness, this movie seldom tries to be funny.

Eschewing poeticism for an empty sense of prefab empathy, Kings is so determined to be hopeful that it forgets to be honest.

Without Remorse doesn’t understand the role it’s meant to serve as the foundation of a potential franchise. It’s a movie locked in a tedious custody battle between legacy and potential, too safe to whet appetites for what’s to come while also too sequel-oriented to stand on its own two legs.

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.

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.

A litany of jolt-focused dream sequences do little to escalate the tension or advance the plot, and Dutta — making his feature directorial debut — hasn’t developed a deep enough skill set for the scares to be as specific to his movie as Sam’s fears are to her immigrant experience.

While The Tobacconist is always watchable, its inability to find meaning in a mess of uncooked symbolism prevents the movie from being worthy of Freud, and from doing justice to his parting words.

The gags in Mother Schmuckers are consistently more gross than funny, and the movie lacks the visual wit or malformed heart required to keep blood pumping as it runs itself ragged from one joke to the next.

The studio did its best to taxidermy this mess into something presentable, but it’s hard to make a Doctor Dolittle movie if you can’t even understand the parable of the scorpion and the frog.

The mixed mulch bag of a movie is ultimately a disappointment in construction and conceit — a putrid desert flower that never fully blooms.

What value there is to be found is in its cast. Hoult and Costa are charismatic, committed, and totally capable of making it feel as though their characters really can’t see what’s coming.

A listless, half-baked, vaguely Hitchcockian thriller about a Romani Holocaust survivor.

F8 is the worst of these films since “2 Fast 2 Furious,” and it may be even worse than that. It’s the “Die Another Day” of its franchise — an empty, generic shell of its former self that disrespects its own proud heritage at every turn.

Most of the movie is spent on overfamiliar ominousness that does little to advance the plot, which is all the more frustrating because Chase has clearly assembled the ingredients for a richer horror experience than the cheap gruel he ends up serving here.

This is the undead equivalent of fast food. Some might find comfort in all these known quantities. Those looking for anything of substance would do better to wait for an upgrade.

The Machine really goes off the rails when it tries to turn itself into an action movie. The blandly violent fight sequences are only watchable because Hamill gets the occasional opportunity to show off his dorky-dad-on-cocaine schtick between punches.

Welding the flow and logic of a romantic comedy to the faintly ridiculous soul of a melodrama, the film is never clear about whose story its telling, or what it might want for them.

Wilde and Silberman seem to bank on the raw power of the film’s third-act reveal to make up for the conspicuously predictable plotting of “Don’t Worry Darling,” but that flimsy switcheroo only detracts from the film’s actual merits. Pugh’s outstanding performance and the extraordinary below-the-line craftsmanship are all impeccably rendered, but they can’t overcome the film’s rotten core concept.

Role Play is stripped of all its potential action parts, and instead is downplayed in the most basic (AKA cheap) way possible.

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.

M. Cahill’s new film about a woman who puts herself up for adoption in her early thirties is too unintentionally strange to be an effective drama, but too determined to be one to succeed as a comedy. The result is a drab retreading of well-worn beats without much interesting substance to show for the effort.

Cooper’s film does no independent research of its own, and therefore can’t possibly offer any tidbits that weren’t first reported in the pages of “Goddess.”

Lockout consists of disciplined action pastiche, but much of its thundering engine borrows from better movies.

DuVernay’s film is unable to fuse melodrama and academia into a single narrative, even with such rich source material and as fascinating a subject as Isabel Wilkerson. The only possible conclusion it invites is every film critic’s least favorite sentence: Just read the book.

Embedded in all this is a would-be message about those who trade freedom for security, the human spirit, and so on and so forth, all of which is too muddled to register with the intended force. Captive State is many things at once — or at least it’s trying to be — and every match it lights along the way is quickly snuffed out.

Godzilla’s interest in saving humanity never made much sense, but it’s this CGI creation with no dialogue that gives the film the continuity and character it lacks elsewhere. When Godzilla lights up his nuke-powered tail and lets loose his interminable scream, for just a moment, the MonsterVerse has something to offer.

As a director, Harrelson seems to be grasping at elements of far better movies. The live component, while impressively executed, rarely alters the movie in any meaningful way.

It’s almost as if Frank can’t fathom why anyone today should care about the incredible true story of how some enterprising immigrants without a nickel to their names formed a multi-billion-dollar racket that shaped a huge part of 20th century America. The tragedy of “The Alto Knights” is that Levinson can’t either.

The Protégé never even begins to cohere as a story about paying for old sins (the ending is a “huh” of the highest order), and its ostensible villain is almost a complete non-entity, but watching Q repel down the inside of a high-rise or seduce Keaton from behind the barrel of a gun makes it obvious that she knows more about selling action on screen than most Hollywood actors could ever hope to learn.

The novelty lies in the animation, a “good in theory” attempt to combine the hand-etched texture of traditional Japanese woodblock printing with the maximalist velocity of modern CGI. In keeping with franchise tradition, the results of that intriguing mash-up are close enough that you can see what Netflix was going for, but also so far short of the mark that it leaves you wishing you’d watched something else instead.

Michael Showalter’s follow-up to “The Big Sick” is as flat and algorithmic as his last rom-com was poignant and alive. The only thing the two films really have in common is a winning performance from Kumail Nanjiani.

All the promise of this premise is squandered in Lin’s adaptation, which in style and structure hews to hackneyed convention at every turn.

