From abandoned panic rooms to flubbed Ghostface executions, the characters make so many dumb choices that eventually we’re convinced that Williamson is frustrating us by design. Maybe in the boldest meta twist of all, the inventor of "Scream” wants to kill it off himself.

I’m hesitant to call Melania propaganda because I can’t imagine anyone watching this movie and thinking that Melania Trump comes off well. If this vapid, airless, mindless time-waster had subversive designs of being a satire about the first lady of the United States, there’s not much it would have changed.

A laughably cheesy, empty-headed follow-up that makes the mediocre prior film shine in comparison.

With its flat location visuals, B-movie gore (snakes pulled from mouths) and colorless score, The Carpenter’s Son is the uninspired origin story you never prayed for.

Stuckmann grabbing aimlessly in the last third for the kind of sickly visual elegance that is Flanagan’s deliberative style. But it only ever feels like homage, not anything organic — Stuckmann doesn’t have his mentor’s storytelling smarts, nor his flair for the underpinnings of normality that ground horror.

It’s an overload of overkill, yet as tedious and empty as the last day of a 72-hour trip to Vegas when the novelty has worn off and you just want to go home and sleep.

Everything about the story, from opening to closing dance party, feels like it was made up on an especially unimaginative playdate by bored kids who’d rather be watching TV.

Jurassic World Rebirth is a straight monster movie with zero awe or prestige. It’s incurious about its stomping creatures and barely invested in the humans either, tasking Johansson and most of the cast to play fairly similar shades of hardy and determined.

It won’t slam the door on Tesfaye’s movie ambitions, but as a bid to conquer the big screen, it’s an off-putting, see-what-sticks wallow that treats the power of cinema like a midconcert costume change.

Love Hurts is an action-romance that fizzles like a science-class volcano made of baking soda and cheese. The individual ingredients are fine: two killers on the run from punishment and their personal feelings for each other, played by Oscar winners Ke Huy Quan and Ariana DeBose. But their chemistry is all wrong.

Wolf Man is a boring body-horror endurance test that mostly takes place in one home from sundown to sunrise. There’s so much interior creaking and panting, and so little dialogue or plot, that if you closed your eyes, the projectionist could have swapped reels with a different genre of doggy style.

Every awkwardly declarative, stagy scene in “Bonhoeffer” is just a right-against-wrong equation to be answered by the title character’s virtue.

Red One is a confounding project that is clearly trying to be for all audiences (it’s weirdly kiddie-oriented, but feels more aimed at adults) and is so bad it ends up being for none.

The story of Here surrounding Richard and Margaret is relatable, entirely predictable and utterly dull.

A childish slog of hero worship.

Despite the high body count, consider this a murder of The Crow.

An insipid mishmash of trite genre tropes, Borderlands is devoid of any real edge.

What unfolds on screen over the course of three hours and one minute in Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1 can only be described as a massive boondoggle, a misguided and excruciatingly tedious cinematic experience. That Costner has promised three more installments feels like a threat.

If kids can grow out of their pretend pals, so too can horror audiences of cynical snoozes like this.

Argylle has bone-deep structural issues on a fundamental level, but it is also a failure of directorial execution from top to bottom, resulting in what has to be one of the most expensive worst movies ever made. It’s honestly fascinating — something that should be studied in a lab.

The overall flavor profile indicates that Waititi, whose own cartoonish appearance as a priest feels like an afterthought, has become bored with his signature brand of goofy uplift. Going by the unfunny self-referential gags (“The Karate Kid,” “The Matrix,” “Taken”), you’d swear the Oscar-winning filmmaker was struggling with the impulse to go full parody.

Try as it does to mash slasher and Christmas picture together into some kind of a yuletide “Scream,” “It’s a Wonderful Knife” so badly miscalculates both genres that you count down the minutes, wishing for a guardian angel to save its likable young stars from the movie they’re stuck in.

