Not even a fun premise and a talking parrot sidekick can save the movie from its low budget, general lethargy, and abject lack of craft.

An immaculate case-study in how far blockbusters have fallen.

This is truly a depressing experience. It’s rare to feel such pity for a major studio movie, but watching Warcraft bend over backwards to set up a sequel is like watching a desperate paramedic apply CPR to someone who’s clearly been dead for hours.

It takes some ambitious swings and works on its own terms in fits and starts, all while not really working at all. Like the T.S. Eliot poems that inspired it, Cats is an elaborate lark.

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.

If nothing else, this accidentally hilarious, goofy train wreck of an origin story most definitely has the courage of its convictions. Alas, the film isn’t smart enough to recognize that its convictions are dumb, and it doesn’t have the goods to back them up in the first place.

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.

Game Over, Man! becomes to “Workaholics” what “Keanu” was to “Key & Peele” — a sporadically funny riff on a formula that worked much better in small doses. You know it’s a Netflix joint, because it almost feels designed to be half-watched in the background; an overly loud piece of muzak.

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.

Wiped from the eyes like so much sea-wash, his 1986 disaster Pirates is considered a rude, humiliating smear on an otherwise thematically sophisticated, if uneven body of work that, yes, occasionally courts the vulgar.

Fortunately, you don’t need to wish for better versions of the movie experience Wish Upon calls to mind; they exist, and deserve repeat viewings far more than Wish Upon deserves one.

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.

Terrible green screen, globs of digital blood, and record-scratch sound effects in place of actual jokes are only potholes along the road for a summer movie that knows what it is, and is slightly less afraid to embrace that than its previous iteration was.

Its low-key religious underpinnings — truly, no one even hauls out a Bible during the entire film — likely won’t rankle the secular set, even as Christian kids will be happy to see their worldview reflected by way of a mild crowd-pleaser. It’s hammy, it’s predictable, it’s a little silly, but what YA musical isn’t?

Wim Wenders’ 3D snoozefest The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez is not a good movie. It’s not a good movie, and at the same time, it doesn’t fail so spectacularly so to provide a compelling secondary reading.

While its bleak assessment of American intelligence operatives imbues the story with some modicum of topicality, the specifics never keep pace. The movie becomes a bland action-drama lacking the sophistication to deal with its weightier themes. As a promising endeavor hacked to pieces, the movie's fate mirrors its anti-hero's own failed ambition.

Finally, the Fifty Shades phenomenon has yielded a disarming comedy that makes this ridiculous material fun to watch.

It’s hard to be even morbidly curious, let alone excited, about any future iterations or installments of a franchise so determined to remix a million things you’ve seen before into one thing you’ll wish you’d never seen at all.

It's a compelling, even decently acted piece of schlock that breezes by at a lean 83 minutes, with enough self-awareness to know you're going to forget it the minute the lights go up.

Somehow, in a movie about finding your niche, the Smurfs are more generic and indistinguishable than ever.

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.

The movie arrives at an eye-roll inducing final twist, and hints at an inevitable sequel. But this app isn't exactly begging for an upgrade.

Call it a case of the Mondays, but this kitty needs to go way back to the drawing board.

Although he races through the occasional blasts of gritty action, Roth slows things down whenever Paul corners one of the people who killed his wife, the director sinking his teeth into long torture sequences or terse dialogue scenes that are punctuated with shocking flashes of gore.

Perhaps it’s appropriate that the 2019 version of Hellboy is busy to an exhausting degree, overloaded with apocalyptic fears, and seemingly endless in its pileup of twists. But it’s hard to read much into a movie less invested in shrewd observations than in stuffing as much lore as possible into 120 minutes.

While the film attempts to thread a tricky needle between absolute drama and wacky comedy — dramedy! — Harris’ script is actually at its best when leaning more into the story’s tougher stuff.

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.

It’s intermittently funny, mopey, and tense, sometimes totally off-base but certainly ambitious in its approach.

Amusing but almost insultingly slapdash.

Friend Request packs some fun scares and twists, but it’s a film best saved for a late-night Netflix binge when nothing better is on.

And that, perhaps, is the easiest way to explain its overarching failure: In a film built on a bestselling eight-book series, filled with all manner of magical beings (including Colin Farrell), and rich in fairy tale history, the best scene is one in which its grating narrator farts on a passerby. You didn’t see that in the “Harry Potter” films, and for good reason.

The Crow is not a waste of talent or resources; worse, it just hangs there on the screen, as undead as Eric himself.

America Latina is brief 90-minutes of blatant boredom. The twist is so easily figured out but the feature doesn’t think the audience has guessed it at all.

The more this film begs to be told from the inside out, the more Zandvliet shoots it from the outside in. It’s enough to make you wish he hadn’t shot it at all.

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

These days, it’s almost refreshing to see a big dumb garbage sequel that doesn’t have any other agend4.

