The doc has its cake and eats it, too, reaffirming Mendes’ vulnerability without putting much of anything on the line.

Gray plays to the simplest pleasures of heist cinema and wins us over because sometimes it’s alright to simply be dependable and straightforward.

The Twin builds mysterious dread rooted in paranormal possessions and possible cult activity, but its ill-serving payoff vaporizes the crippling weight of loss fastened to each character.

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.

Cotillard, whose face is often painted in chiaroscuro care of cinematographer Christophe Beaucarne, manages to provide a gravitas and slightly colored deviations from what is otherwise a monochrome character.

If playwright Theresa Rebeck, who receives co-writing and story credit, brought a fresher perspective to this material at some point, it has been slathered in screenwriterly varnish and a sense of take-charge female empowerment best described as EuropaCorpesque.

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.

Spiral might have rhetorical wrinkles that set it apart from its predecessors, but this franchise is still going around in circles.

Within the framework of grueling training exercises that never seem quite as difficult as the movie tries to make them sound, Space Cadet has some dumb fun. It pushes its luck big time when it moves into a hasty Armageddon knockoff that this movie has neither the budget nor the gravity to pull off.

Orienteering from an unsure script, Slumberland’s uninventive visual language dithers around in unreality while leaving its feet firmly planted in the saddest parts of the real world.

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.

Erik Bloomquist’s direction is composed, and his co-written screenplay with Carson plays on politician-slamming themes, yet Founders Day is still a second-tier slasher that crosses too many plotlines in an overly complicated small-town massacre.

More than anything, it functions as a powerful encapsulation of the death of innocence in youth; a distillation of the moments when we come to terms with the realization that our parents may not be the valorous outlines we’ve built them up to be.

Farrelly’s too busy making a Big Important Movie instead of making a movie that matters.

Though Green may alienate some audiences with choices nowhere near as terrifying as William Friedkin’s original, something about the film’s heart endears beyond another exorcism retread satisfied to follow the same blasphemous beats.

After storing up goodwill with its construction, melodrama and lead performance, The Visitor pulls back the curtain on its narrative, and its revelation, put vaguely, is a bummer.

Avnet likely means well, just as Rokeach meant well. Three Christs needs more than a deep focus on the Christs themselves, and on the system that so utterly failed them. It needs to focus on Stone, and on the collision between ego and benevolence that led to The Three Christs of Ypsilanti’s birth. That should be the story.

A confused mashup of psychological imprisonment thrillers, dystopian social satire and even something adjacent to zombie horror, it’s bereft of actual ideas despite its cement mixer of a premise, struggling to pad out its runtime with 10 minutes of limping credits at its conclusion, leaving 83 minutes as a remainder that feels like a short film or anthology entry dragged kicking and screaming to feature length.

Dead Men Tell No Tales doesn’t rewrite the rulebook for the franchise or the genre as a whole, and is wholly predictable from start to finish, but the likable characters—Thwaites and Scodelario have more natural presence and mutual chemistry than Bloom and Knightley—creative action set pieces, and Depp finally being put in his place in the franchise creates a fun ride that’s instantly forgettable. You know, like the ride itself.

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.

Woodshock is a movie which doesn’t seem to have much interest in being a movie. It revels in images and sensations...without much mind paid to story or character development or really even any context demanded by the difficult issues it raises.

Misunderstandings abound in this ultra-lite comedy of errors. Physical pratfalls (think groin area injuries) get a lot of screen time. But there are moments where Mother of the Bride digs a little deeper, especially when it comes to Lana and Emma’s relationship.

Even though it may lack some nuanced darkness and some of the writing feels a little “on the nose,” as Jiminy himself says, with this family-friendly picture, Zemeckis blends state-of-the-art technology with more up-to-date morals to prove Pinocchio a real and alive text.

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.

Despite an incredibly talented cast of top-tier comedy talent, the film fails to establish a cohesive comedic tone, becoming only more unmoored when it reaches for unearned emotional profundity later on.

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.

Behind You stumbles on inconsistency at best and hesitation at worst.

Unfortunately, Gemini Man is saddled with a fatally weak story, almost as if Lee chose a predictable action-thriller narrative so that he could focus his energy on the effects and frame rate. But the result is a quirky-looking movie that’s generally boring.