When we need the churning dread of an intimate tale of generational trauma, The Marsh King’s Daughter goes formulaic, and when we’re primed for exploitation sweats, it gets flabby.

it is a boring paint-by-numbers ghost movie, a jumble of tropes borrowed from movies like “The Ring,” and a poor facsimile of its influences.

If anything, the new stuff’s brazenness is truer in tone to what this “Cat Person” clearly wants to be: a slick, snarky, pulverizing horror-comedy rather than the compressed, low-key Mary Gaitskill-meets-Eliza Hittman cringefest that Roupenian’s delicate storytelling conjured with every peek into Margot’s drifting psyche.

Everyone here really wants to make something good and moving, but they’re all working so hard to make something out of nothing.

It’s only October but your Thanksgiving turkey has arrived. It’s called She Came to Me, a mishmash of flimsy, fanciful and far-fetched notions dressed up as a screwball New York rom-com. Given its pedigreed cast and filmmaker, the results are doubly sad.

While its ramshackle editing could be unintentionally humorous, and the obvious dialogue almost veers toward the inadvertently enjoyable, it’s the movie’s insistence on punching down that renders it more of a nightmare than a fever dream.

It’s a rom-com both com-less and rom-less.

That title, Cobweb, suggests only one cobweb, but why be stingy? This movie’s screenplay is strewn with them: dozens of dusty tendrils linking it back to older, better horror films, sometimes on a shot-by-shot basis.

A film that boasts about as much edge as a digestive biscuit (translation: oatmeal cookie) too long dunked in milky tea.

It’s as though we’re supposed to already know these people — as if The Crusades were a sequel to a movie we haven’t seen. There is some visual panache here, and scenes that show promise. But too much is missing.

Confidential Informant feels cribbed from dozens of other dirty cop stories, restaged with as little original detail as possible. It has the shape of a movie, but none of the stuff to make it move.

A lumbering Frankenstein’s monster of a B movie.

If the first film seemed indicative of much of what is wrong with movies in the streaming era, feeling inessential and disposable, a cog in a machine rather than something unique, “Extraction 2” is a snapshot of a sequel in this moment, bigger, expanded and even less necessary.

Unable to rise above this internal conflict, it’s a film that’s both dull and disposable. Though it sets up the opportunity for more interconnected franchise filmmaking, this is a beast that needs to be put down.

It opts for too many broad, clunky or far-fetched beats to move the story and its requisite emotional needs forward, rather than weave a more organic, effectively lived-in and, yes, genuinely funny tale.

This is a picture that could do with a little bit of scenery-chewing and a whole lot of sensationalism — anything that would make its middling mystery plot more exciting.

There are talented people up and down the One True Loves cast and crew list, so it really makes no sense that director Andy Fickman’s film is so off-key. Nearly every creative choice goes awry.

The filmmaking lacks the style to pull off its willful blending of fact and fantasy. At least there are the songs to enjoy.

It may be a shoddily made Skittles ad masquerading as a superhero riff, but it’s Levi’s performance that sends it into the stratosphere of cringe.

Is 65 a hall-of-fame bad movie? No, and that may be its problem. It’s just pedestrian dumb and dull.

OF: RDG is classic recent Ritchie: star-studded, snarky, and ultimately grating, lousy with weird glasses and bad accents. This thing is so slight, a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of a “Mission: Impossible” that it’s barely a movie.

Unfortunately, despite the interesting history, the film itself is a dry, scattered slog, neutered of all the thorny, contradictory details of the real story.

The moments of wit and feeling that occasionally steal into the frame. . .feel like emotional outliers in a flat, inexpressive void.

Michael Madsen brings a much-needed jolt of bad boy energy to this dreary psychodrama that squanders good performances and a sharp midfilm twist.

This is a stifling film about solipsistic people.

The overall vibe here ends up being less “good dirty fun” than “foul-mouthed teenager trying to look cool.”

It’s a film that ultimately feels less like a celebration and more like further exploitation of the star, leaving us all with much more unsettling questions about Houston’s life and legacy. Sadly, the disappointing “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” doesn’t let Whitney rest in peace.