Truth be told, there isn’t a single laugh — or even a knowing smile — to be found in this relentlessly stale ordeal, which does for sci-fi adventure comedies what “The Gray Man” did for action thrillers: absolutely nothing.

It’s intermittently engaging as a B-movie, but so often strives for something more that it never finds a satisfying tone.

Despite a starring turn from Sam Rockwell (whose character arc boils down to mastering a Cockney accent) and a supporting performance that should help Phoebe Fox convert a small legion of new fans, this Blue Iguana is far less evocative of yesterday’s classics than it is of today’s direct-to-VOD dreck.

It would almost be impressive how many funny people it took to make something so unfunny — the full ensemble includes Nick Kroll, Allison Tolman, Michaela Watkins and Rob Huebel — only it’s difficult to be impressed when you’re focused on how little you’re laughing.

Fans of Soman Chainani’s popular fantasy series might feel as if a giant bone bird swooped out of the sky and carried them to streaming heaven, but not even Charlize Theron’s Mad Hatter cosplay or Michelle Yeoh’s cameo as a professor of smiling will be enough to enchant a wider audience to such a painfully overworked saga of friendship.

A tasteless and incredibly undercooked serving of the internet’s stalest Creepypasta, Slender Man aspires to be for the YouTube era what “The Ring” was to the last gasps of the VHS generation...there’s one fundamental difference that sets the two movies apart: “The Ring” is good, and Slender Man is terrible.

Brian Petsos’ interminable Big Gold Brick may be a film absent even the faintest trace of purpose or momentum — its endless parade of energy-less moments connected only by the lack of life shared between them, like a daisy chain of skeletons who are all holding hands — but the writer-director sincerely deserves credit for willing his feature debut into existence.

Art can be affirmation, but affirmation cannot be art.

This super-cheap Netflix Original is so determined to satisfy the algorithm that it would lack any coherent sense of self if not for the fact that it was chiefly designed as a star vehicle for Disney Channel grad Sofia Carson — but there’s something rather stubbornly honest about the heartbeat of desperation that thrums below its Walmart veneer.

Holiday movies don’t have to be good, they just have to be comfortable, and by that regrettable standard “Daddy’s Home 2” mostly gets the job done.

The new action flick Peppermint is a rare return to form for Garner, who doles out her vigilante justice with effortless charm. Unfortunately, that’s about the only reason to see Peppermint.

There aren’t that many minutes to mess up, but the film manages to make it feel much longer. At just 86 minutes, Brahms: The Boy II should fly by, but the film lurches forward with its momentum punctuated by bad jump scares and odd flashback sequences.

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

A viewer may find themselves appreciating how the non-visual element of music allows figurative language to retain some wisp of mystery, whereas onscreen it’s made to wear its significance in blatant, artless ways.

Oliver Thompson's spellbindingly awful Welcome to Happiness isn't much worse than most first features — and, in some respects, it's far more ambitious — but this star-studded mess is the rare film that confronts you with the helplessness of watching someone self-sabotage their own work.

By the time the entire town discovers that Clint is trapped in a weird hole and Lucy has fallen for Chatwin’s Rydell White, No Stranger Than Love picks up some serious steam, balancing its bizarre tone with actual charm. Sadly, however, it’s too late to pull the production out of its own gaping void: The inability to treat its characters with respect.

So profoundly bad that it represents the worst of two entirely different mediums, Ratchet & Clank doesn't blur the line between movies and videogames so much as it flushes them both in a toilet and forces us to watch as they swirl together down the drain.

Although no one comes off looking especially good, an acceptable alternate title for the film could be "The Ugly Americans," because Mitch Glazer's script takes some of the worst stereotypes about ex-pats and blows them sky high.

From the director of “Suicide Squad” and the writer of “Victor Frankenstein” comes a fresh slice of hell that somehow represents new lows for them both — a dull and painfully derivative ordeal that that often feels like it was made just to put those earlier misfires into perspective.

It’s only 100 minutes long, but upward of 99 of those minutes are likely to be spent in silent boredom, if not irritated disbelief at being subjected to such guileless, artless nonsense.

There’s too much effort, too much time, and too much sincerity apparent behind this film to dismiss it outright. That’s what makes it frustrating, and maybe even tragic.

A repetitive slog that’s only shape or narrative momentum comes from its slow unmasking as religious propaganda.

A lukewarm soup of second-hand tropes that’s served in a portion too small to satisfy even the least discriminating thirst for slop, Infinite borrows so much from such obvious sources that it never bothers to establish an identity of its own.

As a book, Zeroville was a profound and intoxicating testament to the mythic power of images. As a movie, Zeroville is a compelling reminder to spend more time reading.

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.

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 Divide manages to transcend its numerous flaws while indulging them: No matter where it falters, the underlying purpose stays put.