“Dark Fate” might close the door on the “Terminator” franchise, but every dull frame of it suggests that we’ll be trapped in that vicious back-and-forth ’til kingdom come. The good news is that you can forget about everything that’s happened since the summer of 1991.

Recouping this one amounts to nothing more than taking part in a Friedkin vanity project. Cruising has been freshly dug up for a new generation of luckily clueless viewers; but, as we know, children shouldn’t play with dead things.

Red Christmas rarely deals in gore for gore’s sake in its early going. By the end, however, it becomes such an exercise in sensibility-testing brutality that any message about the fragility of the family unit is as murky as the cinematography.

The craft on display is often as undeniable as the cast that Mackenzie has assembled to bring it all to life, but “Outlaw King” is a moribund piece of storytelling. It’s too big to be an intimate portrait of a reluctant leader, and not big enough to effectively contextualize that leader’s role in the war he was born to fight.

The fast-paced dialogue and mature-but-wholesome humor creates a general aura of clever high school rapport, aided by a lively supporting performance from comedian Ayo Edebiri (“Big Mouth”). But in trying to be everything in between, the movie ends up being not much of anything.

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.

For all of Ferrara’s reckless abandon — and Dafoe’s unimpeachable commitment to artistic exploration — Siberia becomes increasingly unable to instigate our own journeys of the soul; seldom has the collective unconscious felt so inaccessible.

Hodge sells it, just as he sells the rest of an otherwise chintzy film, a Lifetime movie-like drama that falls short of engaging with the many thorny issues it dramatizes.

It’s hard to get the same feeling of awe and epic scale that the series’ best installments can offer when you’re essentially watching ten guys squabble in a forest.

There is no reason to care about anyone in Antonio Campos’ The Devil All the Time, a sweaty, bloated mess of a movie that flushes a knockout ensemble down the drain.

Fine performances by Kate Winslet, Liam Hemsworth and Judy Davis help matters a bit, but the final product is so oddly cobbled together that the entire thing should be left hanging on the rack.

The movie is not without some small pleasures...but neither character is developed beyond broad characteristics, in spite of them occupying 95% of the film's taxing two-hour running time.

Even with Animal's various delusions of grandeur, one thing the film definitely doesn’t want to be is fun. It wants to be edgy, uncomfortable, and shocking for shock’s sake. It’s defending itself against questions no one asked and statements no one made, instead of effectively examining topics that clearly vex Vanga.

And so we’re left with a very sweaty film that strains to be funny, but one that’s also itching to argue that it’s lack of funniness is precisely the point. Some problems can’t be solved by celebrities alone, and the most subversive thing about “Don’t Look Up” is ultimately how — in its own impotent way — it weaponizes its wild star power to make that point.

The horror-comedy takes a mediocre stab at the meta jokes typical to post-“Scream” whodunnits, as well as blisters through more vague quips about American moderates than the old “Colbert Report.” They don’t land.

Sometimes clever, often clumsy, and virtually always denying Kristen Stewart the space required to breathe new life into the film’s namesake, Seberg feels off-balance from almost the moment it starts.

Here we have another spreadsheet of a movie that conceives of the human mind with the vision of a digital artist and the ethos of a corporate accountant; a film so mercilessly “relatable” that only a chatbot could ever hope to see themselves in it.

Coup! isn’t objectionable for its politics, it’s objectionable for trying to deny them. Unless its politics are just that muddled, and then Stark and Schuman have no idea at all how to express whatever it is they’re trying to say.

Both Dickey and Studi shoulder the lesser material through a charming naturalism that papers over the script’s artificiality.

Director Keith Thomas and writer Scott Teems found a way to turn the fun source material into a lethargic parenting drama that’s completely devoid of warmth.

It’s hard to understand how anyone so capable of diagnosing this problem can also believe themselves capable of solving it — so hard, in fact, that the last 20 minutes of Generation Wealth might compel you to reconsider the value of the 80 minutes before them.

Skyscraper plays out like a metaphor for diminishing returns — Johnson keeps climbing, higher and higher, until there’s nowhere left to go but down.

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.

Yes, “Abigail” was conceived as a new take on “Dracula’s Daughter.” But as the finished product stands, that infamous origin story is as invisible as a vampiric reflection. Not only is Abigail routinely sidelined by a plot that fails to trust her skills, but the ostensible underpinnings to her character are as half-assed as one-sided fang.

Forget in-jokes or fan service, this is a movie so long on cos-play (much of it brilliant) and short on character development (none of it interesting) that it requires a casual knowledge of the show’s lore to understand, let alone to enjoy.

A semi-feral drama about parental fears that isn’t remotely scary enough to catalyze those concerns into the action it puts on screen, Wolf Man runs away from its potential with its tail between its legs. “There is nothing here worth dying for,” reads the “no trespassing” sign on the childhood home where Blake inexplicably returns with his wife and daughter. There’s nothing here worth watching for either.

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

The most damning thing about Domino is that it reaffirms what all but the filmmaker’s most deluded fetishists have long since concluded: The world has caught up with Brian De Palma — his fascination with voyeurism and violence have been sublimated into the stuff of everyday life — and the guy is basically just circling the drain.

While “Jason Bourne meets Temple Grandin” might sound like an interesting idea for a studio write-off, “James Bond meets Michael Clayton meets Rain Man meets all of their friends and enemies” is a dull movie that’s too full of distractions to pay out any dividends.