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.

No, it’s not what you’re expecting, and what it is isn’t very good, either.

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.

In these trying times, you generally can’t go too wrong with Almost Love, a film where, for the most part, everyone is nice to each other and just trying to be a good person. But the third act becomes a pile-up of soap-operatic incidents that try too hard to advance plot arcs . . . that are less interesting than the spiky, perky characters at their center.

It’s a fittingly ambiguous title for a directionless film, late night fare that will be enjoyed by just as many horny men as horny teenage lesbians.

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

The full force of Union’s performance pushes the film to occasional crowd-pleasing results — give this woman a real action role, and fast — and Shaun’s ability to fight back is the one reliable element of an uneven film.

Daphne shouldn’t be this captivating, but with Woodley’s vulnerability and full-scale charm backing her up, Endings, Beginnings is able to capitalize on a seemingly thin premise.

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.

onally similar to Autumn de Wilde’s sprightly (and critically lauded) “Emma,” the first-time filmmaker’s cheeky and original debut seems to have been the victim of some messy marketing. The final product is, yes, fun and contemporary, but also suffused with the deep longing of its heroine, Anne Elliot (Dakota Johnson, game as anyone to bridge seemingly disparate tones).

The House That Jack Built is an often-horrifying, sadistic dive into a psychotic internal monologue, with intellectual detours about the nature of art in the world today, and puts considerable effort into stimulating discomfort at key moments. If you meet the work on those terms, or at least accept the challenge of wrestling with impeccable filmmaking that dances across moral barriers, it’s also possibly brilliant.

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.

If there’s a core flaw to Rhinegold, it’s that you walk out of it knowing a lot about its subject’s biography but almost nothing about who he truly is.

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

As dour in practice as it is bright-eyed in principle, Potter’s film makes an earnest but enervating attempt to erase mental boundaries.

The cheerless, choppy nature of A Bad Moms Christmas keeps each storyline feeling oddly singular, and it’s worse for it.

Loosely adapting “A Short Film About Love” into a long film about nothing, Asghar Farhadi’s cramped and tedious “Parallel Tales” forfeits the sordid humanity of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s masterpiece in exchange for the soapy meta-fiction of a meandering daydream.

If this bloody entr’acte, whose title addition works as both noun and verb, has little to offer but a jacked up body count on a bed of fan service, it serves both with panache, charging forward as an almost elemental slasher outing unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.

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

A short, patchy, straight-to-streaming piece of semi-amusing content that tries to fit several different romantic-comedies into a single movie that doesn’t have the bandwidth (or the interest) to mine any of them for major sources of romance or comedy, Claire Scanlon’s The People We Hate at the Wedding basically feels like watching a bunch of talented actors chug cheap red wine for 90 minutes.

An undeniably entertaining watch, Suburbicon stumbles when it tries to recycle effective old ingredients into something new.

Part “Game of Thrones,” part “Snatch,” and almost all bad, Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is one of those generic blockbusters that has nothing to say and no idea how to say it.

The explosions might not be as big on the streaming screen, but they’re as bonkers as ever.

"Prom Queen” blitzes through familiar pop-comic vignettes, only pausing to make its loathsome characters’ adolescent nightmares just a little bit freakier.

Everyone in Campbell’s movie — from the director all the way down to his supporting cast — deserves better than this.

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.

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.

Cannon’s take on Cinderella looks to be this year’s “Greatest Showman,” where the flaws in the narrative are nothing in comparison to the vibrancy and energy on display with each and every musical number, worth dancing for, maybe even in a pair of glass slippers.

Occasionally muddled, mostly convoluted, and yet still broadly entertaining, it’s a shame this glossy and big budget affair (you really can’t fake Egyptian pyramids like these), will only exist as a streaming pick on Apple TV+.

Both bloody and/or creepy thrills are few and far between, but striking images and standout performances keep it cohesive.

It’s an amenable enough ramble of a romantic comedy, and Witherspoon is as charming as ever in the genre in which she excels.

Despite the film’s best efforts to melt its characters into the vast sludge of superhero cinema, the union between Eddie and Venom is simply too pure to be diluted down to nothing. Thanks to Hardy, even the least of the movies in this franchise is definitely something, and it’s something that its genre may not be able to survive without.

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

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.

