It’s no better than it needs to be, and it’s not bad enough to be consistently laughable, either.

The whole story hinges on a twist that’s superficially clever on paper but wildly farfetched in practice. Once that hinge has swung, Stone ratchets up the supposed tension with attempted murders, scuffles, chases, and confrontations. Yet as these attempts at excitement emerge, the movie itself flattens out.

The only redeeming quality: Ice Cube now has a place on Mount Razziemore in a movie I can only hope earns its own Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode.

Smurfs is garbage. It’s a randomized assortment of Stuff That Happens in Kids’ Animated Movies. . . It’s mostly meaningless, or occasionally mildly offensive, if you stop to think about it. It’s also blandly drawn, stiffly animated, and maddeningly inconsistent in its visual design.

Though The Old Guard 2 is only the second installment in this movie series, it’s already far weaker than its predecessor. It does just about everything worse.

In a movie that feels constricted in close-ups and boxed-in set pieces, the group’s music gives Moana 2 a much-needed epic quality. There are… devastating clunkers.

Folie à Deux’s messaging doesn’t come off as artfully ambiguous, just so mixed that it could support any interpretation. If Phillips has a message he’s trying to convey, it might be a repudiation of the fans who took Joker’s protagonist as a rousing nihilistic icon. But he undercuts himself there, too.

There’s no sign of sincerity anywhere in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, and no hint of relatable feeling. The entire movie is an echo chamber crammed with incident.

Snyder’s background is fine arts, specifically painting, and you see it in the chiaroscuro speed-ramping that litters his filmography. But the closest The Scargiver gets to anything arty is that you could compare it to Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son, in that it’s near monochromatic and feels like someone biting your head off.

It’s a franchise reduced to nothing more than a parade of hollow, familiar images, lightly repackaged in hopes that we’ll buy another ticket and try to revisit the emotions we felt when we encountered this world for the first time.

It gets lost in a maze of awful storytelling and frustrating characters, all without offering anything more than the stock-standard horror tropes that have been done better in a million other movies.

Yet for all the boring set pieces, bad exposition, and faulty universe expansion, Johnson, Sweeney, Merced, and O’Connor still manage to find tiny spaces where their charisma can peek through.

The sequel to Aquaman is a total bummer for those of us who enjoyed Aquaman.

Nothing comes of anything either man says. It’s all noise — all passionless anger going in circles, captured by a camera that seems averse to lingering on the tremendous talents of Hopkins and Goode, who try their best to rescue Freud’s Last Session from itself.

A Child of Fire is not only a bore, it’s a shoddy-looking one.

A movie that feels like it’s been machine-learned and reverse-engineered from YouTube fanfic, rather than rooted in any kind of recognizable human experience, behavior, or psychology.

AGGRO DR1FT isn’t an enjoyable or particularly well-made movie, but it is the movie I’ve thought about most this year. For better or worse, that’s worth something.

In the process of stripping the series down to essentials, Green and co-writer Peter Sattler have made the most boring, uninspired version of The Exorcist imaginable: a regular old exorcism movie.

This kind of aggrieved posturing isn’t a good look in 2023. Geek culture won. Mardenborough’s story is real, and has a much more significant dimension than victory in some imagined gaming culture war.

Unfortunately, the film’s most compelling questions don’t ever get answered.

To some extent, each shot is a little more neatly composed. But they’re all strung together with the barest visual and narrative connective tissue, resulting in a baffling film that feels strange not only for a modern blockbuster, but for a Transformers movie as well.

The new White Men Can’t Jump will likely struggle to linger in anyone’s head the day after they watch it. Every character interaction is straightforward, every motivation and foible is stated out loud. Every joke is delivered for the camera, not the characters.

Tyranny of tone and language aren’t the movie’s only problems. Its story is similarly half-baked, with allusions galore to overcoming demons and finding inner strength that are only ever lip-service, rather than being dramatically or even comedically expressed.

While it isn’t the worst film the franchise has to offer, that’s only because the competition is so weak.

The pacing is leaden, the visuals are murky, and there’s pretty much no reason to care about anyone on the screen, except to idly wonder how they’re going to die, and what their innards will look like when they do.

2014’s Goodnight Mommy is one of the best horror films of the last decade, but nearly every element that contributed to that quality has been ignored or reversed in this disappointment of a remake. Not all remakes are unequivocal failures, but this one is.

By studiously spelling out each emotion, Zemeckis and Weitz remove any potential for enigmatic complexity. And while the computer technology bringing Pinocchio to life is nowhere near as creepy as anything in Zemeckis’ Polar Express, that’s mitigated by how obviously fake he is anytime there’s a shot with a human actor “touching” or “holding” the little wooden boy.

The movie is so poorly staged that it manages to conceal the supposedly important hero/kid bonding elements, while telegraphing early on where the rest of the story is going.