Mark Cullen’s ruthlessly boring and decidedly dismal Once Upon a Time in Venice marks a new low in Willis’ still-trucking action career, one that even Cage would likely flinch at, even if it does feature an entire sequence dedicated to naked skateboarding.

If [LaBeouf's] ultimately powerless to make this film worth watching, his performance is a strong reminder that his work should never be taken for granted.

As a bad movie, Pixels is extremely dismissible. The ways in which it is bad are hardly fun to pick apart, a la "The Room;" instead, they're just banal — the deeply predictable plot, the unfunny jokes, the constant low-level sexism and occasional spikes of racism that permeate the story.

If the overlong and often tedious brawls were at least believable and well-choreographed, maybe there would be something commendable and entertaining to be derived from the experience of watching the film.

The only saving grace of Fool’s Paradise is watching Liotta do what he did best.

Saldana delivers her distractingly affected performance with greater conviction than most could muster under these circumstances, but no amount of ferocity can disguise the discrepancy between the 37-year-old actress (33 at the time of filming) and the 62-year-old woman she's playing.

If The Happytime Murders isn’t the worst movie of the summer, I tremble at the thought of whatever’s coming out next week.

If only its irony were the most painful thing about Flatliners, an artless and agonizingly boring remake of a semi-forgotten movie about the dangers of bringing things back from the dead.

It’s an unabashed freewheeling mess of CGI explosions, fast-talking strategies and shiny metal monstrosities clashing in epic battles. And it’s actually kind of fun, in an infuriating sort of way, to watch the most ridiculous Hollywood movie of the year do its thing.

Vaughn Stein’s Terminal takes a mess of dead tropes and Frankensteins them together into an crime saga that’s in desperate need of brains. And a soul. And a story.

Even at a slim 95 minutes, Endless grinds on endlessly.

For all of its gimmicky appeal, Songbird is bad enough that your entire neighborhood will be able to smell it streaming onto your TV, and it gets worse faster than your nose can adjust to the stench.

A superhero film with no power and worse special effects that attempts to rewrite a story that's yet to be told effectively.

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.

A limp and lifeless historical melodrama that aspires to be the “Pearl Harbor” of the preamble to World War I and still falls well short of that ignoble goal, Joseph Ruben’s The Ottoman Lieutenant tries to snatch a love triangle from out beneath the Armenian Genocide but fails to get any of the angles right.

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.

An inoffensive, almost endearingly lame whiff of a movie that has the misfortune of arriving at a time when the superhero genre has almost returned to pre-MCU levels of popularity, this “Daredevil”-ass disaster is hilariously retrograde for a story about someone who discovers that she can see a few seconds into the future.

A generous reading suggests that its vaguely feminist subtext is intentional rather than a happy accident, and to some extent it may well be, but for the most part Hell Fest simply adheres to long-established genre tropes.

It’s the cinematic equivalent of day-old champagne: the taste is almost there, but the bubbles disappeared long ago.

On the surface, Last Blood may be a mess of B-movie contrivances, but like its world-weary namesake, it’s also a timely window into the vanity of violent solutions, and why brutality is only viable when fighting for a lost cause.

It’s rarely a good sign when a movie leaves you thinking: “The Renny Harlin who made ‘The Adventures of Ford Fairlane’ would never have stood for this lazy, mean-spirited crap.”

This low-rent, no-energy, seen-it-all-before genre wank left me absolutely terrified of returning to an era when micro-blogged cries for help could last for half a year and run the length of a novella.

Pacino has made a lot of movies that feel like glorified tax shelters, but this is the first that appears to have actually been shot in one.

Killing Season is like the Saturday morning cartoon version of a terrible movie: still bad, but at least colorful enough to go down easy.

It’s like the most depressing speed-dating night ever organized.

Rings never solidifies into one of kind movie, cramming a handful of possibilities into its bloated running time.

Though ultimately unsuccessful, it valiant reaches for a funky, wild critique of hedonistic sluggards wandering through society with no clear direction. But more than anything else, it delivers Keanu in his element.

Connolly’s biopic isn’t a hagiography. The problem is that it’s not really anything. This is a strange thing to say about a notorious mob boss who was locked up for murder, but John Gotti deserved better.

It’s the kind of movie that seems to suck your soul out while you’re watching it, variably crass and slapstick humor landing with a bloody thud.

An asinine and self-serving call to action that tries to hide its basic incompetence behind a veil of righteous fury.

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.

Wakefield's by-the-numbers approach to didactic storytelling relies on tons of random factoids positioned out of context to drive home his agenda.

With the bizarre way Whit and his crew talk about numbers and money, Collateral Beauty is just another story about spoiled rich people.

Even if it’s possible to understand how Music got made, and even if you accept that Sia’s blinkered approach began with good intentions, such generous allowances don’t make this tone-deaf debacle any less difficult to stomach.

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