In Her Hands is happy to tout Ghafari’s status, the easy headlines about her gender and her age, even tougher stories about the price she’s paid for her work. As to what Ghafari has really done, what she really means beyond those quick hits, there’s nothing.

Dan Mazer’s film is the closest yet the series has come to a true remake, focusing on one plucky kid, two crazed robbers, and a Christmastime backdrop engineered to make anyone feel warm and fuzzy, but despite a classic blueprint, the end result is grinchy, grouchy, and just plain odd.

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.

Alas, the special effects in “Kraven the Hunter” are bad enough to completely undercut the only decent setpiece — a chase through the streets and rivers of London — in an action movie that doesn’t take advantage of its R rating until the final shootout, as the CGI devolves from “adorably cartoonish” to “done as cheaply as possible by a studio trying to cut its losses” so fast that it comes dangerously close to “Scorpion King” territory by the end (which doesn’t stop Chandor from burdening the effects with selling his story’s most pivotal moments).

A reductive documentary that’s far too focused on the big picture to really unpack the human element.

Bird Box Barcelona has strayed so far from what made the first film interesting, scary, and yes, timely! that it remains but a distant memory, as if someone pulled a blindfold over our collective cinematic memory, for no real reason whatsoever, with no answers to ever be found.

By trying to provide a little something for everyone, it ultimately offers precious little to anyone.

Singer’s Reptile, distributed by Netflix, wants to be a David Fincher procedural with Steven Soderbergh’s paranoia, but it’s a fangless homage without suspense, logic, or shame.

A handful of amusing details in desperate need of a purpose, the film spends its first half looking for a compelling reason to exist, and its second half trying to disguise the fact that it can’t find one.

Paradise Hills posits that its entire world is a shell game built on outdated ideas and a resistance to originality, but it’s the film itself that’s most woefully unable to ever go anywhere new.

It’s fitting enough that “Brave New World” is a film about (and malformed by) the pressures of restoring a diminished brand. It’s even more fitting that it’s also a film about the futility of trying to embody an ideal that the world has outgrown. Sam Wilson might find a way to step out of Steve Rogers’ shadow, but there’s still no indication that the MCU ever will.

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.

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.

For a film built on the wild concept that bonafide action bad-ass Kate Beckinsale has to wear an electrode-laden vest meant to shock her into submission before she maims everyone around her, there’s only one response: How dare this film be so lethargic.

While there are moments of committed physical comedy and a few good line deliveries, the circumstances are neither believable nor outrageous enough to add up.

The trouble with Holmes & Watson, a witless Sherlock Holmes spoof that supplies fewer laughs in its entirety than “Step Brothers” does in its deleted scenes, is that the movie can never decide how dumb it wants to be. Or, more accurately, what kind of dumb it wants to be.

As a feat of masochism, Phil is an impressive trick. As a movie, it’s a ghastly mess.

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

Art can be affirmation, but affirmation cannot be art.

Alfredson’s direction proves yawnsomely methodical, ticking off surviving plot points as though filling in some I-Spy Book of Scandinavian Crime Cliches.

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.

Rather than focusing on a cataclysmic showdown between pop culture's most famous men in tights, Zack Snyder's flashy, cacophonous follow-up to 2013's "Man of Steel" is basically one long teaser for the next installment.

This gender-swapped riff on “The Spy Who Dumped Me” was shot like a car commercial, lazily borrows from an obvious litany of actual Hollywood blockbusters, and constantly betrays the fact that it was made without any real financial interest in actually being good.

Tellingly, the most pleasurable moments in Nia DaCosta’s “The Marvels” don’t hinge on the audience having an encyclopedic knowledge of all things Marvel. . . . They’re just solid pieces of blockbuster filmmaking: charming stars (like the full-force charisma of Iman Vellani and the appealing vulnerability of Teyonah Parris), sprightly action, and zippy humor.

It’s a fitting third act for an overly safe film that only feigns at its ambition, and it leaves “The Adam Project” seeming less like a natural fit for Reynolds’ talents than an ill-fitting star vehicle for someone who’s never been less interested in stretching his limits.

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.

It’s as if “Cabrini” is trying to separate the Christian ideals of the saint’s teachings from the political realities of putting them into practice; as if it’s trying to flatter the moral principles of its conservative audience without pushing that crowd to embody them. Just scan the QR code in the credits, pay a few movie tickets forward, and let the hard work of solving anti-immigrant discrimination become somebody else’s problem.

Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby has the hallmarks of a contemporary Hollywood spectacle. It's missing the explosions, but make no mistake: Gatsby is one glitzy misfire.

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

A(nother) disposable Netflix thriller that fails to do anything with its potentially clever premise, Brad Anderson’s Fractured isn’t the first modern riff on “The Lady Vanishes” — not even close — but it’s one of the few that finds a compelling new backdrop for that Agatha Christie-esque tale of conspiracy and gaslighting.

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.

Spencer and Alush turn in the film’s best performances, and Spencer’s natural warmth and Alush’s deep charm keep The Shack hammering right along.

