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.

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.”

You only have to watch the trailer to know that Producer-Director Alex Kurtzman’s reboot of Brendan Fraser’s once-charming mummy movies is full of embalming fluid.

The best of what The Lion King offers is a somewhat technically up-to-date and generally well-voiced reworking of the familiar, but nothing surprising or vital. There is certainly nothing in the least bit urgent about director Jon Favreau’s new telling.

Indeed, considering its trippy visuals and leaden dialog, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil would work much better with the sound turned off (the music is as ubiquitous as it is unremarkable) and Dark Side of the Moon or a bootleg of a Dead show blasting on the stereo.

If there is a breakout role in Millers, it is that of Will Poulter, the 20-year-old English actor who played Lee Carter in 2007’s "Son of Rambow." As Kenny Rossmore, the hapless neighbor who ends up playing the teenage son of Ms. Aniston and Mr. Sudeikis during their version of National Lampoon’s Mexican Vacation, Mr. Poulter strikes a perfect comedic balance between sweet savant and pop-culture lech.

While The Hummingbird Project may not be reap the benefits of a 13-episode season, at times, watching this dramatically flaccid tale of late-cycle capitalism run amok feels that long to get through.

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.

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

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.

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

The main issue is the script. The tale it tells is shopworn.

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.

Ant-Man is a brainless bore and a colossal waste of money, time and computer-generated special effects.

This is a movie that talks endlessly about emotion but displays none of it — and the same can be said for all that destiny chatter.

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.

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

Ambiguous and ludicrous at the same time, director Mr. Nichols (Mud) claims to have structured Midnight Special as a fast-moving thriller, but it’s slow as an inchworm and about as thrilling as buttermilk. Clearly, he’s been watching too many Christopher Nolan movies.

Motherless Brooklyn is so messy, confusing and pointless that you don’t know what’s going on half the time, and couldn’t care less.

Most filmgoers will come away only mildly convinced of Bolden’s place as jazz’s inventor and even less sure that the movie they just saw spun a coherent or compelling narrative.

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

I can’t imagine any film starring Jane Fonda to be a total loss, but This Is Where I Leave You, a vulgar, inept and gruesomely contrived load of junk misleadingly labeled a comedy comes perilously close.

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.

Labored and boring, The Mountain Between Us is a soap opera in the snow that fritters away the time and talents of Kate Winslet and Idris Elba for all the wrong reasons.

Gosh, is it ever a letdown to have a filmmaker all but pop up on screen to remind us what his movie is not-so-secretly about, before failing to live up to not only his own political objectives, but some of the most basic visual tenets of narrative filmmaking. Down with the bourgeoisie? Absolutely. But must the revolution be so sloppy?

After.Life, with a pretentious point between the two words in the title for no explainable reason, is a horror film with a macabre style but few of the creepy chills of cheaper, cliché-riddled thrillers that are a dime a dozen these days.