Watching it feels more like being frog-marched through a wax museum than watching a movie, each milestone restaged with an off-putting, uncanny-valley resemblance and no interiority.

Like being asphyxiated in a ball pit filled with candy, the experience of watching The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is at once kaleidoscopic and nerve-wracking. It pantomimes the hallmarks of a good time, with a fast, forced cheeriness; the flashing lights, bright colors, sparkly design, and subplot-happy narrative are there to hold our attention and charm us, but they accomplish the opposite, instead making us worry about what we’re missing.

It’s familiar, it’s generic, and it feels like a test of how far we’ll lower our standards.

Like Shelley’s much-adapted creature, The Bride! is a creation of enormous ambition. It’s also an incoherent disaster — and not of the noble folly variety. It leaves you with the sinking feeling of watching someone fight their way to the front of a crowd to speak, only to realize when the spotlight is finally on them that they’re not actually sure what to say.

The first Scream skewered Hollywood cynicism. The latest embodies it.

Rosebush Pruning tries to be about something while pretending not to be about anything at all; it’s somehow both too stupid and too cool for the room.

The gap between Melania’s insistently anodyne tone and what’s happened in the year since it was filmed can become downright vertiginous, especially when Melania intones observations about her immigrant journey and how “everyone should do what they can to protect our individual rights.”

The pieces are in place — detestable villain, likable cast — but Now You Don’t can’t muster up the energy or the wit to make us care one lick about what’s happening onscreen.

This new movie suggests that Berger isn’t capable of rising above his source material or, in this case, even meeting it.

It’s when the music stops and the movie is forced to contend with the mishmash of recycled elements it’s trying to use as a plot that it really flounders.

Not scary enough to thrill, funny enough to charm, or clever enough to convince, I Know What You Did Last Summer isn’t just forgettable. It’s actively irritating.

Audiences may not have run out of enthusiasm for what the Jurassic Worlds are selling, or at least they haven’t yet, but the people tasked with making them sure are out of ideas.

While the press tour for the film has highlighted the rapport between its attractive and game stars, that doesn’t reflect the chemistry between them onscreen. There isn’t a flicker of heat between any of them. But the bigger issue is that each character is more of a threadbare idea improperly stitched together than a person.

There’s plenty of talent involved here, but the film fails to cohere on a basic level. Yes, it’s a legacyquel, says so right there in the title, but did it have to be so lazy? Especially in a world where Cobra Kai exists?

The film is one-half Sound of Metal and one-half Misery: Unfortunately, those movies already exist.

There’s something truly off-putting about The Electric State’s palette of junk and colorless branded robots. By trying to give this world such weight and grit, the filmmakers have doubled down on its ugliness.

The notion of the self-doubting hero is nothing new. Still, it might have been interesting to pursue, had it been handled here with anything resembling wit, or intelligence, or depth.

Love Hurts feels like it might have once been something, but in its current iteration it exists basically as a series of fight scenes stitched together with the thinnest of narratives. That wouldn’t be such a bad thing — indeed, it could have been a great thing — if the action was in any way inventive or engaging.

It’s a mess of a movie, and no amount of threatening huffing and puffing on Wahlberg’s part can make it worthwhile.

Kraven the Hunter explores the inner workings of a guy we didn’t care about to begin with, alongside underwhelming action sequences and a lot of scenery chewing.

The Six Triple Eight is about people who received no public recognition for their achievements at the time, but in trying to give them their belated due onscreen, this clunky excuse for a war movie ends up being more about what they endured than about what they accomplished.

It’s a bold formal choice to regard the world through a fixed point in space, and, unfortunately, it’s all in service of the biggest pile of schmaltz you’ll see this year.

Venom: The Last Dance isn’t a lark, but a smirk to let you know that while everyone may be aware of what it’s up to, you’re the sucker who bought the ticket.

Mostly, Arthur is acted upon, even when he thinks he’s seizing control — a punching bag for the world and, more importantly, for the director, who subjects the character to so many indignities that he actually stops being pitiable and starts resembling the punchline to a very long, shaggy joke. By the end of Joker: Folie à Deux, that joke feels like it’s on us.