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

A music biopic so broad and hacky it makes “Jersey Boys” seem like “All that Jazz,” Kasi Lemmons’ well-acted but laughably trite Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody is an anonymous portrait of a singular artist — a by-the-numbers “Behind the Music” episode that needs 146 minutes to say almost nothing about a once-in-a-lifetime voice.

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.

Flatly directed by Stephen Herek from a screenplay by S.J. Roth, the movie seems to be at peace with its mediocrity. As a vehicle for WWE champ Paul "Triple H" Levesque, it's haplessly stuck on cruise control.

Trolls is a spectacularly empty fantasia of bad songs, bright lights, and militant happiness. But there’s no denying how well the film bludgeons you into submission when it gets into its groove.

Here and there, Minamata tells a bracing story of corporate malfeasance and bracing advocacy for the underclass, but even the occasional poignant observation can’t salvage a movie trying this hard to tug every heartstring at its disposal.

This sweet but vacuous exercise in suspending disbelief is an overstuffed and underwritten misfire.

The trouble with Glass isn’t that its creator sees his own reflection at every turn, or that he goes so far out of his way to contort the film into a clear parable for the many stages of his turbulent career; the trouble with Glass is that its mildly intriguing meta-textual narrative is so much richer and more compelling than the asinine story that Shyamalan tells on its surface.

The film, of course, sets up for a sequel or two, another franchise for the algorithm to chew up, more artificial entertainment to consume, another screen to watch. Next time, we humbly ask, can we get a little more human?

Set aside the contrivances and creepy plot twists, and Michael Suscy’s Every Day offers up a timely message about acceptance and the nature of love that’s especially welcome at the moment. Unfortunately, the movie falls short of doing justice to that idea.

I’m all for comedies mixing things up with deliberate intention, but “Old Dads” smacks of simple rookie mistakes that suck the air out of even Burr’s most road-tested bits; the plotting is so clumsy and erratic that it’s easier to stop following the story and just keep a running list of all the things that make Jack angry.

Had Daniels explored all the underpinnings of a horror outing as a dramatic allegory for addiction — as the film‘s opening quote (“I need forgiveness for my sins, but I also need deliverance from the power of sin…”) suggests he might — the director could have fared better than going all the way to ghosts… or is it demons?

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.

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.

The film occupies a strange no-mans-land of the sprawling Spider-Verse, not charming like the "Spider-Man" films, not funny like the "Venom" films, and certainly not technically impressive like the animated "Into the Spider-Verse."

This cut-rate military drama makes an admirable attempt to bridge the gap between the Vietnam War and the veterans it cut loose, but there’s no hope of reconciling the two in a film where each scene feels hopelessly disconnected from the ones that came before it, and every character feels cobbled together from the stiffest clichés that other war movies left for dead on the battlefield.

Jones clearly has valuable insights about being a Black woman in entertainment and has the chops to tell a captivating story. What any of that has to do with the sex industry is a total mystery.

While the movie works to depict how kindness breeds kindness, even in the cruelest of environments, it spends much of the time watching its motley collection of lost souls chase their own tails.

A humorless melodrama about a woman haunted by her past, Malignant sits somewhere between a slasher, a ghost story, and a possession flick, never fully embracing either. The result is a confusing melange of genre archetypes that lacks a clear point of view, even a surface-level stylistic one.

All the individual pieces that make “Allswell” interesting are smothered in treacle.

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 Sacrament is a missed opportunity to further expand West's pallet. Instead of twisting conventions and playing with expectations, West plays into expectations.

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.

The two plot strands are ostensibly linked by an act of indiscriminate violence, but they’re so clumsily threaded together that it just calls attention to the stitch-work.

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.

Burnt deals less with the food itself than the way it drives Adam to the brink of insanity. Yet it falls short of generating any real urgency surrounding that situation.

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.

Gans isn’t especially concerned with the outcome this coupling, instead reveling in overwrought and often bloated storytelling, lush details and some of the year’s most unnerving CGI.

What could’ve been a fun chimera that someone Frankensteined together from two wildly different films instead becomes a low-flying slog that fails to sew its mismatched parts into a monster with a personality of its own.

Robertson, a deeply talented musician and songwriter who is still working today, is a fascinating subject, but the really compelling stuff is lingering just out of the frame. Without a more well-rounded selection of voices ... or a more critical-minded director to give the film perspective, Robertson is free to obscure the bigger questions and deeper meanings, opting for self-mythologizing over self-reflection.

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

For a movie so preoccupied with the choices that people can make, Spiderhead invariably makes the least interesting ones available to it, which is a serious problem for a movie streaming on a platform whose subscribers are never far removed from the choice to be watching something else instead.

Men, Women and Children is so married to the idea of humanity's insignificance that it presents support for that argument with its very existence.

The only bright spot about the odd timing of South of Heaven is that it’s so obviously a relic of pre-pandemic Hollywood, one that hopefully will stop making lifeless thrillers full of hackneyed dialogue and formulaic action.