The stars can’t save it.

It’s not funny, it’s not satirical, and it’s not worth your time, or Toni Collette’s

The teen-targeted fantasy-romance The School for Good and Evil is an exhaustingly long, overstuffed movie that probably would’ve worked better as a TV series.

Any truthful portrait of Norma Jeane Baker, the woman who became Marilyn Monroe, would of course have to reckon with the tightly coiled double helix of her art and her tragedy. But Blonde is all tragedy, and its single-mindedness isn’t just dull and punishing but also wearyingly unimaginative.

With a story this well-trodden, exhausted even, the contributions that “On the Come Up” makes are too limited. It feels dated, both in scope and in form.

It’s as though the filmmakers couldn’t decide on one complication to set the action in motion, so they picked six. That much narrative congestion keeps the story from really moving.

By the end, Maneater has walked right up to the edge of being a fun, silly, “so bad it’s good” time-killer. But after taking way too long, it never really arrives there.

Me Time is less of a movie than it is a bulletin board filled with half-thought-out premises for dirty jokes.

There’s no question writer-director Neil LaBute’s effort doesn’t catch fire.

Like even the lousiest Regency-era frippery, it has its intermittent pleasures, most of them visual. No movie that finds Dakota Johnson modeling high-waisted frocks against the Lyme Regis seawall or the lush Somersetshire countryside could be called a complete waste of time.

Director Patrick Hughes’ film should be avoided at all cost.

This movie is mostly just another brisk recounting of a much-scrutinized actor’s tragic life, coupled with some unconvincing and often confusing coverage of the conspiracy theories surrounding Monroe’s death. The results feel tawdry and shallow.

Frankly, this is the kind of soft-core smut where it’s the character development and dialogue that feel gratuitous.

Memory has a decent director in Campbell (“Casino Royale,” “Vertical Limit”) and a great cast (yes, that’s Ray Stevenson as a corrupt cop), but a crippling case of a bad script that can’t manage to make us care about any of these characters.

What starts out as a screwball “Squid Game” ultimately yields a paltry payoff in the case of “Stanleyville,” a self-consciously quirky social satire that is content to coast on its waning surface weirdness.

It feels like a bad parody, a shadow of what a film is, not an actual film itself. The color palette is a dreary mud puddle of grays and browns, and there’s no sense of space or geography. It has no weight, no heft, no texture, no color, no sense of magic or wonder in the least. The story itself has no sense of stakes or resonance, and the actors vary in affect from lifeless to dutiful to pained.

The Bubble is so charmless, joyless and jokeless — and at more than two hours so endless — that by its close you have to check your smile muscles for signs of atrophy.

It means to be about a struggling family saved by a brave dog. What most viewers will agree on is that it needed more dog.

Daniel Espinosa’s Morbius, a misbegotten, artistically bankrupt bid by writers Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless to fuse a gothic horror edge to the MCU, is the nadir of comic book cinema.

The new Cheaper by the Dozen feels less like a feature than a lengthy sitcom pilot. It’s an assembly-line product scrubbed clean of personality.

The 1974 film was a nightmare that felt too close to reality, but this is merely unpleasant — and not in a good way.

The kind of low-wattage, paint-by-numbers thriller that usually signifies a perilous turn toward the action purgatory that is cheap, direct-to-nowhere fare.

Scrolling through internet videos is generally regarded as a waste of time, but watching 100 minutes of cute animals on your phone is preferable to sitting through the laughably bad The Wolf and the Lion.

Overall pacing is flaccid and too many scenes peter out when they should punch. But perhaps the movie’s biggest infraction is that there’s hardly a chuckle in it.

The film is sanitized to the point of sterility.

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City” may reward longtime fans of the video games by returning to the series’ origins, but others will find themselves wanting to leave town, much like the movie’s characters.

