The 70-year-old Neeson lacks both the physical stamina and charisma to pull off the Marlowe character; his fight and action sequences are sluggish and incredulous, and there’s zero chemistry between Marlowe and Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger), the beautiful blond who hires him to investigate the sudden disappearance of her former lover Nico Peterson.

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.

Under the Eiffel Tower is a functionally enjoyable film bookended by an opening and a conclusion both dogged by distrust in the audience’s reading comprehension.

With the current onslaught of half-baked political horror commentary, sometimes it really is just enough for a film to simply focus on the scares for once, but be forewarned that The Exorcism of God’s subpar plot and politics definitely don’t do it any favors.

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.

While the director clearly has a few tricks up his sleeve for hitting his viewers with the heebie jeebies, what he doesn’t have, at least for The Sonata, is a sense of how to weave those tricks into a unified, cohesive narrative.

In a world full of soulless, self-conscious CGI-rampant action flicks and superhero movies that seem like they were made by robots, Emmerich seems to really care about this movie. And that’s a trend I can get behind.

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

The Woman in the Window succeeds when it comes to constructing an adequate cinematic language to tell the story of its original source material, but tends to overcompensate for its narrative shortcomings.

With House Party, Calmatic jumps from a prolific music video career to feature filmmaking with the same energy, leading to shorter-burst storytelling that values standout moments over longevity.

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.

Juvenile is as juvenile does, but the Broken Lizard fellows supplement their puerile nonsense with abiding endearment. They’re idiots, but sincere, disarming idiots. Like the characters they play in both movies, they mean well, but meaning well comes in second to antics when spending your career making concerted efforts to avoid responsibility.

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.

There’s a lot of talent on the screen, some catchy music, and some wonderful visuals and design choices, but none of it ever quite adds up to something bigger, leaving us with a film that’s ambitious but strangely hollow.

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

Falling for Christmas feels less like a genuine chance to give Lohan a due shot at a re-return to acting as it does like some executive’s opportunity to capitalize on millennial nostalgia.

Theoretically, it’s a solid generator of comic tension, with a clear timeline taking the production through rehearsals, tech, dress, opening night, and beyond. But Peretti dices these segments into so many blackout sketches that the whole thing feels as weirdly protracted and repetitive as the frequent slow-mo shots Peretti inserts for reasons beyond my understanding.

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.

Directed by Ben Wheatley, Meg 2: The Trench earnestly takes on the challenge of being even more brazenly goofy and ludicrous than the first film.

Honeydew is a cannibalistic descent in a vintage-inspired hell complete with antique lace doilies and ceramic kitchenware. It is a fascinating, hallucinatory puzzle that is short a few pieces, but is still reminiscent of a classic like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

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.