We’re typically never trusted to accept the reality of an icon’s life for what it is rather than what media consultants want it to exemplify. What the film’s real failing amounts to is any lack of interest in Ginsburg’s true superpower: Her inhuman, sleepless drive to do the work.

The thrills become rather predictable.

In its broadest outlines, Book Club: The Next Chapter is a harmless, mildly farcical travelogue for fans of the central actresses, as well as those casually interested in briefly recognizing Andy Garcia, Don Johnson and Craig T. Nelson.

But there’s so much done wrong as the film tries to be funny that when it is funny, the funniness goes down like a bitter pill: Why can’t it be good all the time?

There’s a good movie baked into Being the Ricardos’ 131 minutes. It’s about 90 minutes long, maybe a little less. The remaining 41 minutes comprise an Aaron Sorkin movie, and like too much cream in a beautifully fried donut, they weigh down the total package with needless fat: Talking heads, flashbacks and archival footage.

While the Russos and Holland clearly want to break out of their professional boxes, pulverizing this film with their big swings, Cherry is a bomb.

It’s so devoid of content and meaning that it’s easy to watch in spite of its terribleness.

AI may not be advanced enough to make a movie even as crappy as Atlas, but in the meantime, it seems like autocomplete is having a go at it.

As Rowling continues submerging her magical world into the same hellish and disreputable bog as her personal legacy, I wish she’d kept The Secrets of Dumbledore to herself.

Sleeping Dogs winds up playing like a low-rent Saw sequel without the elaborate traps or gore. It’s all bad cops and worse twists, turning the fragility of human memory into a cheap trick.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire doubles down, fully committing to its existence as a cynical nostalgia raid masquerading as a movie.

Who could have guessed that a simple Smurfs reboot would constitute such an unholy mess?

Unfortunately, Nichols’ interpretation feels like a blind wandering through uncharted land, populated by a host of chiseled yet undeveloped characters. The Bikeriders is a shallow parade of cool images.

Flight Risk feels like a free-floating outlet for a little bit of rage and a little bit of shtick, both Mad Mel standbys that he seems unwilling to really examine, within these confines or elsewhere.

Directed by Julius Onah, Brave New World is as visually lifeless as the most lifeless MCU thrillers, marred by needless overcutting, flimsy digital backdrops and stilted composition; thematically, it says nothing confidently and even less coherently.

Ana may be attempting to climb the class ladder, but the movie moves between classes with a freedom that feels weakly imagined.

Though the film acknowledges its performative nastiness at every opportunity—setting its killers and victims in windows, mind ballets, stages, and jail door slits, having them directly address the camera—acknowledgement doesn’t mean subversion, satisfaction or novelty. Even the most dedicated gorehounds should look elsewhere.

The filmmakers behind Leap! seemingly can’t picture a children’s movie without a cavalcade of unnecessary action scenes and fart jokes—and not good fart jokes at that. The result is a movie allegedly about ballet with weirdly few scenes featuring actual dancing.

As mired as it is in identity confusion, cheeseball sentimentality and jaundiced camera filters, The Tender Bar could’ve been something if it had a purpose.

Though its actual storytelling is pretty arbitrary, The Black Phone has the emotional simplicity of a children’s film, wearing its grit like makeup.

Considering Ferrell and Reilly’s immense talents, Holmes & Watson is an even more unsettlingly unfunny experience.

Everyone has off days, or in his case off years. But Summering extends those off years into Ponsoldt’s most puzzling effort so far, a genre jumble roping together a kid-detective novel, a ghost story, a hokey “do you know where your children are” PSA and a coming-of-age dramedy.

Heart of Stone is murky, drab and always going the wrong speed. It’s either motionless, allowing exposition scene after exposition scene to lay out the boring details of what might happen if the wrong folks get control of The Heart, or erratic, dicing its badly remixed action sequences like it was trying to avoid a copyright strike from the movies it steals from.

While most of the film is simply mediocre-to-bad melodrama with a questionably conservative bent to its messaging, some elements stand out for how downright terrible they are.

Making it just a little bit smarter—taking out perhaps just one of its multiple, intelligence-insulting ending clichés—could make its plot simply boring rather than asinine, which would make the film dangerously forgettable, able to inflict 100-minute gaps into moviegoers’ memories at distances of up to 500 yards.

