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.

Instead of commenting on the vapidity of the film industry, Paul Schrader's miscast, poorly executed and utterly soulless drama is an example of the failing art form it seeks to indict. Though it has real ideas, Schrader and his team never manage to put them into action.

Space Jam: A New Legacy is as relentlessly odd as its predecessor, but its even giddier interest in corporate synergy turns it into a far more cynical outing. It will sell so many plush toys.

Neither goofy enough for camp status nor lackluster enough for extreme derision, Son of No One is just mediocre enough to be an easy target.

If this is the best Hollywood can offer these women, it’s not their fault for wanting to work. Instead, it’s on writers and studios to stop treating seniors like some sort of oddities to squeeze a few laughs out of before they croak.

Declaring Assassin’s Creed to be the best video game movie ever made is the kind of backhanded compliment that sounds like hyperbole, but the description fits the bill on both counts. Regardless of what you call this peculiar, arrestingly uninviting nonsense, the fact of the matter is that it’s the only blockbuster of 2016 that left me desperate for a sequel.

Special Correspondents is more about smirking sideways than it is laughing out loud, but it doesn't provoke much of either — it's one thing for Gervais to subdue his usual bark, but his bite has never been softer.

Blind is bad for many reasons, chief among them how it contributes to the belittling notion that representation doesn’t matter for a demographic that will never be able to see themselves on screen.

While shoving big messages inside animated offerings isn’t a new concept by any stretch of the imagination, The Nut Job 2 is uncomfortable with its most ambitious concepts, bookending them with gross-out nonsense that doesn’t seem engineered to appeal to anyone.

From the start, Whittington’s script lays everything out so schematically that there’s little reason to keep watching for the story.

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.

For most of its interminable runtime, Action Point feels like a porno that deliberately ruins the sex scenes in order to stop you from fast-forwarding through the plot.

A lazily plotted and largely generic thriller.

In the face of icky writing, limp directing, awful pacing, horrific green screen, and terrible jokes, star Joey King spent three film adaptations of Beth Reeckles’ YA novels injecting heart and humor into her Elle Evans. Still, King’s charm isn’t enough to save the series, but it’s sure as hell the lone silver lining of a franchise that finally, blessedly, is coming to an end.

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.

Art History is essentially Swanberg's version of "Zach and Miri Make a Porno," and, within the larger context of his career, just as inconsequential.

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

Cohen and Halberg manage an admirable faith in their own movie — delivering consistently delightful kills in a soapy story that doesn’t seem insecure until the very end.

There are plenty of plot devices to keep the audience on its toes, and Reynor is the epitome of a 21st century lovable antihero, so fashionable these days. He’s hard and grizzled when needed, but soft and playful as well.

Truth or Dare doesn’t aspire to groundbreaking heights, but it’s got just the right mix of laughs and scares to keep viewers engaged with the ridiculous concept they signed up to watch — and a welcome finale that suggests the game could come back for another round in the future.

While the film is understandably concerned with its titular characters — Ed Helms as straight-edge Detroit cop James Coffee, young star Terrence Little Gardenhigh as his plucky pre-teen foil Kareem — its real standouts are supporting talents like Gilpin and Taraji P. Henson, who end up holding together a film that perhaps should have focused on them instead (cutesy title to come).

Though born of an inventive idea, Camera Obscura comes out underdeveloped.

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 film's narrative is both plodding and predictable, and after the third or fourth battle sequence that leans so heavily on loud, thudding noises and swirling leather topcoats that it's impossible to see who is actually hitting who (and, moreover, why), audiences may be in danger of remembering just which "reimagined" fairy tale they're watching on screen.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 goes for the cheap laughs and the tacky attempts at pulling heartstrings.

Mute is ludicrous, but within the confines of its referential logic, also pretty cool.

The strength this film exists to celebrate is directly contradicted by the weaknesses of its storytelling.

Character development, life lessons, holiday cheer? All a distant wish.

The whole thing is a flimsy parody of an easy target-at best infectious and at worst gratingly incoherent, but uniformly original.

This leaves the viewer with two choices: reject the parasite or let it take you over. Fight it off and you’ll have a bad time; become one with it and you may achieve a kind of symbiosis.

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.

Argylle ends on another glorious high that a more serious movie would never have been able to pull off, but the flimsy and hyper-contrived fluff leading up to it is so determined to justify its own absurdity that it doesn’t leave us enough of a chance to enjoy it.

