Based on Henrik Ibsen’s classic stage play Hedda Gabler, Nia DaCosta’s Hedda seeks to reinterpret and modernize the late 19th-century material. However, in the process, it loosens the nuts and bolts of Ibsen’s dramaturgical machine, causing it to ricket until it falls apart.

Like Steven Spielberg, [Howard]'s films are usually polished, coherent, and suitable for all ages. His obsession with Eden delivers none of those things, and it’s so vile, pretentious and confusing in style over substance that a lot of it is downright unwatchable.

The Electric State is weighed down by a staggering tonnage of stuff, dozens of CGI robots wandering around and muttering off-camera jokes, clunky newsreels dumping details that end up contributing very little (but featuring MTV News anchor Kurt Loder as himself!), a total overload of boring, gray dreck.

Even the film’s title lacks a much-needed punch. Ridley is a strong action heroine, but she deserves better material than this.

Not particularly good or bad, it is “another Marvel movie” — certainly not the cure to what’s been ailing the Marvel Cinematic Universe since Endgame.

It’s hard to label a film this empty, but the word “worthless” comes to mind instantly.

Credulity is strained on every level in scene after repetitive scene. The shallow screenplay robs the actors of success whenever they strive for any kind of badly needed comic relief, which is probably why the acting seems so bland and unconvincing.

It’s occasionally diverting, sure, but so is killing time while you wait for your flight to board.

Shaving too fast with an old razor blade, I’ve had more scares than anything in Heretic from my bathroom mirror.

Color it long, clumsy, gimmicky, schmaltzy and pointless.

True to form for this trilogy—which supposedly concludes here—the brainless and disjointed Last Dance skates by on star Tom Hardy’s charm and a few good gags.

Katherine is searching for inspiration during her time in Morocco and, meanwhile, Dern should search for a better project.

It falls flat as a musical, as a courtroom drama, as a romance, and as a character piece. It’s the rare film that is both weird and boring, to a degree that it’s hard to imagine anyone enjoying it.

Never Let Go never manages to answer any of a number of recurring questions adequately, and the movie makes no more sense than one of those head-scratchers by M. Night Shyamalan, which it annoyingly resembles.

The Front Room, the new horror-comedy from filmmakers Max & Sam Eggers and A24, boasts a strong premise and a game cast, but it’s not particularly scary or funny. It’s surreal, clever, and occasionally visually quirky enough to fit the “indie horror” mold, but a little too unsubtle and user-friendly to feel like arthouse fare.

AfrAId, the new thriller from writer-director Chris Weitz, is a boiler-plate example of the exploAItation genre, a condemnation of A.I. so by the numbers that an A.I. could have written it. And, like the best examples of A.I. “art,” it’s solidly, emphatically, “good enough.”

It’s lifeless as a stump, and destined for box-office doom.

This contrived, pointless, blindingly boring vehicle is a pathetic, desperate attempt to keep Halle Berry and Mark Wahlberg’s careers alive.

Despite the cast and the director’s best efforts, this is a movie that so desperately wants to be edgy that it somehow becomes completely dull.

Shyamalan knows what his thing is, he knows we know, and in a charming way, he doesn’t seem to care. His latest film, Trap, might leave some viewers rolling their eyes, but those acclimatized to his brand of weird will forgive the flaws the way they do their dad’s corny jokes.

The latest example of the humiliations lovely seniors desperately seeking employment are forced to endure in order to call themselves working actors is a dismal comedy without a shred of wit, imagination or originality called The Fabulous Four.

Deadpool & Wolverine is every inch a post-peak Marvel movie, a parade of crowd pleasing pops with practically no substance, guaranteeing a billion dollar return and a shelf life of about five minutes.

What one does not expect is a load of total trash full of gimmicks instead of ideas, stolen scenes from other movies instead of originality, amateurish posturing instead of professional performances, clueless meandering instead of organized screenplays, and pointless confusion instead of clear-eyed direction.