Where The Pickup could have most easily have ideologically separated itself would have been on the comedic side, by leaning into the talents of its marquee names, but it instead represses the delivery of jokes more and more as it goes, becoming merely another tepid crime caper without a more distinct identity.

It turns out, after the third attempt to recapture the magic of the first film, that the Men in Black universe is not a particularly compelling one after all. Probably time to move onto something else. They’re all tapped out here.

All Eyez on Me risks little, and as a result it’s not worthy of his complicated legacy.

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.

Chaos Walking feels like a condensement of Ness’ trilogy of books instead of a straightforward translation of the first, and consequently there’s too much that needs to happen in too slim a running time, which leaves little space for making the movie’s conflicts matter.

While none of Viral’s segments manage to equal any of the better sequences from either previous V/H/S installments, what’s left is a solid group of vignettes that—while not reinventing the wheel—will surely put a smile on the right (albeit, twisted) viewers’ faces.

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

Role Play hardly spices up the subgenre with its saucy date-night games, never as action-packed as Mr. & Mrs. Smith or as sweetly sincere as the rom-com classics that inspire this undercover tale about finding that special someone worth killing over.

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

Director Justin Chadwick has managed to concoct a story so overladen and contorted it would actually probably be more satisfying to watch actual tulips growing. In the ground. In real time. (At least then the visuals would be beautiful and the story would make sense.)

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.

Things like a film’s cast, script or direction can keep us interested and giving a damn—but all of those elements fell flat in this installment.

An irreverent mix of genres taken completely seriously but with no small amount of fun, Devil’s Gate wears its script’s stupidity on its sleeve and allows its creature effects and committed cast to carry it throughout.

There doesn’t seem to be any insidious motivation behind writer/director Deon Taylor’s vision for his film, no purposeful undermining of the real impact of sex slavery by coating it in a veneer similar to what can modestly be described as a highly eroticized, run-off-the-mill basic cable home invasion thriller. It’s misguided, not nefarious.

Baywatch is a tonal mess of epic proportions.

I can imagine and understand it receiving all kinds of passionate feedback, from intensely negative to downright infuriated, but I doubt anyone will claim it is boring.

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.

Writers Kevin Biegel and Scotty Landes adapt Kreischer’s unbelievable viral story about robbing a train with Russian mobsters into a retrospective on the comedian’s tumultuous history with excess—a tonal misfire of fantastical absurdity clashing against emotional confessions.

It’s easy to see why studio execs at Paramount were unsure of how to market this movie, as it seemingly attempts to check so many boxes at once that nearly any description is going to fail to accurately convey the experience of watching it. Ultimately, it’s that unstable, unpredictable nature that is simultaneously its most entertaining and most problematic aspect.

Life Upside Down is a clunky, graceless movie, but it’s utterly engrossing as a stage for letting Odenkirk, Mitchell, Huston and the rest vent their own stir craziness. If you think of the film as more of an outlet than a functioning narrative, it gains value. But that reflective detail isn’t enough to hold our attention, no matter how likable and gifted its authors.

The grotesquerie crowds out the movie’s fleeting cuteness.

For all of its lackluster holy leanings, Demonic still achieves an air of abject horror, aided in no small part by Ola Strandh’s electro-exorcism score. The demon’s design is also consistently terrifying, whether it is enveloped in a neon-soaked backlight or morphing into unpredictable and increasingly abominable versions of itself.

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 reason such a colorful mainstream family time-waster should exist is to string together a bunch of zippy PG-rated action set-pieces. In that sense, the film succeeds at the basest level, thanks primarily to the beautifully crisp animation, a big step-up from the first film’s overtly plastic CG look.

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

Like an unstable particle of antimatter–which beyond all reason becomes a major plot point, if you can believe that–Time Cut begins to rapidly deteriorate in legibility in its third act, before spinning totally out of control.

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.

Truth or Dare commits the cardinal sin of a film with such a stupid premise; it tries to explain the spiritual source of the game.

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.

It’s occasionally delightful, frequently funny, and good enough to make me look forward to what Greer will do next behind the camera.

Even though the plot of the movie is wispy, it still features the humor that made the original so beloved.

