The Great Wall doesn't have the lunacy that made last year's Gods of Egypt a hoot. Zhang can't kick his craving for respectability, even if he's making a movie that flips the middle finger at historicity.

The Space Between Us has admirable ambition, even though none of it works. Sure, the romance is a bust and the script is a howl. Yet every so often, Butterfield becomes infatuated with a new earth treasure...and for a moment, the film reminds us that there are things on this planet worth risking your life for.

It’s hard to spend time with Jackie, and Hackford doesn’t make a convincing case as to why we should. Instead, the script attempts to justify his bitterness by lowering the rest of the world to his level.

We’re stuck with Hancock’s vanilla saga about a soulless businessman who failed until he won big, a story that might have worked in the cynical ’90s but today has a moral obligation to say something with its two-hour running time.

Live by Night loses energy whenever Sienna Miller’s not around. She makes this world with its showdowns about machismo and machine guns seem fresh, instead of the same old antler clashes.

Edwards and the screenwriters have designed Rogue One around applause breaks for cameos and callbacks. We’ve all lost the point of the franchise. Audiences once packed theaters to gawk at the future; now, it’s to soak in the past.

If only the script measured up to the craft. La La Land gives us no reason to root for Mia and Seb’s romance, except for its blithe assurance that you will because you loved Stone and Gosling together in Crazy, Stupid, Love.

Newt lacks soul. So, too, does his movie.

When it was all over, I found myself googling Dante for my own clue as to what I’d just suffered: “He who knows most grieves most for wasted time.”

The film is polite when it should be wicked — it’s melodrama that thinks it’s saving lives, like it drank too much chardonnay and convinced itself that since Gone Girl almost got an Oscar, maybe it can, too. That tonal muck prevents the film from going in any direction.

The direction is so heavy-handed that it feels like Parker is afraid audiences don’t know slavery is wrong. Or maybe that truth is all he’s comfortable using Nat Turner to say.

When no one is making believable choices, who cares who’s human? It’s all just lines of script.

Tom Hanks is so quietly compelling that he gives the film an illusion of depth.

Fegley’s heartbreaking performance is fused onto a marshmallow. Lowery overcompensates for the darkness in the script by making everything else soft and squishy.

Yes, Nine Lives is dumb. Yes, it’s for very young kids. Yes, Lil Bub has a cameo. And yes, I giggled anyway.

Instead of focusing on the squad in the title — the chemistry the audience wants to see — Ayer doubles down on the usual DC tics: dark fights, a humdrum dependence on guns and fists, a cynical everyone-sucks grasp of politics, and sudden rain showers that people ignore. It’s moody and mindless, an angry toddler screaming over his parents’ classic rock mix of The Rolling Stones, The Animals, and a 14-year-old song from Eminem.

Bad Moms is a retro throwback that proves girl comedies can rage as hard — and as mindlessly — as any dumb all-dude giggler.

Freed from reality, Lin turns into a kid gifted a box of markers and glitter: Everything is manic and distracting. There’s a cool swoosh where the lens surfs behind the Enterprise as it accelerates through a tube, but mostly the tricks are garish.

It’s all a little slow and stoic and familiar.