Exhaustion of every sort pervades Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. You see it in its dearth of ideas, as the film recycles structure, set pieces and even music cues from the original.

The challenge here is that Kidman and Efron have no spark, which makes it awkward and uncomfortable to witness their coupling.

Like any good thriller, information is strategically withheld to build intrigue, but then it’s simply dropped in the audience’s lap with no impact at all. The characters are paper-thin, each reduced to essentially one trait that is explained by one underwhelming secret.

More visualized Wikipedia article than movie, Back to Black covers a wide swath of Amy Winehouse’s life and career without any real depth.

Not only is it the worst movie I have seen this year, this dog is one of the worst movies ever made.

The latest jacked up, action extravaganza from stunt man turned director David Leitch (his last film, the not-very-good Bullet Train, is still leagues ahead of this movie in terms of imagination and execution), teems with contempt for the audience it is desperate to win over.

You can sum it up with a few smiles, a weak premise that never pays off, and a narrative that is nothing more or less than a big piece of zero.

Jake Gyllenhaal is the sole component that separates Road House from the sort of movie that stars stunt legend Scott Adkins and premieres on VOD.

Red Right Hand, another routine crime-thriller with a title that makes no sense, is a violent and nauseating excuse to entertain the portion of what is left of that dwindling movie audience that lives for nothing more than a lot of posing, crunching and muscle-flexing, not always in the same order.

The film is fine for the first 30 minutes and you almost wonder if it might not be as bad as everyone is imagining. But then it somehow gets worse and worse until you just feel embarrassed for the cast, who probably couldn’t tell you what Madame Web is about if asked.

Thanks to sluggish direction by Rachel Lambert and a screenplay by three entire people who fail to display the focused writing talent of even one, this is a slogfest from beginning to end.

I guess it claims to demonstrate how repetitive and routine the lives of professional assassins can be (yawn), but in my opinion, movies about them have an obligation to be juicier and more consistently fascinating than American Star.

2024 is very young, but in the months ahead, I seriously doubt things will get any worse than Mean Girls.

While diverting enough for its forgiving 98-minute runtime, Night Swim neither sinks nor floats. It just wades in the waters of “whatever.”

I hated it, but reluctantly give it one star for whimsical sets and costumes, and there’s a minute sprinkle of suspense while you wait for a point of view that never arrives.

Not only is Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire a pale imitation of the George Lucas and Akira Kurosawa films that inspired it, but it’s a structurally unsound mess that fails to inspire any excitement for its planned second half, let alone the trilogy that’s supposed to follow. It’s a blunder of Hobbit proportions.

Leave the World Behind is a dumb movie disguised as a smart movie, a middling thriller whose decorated cast and tricky camerawork can’t compensate for its undercooked, overwritten script.

It’s as scary as a pumpkin pie left in the oven too long. Instead of horror, it’s pretty funny.

Next Goal Wins is an empty quasi-comedy, filled with cliche jokes and tired bits.

Five Nights at Freddy’s takes a novel, off-the-wall premise and makes it feel rote. Even as someone who has no experience with the games, I felt as if I was on my third or fourth playthrough already.

Written and directed by Garth Davis from a 2018 novel I never want to read by Iain Reid, Foe is not just a bad dream. It’s a colossal nightmare.

Like many third iterations, this one shows signs of the creative team growing bored with what made the story worth telling in the first place.

There are some pretty shots of nature and a few stabs at humor, but don’t be mistaken—this movie is background noise at best.

Like all Wes Anderson movies, it is enigmatic, artificial, infuriatingly self-indulgent and irrevocably pointless.

The Flash is no genre-redefining masterpiece and it’s unlikely to appeal to viewers who aren’t already bought into the superhero oeuvre, but it’s a much better movie than what’s being advertised.

The Boogeyman, a pointless, misguided and totally incomprehensible waste of time, is yet another horror film that exists for the sole purpose of exploiting the endless desk-drawer doodlings of writer Stephen King.

