The young ones that this film is being aimed at are of the age when the movies can genuinely be magical, and the best ones can form memories that will last a lifetime. “Migration” may pass the time, but my guess is that those kids will retain more lasting memories of whatever their parents got for them at the concession stand than anything up there on the screen.

Hyena is such a nasty and brutish item that even the hardiest of moviegoers may find themselves repulsed by some of the sights that Johnson has in store.

The Devil Conspiracy is nuttier than the proverbial fruitcake and twice as difficult to swallow, regardless of where you reside on the theological spectrum.

As loud and in-your-face as these developments are presented, they're amount to a shabby collection of Blumhouse-lite scenes that would be a parody if it weren’t so dull.

As for those special effects, they are vivid, colorful, convincing. They aren’t quite so good that you don’t notice the WWII fantasy scenarios enacted therein are clichéd constructions reenacted in high heels.

The story ends up being one wrong turn after another. A GPS hasn’t been invented that could get this plot-hole-riddled script back on track.

Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin feels less like a chance to creatively reboot a hit franchise and more like a way to cheaply profit off any residual interest left in it.

Yes, the casual-chic interior designs shine as much as her mom’s ever did. But I never really felt at home with Home Again.

Imagine “Office Space” with forgettable characters and nothing to say about this next bleak phase of the business world.

There's not only nothing new here, there's nothing convincing either. And if I'm supposed to judge Bumblebee based on how well it succeeds at what it tries to do (rather than what came before it), it's still not very good.

Muzzle is filled with intriguing aspects not explored meaningfully. There are so many different threads, themes, and plots, even Scotch-taped together in the hopes it will come together. It doesn't.

Maybe the heart of the problem is that Kate and Meg's behavior doesn't track with the practical realities of lifelong, functioning friendship between (most) women as experienced by...well, any functioning adult who lives in the world.

When she least expects it, the face of the cat transforms into a monstrous one, with sharp, pointy teeth and a roar. Yes, this is going to be one of those horror movies.

A staggering misfire on two discrete levels. As an adaptation of the 1997 novel by Philip Roth, it is lead-footed and inept. The screenplay, by John Romano, treats the narrative in a way that strongly suggests what I hope was a willful misreading of the book. But even considered entirely separately from its source material, American Pastoral is hopelessly weak.

Rather than dig into what’s specifically changing about their relationship, Duplass and Eslyn focus on armchair psychology and black-box speeches to explain away what’s really going on with these two men.

How can a movie this visually glossy be so devastatingly uninteresting and dull?

Fernando Coimbra’s Sand Castle offers too little to the War is Hell genre to be noteworthy.

Worst of all, the pacing here is just off, leading to a film that drags even at 90 minutes. If the cold doesn’t kill you, the boredom will.

The Lesson, directed by Alice Troughton from a script by Alex MacKeith, aspires to be high-toned but only gets to the peak of a cliché slag heap.

Through it all, a few performances actually increase the disappointment, for one wishes they were in a better film. Leo is perfect casting as a woman whose acerbic personality helped define her.

Based on a 2016 memoir by Tom Mitchell, “The Penguin Lessons” wants to be a thoughtful light entertainment about ideals and courage, but ends up seeming grotesquely misguided.

The cast gives their all, but the film ultimately has nothing to offer.

Rio, I Love You feels like little more than an extended tourism promotion video.

A project clearly made by a first-time actor-turned-director, who is most concerned with their own scenes and casting.

Written and directed by Aharon Keshales, whose debut (2010's Rabies) was an attention-getting nail-biter, South of Heaven—with a couple of exceptions—is inert and unimaginative.

A spectacularly disjointed comedy that’s only superficially about two foul-mouthed, but well-meaning dopes who light and pass the proverbial torch to the next generation of slackers. “Reboot” is more of an ego trip for Smith, an amiable, creatively frustrated pop artist who survived a major health crisis — one that even he knows he can’t shut up about.

This film is simply a simulation of the genre beats you expect in a story about a man kidnapping a woman in the woods. The cloying setup also leaves much to be desired, as does the anti-climatic ending

What makes The Vigil so frustrating is that it feels like a product and not a reflection of its subject’s identity crisis.

Next Goal Wins exists as proof of the invulnerability of a certain movie template and as a Frankenstein patchwork of previous films.

The movie is bland hackwork; its crime isn't incompetence, but indifference.

It features one good performance from Dennis, who struggles to show us a real woman doing her best to live up to her expectations for herself and accept love into her life again. But Dennis can't save the whole thing. It's too big of a mess.

William simply devolves into a drab, moody morality tale for parents about not treating your kids like test subjects.

The United States vs. Billie Holiday is so misguided that it's hard to know where to start griping about it. It wallows in cruelty, misery, and degradation without providing insight into the historical personages who are so thoughtfully depicted by its cast.

In news that will probably not startle too many of you, The Pyramid is pretty much junk from start to finish.

Casting goes a long way with this project, to fill some of the gaps of charisma the story itself lacks.

Throughout its last hour it keeps jumping into your lap and demanding love without doing anything to earn it.

But it looks great, right? Not really. Directed by Christian Rivers, a longtime art director for Jackson, the overall look asks the question, “are you sick of Steampunk yet,” and for me, yeah.

Director and co-writer Sarah Adina Smith offers some inspired moments and laughs here and there, but too often, running bits simply don’t pay off.