A gross-out comedy masquerading only in the flimsiest sense as a romance, The Wrong Missy still knows its way around genre convention, but Spindel and company seem compelled to use those expectations to tee up cruel gags that do little to advance the film’s plot or central romance.

The good news is that the story of Ben-Hur is so rock solid that not even the director of “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” can screw it up completely.

“Miss Peregrine’s” is a hollow ode to wonder and weirdness that suggests we’re running perilously low on both.

It's a shame that Guggenheim's slickly produced documentary examines such an important and fascinating story with such underwhelming results.

The question with a movie like Jigsaw, which was preceded by seven “Saw” movies and did not screen for press, isn’t “Is it good?” but rather “How bad is it?” The answer, dear reader, is “quite.” Jigsaw is quite bad.

The performances — especially Stevens’ — are silly and sincere, and the action competent enough for “Cuckoo” to have worked as pure pulp. But this film takes itself too seriously and pokes fun at its own silliness, a fatal combination.

With muted characters and a conventional structure, the movie struggles to find the fun or the spirit, humming between high notes and low notes to fall flat in the middle. While its heart is in the right place, Gay Chorus Deep South just doesn’t sing.

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

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.

Yeon eventually just throws his hands up and surrenders to the cheesy spectacle of it all with a frenzied third act that finds the entire cast in a death race to the border. It’s here — in an amusingly unmoored but ultimately exhausting sequence that looks like someone trying to recreate “Fury Road” on a Nintendo 64 — that Yeon stops being able to afford his own ambition, and the film’s budget suddenly feels like a rubber band stretched over a hula-hoop.

Between an over-reliance on woozy indie filmmaking staples — from its soft lighting to its plodding, overly delicate score — and a central family dynamic that never feels legible, the end result is more irritating than enlightening.

A terse and streamlined dad movie that’s shorter than a Sunday afternoon nap and just as exciting, Greyhound bobs across the screen like a nuanced character study that’s been entombed in a 2,000-ton iron casket and set adrift over the Atlantic.

The whiz-bang joy of the first film is wholly absent, and Despicable Me 3 limps along for nearly an hour before finding its footing.

The film’s scattershot focus — in stark contrast to the breathless immediacy of “The Rescue” — and advertorial tone diminish the sheer thrill of watching the company land an orbital class rocket for the first time.

“Mektoub, My Love” is never about anything more than its own style.

It’s always been hard not to admire Hausner’s audacity, but this time around the boldness of her storytelling finally spills into trollish provocation.

Unfortunately, the unbridled shock value isn't matched by a similar investment in other ingredients that might have made this low rent B-movie worthwhile.

No filmmaker has ever loved anything as much as Abdellatif Kechiche loves butts.

Entering boldly into this bunch is Happiest Season, a shiny holiday comedy which is by all accounts indistinguishable from the rest save for one little detail: It’s gay! Unfortunately, this tiny tweak isn’t enough to make a lasting impression on the genre, especially with a lackluster script that offers little in the way of surprise or delight.

Cruise’s undeniable star power is all that keeps “Never Go Back” from feeling like it came off a studio assembly line, though you’ll still spend most of the movie wondering if you’ve been swindled into watching a movie about Ethan Hunt’s luddite twin brother.

Overwrought with visual style but relentlessly one-note, The Front Room is willfully annoying and dubious in its purpose.

It's a shame that the divine and human elements of this story are put into competition, because either one might have flourished on its own.

There’s just something retrograde about the entire thing, a copy of a copy, a “new” story with some very light edits to the “old” one, that bogs down even the lightest touches of merriment.

While the initial perimeters of The Re-Education of Molly Singer are simple and perfect for some laughs and character growth, little of that happens here.

Forestier and Seydoux are both fantastically desperate as dead end citizens who met each other at a very dangerous time in their lives, but Desplechin fails to make full use of his actors; instead of allowing them to shade in their characters, he pummels the audience into an ambiguous state of forced sympathy.

A shocking misfire that nevertheless demonstrates the sheer confidence in his storytelling that Dolan has cultivated over a decade of movies. It’s the only possible explanation for this baffling ensemble piece, a campy (if at times inspired) burst of melodrama and ludicrous scenarios caving into each other in a spectacular mash of half-baked ideas.

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 Fallen Kingdom is at its worst when attempting topicality (the testosterone-fueled Wheatley refers to one of our heroes as a “nasty woman”) or when beefing up its crass plot.

Despite the refreshingly experiential flavor of Szumowska’s approach, her film is handcuffed by the facts of its true story, and Pam remains at such a pronounced emotional remove that it sometimes feels as if she’s only hiking up that mountain because the facts of the matter demand that she must.

The good news is that the fans of Antoine Fuqua’s “The Equalizer” — a bland and pulpy 2014 riff on the ’80s TV series of the same name — are in for more of the same. The bad news is that the rest of us are, too.

Becky is as grim and gruesome as any horror movie in recent memory, but that alone can’t save this gross-out thriller.

In trying to thread the needle between a tribute and a testimony, Pelosi in the House ultimately succeeds as neither.