There’s much to enjoy in the film’s first hour, which plays out a bit like an updated “Four Weddings and a Funeral.” It’s a chatty comedy populated by amiable leads and a constellation of wacky supporting stars, with an ill-fated would-be couple at its heart.

These stories are all tragic and sad and complex, and more than worthy of innumerable explorations. Many of them are even present in this film, even if nothing about them satisfies. Consider this one a crisis of its own: a well-meaning look at a world that never goes deeper than the surface.

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.

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

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.

Even as the film’s scenes begin stacking into an unstable Jenga tower of contrivances, the turbulent father-son dynamic continues to hold strong.

Comedy has to be more than just cheap, gross gags that illicit a response steeped in revulsion. It’s got to have a heart.

It’s the cinematic equivalent of a window not worth opening. Pull the drapes closed, it’s curtains for this one.

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

There is no hero or villain, only a murky undercurrent questioning whether having a muse is inherently predatory or not. And that story is worth writing.

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.

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.

The scenes where Creech and co are outracing the Terravex death squads are playful and inventive enough to provide a glimpse of what this movie could have been if it weren’t so remarkably bad in most other respects.

Though Latimore and Cole have enough charisma to skate by, the movie lacks the originality and scrappiness of its inspiration. Trading on celebrity cameos and impressive set pieces, House Party feels like an uneven amalgam of so many studio comedies that came before it.

Taking a sturdy, mainstream premise — a big-city careerist reflecting on her life path during a trip back to the holler, in a setup that faintly echoes “Sweet Home Alabama,” among a hundred other rom-coms — and shading it with moral grays, natural light, and a more unvarnished turn from a well-known star, Leave One Day plays uncannily like a Gallic cover of a Sundance movie, gussied up and vaunted onto the international stage.

With every note as predictable as the next, the movie just blends into a discordant mess. Even Rodriguez’s smile can’t salvage this disappointing remake, but at least it provides a welcome reminder to check out the movie that inspired it.

While Carrillo-Gailey’s book was flinty and fresh, A Nice Girl Like You is more predictable than wild, more staid than sexy, but at least Hale injects some refreshing fun into the outing.

The movie stumbles through its shaggy comedy aesthetic with mixed results.

Brief moments of brilliance, including a riveting performance by Riseborough and a number of gorgeous frames, only shine with momentary appeal before the whole thing slips back into vapidity and convention.

At 108 minutes, Staten Island Summer does wear thin around its middle, and it suffers from a conclusion that just never seems to know when to wind down for good, but it's an amusing feature that just might be destined for the kind of cult affection heaped on its ilk.

The overarching problem with Mojave is that the two tones don't mesh well together, to the point where it seems Monaghan can't decide if he wants to make an ominous neo-western or a dark satire. Fortunately, the filmmaker's committed lead actors make some of the storytelling issues bearable.

Every performer conveys sincere enthusiasm to be on screen with other Filipino actors, but their joy is squandered by a cartoonish story that squanders its honest core. Easter Sunday will likely please Koy’s fanbase and possibly anyone eager to find grandma-and-kid-friendly entertainment, but everyone else might find it lacking.

The Most Hated Woman in America makes it abundantly clear that Madalyn Murray O’Hair was a riveting human being whose story is worth telling in our messed up times, but the film never has the slightest idea of what that story might be about.

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

In practice, mincing up the miniseries’ plot without losing any of its main ingredients — and even adding several new ones to the mix, including a whopper of a third act twist that turns Ruth into a martyr and all but completely erodes the movie’s emotional core — results in an undercooked stew that isn’t given the time it needs to find any real flavor of its own.

Erin Lee Carr’s Britney Vs. Spears feels like a movie not searching for scandal but a genuine desire to help, to say something to Spears, to remind us why we love her and how we failed her.

After 85 minutes of mediocrity, The Week Of finally lands on one inspired bit, and then there’s another half hour to go.

Caldwell’s Infamous, at turns nihilistic and uncomfortably believable, may be built on a thin premise — what if its star-crossed pair of criminal lovers was, as the kids say, doing it for the ‘gram? — but an appropriately nutso performance from its star and some sharp writing keep it from feeling as disposable as its worldview.

In a film where several of the major story beats fall somewhere between far-fetched and Tolkien-level fantasy, it’s impossible not to appreciate the raw human texture that Haddish brings to her under-written role.