The dialogue is witless and dull. The direction by Tony Dean Smith gives the actors nothing meaty to do beyond mouthing words designed to move the narrative forward.

It’s annoyingly lumpy, shockingly pedestrian, and instantly forgettable.

It’s not much to examine at length, much less remember, but if you’re in the mood for a Hallmark card to revive your faith in gooey rom-coms, Love Again is not the one.

Ghosted, the new feature film on Apple TV+ from Ana de Armas, Chris Evans, and director Dexter Fletcher, is 50% romantic comedy, 50% action blockbuster, and 100% forgettable.

As a self-serious horror drama that fictionalizes the real-life exploits of the late author and Catholic priest Father Gabriele Amorth into an absurdly plotted, blood-drenched haunted house movie, The Pope’s Exorcist arrives in theaters Friday the 14 with all the vitality and vivaciousness of a 15th century corpse.

The worst film since Babylon, this surfeit of loud, obnoxious, violent junk audaciously claims to call itself a vampire farce, but there isn’t a genuine shred of originality anywhere in sight and it’s as witty as an ambulance with a flat tire.

A lumbering bore called Inside is a crucially wooden and mechanical vehicle for the peculiar talents of Willem Dafoe that amounts to nothing more than nearly two hours of pretentious bilge.

Bad movies waste time, but a contrived, empty-headed dinosaur movie called 65 wastes more of it than anything I’ve seen lately.

The extent to which the film fails to deliver on the B-movie promise of its title is staggering and, given the high-quality cast and crafts people stooping to concur on behalf of the film’s high-wire and harebrained premise, it is borderline tragic.

Even for a third-rate farce with two stars who appear together onscreen for no more than a total of five minutes, it’s derivative and preposterous—worse than a rejected TV pilot, and about as romantic and funny as a root canal.

This movie goes downhill so fast it turns inadvertently from horror to comedy, but when they see the box-office grosses, I don’t think director Brad Anderson or screenwriter Will Honley will be the ones who laugh.

The movie exists between prestige and genre (or two genres, really, as it morphs in its final third from an escaped fugitive picture to a war movie), yet it can’t quite grasp either the elevated emotion of prestige or the snap of the genre.

It’s a preposterous debacle that might work better as a Halloween skit on Saturday Night Live, but it takes itself seriously, which makes it seem even sillier. I found the result too sick and disgusting to describe, but not interesting enough to care.

There are individual scenes, individual moments of action and even characters that actually work, but as a whole, Black Adam is a tangled, cluttered mess.

Things really have to be precisely calibrated for comedy to work amidst all of this vicious violence—blood pours from eye sockets, gushes from neck arteries, and spouts from nearly decapitated heads—but no such luck. Instead, a talented ensemble of actors must stumble their way through chaotic tone shifts and declarations of irony that feel both uninspired and cruel.

Crimes of the Future is a load of crap. I would like to find a more civil way to describe even a sick and depraved barf bag of a movie like this one, but it defeats every reasonable attempt to try.

A sports anime focused around a group of orphans which makes the conscious decision to compete over basic necessities instead of participating in everyday society is the seed of a fruitful idea. But instead of playing to his strengths Araki has settled for lowest common denominator storytelling.

It is an absurd premise, one made even more so by its execution, which at the hands of veteran Hollywood thriller director Martin Campbell (the one-time director of Bond films who has been in movie jail since 2011’s Green Lantern) is often lackluster and, on occasion, shockingly inept.

The movie spends the bulk of its largely inert runtime painfully unaware that it is an example of the self-indulgent narcissism it’s intended to send up.

This is a director whose only interest is in entertainment without a trace of originality. He isn’t interested in quality, only in length, noise, and stale ideas from old movies. There’s plenty of all three in Ambulance.

The movie is sewer drainage, but it does give Melissa Leo a rare chance to quote lines by the Bard she would never otherwise be asked to deliver.

Watching The Lost City is the cinematic equivalent of slogging your way through monkey poop.

