The ticking clock makes The Midnight Sky a post-apocalyptic survivalist space film whose narrative is so overloaded that the emotional weight offers zero gravity.

Unfortunately, The Rental unravels. Rather than building on the characters’ moralistic inequities, and relating them to their unknown voyeurist, Franco lets the final act wither under the weight of facile jump scares and an unimaginative killer who apes one of horror’s iconic maniacs.

The Expendables movies had one trick, and that trick has been played out. Director Scott Waugh has to resort to something else with Expend4bles: finally trying to turn one of these projects into a good action movie.

The movie’s mock-jaundiced attitude toward social media is itself satirical, and there’s a germ of a funny idea about how principled liberals can get entangled in pointless social media battles and infighting. But it’s eclipsed by an unavoidably moneyed perspective that presumes privileged people are inherently liberal, rather than attacking the hypocrisy of rich liberals in particular.

Shepherd is more of a bandwagon-jumping exercise in arthouse horror films about grief than a truly bone-chilling example of one.

This is neither a uniquely marvelous film nor a teeth-gnashing pain. It’s OK in the moment, and it evaporates as soon as the end credits roll.

The well-placed message and the imaginative animation will win over the film’s intended audience: young children. But the moves Where is Anne Frank uses to deliver that message may do as much harm as they bring help.

Craig Gillespie’s Dumb Money is neither dumb enough to capture the bonkers nature of the story nor smart enough to turn it into an entertaining or even informative tale.

Borderlands is the one kind of movie that’s the hardest to get excited about: the kind that lands in the middle space between a project with its own strong identity, and a compromised adaptation trying to play to the masses. It’s tough to live in the borderlands.

Realism isn’t necessarily the problem here; dissonance is. The Gray Man is a story about assassins who are, we’re told, the very best in the world. And yet over and over again, they are shown to be shitty at their jobs. They incite international incidents. They wage small wars in town squares. And they have a very hard time holding a small girl hostage.

As filmmakers try to figure out how to lasso the internet and tame it for the screen, Cat Person is mostly useful as a lesson in what not to do.

The result is admirable for how grim it is in its multifaceted way, but as a whole, Warning is too disjointed and underdeveloped to really make an impact with its dystopian cautions.

It’s mostly a movie with designs on over-the-top action that are undercut by the actual action.

Thor: Love and Thunder isn’t just a misfire, it’s a scam. Its characters only move forward in the most artificial ways. Their status at the end of the film is no more intriguing than it was at the beginning. It’s the worst thing a film in this mode can be: inconsequential.

Wish is all about the twinkling star in the night sky, the one many a Disney hero has wished upon. Perfectly calibrated for that Disney magic! Except this movie is a little too perfectly calibrated.

Uglies winds up being yet another uninspired, forgettable entry in the deluge of YA dystopian movies that make my passionate defense of the genre such an uphill climb.

Its unusual structure makes it both novel and ungainly.

What’s supposed to resemble a smart, unnerving sci-fi movie looks more like a lecture about male dominance and deception that keeps foregrounding its least interesting characters.

Disney Plus’ Lady and the Tramp flattens the original movie’s dreamy love story by trading genuine emotion for artificiality and a past that never existed.

It offers the bittersweet spectacle of a pretty loony movie trying its best to become a more conventional one. Maybe an outright boondoggle would have been more memorable.

The first two movies are packed with “I can’t believe that just happened!” moments. The third one instead chains together a series of “Oh yeah, I’ve seen this before” scenes.

Maybe the most baffling thing about Scream 7 is that it’s not an off-the-rails franchise-ending disaster. It’s entertaining enough, with a few fun side performances and the easy prickliness of Sidney and Gale’s friendship. But it’s missing the giddy carnival-ride audience-movie thrills and clever meta-humor of previous entries, and the more serious material simply isn’t insightful enough to take its place (or distract from its craven origins as a corporate patch-job).

Janky anachronisms and grating narration aside, the film is aggressively OK, though the dynamic side characters do most of the heavy lifting.

A lot about this Chainsaw is under-realized and messy — perhaps because of the project’s convoluted shoot, which saw the original directors axed one week into production in Bulgaria. The final version of the film, directed by Garcia, packs a lot of characters, subplots, and backstory into its 83 minutes, and very few are essential.

[Rob Jabbaz] can’t find the proper measure of finesse and shamelessness to marry his grotesque gore and violence to, given the moral lessons he seems to think he’s obligated to offer.

Thunder Force is only occasionally insightful, and almost never surprising. It’s arriving in a world where people generally expect more from its genre than light, enjoyable performances and a handful of overstretched gags, and that’s all it has to offer.

Deep Water is more like the movie plenty of people probably assumed Deep Blue Sea would be like in the first place: watchable, forgettable shlock.

Black Adam is overstuffed with underdeveloped concepts and characters that have been done better in other shows and films.