Reagan is pure hagiography, but it’s not even one of those convincing hagiographies that pummel you into submission with compelling scenes that reinforce their subject’s greatness. Sean McNamara’s film has slick surfaces, but it’s so shallow and one-note that it actually does Ronald Reagan a disservice.

Skarsgård and Twigs have a total absence of chemistry, and while she’s adequate in what’s still basically a dead-wife role, he’s shockingly inert for someone with a career built almost entirely on characters at the intersection of creepy and hottie.

Unfortunately, Kravitz has neither the vision nor the range to deftly skewer the heinous foibles of wealthy men, let alone disrupt Tatum’s onscreen reputation.

The real problem with Jackpot! (aside from the inept direction, the unfunny script, and the irritating characters) is that the whole film indulges in a kind of misanthropy that would require a lot more thought and ballsiness to pull off.

This movie feels like it’s been shredded to bits, stripped clean of personality and character and coherence, presumably in an effort to get it short enough to sneak in some additional screening times.

Harold and the Purple Crayon makes the classic Hollywood mistake of taking a story that was lovely because of its concision and simplicity and turns it into a movie that is overly long and complicated for no good reason.

The Scargiver plays like a screensaver. Its shots are littered with lens flares and aesthetically pleasing smoke, with the contrast of golden light and planted fields alongside spacecraft and gas giants on the horizon. It would be just as evocative as a carousel of stills on an unused monitor, or maybe more so, given that the stills wouldn’t be accompanied by ponderous dialogue.

It’s a film about Amy Winehouse that just doesn’t care for Amy Winehouse much, as an artist or as a person.

The kaiju of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire don’t stand for anything but themselves. They’re just giant monsters that occasionally fight one another, which would be forgivable if the fighting in the movie weren’t so torpid.

Even Johnson has her limits, and Madame Web, one of Sony’s attempts to build out its own Spider-Verse, blows so far past them that you can practically guess which scenes were shot last based on the degree to which its star has given up.

The result is a shallow picture book populated with cutouts where people should be.

Smith is a stunt coordinator and performer, a background that’s led to some great action fare in other contexts, but in this one, produces a mess of chopped-to-bits showdowns that sometimes seem to be missing coverage.

The Bricklayer isn’t worth seeking out — it’s ideally stumbled onto on cable TV on a hungover Saturday afternoon, when there’s plenty of time to reflect on how little time a slumming Tim Blake Nelson, playing the director of the CIA, must have spent on set.

Crumbling under the weight of its own visionary grandiosity, Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon is a series of amazing-looking sets and costumes and effects looking for a story, characters, emotion — really, anything that might raise the pulse.

Poor Things is ultimately ugly — spiritually and narratively, which curdles even its aesthetic splendor.

Unfortunately, Wish manages to be none of the things it wants to be. It is neither evocative enough of the past to work as a tribute, nor irreverent or inventive or just plain funny enough to justify its constant but half-hearted callouts. It’s the ultimate cop-out — a lifeless, uninspiring mess of bland brand management.

Five Nights at Freddy’s, the movie, is the kind of hollowed-out exercise in atrociousness that pretty much forces you to mull other things, be they what you’re having for dinner, the decline of American community, or the heat death of the universe.

There are a few funny sequences . . . But the film is otherwise so sloppily assembled, and so lazy, that it frequently ends up feeling like an inadvertent parody of the underdog-sports genre it belongs to.

The scenery in My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3, largely shot in Corfu and Athens, is gorgeous but everything else about the film’s construction is an absolute mess.

Eventually, the oppressive sameness of everything becomes stultifying — which to me feels like a death blow for something so self-consciously experimental and wannabe visionary.

The film is remarkably banal. It’s a deteriorating rest stop on the road to nowhere.

The line between a movie and an advertisement has gotten increasingly blurry — movies used to be a way to sell toys, but now toys have become the sole basis of movies. But Gran Turismo, in its texturelessness, the lack of joy in its depictions of gameplay, its too-sleek race footage and void of a main character, is particularly egregious in what it’s doing.

