It’s not a great film by any means (I’m mixed-positive on Farrelly comedies, generally), but Ricky Stanicky does succeed in fashioning a fairly consistent number of gags that got a rise out of me even if the narrative, especially as it careens into the third act, feels like a one-note joke that’s getting stretched a little too far.

There’s an inspiring story at the center of Next Goal Wins, but that story deserves better.

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.”

Although at times it shows a remarkable focus and weight that its predecessor lacked, it also falls victim to the type of cliches and convolution that tend to doom franchises gearing towards the development of still more installments.

Everything I’ve been asking for from a Resident Evil movie? Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City accomplishes.

The Long Night’s understanding of horror genre fulfillment is nonexistent, no more satisfying than rice cakes with a little red food coloring splashed on to mimic spooky decorations.

It might not fix videogame movies overnight, but Mortal Kombat might finally deliver their sweepingly bad reputation a devastating fatality.

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 issue with Night Swim isn’t that it’s ridiculous, it’s that it doesn’t understand quite how ridiculous it is.

Backstory is fine. Seeing King introduce scores of anonymous leering henchmen to their varying deaths is better.

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.

Slattery and Bernbaum’s adherence to genre standards may hold Maggie Moore(s) back from doing anything new in its space, but not from doing anything worthwhile. There’s nothing wrong with a messy low-level crime movie done right.

There’s a very scary, thrilling, insightful movie to be made about these kinds of accidents and the people they happen to. Silo isn’t it.

Quicksand swings and misses as the next buzzy nature-born thriller. Beltrán can never decide if he’s making an upscale SYFY B-movie or an overserious examination of marriages so stale that self-destruction seems the only answer.

When King and Efron are grooving to their boss/assistant bickering beat, Affair is the most believable and entertaining. As for the rest, it’s been done better and with more depth in a zillion other films.

Younger horror fans who haven’t caught up with the earlier films may well receive this one as a perfectly creepy little genre exercise, and there are moments where it plays that way even to a more experienced audience.

Where the Crawdads Sing is shallow, predictable and just broad enough that you can understand why it sold so well as a half-lurid paperback. Newman’s work adapting it makes its derivative elements as obvious as a bad accent, but its chart-topping, tone-deaf mediocrity is faithfully replicated.

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.

When Donowho brings The Old Way back to the well-trod ground of old Westerns, it’s just plain old.

Although the premise teeters on being twee, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey mostly works because its self-awareness keeps it from devolving into cliche … until it doesn’t.

Maybe this isn’t the sophomore picture we’d hoped for, but it’s sharp and insightful regardless.

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.

Like its confusing title, Mother/Android never really figures out what it wants to say.

Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Back to Black—her attempt at telling the taboo tale of one of music’s most tragic figures, Amy Winehouse—leans too much into the dark cloud looming over the singer’s sad demise, in turn fumbling what could’ve been a rare, successful dramatization of fame and addiction.

The Takedown isn’t a radical or revolutionary movie (it is still about good-guy cops), but it’s refreshing relative to its genre contemporaries.

Dark Phoenix was always destined to fail. Limiting the sprawling story to one main arc severely debilitates the original’s emotional resonance, but avoiding Apocalypse’s swollen plot and stakes-less character narratives means reigning in an essentially big saga and cutting all of its awe down to some rote CGI. To make this work in one movie is to deny the essence of the source text.

It’s just passable popcorn entertainment for a Friday night on the couch, and not on the same level as more inspired Netflix genre movies from the likes of Mike Flanagan, such as Hush or Gerald’s Game.