The criticism is less that Mute doesn’t know what it wants to be, and more that it seems to emphatically decide what it wants to be every few minutes, only to then change its mind once more. And every time it does so, it’s the audience that is being left behind.

There are a few tense moments, good performances and a fair variety of settings to make it feel like a complete journey. But by having some science-fiction cause for why nobody sleeps, it’s not about actual insomnia in any way that’s relatable to anyone.

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.

For a cool $200 million and this cast, I would have gladly taken less marketing mystery on the front end and more rigor in the actual story.

Yet there’s some kind of invisible force here, hurrying things along in the hopes of a future team-up, making sure this feature film arrives more undead than alive.

In many ways, The Hurricane Heist’s lack of self-awareness regarding just how dated it feels plays to its advantage. If you’re looking for that 1997 big-budget CG showcase experience without the wink-wink self deprecating irony of The Lonely Island or Deadpool, then you should be fairly satisfied with this cinematic time capsule.

Joke’s way over, guys, and everyone’s now uncomfortable, thanks. Now, who needs a drink…?

The Desperate Hour, while consistently entertaining and confidently boasting a tight, no-frills script, fights too hard to explain that it does not exist purely by virtue of it being a fun kind of story to tell.

With a solid cast and decent predecessor, Tall Girl 2 could have been a compelling watch, if only it didn’t make the mistake of relying on a premise that the first one had to go to unreasonable lengths (or heights?) to disguise as something else.

If watching Rebel Moon—Part One was over before it started, Part Two is a miserable exercise in unearned hubris.

Writer Josann McGibbon’s script plays it safe from beginning to end. The potential cleverness of the format is never tested or pushed to explore any truly weird choices for Cami.

The true fatal flaw of Harold and the Purple Crayon is that everything—from the story to the visual design—feels like it came pre-packaged in a microwave dinner.

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

Ghosted is a little breezier and less blatantly synthetic than the plastic Red Notice or the smirky Gray Man, but put together these failed attempts at action-packed romance still feel like a psy-op for the superhero industrial complex: With star vehicles like these, maybe movie stars will have to stay in capes forever.

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?

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.

While the Netflix Original film manages to sneak in a few genuinely funny moments, it’s not nearly as action-packed, suspenseful or humorous as it aims to be.

A horror movie so derivative that it becomes uniquely terrible.

With Evil Dead remake genius Fede Alvarez producing, and an apparent dedication to meaningfully furthering the original storyline, it seemed like there was no way this new version of the worst crime in Texas history could be a misstep. It turned out to be a trite modernization of the original, resting on topical concepts that it doesn’t know how to comment on—or at least, it’s not saying what it thinks it is.

It’s genre salad, and every ingredient is wilted at a moment in America where Kings’ historical makeup remains fresh.

As a commentary on the modern blockbuster, the movie’s fascinating. But as an actual movie, it’s fairly disheartening.

Though Quan and his supporting cast are often a delight, and the film’s fight scenes are worth strapping in for, this is a movie that makes a choppy mess of its brisk runtime, and wastes a lot of its potential with a molasses-slow, often baffling second act.

While attempting to highlight the inconsequential nature of “rich people problems,” the film isn’t incisive or clever enough to parody the very cinematic sensation it’s unintentionally playing into.

Mostly, Five Nights at Freddy’s relies on a lot of jump scares, and scenes with building tension that result in cat-and-mouse scenarios, which are perfect for the age range it’s playing to.

Old Guy is a rather careless take on the fusion of comedy and action genres, the kind of film that will throw around an acronym like “PSNI” in the middle of conversation and just assume an American sitting at home on their couch will deduce this stands for “Police Service of Northern Ireland.”

The Scribbler is overwrought, absurd, occasionally exploitative, completely lacking in subplot, takes a good 20-25 minutes to really get going and has acting that varies from excellent to, well, less-than-excellent. It’s also hugely fun!

It’s a remake that lacks identity, urgency and enthusiasm—such a shame after Keith Thomas’ outstanding horror debut.

While the movie is often adorable and overwhelmingly wholesome, it lacks the true essence of Tom and Jerry cartoons: Goofy, slapstick barbarity perpetually enacted between the two characters.

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

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

The main novelty, and the film’s primary pleasure, is the commitment of its cast to its bloody, profane vapidity.