The look of Ruby Gillman has a TV-cartoon cheapness, but its frames are cluttered with all manner of objects and elements of odd design, almost as if the filmmakers hope we won’t notice how basic and uninspired everything looks.

What makes Flamin’ Hot such a depressing offering isn’t the relative truthiness of its source material, but the qualities it holds aloft as inspiring.

It’s not spectacular enough to impress us, nor intimate enough to move us. It’s just kind of there — ready to be consumed and forgotten.

Bailey is, unfortunately, completely failed by the dull, misguided production around her. As the studio has done with other live-action remakes, Disney betrays its own lack of imagination and an essential misreading of what made its original children’s fare such a joy to audiences in the first place.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie, an almost impressively generic kiddie movie re-skinned with characters and concepts from one of the most famous video game franchises in the world, might as well have been assembled by a focus group.

65 is not good, if that even needs to be said. For something that involves almost nonstop dino action, it’s impressively unengaging, like watching a video game no one’s allowed to play. But its mangled badness is kind of compelling.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is an atrocious movie, but it’s atrocious in a way that Marvel movies rarely are.

The ending may be heavily foreshadowed, but that doesn’t make the lead-up any less exasperating or what happens any less egregious.

It’s not the first film to try to disguise its titillation at violence, in particular against women, with blunt, larger themes. But when those themes are about the structures that enable that violence, the whole enterprise just feels repellent.

Östlund’s slog of a film is exceptional in the distance it creates between the viewer and its characters and in how comfortable its attempts at causticity actually feel. It comes complete with an ending that should be bitterly dark and instead just comes across as a moue of indifference.

As the grown-up Kya, Edgar-Jones is perhaps best at conveying this young woman’s wounded inner life; that speaks to the actress’s talents. However, she never really feels like someone who emerged from this world, but rather one who was dropped into it; that speaks to the clunky filmmaking.

Its empty girl power aesthetic has the quality of an intrusive thought. Like something out of a time capsule cracked open too early, The Princess is an artifact of girlboss feminism that retains no resonance, but that’s also not distant enough to have curiosity value.

What’s ultimately so disappointing about Cha Cha Real Smooth is its shallow vision of growing up, which might explain why the protagonist does so little of it.

It’s frantic yet lifeless, chaotic yet pro forma. A thorough lack of care emanates from the screen.

Perhaps what’s most dispiriting about this Firestarter is how visually impoverished it is.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is trying for a blend of horror and humor, something close to the heart and terror that Raimi was able to bring to bear throughout his career. But here, his craft has been hemmed in, gamified, leeched of color and vivacity.

If the series was conceived as a way to hold on to the fans of the original books and movies who are now grown, what’s clear in practice is it’s a children’s story staggering to support a few ambitious and deeply underdeveloped themes.

It’s an assemblage of ideas from other popular films that just hangs there with little cohesion. It’s like watching a movie that hasn’t been made yet.

The real sin of The King’s Man is its near-total lack of fun.

With Eternals, Marvel proves itself to be nothing more than a staid, lumbering black hole.

It’s so obviously shaped by fan response that it feels like the movie equivalent of someone who went viral online and now can only repeat themselves to diminishing returns in an attempt to hawk merch while they can.

A musical, theoretically, could reveal something under the surface, whatever thoughts her character isn’t able to articulate in dialogue. But there’s nothing under the surface here, just a girl trying to sell you a dress.

In trying to reckon with the contradictions of the ’92 film, as well as carve out their own work, DaCosta and her collaborators have created a misfire that can’t make its tangle of politics — about gentrification, the Black body (horror), racism, white desire — feel either relevant or provocative. When Blackness is whittled down, this is the kind of poor cultural product we are sold.

The preceding two-plus hours of this 145-minute slog — Tommy’s threadbare hodgepodge of bad impressions, gratuitous filmmaking, and even worse depictions of mental health — isn’t even a shadow of the real natural woman.

The clarity of its aspirations just makes the film’s downfall that much more pathetic, like a baseball player pointing to the home run he’s about to hit and then completely whiffing and landing on his ass.