When The Hustle succeeds — in fits and starts, and with occasional big laughs — it’s wholly thanks to the dedication of Hathaway and Wilson, who throw themselves into thinly written roles (the film somehow required four screenwriters) that they spice up by bringing their A-game to material that’s beneath them.

A gritty romance that only translates some of the source material’s poetic bent to the big screen.

In aiming for a piece of atmospheric sensuality, she instead lands in an erotic no man’s land, where the dramatic but obvious filmmaking — like an orbital shot when Emmanuelle finally reaches orgasm — isn’t surprising or evocative enough to make up for the silly monologues and empty characterizations.

While there are flashes of originality in the film’s script — which quite artfully builds on Bowie’s worries with a distinctly personal edge — most of it is relatively straightforward, never as psychedelic or sophisticated as its opening shot, which finds Flynn stuck in spacesuit and unable to engage with the world around him.

Despite some major narrative missteps, the film’s bold twist on the mob drama still has a refreshing quality. Maybe The Kitchen would have fared better as a series, with more time for its potential material to simmer.

Andy Fickman’s film is bogged down with blatant exposition, courtesy of Emma’s sister Marie (Michaela Conlin), Hallmark-esque declarations amid a bland score, and more plot holes (how did Jesse survive?!) than we care to admit.

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."

The Turning announces Sigismondi as a bold and adept genre filmmaker, with an eye for detail and impeccable casting choices.

Through the use of different set ups -- such as a shootout seen only through the crack of a door, or a fight inside an elevator seen from way down the hall -- Lynch is able to add suspense to fight scenes that might otherwise seem flat.

[A] maudlin, truly terrible thriller that relies far too heavily on manipulation and narrative revision to deliver a “message” that we don’t need to be spelled out for us.

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).

Marketed as a triumphant return to form and positioned as a nostalgic corrective move for Paramount after a year of public controversy, director Kevin Williamson’s latest lands like a corporate gesture that misunderstands both the franchise he created and the horror landscape it inhabits now.

It’s almost a blessing in disguise that Proud Mary is so light on action, as Henson and Winston generate some real chemistry during the low-key moments they share together, both of them doing a fine job of negotiating between violence and vulnerability.

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

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.

If this catastrophic bore of a film isn’t game over for “Rebel Moon,” then nothing will be able to stand in her way.

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.

Cheesy without being self-aware, hobbled by rampant transphobia that the screenplay’s too dumb to address, this inane burst of campy stupidity can’t get beyond the sheer absurdity of its very existence.

The most surprising thing about Keeping Up with the Joneses isn’t that it’s actually funny, but that some touching unlikely friendships emerge amidst the outrageous action sequences.

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.

King’s Dark Tower universe is rich with cultural reference points and is always totally unpredictable, but in cutting it down to consolidate its highlights, The Dark Tower can’t even shoot the most necessary bullets straight.

Lester treats the whole thing with breezy exuberance, with colourful cinematography by legendary Carpenter, Zemeckis, and Spielberg collaborator Dean Cundey, and best of all, a killer late-disco soundtrack sweeps all your cares away.

If Sleepless feels like the microwaved leftovers of a dish that was designed to be swallowed whole, Foxx is the frozen part in the middle, the bite that makes you regret that someone tried to heat this up in the first place.

The War With Grandpa is a sluggish hodgepodge of slapstick humor that barely holds together its illogically motivated plot.

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.

A waste of a talented cast, including Brian Cox, who pulls double duty as director.

While McCarthy and Spencer do their damndest to make the family-friendly feature work — McCarthy in particular brings real texture to her charming slacker with a heart of gold, a role she’s played so many times before — Thunder Force isn’t clever enough to break new ground in the superhero milieu, nor is it silly enough to mine its material for the kind of jokes that would make it distinctive.

You don’t watch Red One so much as stare ahead at the screen. It is a movie that is playing in front of you, I can comfortably give it that much, and for one meant to summon up the Christmas spirit, there’s not a whiff of mirth from the screenplay to the production level.

The work of everyone involved — from the sleepy performances to the crew doing an okay but never exemplary job — suggests a first draft, a sense of wanting to get the thing out and move on. At every minute of “Mercy,” you can practically hear the filmmakers saying: “Eh, it’s January. Good enough."

As Alice runs from one hollow set piece to another, hitting every standard mark that a colossal movie like this must in order to pay for itself, her adventure grows less and less interesting with every turn. By the end, all that lessness is too much for the muchness to match it. Less is usually more, but when it comes to this franchise, none would be ideal.

As a holiday rom-com, however, The Merry Gentlemen is sorely lacking the sparkle and comfort that is found in so many other recent holiday movies like it.

