Words are generally a problem for Dolittle—a fatal flaw when your picture is about talking animals. While the words are abundant, most are either perfunctory exposition or anachronistic jokes that fall flatter than the state of Nebraska.

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

A far too anemic and restrained take on a story that demands at least some kind of dour sensuousness if not straight-up bodice ripping.

No one was expecting Midnight Run level repartee from Hobbs and Shaw, but is it too much to ask for a bit more than the who-has-a-bigger-penis stuff we get here?

A dismal hack job pretending to be a take on modern relationships.

The insurmountable problem is that Imogene is not a very original, dynamic or charismatic character, and Kristen Wiig is not a very original, dynamic or charismatic actress. Nobody in this movie is really appealing enough to be much fun. The state of New Jersey should sue.

It just goes to show, no matter how burnished your backdrop or splendiferous your setting, if your script is crap, you're stuck with a total dud.

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

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.

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

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I'm not sure what went wrong with this picture. It could just be bad judgment on the part of screenwriter Steve Adams, who for all we know finds stalking adorable.

In my own very humble opinion, In Praise of Love lacks even the most fragmented charms I have found in almost all of his previous works. [9 Sep 2002, p.25]

It is the Oscar winner’s most affected performance to date, which is truly saying something when you consider that she has already played both Katherine Hepburn and Bob Dylan.

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

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.

Speaking of afterthoughts, Olivia Wilde has a bit part as a single mom who unwittingly aids and abets the Brennans in their escape, and Brian Dennehy lurches silently through a number of scenes as John's working-class father. It's jarring to see such big-name actors in such thankless roles.

What I don’t need is more undercooked leftovers: elevator pitches that satisfy the suits (It’s The Hangover with chicks!) because risk-averse studios don’t want to take any chances with that chick stuff and therefore create a self-fulfilling prophecy of estrogen dreck.

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.

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.

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.

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.