This movie is as lifeless as the bodies Morbius drains and throws on the floor.

It’s not exactly a dull watch—two hours pass quickly—but it’s a purposeless one. Everyone involved, especially the puppy, deserved better.

It is true that with Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Jason has entered the unofficial family business of trying and failing to recreate the inexplicable magic that made the original Ghostbusters such a frothy delight.

Depraved, delirious, and downright stupid, Last Night in Soho is two hours of amateurish drivel by B-movie director Edgar Wright (Baby Driver, Shaun of the Dead) that pretends to be half-retro Swingin’ Sixties comedy and half-horror thriller.

Rarely will you see a more soul-numbingly empty product of this tragic operation than Halloween Kills, a film that so completely sucks the vitality out of John Carpenter’s and Debra Hill’s original vision that one would be tempted to call it a desecration if that didn’t make it sound like more fun than it actually is.

No Time to Die may not be the worst James Bond movie ever made, but it’s in heavy competition as the dullest one since Octopussy.

It slogs on, piling on scenes and memories of every sci-fi epic and film noir from Blade Runner to Chinatown, but who cares?

The target audience — people who waste their lives playing video games — might be amused by a movie about devices designed for the sole purpose of destroying everything in sight, but the serious audience the film industry wants to lure back to brick-and-mortar cinemas won’t find much substance here.

Old is asinine.

The fight choreography is often impressive. But the script is pockmarked with cliches, tropes and never-ending predictability.

The Mark Wahlberg–starrer reveals just how stuck Hollywood sci-fi is in 1999, when The Matrix cemented ideas of digital consciousness in the Western mainstream (with a bent of pan-Asian spirituality).

There’s little weight, not much style and even less sense to the psychological terror The Woman in the Window attempts to inflict.

It will more than likely meet fans’ expectations for what they want in a Mortal Kombat movie but will fall short of exceeding them.

The filmmakers’ attempts to play around with the concept of the unlikely action hero are only moderately successful.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League may feature altered scenes from its chopped-up counterpart, but it’s unlikely to play any differently to general audiences — apart from feeling like more of a slog. Its mere existence guarantees that someone, somewhere will be satisfied, but the film’s improvements are hardly enough to fix what was, now quite apparently, a flawed endeavor from the start.

Shockingly un-cinematic and utterly devoid of dynamism, the film lacks anything resembling the well-researched insights or sharp-edged comedy that you have come to associate with the former host of The Daily Show.

That the film is a mediocre product doesn’t matter nearly as much as the fact that Disney+ now has a shiny new big-budget spectacle to dangle in front of its core audience.

It would be easy to put the blame here on the two stars; expect a lot of misguided chatter about Nanjiani and Rae’s lack of chemistry. But if they deserve blame, it is in their capacity as co-executive producers who approved production on the anemic and half-baked script.

Inheritance has not one iota of the thematic intensity of Bong’s film, nor any of the dynamic relationships that make Succession’s twists and turns impactful. Instead, there is nothing much on Inheritance’s mind, and the relationships end up as underdeveloped as the film’s cliché-ridden dialogue.

The often-stilted dialogue of the teenage protagonists doesn’t fare much better. As a result, many of the performances from the seemingly talented cast come off as stiff and stagey.

This moronic parable inspired by Donald Trump’s treatment and attitude towards illegal immigrants is a disgrace, but so is almost everything else on the screen these days.

Despite its title, Onward is a regressive film, sometimes painfully so.

The entire enterprise is so muffled and dull you can’t believe what you’re watching.

For an alleged psychological thriller, The Night Clerk has no thrills, suspense or tension.

Vulgar, contrived and incomprehensible.

It was written with empty-headed desperation and directed with minimal imagination by Guy Ritchie, one of the most incompetent filmmakers of the century.

The best thing about reviewing the new PG-13 horror movie The Turning is that you don’t have to worry about spoiling the ending because it doesn’t have one. It just, sort of, stops.