The Beast Within has nothing much to offer except the domestic violence allegory at its center, so Farrell repeatedly emphasizes, spotlights, and underlines it in red, just in case anyone was unclear about what the film was really about.

It has so many things it wants to say about the state of modern America, but it finds no suitable or impactful way to say them.

Over time, Gold becomes nothing more than a masterclass in watching a great actor try to build a fortune out of dirt.

It’s believably fun, but best suited for the age group the actors embody. Any older audience member will surely roll their eyes at the spoon-fed cuteness. Yet for a 12-year-old, “Crater” just might feel like shooting for the moon.

A thin, dull, and by-the-numbers biography that fails to capture its subject’s irrepressible spirit or properly contextualize his importance.

For all of the favors that Howard does to the subject of his biopic, the director can only do so much to disguise the self-serving nature of a story that was always less about where Vance came from than it was about where he wanted to go.

The film’s threadbare story runs parallel to some compelling ideas about masculine insecurity, internalized pain, and the price of genetic privilege, but Anvari’s well-calibrated jump-scare machine is too preoccupied with gross effects, unmotivated jolts, and that strange rash that’s growing in Hammer’s left armpit to engage with any of them.

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.

Godmothered has all the pieces for at least an amiable enough production. Instead, the result is a paradoxical combination of sweet messages and dull execution, good-hearted ideas and bizarre subplots, a dull affair that very clearly sprang from a good place.

Occasionally, both Johnson and Penn — unquestionably talented performers — nearly get Daddio back on track.

Roxine Helberg’s directorial debut constantly reminds us that our world exists in complicated shades of gray, but the story that it tells is painfully black and white.

Despite the efforts of its cast, Crown Heights is too crammed and hectic to convey the immensity of the systemic evils that run through its ruptured heart.

The film is never funny, and its attempts to wink at the adults in the room are so lame that you wish they’d been left on the cutting room floor, but the deeper the film delves into Tim’s imagination the less imaginative it becomes.

After nine years and four movies, it might be time to hit the “eject” button on the “V/H/S” series once and for all.

As narrow as the universe is wide, this dull, sanitized dramatization of history’s tawdriest astronaut scandal has absolutely no idea how touching the heavens might transform a person — it only knows that it does.

There are bigger questions to ask here, but when it’s easier to roll out some simple images and wrapped-up answers, Breakthrough breaks down, happy to just explain away everything good as a divine act that no one could possibly control. Movies, however, require a bit more than just faith.

For all its vibrant, flamboyant aspects, “Dom Hemingway” is a resoundingly empty star vehicle. It gives Law a character too thinly crafted to justify his eccentricities. He acts his heart out for a role that has no heart.

Bad as this movie can be, there are far worse things in our world than a story about the value of love and kindness, and the joy of sharing those things with those who may never have known them before (kudos to Cumberbatch, who sells the climactic transformation).

It’s awful, and yet it’s almost objectively Sandler’s best movie since “Funny People.”

The film’s best moments are hollow and derivative, as borrowed from better fictions as any of the names that Alice takes for herself.

A misfire that’s as stilted as it is inert.

The lurching between genres, whether horror or comedy or heartfelt father-daughter movie, becomes increasingly transparent and frustrating as the movie tries to win our hearts back over with sentimental weepie moments in the film’s last act.

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.

Between the setting, the production design and a majority of the cast, Outlaws and Angels has the individual pieces to be something of merit. This particular revenge tale isn’t an example of incompetent filmmaking, just sadly misfocused storytelling.

It’s queer and contemporary — a decent addition to an already lengthy Christmas horror movie marathon that can edge out 1997’s “Jack Frost” but doesn’t come close to touching “Gremlins” or even “Krampus.”

It’s all an approximation of fun, mirth in tiny portions, amusement of the thinnest variety.

It’s a decent Cliff’s Notes version of the narrative with glimmers of something far more fascinating. It just feels like Broomfield missed the point on saying anything ground-breaking.

Commingling an overwrought spin on something like “The Babadook” with the kind of bland nonsense genre fans should expect from a Blumhouse flick in March, The Woman in the Yard is effectively a cinematic garage sale peddling parts from better movies.

