Nothing in the movie seems to matter, from its internal lore to the extraneous sequel setups that appear out of nowhere to the characters’ own ethoses. Audiences have not cared much about Sony’s non-Spider-Man Spider-world movies. That’s no surprise when the filmmakers seem to be this indifferent as well.

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).

Like The Snowman, The Last Thing He Wanted fails to give its audience all the clues necessary to form a coherent picture, and flops in spite of what should be a killer director/cast combination.

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.

For a product of its time — a decade full of video game-inspired stinkers — it’s worth looking back on, especially because it’s obvious how much fun the cast is having.

This is a rom-com, formulaic and comforting and breezy, with some action trappings, but with no expectations that anyone needs to care about the results of that action.

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.

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.

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.

The movie is full of the best bits of the kid-adventure genre — exciting and weird powers! Cool training montages! Intriguing plot! — but when it brings in heavier emotional stakes, the elements don’t quite gel.

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.

To the degree that Love Hurts feels like a movie at all, it’s because Quan puts so much heart into his work, and so much squeaky-voiced comedic talent, paired with the speed and flexibility that makes a fight scene thrilling.

In short, it’s the “Imagine” video of movies.

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.

What’s frustrating is that The Wrong Missy isn’t entirely devoid of self-awareness.

Giarratana doesn’t seem to trust that the story of two kids and their emotions is enough of a draw onscreen, so they fluff up the movie to bolster the drama — but really, they should have just let the tiger run free.

Cats undermines itself in both editing and musical arrangement, barely has a plot to hang its hat on, and is CGI-ed into oblivion. Yet there’s something weirdly wonderful about just how committed Hooper is to his vision, which feels like it should have been audience-tested into something less phantasmagorical.

Firestarter 2022 is a marginal improvement on the ’84 original, if only because it has a handful of redeeming qualities rather than virtually none at all.

Tom & Jerry feels freer in its moments of unbridled cartoon silliness than it ever does when it’s attending to its human plotting. It’s yet another hybrid where the overlit crumminess of live-action tries and fails to rescue animation from its own artistry.

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.

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

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 Stein assembles his early sequences with precision, laying out geography and shorthanding through set design, that sharpness is undermined by basically everything else in the movie, from micro to major.

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.

Designed to fit, then subvert and smash, archetypes, the two leads of The School for Good and Evil and their strong friendship turn the movie from fantastical fun to memorable delight.

Watching a foot-tall plaything flip over a dinner table would be either hilarious or terrifying, and either direction would be an improvement over the flavorless slurry Bell is dishing up.

Mark Wahlberg should never be in a science fiction movie ever again. While the Paramount Plus exclusive streaming movie Infinite isn’t entirely his bad — the direction, script, and overall absence of creative vision also range from nonsensical to embarrassing — it suffers profoundly from his bland, phoned-in, looking-for-the-craft-table performance.

Though any Cage-free attempts at comedy fall flat, the action remains exciting, thanks in large part to Logothetis’ steady-handed, no-frills approach. Who knew putting together a bunch of gifted martial artists and letting them exercise those skills could take an action film so far?