An evident attempt to right the ship has turned into a calamitous case of mission drift, as a property with no identity travels in nonsensical circles, looking for a sustainable new direction.

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

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 comes across more like a showreel than a stand-alone film, like, a confusingly edited sizzle teaser for a much more in-depth Doors drama series.

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

Any goodwill provided by the concept or cast is utterly squandered by a film that packs in endless references without having anything whatsoever to say.

There are no stakes, and there’s little that’s offensive, except to the art and craft of cinema. It’s funny. It’s glossy. It’s a fantasy. It’s safe. It’s soft.

It’s a disappointment to discover that Bay’s new Netflix movie, 6 Underground, is utterly joyless.

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.

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.

Though the filmmakers hoped to balance the historical atrocities of slavery with contemporary racial oppression, Antebellum — yet another unnecessary slave movie — rarely feels like a horror flick. Instead, its needless brutality, ropy character work, and misguided twist make it easily 2020’s worst movie so far.

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.