Lohan is just fine with self-deprecating quips at her expense and looking silly while getting messy by way of physical comedy involving toilets, raccoons, and the aforementioned ski accident. Lohan shines in these moments, and the blooper reel in the credits shows that shine even extended to the set.

This bland stab at seasonal entertainment is too enamored by its own edgy revisionism to deliver on that promise, and after the 2020 that we’ve been having, everyone — young, old, Christian, and not — deserves something better in their stocking this year.

By the time it’s finally over, the only person more exposed than its star is her director.

Blitz manages to land the occasional punchline, but the smattering of decent jokes only call further attention to the film’s complete lack of rhythm.

Melissa McCarthy is hilarious in every scene of The Boss, but the movie rarely keeps up with her.

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.

You’ll get little more than a refresher course in the art of gaming from this documentary.

Dressed heavy-set, Crowe is all grimaces and frowns in disgust at everything around him. His only emotional note is all ANGRY, resulting in a parody of his own performances. It’s Crowe on overdrive, and it’s horrible.

Suicide Squad never has the courage of its convictions — it doesn’t own anything. At best, Ayer rents some pre-existing pop iconography and charges us $15 to watch him take it around the block for a spin. Forget the “Worst. Heroes. Ever.” These guys don’t even know how to be bad.

The big problem with The Goldfinch — a lifeless film that doesn’t consist of scenes so much as it does an awkward jumble of other, smaller problems stacked on top of each other like kids inside a trench coat — is that it mistakes its source material for a great work of art.

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

Life might be messy and weird and scary, but it possesses more honesty than this cinematic misery.

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.”

This is a bizarre movie that disappears up its own empty gastrointestinal tract.

Varley’s homages and nods can’t help save The Astronaut from a sudden tonal shift that takes away what makes the first half of the film interesting and brings it into redundant — and honestly, quite baffling — territory.

“The most original movie of the year?” Not quite. But sometimes, if a film is this hard to sell, perhaps that’s a sign that it shouldn’t have been made in the first place.

The pop icon’s stardom is so etched in concrete at this point that he could tell his fans just about anything and they would never stop listening. So it’s a pity that the documentary vehicle that surrounds him isn’t more forthcoming about the man beneath the wife beaters and airtight skinny jeans who sends so many swooning, but surely must, at times, feel lonely late at night like the rest of us.

The sincerity of Without Blood can’t be denied, but alas, the road to mediocrity is paved with good intentions.

Too conventional to function as shock comedy and too angry to spark spontaneous laughs, The Comedian is a film without a purpose.

In its revelations of Salinger's flaws, the documentary capably strips away the fanaticism associated with his books to create the impression of a human being.

The real crime of “Lift,” however, is not that its poised as an “Ocean’s” movie lacking all of the glamour. No, it’s that director F. Gary Gray has made some incredible films in the past and “Lift” simply isn’t one of them. This is the filmmaker behind Oscar-nominated “Straight Outta Compton.” This is the director who helmed the American remake of “The Italian Job.”

The Lost Village may be awful, but it’s not malicious. It doesn’t flaunt its mediocrity or celebrate its ugliness — it isn’t “Sing.”

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.

Equally hobbled by an amateurish script and vaguely defined characters, the movie's long list of mediocrities have an anonymous quality, as though the director has been completely reborn as a hack.

Fortunately, Green’s sequel doesn’t have much interest in frustrations; this is a movie about unbridled joy, about transposing a cartoon veneer over a bleak human world.

Some of the goofier bits from Pitch Perfect 2 has been excised, and this latest entry focuses more firmly on the bonds between the ladies after its somewhat mean-tipped predecessor, though it never hits the girl-powered highs of the original. But mostly, it’s yet another unholy mashup of disparate tones that’s never as fun or frisky as the original material.

Inconsistent tonality, uneven pacing, and far too many self-referential winks dilute this tale of unrequited love before it even has a chance to fully develop.

The in-between moments when Mine is simply a guy stuck in the desert, trying to use his own wits to save himself, is when the film is at its very best, but that’s precisely what makes Mine such a disappointment: those moments are the in-between ones, not the bulk of the film.

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.

While there’s certainly room to explore Alcott’s biggest themes in the lives of modern women, here the results feel more hammy than revelatory.

Beyond Walken and Jones’ considerable contributions, A View to a Kill also contains a robust assortment of action sequences.