By the time the credits rolled, I realized I don’t think I’d ever watched a movie this long that still felt so brief and bewilderingly abridged; where so much happened and yet nothing happened at all.

The Jurassic World franchise may have willingly chosen extinction with this final entry, but Dominion would’ve killed it off anyways.

Kids vs. Aliens is a harmless trifle. A filmmaker with this many years under their belt should have more to show for themselves than that.

The most galling, offensive thing about Brainwashed is how poorly it demonstrates a point that should have been so very easy to prove.

Gina Rodriguez, who proved in Annihilation that she’s capable of something so much more addled and kinetic than this, does what she can with such aggravating material, but everything around her insults whatever emotional depth she can mine despite what she’s given.

As with Free Guy, Reynolds and Levy have made a movie aimed at the dead center of mainstream geek culture, designed to be described as having so much heart—even though it’s as smooth and featureless as a Funko Pop.

If there’s one apt element Seinfeld and company bring to Unfrosted, it’s that they knowingly treat it like a bunch of silly bullshit.

Beck and Woods seem to have an entirely misguided conception of what people love about B-movies in the first place and, like A Quiet Place, 65 flounders in this middle ground because it won’t commit to being a genre film.

The King’s Man is an off-putting installment in a series that should have already ended.

Just like with Welcome to the Jungle, the action is serviceable, but lacks genuine thrills.

Marmalade is the kind of just okay, middle-of-the-road, nearly inventive but still mostly derivative indie that at least has the decency to be only 90 minutes.

Aggro Dr1ft is less interesting than the video game cutscene it resembles, padded by a narrative peppered with the tropes of a hit man action film but lacking substance.

A discarded made-for-TV sequel to Rosemary’s Baby in the ‘70s is now just what most mainstream American filmmaking is, summed by prequel Apartment 7A: something stupid, easy and familiar to watch in the comfort of one’s home, confined to the medium that had once threatened to overtake cinema and is now doing so again all these years later.

The School for Good and Evil is juvenile, over-the-top and campy in all the worst ways. It’s too busy trying to combine TikTok fashion with Top 40 music and popular children’s fantasy films to create any visual, musical or narrative distinction for itself.

The overlong and tedious film opts for rudimentary Oscar-bait trappings and a crudely voyeuristic portrayal of the renowned jazz singer—a commanding performance by first-time actress Andra Day notwithstanding.

A completely detached exercise in bewilderment that’s enigmatic nature comes off less Lynchian and more “unfinished scriptian,” director Pascual Sisto’s feature debut aims for intrigue but settles comfortably in mediocrity.

It is glorious to see a predominantly Asian cast, including Asian-Americans, and extended scenes set against a gorgeous Thai backdrop. However, there’s little else to enjoy in this middling martial arts flick.

I can’t imagine any child actually enjoying this film, let alone a child who is familiar with and fond of the original animated adaptation.

Regrettably, a gross number of missteps overshadow the Hawkes’ good intentions with this film. Even without Maya Hawke’s frumpy hag drag as O’Connor, complete with too-large dentures and an unfortunate wig, the lack of creative risk taken by the filmmakers, as well as the lack of research done by the team, sinks Wildcat before it gets started.

Festive horror is a notorious subgenre, with last year’s runaway success Violent Night scratching this itch for many—to say nothing of classics like 1974’s Black Christmas. It’s A Wonderful Knife sports an equally clever parody title, but has little else going for it, coasting on the premise of Frank Capra’s classic and failing to stand out among its predecessors.

And as far as criticism goes, the tedious and trite, regressive and ridiculous Voyagers doesn’t need any more than it’s already going to get.

The lone beacon of subtlety and warmth here is Dave Bautista, a man I would like to give a long hug. Bautista is able to extract quiet moments of genuine empathy and reflection from the shitshow droning on around him, yanking whatever depth is available from the shallow husk of a character he’s given.

The confused comedy waddles onto the court as confidently as a kid in an oversized hand-me-down jersey. But why would this derivative filmmaking aspire to anything else? It’s all just set dressing for Jack Harlow’s brick of a big-screen debut.

Despite (or perhaps due to) having four writers contributing to the script, Stay Out of the Attic is disjointed and incongruous, with thematic ties to twin experimentation, eugenic science and the medicinal properties of the optic nerve that never connect to reveal anything substantial.