Rarely has a sequel been this listless, this creatively bankrupt, or this unaware of the charm and appeal of its predecessors. Rarely has a film been this craven in appeasing an imaginary audience by mimicking what came before it and refusing to challenge itself in terms of dreaming up a new world, crafting new characters, or fashioning new stakes.

A mishmash of star power, bleakness, CGI and the cutes, it will on the one hand remind you of how charmingly adaptive Hanks can be, while the same time proving just how problematic the end of the world is as a scenario for schematic heart-tugging.

A depressing reminder of what Hollywood considers “original” material these days, “Red Notice” plays one of those self-consciously convoluted, ultimately derivative long cons that strain so hard to seem breezily insouciant they wind up wearing you out. By the end, it’s the clichés that warrant a rest.

Queenpins does nothing other than waste your time with bad wigs and poop jokes, and that is the biggest crime of all.

To very young kids who like cartoon dogs driving shiny vehicles, PAW Patrol: The Movie may be awesome. To grown-ups, it may be an aggressively under-written, 88-minute toy commercial.

The movie is just a big, empty declaration of corporate dominance, a whirling CGI tornado that — like a much stupider Tasmanian Devil — ingests, barely processes and then promptly regurgitates everything in its path. It’s Upchuck Jones.

It’s more of an action gallery, not a blood-pumping story accelerated by its flights of fury.

Casanova, Last Love, which looks at the famed 18th century philanderer’s infatuation with the supposed “one true love of his life,” is a dull and uninvolving portrait that, despite its sumptuous settings and costumes, never takes flight.

The script doesn’t reincarnate so much as it recycles, drawing freely on the nested realities of “Inception,” the free-your-mind metaphysics of “The Matrix” and the amnesiac-assassin revelations of the Jason Bourne movies. Maybe watch one of those tonight instead.

There is an enjoyable fight scene and the production design and cinematography of “Funhouse” do what they can with limited resources. One wishes the script hadn’t been the most limited resource of all.

Franco pursues this nihilistic thesis with a single-mindedness that one might call rigorous if it didn’t also feel so lazy.

Adams tries, as always, to make intelligent choices, to underplay the intensity and avoid the obvious. She works against the freneticism of the filmmaking, emphasizing Anna’s moments of groundedness and lucidity as well as the instinctive empathy that likely made her a good psychologist to begin with. By rights she should be the centerpiece of a great and genuinely Hitchcockian thriller. This one is for the birds.

If Spiral hoped to reinvent the franchise, the dull installment merely amounts to bad fan fiction.

It takes a peculiar kind of ineptitude to cast an actor as good as Michael B. Jordan and wind up with something as decidedly not good as Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse.

Thunder Force is at least an equal-opportunities bummer: It doesn’t work as a superhero adventure or a midlife reclamation movie or a mismatched buddy comedy or a family entertainment unless your aim is to disappoint all members of the family equally.

It’s clichéd, falling back on the old pulp premise of the culturally diverse “ragtag team” of tough guys and gals, barking out clumsily expositive dialogue in between unimaginative fights.

The best thing The Devil Below has going for it is its stark, remote location, which evokes the feeling of a world unto itself, hidden away in rural America. But what happens in front of this striking backdrop is too blandly familiar — and not nearly hellish enough.

This is a pretty rote slasher premise, the Utah setting aside. And Devane doesn’t do himself any favors by making his potential murder victims — a techie nerd, a social media influencer, a boorish jock, a pot-head and a prickly lesbian — so gratingly cartoonish.

Coming 2 America is the rare sequel whose title sounds identical to the original, which may be the cleverest thing about it.

We get slivers of moments and feelings described rather than experienced.

A film littered with tired tropes.

Breaking News in Yuba County lacks both the form and substance to cash in on its acting assets.

Landon struggles to generate much tension from her plot, which frequently feels contrived. The story jerks its protagonist (and its audience) through several dark and heartbreaking moments, before inevitably landing on a final confrontation with an outcome that’s not too hard to predict … and thus not all that nerve-wracking.