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.

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

There are movies that fail because they are misguided, or because their heart isn’t in the right place. This movie wants to be special, which makes the fact it is such a lumpy, clumsy mess all the more frustrating. You root for this movie, and the movie tries to go a long way on that good will. It doesn’t make it far.

Despite the amateurish lack of comic or dramatic timing, Christmas Pageant does have some old-fashioned charm.

Frankly, Earwig and the Witch looks ghastly enough that storytelling merit doesn’t even matter. It’s a movie almost too ugly to consider beyond the surface.

Eastwood’s been riding off into the sunset for decades now, and Cry Macho’s creaky, lackadaisical hat-wave is a feature-length parody of a golden oldie.

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.

Medieval’s best quality is that it might make you do your reading, but as a film about Jan Žižka and his exciting, catalytic moment in history, it’s less interesting than the dozen Wikipedia tabs it might cause you to open.

Love Machina may want to take a peek behind its own curtain every once in a while for a reality check.

Patti Cake$ clearly loves music, but fails to translate that into a compelling narrative. It’s an album filled mostly with half-baked skits.

Kandahar gets the straight face right, but seems woefully convinced that it’s a serious drama, right down to the wailing-woman soundtrack that so many Hollywood and Hollywood-adjacent movies about the Middle East bust out to show they’re down with the anguish.

Den of Thieves is such a dumb misunderstanding of the genres in which it plays, such a loud, interminable shart of unmitigated machismo, such a heavy-handed rip-off of Heat and The Usual Suspects and even Ocean’s Eleven (and maybe even The Fast and the Furious, but for scumbags) that it feels anachronistic on arrival, the kind of melodramatic, pulpy studio action flick that doesn’t get made anymore because it shouldn’t.

Dog Years’ lack of faith in its audience makes its over-explanation and hackneyed groaners unshakable weights on a story that only needed to let Reynolds do his thing.

Our Father’s failures aren’t in its lurid source material, but in its leering execution.

While most of the story takes place in a constrained setting and it wastes no time in introducing us to the dangers of being trapped in a metal box with a delirious Nicolas Cage performance, Sympathy for the Devil’s inability to paint its characters in anything but the broadest strokes makes it difficult to see past the artifice of it all, dulling its attempts at dangling these people’s fates over the precipice.

With all the elements on hand to achieve something of note, The Starling disappointingly reduces the complexity of loss, grief and forgiveness into a birdbrained fairy tale that is more than happy to bypass reality in order to make a featherlight point.

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

The Electric State is one hell of an artistically neutered, sanitized boondoggle, awe-inspiring in its deployment of expensive visuals but largely bereft of any kind of genuine wit, humor, warmth or adaptational deftness.

If you’re looking for an inconsequential way to spend an hour and a half, Good Mourning boasts familiar faces wandering aimlessly through a threadbare plot—perfect for half-watching while checking IMDb to identify the plethora of vapid celebrity visages.

Land of Bad is middle-of-the-road war movie gobbledygook.

A frequently heartstring-tugging inspirational dog movie that does little to excel beyond acceptability yet manages to not be a complete drag to watch.

For Zodiac Killer Project to work, it would have to be coming from a filmmaker who is fully ready to admit their own culpability in continuing to fuel the worst aspects of the genre they intended to exploit. That kind of brutal self-admission would have taken a great deal of courage, but Shackleton can’t quite get there, even if he comes close at times.

A fresh take on how our hyper-connected world observes catastrophe would rightly pick at this scab. But Alex Garland approaches this modern hopelessness with impersonal detachment, dreaming up an empty war filmed for no one.

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.

Downfall: The Case Against Boeing is your average talking-head documentary and a useful resource of information if one is writing a grade-school research paper on the basic logistics of the tragic crashes.

On the 3rd Day never coheres, it’s just Halloween Mad Libs trying to fake its way through an actual start-to-finish storyline.

Is it a tragedy of genre saturation, both movie-haltingly flashy and deeply unimpressive. Everything is constantly moving and you don’t feel a thing.

The sequel feels compromised, lumped with easy lessons about family and community, piecemeal and cobbled together from bigger ideas and the ever-nagging intuition that the sell-by date on the franchise has long expired.