The sparse action scenes are useless jumbles, tossing bodies in misblocked blurs of messy motion—like a human game of 52-card pickup—or encased in total darkness. If we can’t see anything, this gamble suggests, maybe we won’t think that what we see is bad.

The Clapper is just so boring and corny that all the audience can do is either feel bad for Helms or disingenuously applaud his unsuccessful efforts, mimicking his character’s chosen vocation.

This live-action co-production between Sony and a Japanese animation studio begins with the colorful bounce of Paul W.S. Anderson directing a cosmic X-Men knockoff, and quickly runs out of gas in a way that resembles the worst of Sony’s Screen Gems genre arm.

Surely a short film interview would have been more interesting, and engaging, than He Went That Way. It’s the kind of story that’s undeniably fascinating, but so bare-bones as a screenplay that it needs a little something more if it’s going to work, padded out either in the director’s style or in the writer’s script.

The problem dogging the film from the start is the absence of insight. Nothing that Wein and Lister-Jones have to say about facing the past, making peace with yourself and with the people who psychologically and emotionally scarred you over the course of your life, or even their most central concern, death, turns out to be worth hearing.

Unfortunately, The Tomorrow War isn’t allowed to be the dumb, “just go with it” summer spectacle it should have been, a la Independence Day. Instead, McKay and Dean force it to be a self-aware and “smart” time travel drama, with feelings big enough to crack generational war trauma issues, among lots of things that go “boom!” and “pew, pew, pew.”

Tipping approaches this dilemma but is too intellectually distracted to focus on the raw complexities that would otherwise give it shape or resonance. He opts for spectacle, which wears thin fast.

Padre Pio’s two halves stubbornly, constantly butt heads with each other, stories in catastrophic disharmony.

Through its aspatial editing, refusing to ever let a racetrack be understood in continuity, Gran Turismo becomes a cacophonous collage of experience based on real car racing as much as real videogames, but fundamentally opposed to the reality of either.

Every creative problem White gives himself receives the most boring, trite solution, each chance for artistry stifled by mediocrity.

By the end of this movie, its inventive genre cross-breeding feels as worn-out as any other.

An overuse of stale horror conventions in an already predictable plot—combined with decades-old, thoroughly unchallenging ideas about women’s relationships to their bodies—leads to a film that claims to support its protagonist, while treating her like the butt of the joke at every turn.

Home Sweet Home Alone doesn’t bear any aesthetic beyond “existing.” It is obligatory when it needn’t be. It will undoubtedly get a sequel.

Locked Down is a crushing miscalculation on every level that should’ve stayed locked up.

Imagine spending an hour and a half or so watching a film that, the minute the credits roll, dissolves from the mind like cotton candy in hot water. That’s Vanquish. Nothing that happens throughout its narrative happens for any good reason, other than the plot dictates it must for the sake of limping to the next scene.

Such a thin plot from some of the Jackass guys would have been completely forgiven, or even blissfully ignored, if the stunts were on par, or at least close to, what we expect from these guys.

It’s less a story and more a fragile white male provocation, and it’s repulsive.

Compounded with dull plotting and a truly uninspired protagonist arc, Dogman is a curiosity of a comeback film that only makes you consider the virtues of director jail.

David Loughery’s writing isn’t necessarily bad, it just isn’t interesting, and when you’re doing this type of done-to-death B-movie, you need to bring something fresh to the table or else your film just fades away.

Because of its long road to the screen, I wanted so deeply to like it. However, its haphazard story, mediocre visual effects, downright awful costuming and other cardinal sins made it hard to find anything redeeming about the movie, no matter how many years have passed.

Run Rabbit Run never gets past the sensation of being a Mad Libs horror movie, where those blank spaces are filled in with the most obvious tropes.

Zeller is clearly more experienced as a writer than a director, but even his ability to extract the powerful (if stagey) performances we saw in The Father is missing here, as everyone just insists their lines upon each other with tones borrowed from shouty amateur theater.

The Lair is an abomination of bad accents (“Texan American” yee-haw, “Unintelligible Englishman,” Australian muddying both), excruciating action hero one-liners, and discouragingly archaic plot choices.

The generic moniker proves accurately foreboding for the run-of-the-mill film, one that desperately latches onto the goodwill of a familiar title but has nothing meaningful to add to its legacy.