Despite a fun premise and a well-structured first act, “The Man from Toronto” tries to do too many things at once and devolves into a strange bouillabaisse of studio comedy tropes.

Beers' screenplay manages to sustain the outrageous scenario with a string of jokes that don't take the underlying goofiness for granted. Instead, the writer-director builds on its crass foundations with constant inspired one-liners.

Even at its most entertaining, “Imaginary” has about as much staying power as the figments of imagination that give it its name. Just like your childhood imaginary friend, you’ll probably forget about it pretty quickly.

It delivers plenty of blood spattered, gut-spilling gore to satisfy genre lover’s bloodlust, even if we’ve pretty much seen everything a chainsaw can do by now.

As an intellectually empty piece of genre cinema, “Yakuza Princess” can’t even sit alongside movies that offer similarly obtuse ideas but that gain some favor through impressive spectacle.

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.

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.

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

It’s hard to tell if it’s deliberately targeting a certain demographic or just too sloppy and unsophisticated to work on anyone who’s learned to tell the difference in quality between “Cars” and “Planes.”

King can’t really play a teen anymore, and the message of non-conformity feels stale, in the YA adaptation space and beyond. This trend, much like shifting beauty standards, is already on the way out.

Perhaps writer Demos-Brown and director Kenny Leon hope to tap into our collective consciences, but it’s difficult to be moved by such hackneyed, all-too convenient storytelling and overwrought sentimentality.

It’s not that it’s bad, it’s that it never could have been good. It’s an irredeemable disaster from start to finish, an adventure that entertains only via glimpses of the adventure it should have been.

A nasty, claustrophobic display of creative ineptitude — one that’s packed with as many incomplete ideas as it is tired genre cliches — Return to Silent Hill squanders the rare opportunity to translate one of PlayStation’s most psychologically sophisticated worlds into valuable box office fuel.

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.

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.

Apatow gets a lot of shit for making scattershot comedies that run the length of David Lean epics, but the patchwork of scenes that comprise his latest have less in common with “Funny People” than they do “Movie 43,” and might just be aimless enough to make the director’s critics appreciate the flow of his earlier 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.

Somewhere in this material is the potential for tense exploration of private desires afflicting people enmeshed in extreme psychological disarray, but this sleepy drama never approaches the sophistication (or pulpy fun) that would allow it to succeed on that mission.

Song reference or not, the title alone should be a major red flag, but there’s no way to fully prepare yourself for the navel-gazing narcissism to come during the film itself.

It’s an imperfect debut, but it holds thrilling promise for what comes next.

A film about a haunted Chuck E. Cheese clone doesn’t exactly need to be complex to be watchable. But Five Nights at Freddy’s somehow misses the arcade for the flashback forest, undercutting the obvious appeal of animatronic cartoon characters as menacing slasher villains by refusing to ever become a real horror movie.

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.

Never quite sure where to put his cameras, Creevy attempts to compensate by placing them everywhere, and cutting between them as if at random.

A clever but unformed hunk of speculative science-fiction.

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 film is undone by the wobbly dynamic between its romantic leads.

For a film that treats historical realism as a primary selling point, The Ritual has no real grounds on which to assert that it’s less fantastical than any of the better exorcism movies out there.

Whipping up a proper tone for the big screen versions of E.L. James’ wildly popular novels was always going to be the films’ biggest problem, and while director James Foley might not quite nail it, wily injections of humor prove to be an unexpectedly helpful addition to the kinky franchise.

Ideally, you want your action comedies to contain compelling action sequences and funny comedy. At the very least, it’s fair to expect one of the two. Despite a semi-compelling relationship at its core, “Old Guy” isn’t nearly as funny as it thinks it is, and its set pieces are quite flat by action standards.

Tucked into the melodrama of Regretting You, there is a sweet story about a mother and daughter trying to figure things out, but the reliance on their outside romances often detracts from it. That’s a shame.

Like a Boss may preach friendship above all else, but sitting through it together would test even the strongest of ties.

It has to be said that “A Light in Darkness” is considerably better than the two movies that preceded it. Mason, in stark contrast to OG franchise director Harold Cronk, actually knows how to frame a shot like he’s ever actually seen a film before. Corbett also lends a real credibility to the scenes between Reverend Dave and his brother.

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.

Even as it makes the facile Palin-for-president case, fence-sitters will find themselves non-plussed and existing Palin haters won't budge.

It's possible that Every Thing Will Be Fine is understated to a fault, that excavating its deeper meanings is deliberately impeded rather than enabled by its gently casual vibe.