If we absolutely must have G.I. Joe movies, surely they shouldn’t be this joyless.

The film’s humorlessness is off-putting; it is slick to the point of lacking texture. But the underlying problem is more fundamental. Gunpowder Milkshake is led by someone without the star power to carry it, surrounded as she might be by actresses far more interesting.

Infinite feels like a depressing fable about the movie industry.

Cruella takes one of the richest narrative archetypes — the madwoman — and whittles her down into a glossy, hollow, capitalism-approved monster fueled by girl-boss politics. It has nothing to say about how women move through the world.

Wrath of Man could have been salvaged had it delivered on some decent action sequences, but once such sequences come, they tend to be either lifeless or unintelligible or both.

Without Remorse is awful — an incoherently shot, grindingly dull movie in which just about every actor manages to seem miscast.

Thunder Force doesn’t work as a comedy, but that’s because it doesn’t really work as a movie. There’s so little chemistry between McCarthy and Spencer, longtime real-life friends, that, rather than buddies, their characters often just come across as mildly surprised to find themselves in the same room.

Voyagers, in keeping its focus where it does, feels like a waste not just because of how predictable its beats are, but because it ends just when it feels like it’s getting interesting.

Tom and Jerry is so busy, so desperately unfunny, so clunkily cacophonous that it makes you long for the simple, brain-numbing charms of the one thing it pretty much refuses to give you: a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

All Me You Madness has to offer are poorly written rants, indifferently staged action, and ill-conceived comedy. In the end, it doesn’t even deliver on the madness.

An old-fashioned piece of shameless hokum, Sia’s Music might be hilarious if it weren’t so offensive.

Wild Mountain Thyme is not just charmless. It is genuinely confounding, a movie constantly working against itself to make its characters and their dilemma comprehensible.

Sadly, all that glittered in the franchise’s first outing is gone in Wonder Woman 1984. The disappointing sequel highlights not only the dire state of the live-action superhero genre in film, but the dire state of Hollywood filmmaking as a whole.

Bad Hair surprised me, ranking as the most stunning floundering of filmmaking in 2020 — a failure of empathy, intellect, and morality that I haven’t been able to shake.

It’s an adaptation without direction or purpose, with an unwieldy but deeply committed performance at its center. Hathaway looks to be having fun, at least. Someone should!

The leads set the tone for this unfortunate waste of time, heralding a series of issues that reflect poorly not only on this ugly retread but on much of Hollywood’s recent output as a whole.

What’s onscreen — choppy, lifeless, predictable action scenes jutting up against unbaked, middle-school-theater-production-level family drama — is quite damning in its own right.

Antebellum is ultimately a travesty of craft and filmmaking with a perspective that hollows out the Black experience in favor of wan horror.

The zombie sequences are strictly pro-forma; the undead are treated mostly as a nuisance rather than a genuine threat this time around, which is probably intentional. The car chases are debilitatingly fake-looking and try to make up for their flatness with speed, to little effect.

Everything dissipates in such a spectacularly unsatisfying fashion that you might wonder if you dreamed the whole thing.

Irresistible isn’t just shockingly ineffectual in its insights into national schisms — it is, in an added betrayal, unfunny, requiring its audience to slog their way through so much laborious farce without a laugh in sight.

It might have worked as a drama, but as horror, it’s a disaster.

The movie is so charmless and hopelessly incoherent that you might feel the need to consult Wikipedia afterward for some help on what it was even about.

Even if it had been released at a less tense and tender time, this thing would go down like an oversized flaming lead balloon.

The best part of Scoob!, a computer-animated reboot of the Scooby-Doo franchise, is the part in which the movie painstakingly recreates the opening credits of the original series.

The problem with Capone isn’t that it’s an unconventional biography or a challenge to the image of a famous figure. It’s that it’s not bold enough on either of those fronts.

At this point, what could have been a passably entertaining diversion, the kind of film best enjoyed overcoming a hangover or while folding laundry, falls flat on Diesel’s lips. He lacks the gravitas of delivery, disinterested in his lines even before he finishes saying them.