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.

El Chicano feels less like a cut-rate version of a comic book movie than it does an insanely over-budgeted pitch video.

Tjahjanto is a talented filmmaker with a penchant for messiness and the power to will his visions to the screen, but May the Devil Take You suggests that it might be time for him to slow down, clean up his act, and focus his abundant energy on movies that puke blood with a little more purpose.

Eventually so generic that it might as well be about anyone, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool creates a foul tension between the paint-by-numbers quality of its approach and the uniqueness of its affair.

Life of the Party is proof that even the funniest actors need good material, which makes it all the more disappointing that McCarthy wrote the script with director Ben Falcone, who is also her husband.

If the film’s story is steered by a hard-nosed focus on the large and small of what actually happened, the way Emmerich tells it feels more informed by WWII movies than it does by the war itself.

In the Tall Grass is just a few minutes old before the emptiness beneath its Escherisms creeps up into the soil, and the movie only grows more enervating with each new wrinkle Natali introduces.

If you’re a die-hard James fan, and have a high tolerance for self-congratulatory films, Shooting Stars might be worth the almost two hours of your time.

The only reason to take such a uniquely Japanese story and transplant it to Seattle is to explore how its thorny moral questions might inspire different answers in an American context, so for this retread to all but reduce America to its whiteness indicates an absence of context more than anything else. It’s the most glaring symptom of a film that utterly fails to investigate its premise.

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.

When it works, it’s never better than a loving retread of the pleasures of the first film; when it doesn’t, it’s a head-scratcher of the highest order, a film that exists to push forward a franchise that seems to have already lost its way.

While the gentle mediocrity of it all is somewhat charming at first — even with such tired material, Atkinson is still a reliably sweet and well-intentioned screen presence — it doesn’t take long for the film to wear out its welcome.

The material simply isn’t strong or self-interested enough to support a cast as rich as the one Simien assembles here, a fact made all the more obvious by the director’s natural facility for staging ensemble comedy in the face of mortal danger.

Emmerich takes the story at face value and delivers a film unlike any of his others. That is to say, a boring one.

Dreams of a Life unintentionally amounts to a mean-spirited snooze.

Ultimately, one just gets the sense that “Knox Goes Away” is unsure of what it’s supposed to be. On one hand, it leans into the chillingly gruesome; on the other, it wants to laugh at the grimness of its own scenarios.

The Curse of Bridge Hollow makes no attempt to hide the fact that its only selling point is that it takes place during the holiday audiences are currently celebrating. The combination of autumnal B-roll and nonexistent storytelling ambition results in something that’s more of an addition to your living room’s Halloween decorations than a piece of cinema that commands anyone’s attention.

And you thought fixing Sonic’s teeth would make this movie any less of a nightmare.

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.

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

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.

This franchise might not be entirely dead just yet, but its latest resurrection doesn’t make nearly enough good arguments to keep pumping life into it.

Him asks its characters ad nauseam how far they would go to be great, but this dreadfully compromised movie never even risks enough to be good.

A litany of jolt-focused dream sequences do little to escalate the tension or advance the plot, and Dutta — making his feature directorial debut — hasn’t developed a deep enough skill set for the scares to be as specific to his movie as Sam’s fears are to her immigrant experience.

While The Tobacconist is always watchable, its inability to find meaning in a mess of uncooked symbolism prevents the movie from being worthy of Freud, and from doing justice to his parting words.

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 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.

The mixed mulch bag of a movie is ultimately a disappointment in construction and conceit — a putrid desert flower that never fully blooms.