A standard-issue horror barely making the move from short to feature (it’s only around 80 minutes before credits), The Moogai is a scare-free blunt instrument, imprecise and uninterested in its own genre beyond its potential for metaphor.

Strays is bad, but it’s not offensively so—and it’s certainly better and more watchable than something like Cocaine Bear (a low bar to cross, albeit).

The premise is also genuinely neat, a fun, breezy little 90-minute high-concept that unfortunately sounds more propulsive and invigorating than it really is.

Matthew López’s take on the story suffers from breakneck pacing, shallow characterizations across the board, and filmmaking choices that sometimes baffle, and sometimes betray the film’s low budget. It’s a disappointing, slapdash cash-in that does a disservice not only to McQuiston’s book, but the genre it’s part of.

It’s probably a tautology to say that the patchwork surrealism of Kuso doesn’t hang together as a coherent experience.

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.

There is so much that can be mined from the terrifying experience of aging, but The Front Room is decidedly uninterested in everything that wellspring of tragedy has to offer—save for incontinence, and that is something (perhaps the only thing) it is very, very interested in.

This is Shyamalan at his worst, a speechifying, moralizing scold who wants your adoration but doesn’t want to put in the effort, or himself at risk, to earn it.

While Don’t Breathe 2 emulates a similar aesthetic from its predecessor and is still able to skillfully build tension, it is ultimately an incredibly disappointing film.

This is a standard vigilante/revenge fantasy too plodding to deliver the base genre goodies, and too simplistic to work as a character study on how a sudden life of violence can irredeemably disrupt an average citizen’s psyche, the way the original film at least half-heartedly attempted to do.

More hollow than hollowing, director Jonathan Glazer’s Edenic nightmare is better when taken metaphorically. There are no people to grasp onto here, only concepts.

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.

Slowly, agonizingly, over the course of two-and-a-half hours, the house collapses in a stream of Star Wars free association. At best, The Rise of Skywalker solidifies Ridley and Driver as movie stars. At worst, it ends this narrative not with a bang but with a recycled image from a better movie. If that isn’t proof that Disney considers this property more product than art, nothing is.

The film’s confounding tonal discordance, salvaged only in spurts by a commendable performance from Julia Louis-Dreyfus, makes its observations far more embarrassing than existential.

Coming from a first-timer, Golden Exits might suggest promise. Coming from Perry, it nearly reads as self-satire, the epitome of overly dry and thoroughly hubristic indie filmmaking. Don’t let the indulgent chatter fool you. Here, Perry has nothing to say that’s worth listening to.

It bears an overall feeling that we’re watching a work in progress.

Salinger’s world doesn’t feel real, but like an amusement park ride taking visitors through the major stops of an author’s legacy, each moment a checkmark before the literary splashdown. It’s almost stubbornly mediocre.

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.

Jolt’s generic results are so far removed from its high-concept electrical premise that you have to wonder: Watt the hell happened?

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.

There was no good reason to resurrect this property. To quote Jud, “Sometimes, dead is better.”

Despite Fraser donning anywhere between 50 and 300 pounds of prosthetic fat for his role, Charlie lacks a fleshed-out interiority that, unfortunately, reflects Hunter’s original material.

It’s not willing to be goofy and gonzo enough for the inanity of its concept, not cool enough for the slick fight scenes it wants to impress you with, and not worthy enough of Cage as Dracula (the real star of this show).

The premise of a bunch of 1919 circus freaks whimsically conspiring to save an elephant from captivity should be an easy layup for Burton, but he just goes through the motions here with a paint-by-numbers Disney climax.

Lacking the whip-smarts of previous works, The Second Act only winds up feeling as self-important—and as insecure—as the very characters it caricatures.

Kurt Wimmer’s newfangled Children of the Corn is a rotten husk of a Stephen King adaptation.

Make no mistake: Puppy Love is a bad movie. This isn’t an exact precise calculation, but it certainly seems like at least 30% of the 106-minute movie are montages.