You may not want to spend more time with these characters, but you will want to sink deeper into their world — fortunately, the forthcoming videogame will allow players to do just that. Whether the game will make retroactively make “Kingsglaive” a more engaging movie remains to be seen, but there’s certainly room for improvement.

Cathartic and outrageous as it can be to hear the juicy — but wildly unsurprising — details of how Abercrombie operated behind the scenes, Klayman’s film doesn’t ground them in any greater sociopolitical context.

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.

In the end, Denis Villeneuve was all too right: Your television isn’t big enough for the scope of his Dune, but that’s only because this lifeless spice opera is told on such a comically massive scale that a screen of any size would struggle to contain it.

Rather than forge a believable relationship between Grace and Del that stokes our interest in the future, this uneasy two-hander strings us along by raising dull questions about the past.

Tom and Jerry manages to prove that it’s possible to be stretched thin and overstuffed at the same time. It’s a specially calibrated kind of chaos not so much meant to be a movie but something designed to hold the attention of a child.

Franco clearly enjoys playing the idealistic rabble rouser, and who wouldn’t want to direct a movie so they could cast themselves as a charismatic radical? Unfortunately, watching someone else play make believe is only fun if you believe it yourself.

Though Stein’s film doesn’t exactly work up to a big surprise, it does unveil some new twists in its final act that hint at better craftsmanship than what was initially on offer.

As I watched this turgid muddle, a messy ball of nonsensical threads and worse performances, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Roger Ebert’s old maxim: No good film is too long, and no bad film is too short.

The Hand That Rocks the Cradle is easily at its best whenever it digs into the art of repression — repressed feelings, repressed desires, repressed pain.

If granted permission to bring his signature sadism to these infamously batshit characters, Roth could have delivered his “Mad Max: Fury Road.” Instead, restricted by standards that seem equally unlikely to please preteens, he was left holding a bomb.

While the decision to digitally move the dogs’ snouts when they speak English to each other is almost off-putting enough to negate the effect altogether, fur-and-blood puppies aren’t the only pleasantly old-fashioned thing about this “Lady and the Tramp.”

The rare moments when Shoplifters of the World isn’t tripping over its own cutesy fan service reveal a movie that’s listening for the real and mysterious friction that has always transmuted suicidal music into its own kind of salvation.

The 80 minutes of the movie that are set in flesh-and-blood reality can’t help but seem flat by comparison, as the thrust of the film’s story is so functionally reverse-engineered from its central gimmick that Demonic winds up feeling like a glorified proof-of-concept video that should have been exorcised of any grander ambitions.

Old Henry is a retread of the same dusty plains and macho bonds we’ve seen too many times before. It tells its slim story competently, but it does so little beyond that that it can’t help but feel mediocre.

Asking for It puts men and women in their own fringe camps, erasing the real and complex struggle for women to achieve equal rights, have their stories heard, and to see their rapists and abusers prosecuted fairly.

The Bride! is full of rage and feeling, striking an anarchic pose against oppression. But who it’s yelling at, who it’s yelling on behalf of, remains out of focus, the mystery of whatever Elsa Lanchester’s Bride might’ve been thinking left unanswered.

While too silly and open hearted to hate, Brigsby Bear begins with a premise that’s weird enough to be good, but settles for a weak trajectory that isn’t good enough to be weird.

The film’s script doesn’t have the emotional complexity to bolster emotion toward Sophie and Malcolm and their tangled predicament.

A star-studded new historical comedy that’s amusing at best, noxious at worst, and frantically self-insistent upon its own negligible entertainment value at all times as it strains to find the beauty in the mad tapestry of life? That’s right: David O. Russell is back.

For a film with so few secrets of its own to hide, Eva also offers little to see on the surface.

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.

As generic and retrograde as “Black Panther” was specific and revolutionary, Captain Marvel is a frustrating disappointment at a time when every inclusive blockbuster is fought over as though it could be the decisive battle in our never-ending culture wars.

Too robust to sink into the rhythms of a character study, but too financially limited to tell a story that matches the sweep of its director’s vision, Free State of Jones is a film divided against itself, and it cannot stand.

Amusing but almost insultingly slapdash.

