Grim, grisly and downright sickening, Midsommar is a feel-bad horror film about suicide, mercy killings, insanity, graphic nudity, religious hysteria, and the kind of grotesque imagery that exists for no other reason than shock value.

Part of the problem with Close to You is Hillary Baack, who plays Katherine. Miscast and inexperienced, she is not up to Page’s standards and mumbles so incoherently that whole scenes clumsily pass by without clarity.

The star-studded After the Hunt has a lot on its mind about human complexities, but largely expresses these notions in didactic form and through dramatic conflict that all but resolves itself halfway through the movie’s languid 2 hours and 18 minutes.

Except for the admirable testosterone on display that represents hours in the gym instead of the acting class, the rest of Magic Mike XXL is seriously stupid.

Australian films are like local wines from Australian vineyards. They don’t always travel. A bore called The Dressmaker is the latest example.

Everything Must Go is the one for the Gipper-the movie in which he steps out of character for his own sake and works hard to lose Will Ferrell. The results are mixed, but I admire the guy for making an effort.

Despite the presence of Shirley MacLaine, the moments of pleasure provided by The Last Word are far outnumbered by scenes of exaggerated, phony, sugary marzipan-like make believe.

I'm sure there is much to be learned from Forks Over Knives (the title means fruits and veggies can be forked, but anything you cut with a knife is lethal), but what does it have to do with real life?

The result is a colossal bore that is never passionate, exciting, sexy or entertaining, with an ill-fated titled performance by Joaquin Phoenix that borders on catatonic.

Never failed to hold me spellbound, even when I saw obvious spots where easy cutting would reduce the agony to a much more comfortable running time.

The film is as disappointing as his fate, but it’s worth watching for the rugged, nerve-wracking performance by Colin Firth.

While The Caine Mutiny is a showcase for its actors, it doesn’t put much else on display.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is ultimately one of Marvel’s dullest and most unnecessary movies to date.

Billed as a comedy, it’s never funny. Taken as a rural western drama about sibling rivalry, it does not take place in the West and the drama never involves. The game cast is chock full of talent, but nothing percolates.

The melodrama, unfortunately, is not always convincing. The quality of the acting is so strong that the emotional impact is undeniable. Knightley is so gorgeous, Skarsgård, the Swedish heartthrob, is so decent, and Clarke is so noble in the way he hides his vulnerability, that I liked them all.

The movie has moments, but clichés abound and it runs out of energy and steam early. In a memorably bad summer, count it as another dull indie-prod on its way to home video.

The Banker is a sadly facile and largely surface level rendering of a profoundly complex problem that deserves more attention.

The film, written by Dan Mazeau and directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, is well-intentioned in its thematic arc, but its execution falters.

The entertaining surrealism that energized the opening movements fizzles out as the film reaches the third act, the reveals of which are both mundane and expected.

Legendary is a soap opera with steroids.

Cowperthwaite successfully turns the I.S.S. into a sweaty pressure cooker, but what’s she actually cooking? Not much, unfortunately.

To pass the time and justify the film’s nearly two-hour length, director Elliott Lester and screenwriter Chris Kelley concentrate on loading everyone with enough oddball characteristics to convince jaded viewers who hate Westerns that they are watching something unique.

It’s the witless script by Shane Atkinson and the petrified direction by Zara Hayes that lands everyone in traction.

While the movie may not, in the end, be so effective in tapping into our current class anxieties, that hardly seems to matter. Like a trip to Elysium, it’s a wild ride.

The Whale has moments that touch the heart and passages that engage the mind, but the insufferable parallels it constantly draws between Charlie’s obesity and Moby Dick, Charlie’s favorite book, may have worked better in the stage play by Samuel D. Hunter than they do in his screen adaptation, where they merely ring false and drag the pace to a crawl.

Preposterous, illogical, senselessly over-plotted and artificial as a ceramic artichoke, David Fincher’s Gone Girl is another splatterfest disguised as a psychological thriller about the disintegration of a murderous marriage that I find one of the year’s grossest disappointments.

Unfortunately, Hide Your Smiling Faces is so slow it could use a few action sequences to speed things up.

Watching the misguided artistry at work in Empire of Light, it’s hard to fathom just what attracted so many top-tier talents to a project of such torpor.