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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

As the film trickles toward its howler of a conclusion, any hopes McCarthy might somehow salvage this story evaporate. Stillwater sinks like a stone.

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.

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 worst choice Mary Harron makes in Dalíland is relying on convention to make an end-stage portrait of an unconventional figure.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Those unfortunate enough to populate Mr. Harrigan’s Phone must be as dumb as the movie thinks we are. This low opinion of its audience is apparent in every step of its narrative and in some of its stranger creative choices.

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.

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.

It’s a shame, because the idea of a serial killer approaching his work with a kind of dutiful, world-weary professionalism is funny enough – maybe only comedy-sketch funny, but then again, The Shallow Tale produces a profound longing for the number of laughs that could sustain a five-minute sketch.

Good on Paper wasn’t that good as a stand-up segment; as a movie, it should be permanently erased from the memories of anyone unlucky enough to have seen it.

It Ends with Us is in deep solidarity with its source material when it comes to constructing a work that is uniquely bland and unmemorable.

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.

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

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.

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.

Before we get to its many faults, it’s worth noting G20 gets one part of its concept correct: casting Viola Davis as the President. Getting the vibes right when casting your President is the most important first step when making a film in this subgenre.

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.

Despicable Me 4 loses focus like a golden retriever in a Petco plushie aisle, splitting characters into bottled subplots that can only be addressed in single-file order.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Rob Savage’s Dashcam is the equivalent of strapping a GoPro to a Republican edgelord’s dirty diaper and throwing it into a blender.

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.

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.

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.

A movie like Haunted Mansion is always going to be, at its heart, a cinematic advertisement for the theme park, but couldn’t we at least run with that idea and make it fun?

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.

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.

The documentary—with the pretentious full title of And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine, after the British monarch whose coronation Georges Méliès staged and filmed—is a bad undergrad media studies paper, given shape and movement by directors Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck.

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

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.

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

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.”

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.

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.

Paint is interested in the meme of the man. As the old proverb goes: A funny meme does not a feature film make.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

It’s difficult to think of a biopic that so thoroughly embarrasses its subject in the process of attempting to honor them the way Churchill does.

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.

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

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Even in Kristin’s quietest, most contemplative moments, Collette can’t stop bugging her eyes or yanking down her mouth – which, to be fair, is a natural reaction to being repeatedly poisoned over the course of 101 endless minutes.

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.

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

The problem with director and writer Hallie Myers-Sheyer’s film is that it just blandly presents all of the expected cliches of the genre without anything really new or unique to say.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 possible for cinema to weave this many themes and concerns together into one cohesive film. The Unforgivable simply doesn’t.

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.

Everything about Pitch Perfect 3’s foundation is openly half-baked. If it winked at its own indifference anymore than it already does, you might mistake its indifference for outright contempt.

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.

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

There is nothing in The Family Plan that you haven’t seen before, to the point that there’s somehow even less.

I could dig into any number of the movie’s unfortunate choices, bad decisions or downright detestable elements—sprinkling in faint praise like, hey, the Tony-winning Platt might be acting through five layers of bullsh*t, but he can still sing—and I’d still never capture all the reasons Dear Evan Hansen fails.

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.

The only explanation for such shoddy plotting is that this is the first in a planned franchise, but Mile 22 gives us absolutely no reason to want to return to the world of Jimmy and his war games, an apocalyptic hellscape protected by a guy who cares about nobody and is fine with it, because nobody cares about him.

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.

It is obnoxious, overlong, annoying and, above all, deeply unfunny.

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

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.

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!

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.

Baywatch is a tonal mess of epic proportions.

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.

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.

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.

He’s All That is, yes, a nightmarish, joyless commentary on influencer-beholden adolescence told through the crutch of nostalgia and starring a charisma-less TikTok star, but it’s hard to know if one is merely an example of “Old Man Yells at Cloud” or if the teenagers of today are truly living in a Hell on Earth

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.

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

The Nut Job 2 actually contains some impressive animation, with photorealistic backgrounds and detailed fur dynamics on the characters, but that makes it an even bigger tragedy, since we know that untold hours were spent by artists in service of a product that even the least discerning child would find tired and useless.

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.