Shanley, whose script for “Moonstruck” suggests that he once had a slightly tighter handle on this sort of thing, brings his play “Outside Mullingar” to the screen like he’s trying to fill every close-up with enough whimsical enchantment to reach the back row of a Broadway theater. The lethal intensity of this effect cannot be overstated; the only logical explanation for what happened here is that someone planted a bomb in Shanley’s editing bay and timed it to explode if any cut of Wild Mountain Thyme dipped below 50 kilohertz of cartoon Irish charm per minute.

Save for a few clever twists and winning performances from O’Shea Jackson Jr. and 50 Cent (née Curtis Jackson), Den of Thieves is the kind of bloated crime thriller that could have been made in any decade — which is not to call it timeless so much as way past its time.

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.

If The Mauritanian is a slight cut above so many of the pious and self-flagellating political thrillers that Hollywood churned out in the years after 9/11, that’s because it doesn’t aim to exorcise America’s guilt so much as it tries to use it as a necessary step on the road towards forgiveness.

Odenkirk seems decidedly checked out: he, along with almost every other actor in the cast, approaches the material with a complete lack of energy, which can pass for an acting choice to represent Hutch’s exhaustion but slowly begins to resemble a boredom with this character.

What we’re left with is a benign, artless, nothing of a movie that feels cobbled together with the same app-driven, gig-economy mentality that Phil is trying to disavow. Entire characters are ordered à la carte and forgotten about as soon as they leave our sight, as “Jexi” races across its story with the listlessness of someone blankly scrolling through their social media feeds.

Forget “The Terror,” here comes “The Tedium.”

Black Flies is too enraptured by the violence it finds in the margins of New York City to meaningfully interrogate the mental stress of healing it; too focused on the constant buzz of sirens and death to rescue anything more nuanced from those layers of white noise.

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

Long on voiceovers, short on specificity, and so high on the generic-brand Scorsese of it all that it glosses right over the gray areas that make its characters so tragic, Yates’ film is more focused on being easy to swallow than it is on meaningfully addressing the source of the pain.

Like most bad trips, Cary’s documentary is ultimately harmless. And like most bad trips, you realize something’s gone wrong after just a few minutes, and then start to freak out that it’s never going to end.

Elijah Bynum’s debut embracing every last cliche it can find in a perverse attempt to forge its own identity. It’s a noble effort that comes up empty. Instead of something original, we’re left with a sweaty pastiche that shares its protagonist’s desire to be all things to all people, only to wind up losing any sense of itself along the way.

The palpable sincerity behind “Back to Black” almost makes its myriad weaknesses more glaring. Everyone involved in the film approaches the late artist with love and respect, but its tawdry instincts and misguided sense of responsibility let her memory down.

A lot of jokes have been made at the director’s expense because of it, but if Lee Cronin’s “The Mummy” hadn’t been released as “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy,” it would be extremely difficult to tell who made it. Maybe the wet gore would give it away? The word “slop” doesn’t come to mind for once (bland as it is, Cronin’s film is far too effortful for that), but goop is its only defining touch.

A horror movie — even one as grounded and genre-adjacent as this — can’t hope to survive if it doesn’t even feel believable on its own fantastical terms.

The Red Sea Diving Resort is a dull and derivative film that’s too in love with its heroes to bother with its victims.

Nuestro tiempo ultimately feels like an extended couples-therapy session that we were invited to by mistake, with Reygadas playing both doctor and patient in a conflict of interest that goes unresolved.

A gleefully over-the-top celebration of silliness too in love with its outrageous characters and premise to make them gel. Scene after scene features a self-satisfied kookiness akin to spending time with a terrible comic unwilling to give up the mic.

The algorithmic results don’t reflect well on the Russo brothers’ directing chops — their monumental spandex operas seldom required and never displayed the kind of muscular imagination needed to stage Michael Bay-like fight sequences — but The Gray Man is even more damning for Netflix itself, particularly so far as it epitomizes the streamer’s penchant for producing mega-budget movies that feel like glorified deepfakes of classic multiplex fare.

A forgettable post-apocalyptic pastiche that borrows liberally from “The Terminator,” “The Last of Us,” and “A Quiet Place” without building upon those influences with any new ideas of its own, Mattson Tomlin’s Mother/Android is the sort of mediocre streaming fare that might appease genre fans for 100 minutes or so, but will almost certainly leave them pining for the days when original sci-fi movies demanded (or at least encouraged) a modicum of originality.