Sadly, even a perfectly workable premise needs engaging writing, directing and performances to bring it to life, and in this capacity, Netflix’s new feature Brick is as utterly inert as its title–likewise reused from Rian Johnson’s far more interesting high school neo-noir from 2005.

It all adds up to another frantic grab by a studio desperate to wring success from a superhero universe they’ve never fully understood.

What wants to be a James-Bond-derivative blockbuster ends up being more like The Hitman’s Bodyguard, an unintentional pastiche with somehow even lower stakes. Yes, it’s possible.

This inept, unpleasant, cobbled-together debut only reveals its first-time helmer as a Dr. Frankenstein about to lose his license.

Without any actual classicism to accompany Craig’s outdated notions of outrageousness, the movie quickly turns fustier than its edgy posturing lets on. Craig simply watches a bunch of selfish people behave badly in predictable ways, and occasionally has them lunge at each other in anger. How perfectly droll!

Wish Upon’s plotting is all too arbitrary to be earnestly enjoyable.

While there is a literal amount of truth running through the semi-autobiographical Suncoast, its glossy, uncertain cutesiness is as fake as Ron DeSantis’ height.

All the signature Bay Movements are here, the slow-motion hero shots, the scale so vast that even planets look small and modest, the aggressively dorky jokes, but they all have a perfunctory feel, like even Bay couldn’t muster up much enthusiasm this time.

What’s immediately surprising and dispiriting about The Happytime Murders is how haphazard the actual puppets are. They aren’t inventively or cleverly put together, and they’re sort of repulsive in a way that’s less “edgy” and more “consistently unpleasant to look at.”

Black Butterfly plays as little more than the act of snickering adolescents toying with their audience, complete with an insulting final scene that confirms the film as a total waste of time.

The movie seems to pre-suppose that in our desperation to spend time with Wahlberg and Berry, any empty stupid simulacra will suffice as an excuse.

The film is a black hole that sucks comedy into its vortex, never to be seen again.

It misses the painful performance of everyday life, or less Hallmark-friendly emotions, like anger or numbness.

Overlong and overstimulating, the entire film is like a giant, immersive eyesore.

The veteran-comes-home revenger Trigger Warning is thoroughly idiotic and deathly slow, filled with so much ugly camp that it could stand in as the first Lifetime Original action movie.

Three films into his career, Pesce is batting below average: Last year, he dropped his inventive sophomore stunner, Piercing, and demonstrated range and precision not as evident in his hollow, unrepentantly nasty debut The Eyes of My Mother. With The Grudge, the worst proclivities of that movie override the sensibilities of Piercing and combine with studio horror’s “just play the hits” ethos, resulting in one of the year’s most unpleasant releases to date.

It’s as if Neeson is attempting to maintain the same schtick from Taken, with the children remaining the same age despite his own age ever trudging onward (there’s a twisted Dazed & Confused joke someone could make here). It is a workaround refutation of his mortality without the use of de-aging CGI.

Even when it’s not selling its past self, Good Burger 2 is selling something. It’s what makes it a hard movie to root for, even when it lucks into saying the right things: It tosses one money-grubbing trend in the trash while ordering all the others directly off the menu.

If only Red One had a bit more respect for its audience. We can all use a reaffirming message this holiday season, but this stuffs stockings with little more than hot air. I’d have preferred some coal. There’s at least a use for that.

Clean is irrefutably, deliciously bad. But there is something unironically beautiful about movies that are just plain awful, movies that dare to provoke your senses at all instead of simply sating them with something pleasant and “competent enough.”

Deadpool & Wolverine is another mind-numbingly corporatized CGI fest, divorced from any true emotional stakes. It’s a picture that would rather tell you how to feel than make you feel.

Kids deserve better entertainment than Dolittle. They deserve not to have their intellect insulted with half-assed celebrity vocal cameos and a plot that concludes not with a bang, but with a fart joke. Neither Gaghan, nor his ensemble, nor Universal have an excuse. Downey doesn’t either.

The story isn’t necessarily awful, but it’s mostly boring, stretching itself out to an unwieldy 115 minutes.

There’s not anything in Pain Hustlers that’s worth your valuable time. Better-told versions of its story abound. More thoughtful takes on the opioid industry and the harm it causes everyday people are plentiful.

Beyond the tepid cultural commentary, the film has few other redeeming qualities.