Though Pugh valiantly muscles through the melancholy beats of Braff’s melodrama, there are too many other characters and plot threads to allow her to do much besides heave the story forward.

We never get the chance to see what inspired Chisholm’s political fire or her personal problems — mostly, that’s left to exposition-heavy dialogue from other characters — and even the machinations and calculations behind her presidential run are left far to the side.

If nothing else, Capturing the Killer Nurse should inspire its viewers, eager for both more information and more nuance, to seek out Lindholm’s film. Fortunately, even in the seemingly endless maw of Netflix content, that better version is just a single click away.

Like its heroine and namesake, The Good House is a drama that strives to sell itself as a sly and vaguely supernatural comedy for adults. And like Hildy, the film waits far too long to relinquish that happy-go-lucky idea of itself.

A barrage of screwing with interludes does not yield a cohesive movie. Watching Sexual Chronicles of a French Family, the one-note idea grows increasingly evident, as does its absence of fresh ideas.

Inherit the Viper is at its best when keyed into the disposability of human lives, but most of the film can hardly be bothered to care about the ones it chooses to follow.

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.

Too chaste to be a “Fatal Attraction” ripoff and far too dull to approach the hammy charms of “Obsessed,” the greatest assets of Peter Sullivan’s Fatal Affair are stars Nia Long and Omar Epps. They keep this from looking and feeling like a limp Lifetime movie knockoff.

Exploiting now-familiar techniques of documentary misdirection in the service of easy suspense, Misha and the Wolves wastes a golden opportunity to interrogate the slippery nature of historical truth (and a Herzog-worthy heroine along with it), opting instead to spin a self-satisfied yarn that offers little insight into anything beyond our natural tendency to believe the most ecstatic truths.

It’s wonderful that Mendes spent the pandemic making a movie about the irreplaceable vitality of movie theaters — even going so far as to paint them as one of the final strings in what’s left of our social fabric. It would have been even better if he spent the pandemic making a movie worth seeing in one.

Cruz is radiant in her role, finding inner strength even when the script pushes Magda towards blind hope, and finding pain even when Medem insists that cancer hits with all the force of a bad night's sleep.

It’s visual soup where nothing pops or stands out. Almost nothing anyone does or says feels rooted in recognizable character traits, and despite Marsden’s most sincere efforts, he finds himself once again unable to meet Sonic’s eye-line (a production kerfuffle that would be funny, were it not also another reminder of VFX crunch).

There is absolutely an audience for this: one that will delight in watching Condon full-on battle a pool cover and cackle hearing Russell say, with his whole chest, “That pool is the best thing…THAT EVER HAPPENED TO ME.”

Despite charming performances from Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke, this saccharine romance...rings a bit false from start to finish.

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.

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.

While The Affair rather adamantly insists that life doesn’t adhere to the idealized cleanliness of modern design, this hollow adaptation also never allows itself to share in the forward-thinking courage of its architecture.

The Human Centipede III (Final Sequence) is just as repulsive, but far louder, and in color.

No one will say that Jumpin’ Jack Flash, a comedy thriller in which Whoopi plays a computer operator who gets accidentally tangled up in a silly plot involving spies and dead bodies, is the greatest film ever, let alone a passively good one.

Despite Close’s valiant efforts, everything about Four Good Days feels artificial, like face powder barely caked on over the horrors of a TV movie of the week.

A generic and diverting sequel that corrects some of the original’s biggest mistakes while also highlighting some of its more eccentric charms, “Uprising” drops us into a world that’s much richer than what the previous film left behind.

The “Jurassic” sequels were bad enough when they made an effort to evolve — they’re even less worth seeing now that they already come pre-fossilized.

A half-assed action-comedy that lacks the courage to commit to its own premise.

Director Chris Perkel, who also edited, hasn’t made a movie so much as a prolonged tribute reel with ample material to fuel a dozen lifetime achievement award ceremonies.

Visually unexceptional when it’s not plain squalid, shameless in its bid for a sequel, The Gentlemen is the film Britain deserves as it staggers backwards into the New Year under the questionable influence of an unabashedly populist leader.