Anenome is Ronan Day-Lewis stretching his canvas beyond his background in painting, and while there are some interesting crossovers between the broody visual style and eye-catching surrealism, he still has much space to fill.

Sadly, “Dreams” never figures out what it wants to say, and what it does convey is done with so little affect or pulse that it almost feels like an intentional choice to tell a “hot” story in as “cool” a way as possible.

Everything here feels timid and toothless, lacking in true atmosphere or genuine scares.

Desperation destroys comic timing, and this thing is drenched in the flop sweat of a stand-up comedian who knows he’s losing his audience.

Sykes steps into the role enthusiastically, but Miller’s script (with cowriter Anita M. Cal) is beat-you-over-the-head melodramatic, making Sykes’ committed effort to deliver heartfelt pathos all the more difficult to buy.

Piercing, the latest horror film by music video helmer turned feature horror writer/director Nicolas Pesce, is more frustrating than it is actually bad. Because Piercing, an adaptation of Ryu Murakami's novel of the same name, succeeds as a darkly comic provocation. I think. Sort of?

The prior end to this series, “A Madea Family Funeral,” was actually a decent movie. Madea should have quit while she was ahead.

The movie USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage is not exactly unwatchable, but it’s also completely not worthy of watching.

Padre Pio is a therapy session for star Shia LaBeouf, intercut with a story of labor strife in a traumatized Italian village. If that sounds weird, it is, but never in a way that's consistently interesting.

Genuinely inept in every way, “Scream 7” is far and away the worst of the franchise, a shallow rendering of things that worked better in other films.

Lowe's attempts at getting into anti-heroine Ruth's head are largely unsuccessful, though her performance is sometimes effectively hysterical.

The comedy thriller The Con is On is a Who's Who of 1990s indie film character actors, but the movie ends up delivering a lot of cliches from that brief but extremely specific era of filmmaking, and not necessarily the ones you might want.

There are hints of a deeper movie here, but the one on-screen sticks too closely to stories and ideas we already know.

A disjointed and at times off-putting mess that veers wildly and unconvincingly between a road movie, a family drama, a violent crime film and an offbeat sci-fi thriller before arriving at a finale so loopy that even if I spoiled it here and now, many of you would just assume that I was kidding.

While the premise has some undeniable potential, it has been executed by writer-director Lotfy Nathan in a manner that is neither particularly frightening nor spiritually enlightening.

When Madea is onscreen, at least you know what universe you are in, and there is something interesting and insane to watch. Otherwise, you are thrust into an abyss of meaninglessness and plot-heavy maneuvering overlaid with Christian propaganda that wears out its welcome with the first line of exposition.

Imagine a J-horror plot involving a child possessed by a swamp demon told through the aesthetics of the screenlife found footage subgenre, and you can pretty much imagine how writer-director Pablo Absento‘s new film, “Bloat,” will play out.

This is one of those super-convoluted conspiracy theory movies where nothing makes sense and you simply stop caring. Saviors show up inexplicably at just the right time. People come off as evil for the sole purpose of misleading us. There’s no character development, a lot of patriotic posturing and the villain gives a lecture that must have been written before they cast a Black actor as its recipient. Despite endless gunfire and a lot of shit blowing up, most of the action sequences fail to quicken the pulse.

It’s not involving; it’s not scary; it’s just kind of miserable.

The worst thing about The Girl in the Spider’s Web — the element likely to enrage most fans of the franchise — is how it betrays its central character by eradicating almost every aspect that made her so initially fascinating.

As the story bloats to two hours by mistaking itself for an epic, The Outsider falls into a pit of boredom somewhere between the white savior complex of Tom Cruise in “The Last Samurai” and the much slicker kills by Alain Delon in “Le Samourai.”

The Amateur skims the surface of what has worked in spy thrillers of the past, never finding its own rhythm, identity, or personality.

The Hunter’s Prayer is like a Luc Besson film put through a deflavorizing machine to remove any element that could be distinctive, energetic, or fun.

As it stands now, Aloha feels like several films at once, crammed together and sped up, with results that are emotionally hollow and narratively confusing.

It's a movie lost somewhere in the middle: too weird to be believable, not weird enough to be memorable.

When Day of the Dead: Bloodline, a promised retelling of one of Romero’s classic “Dead” films came across my radar, I thought, “That might be a fun way to start the new year.” It’s not.

For far too long, nothing especially creepy or unsettling happens on screen.

My Policeman is surface-level queer representation lacking in visual imagination and begging for better performances. It’s the kind of glacially paced movie that sticks around for two hours and tells its viewer nothing new; a series of moving images without any sense of emotion or wonder. “My Policeman” commits the gravest of crimes—it’s soulless.

Mighty Oak is clumsy when presenting its darkest stuff, and can't balance that with its sporadic attempts at broad humor.

Science fiction is often used in allegorical fashion. It may not be fair to judge Automata by this gauge, but the film is so deathly somber and heavy-handed that I can only assume director Gabe Ibáñez wanted to tell us Something Important.

To top off all of the ineffective weirdness, the movie ends on a tone-deaf “got a sequel if you want it” note.

The Shack wants to be a sincere exploration of faith and forgiveness but somehow manages to be both too innocuous and too off-putting for its own good.

Spiral: From the Book of Saw is more frustrating than the average mediocre horror sequel because you can easily decipher the wasted opportunity up there on the screen.

Edward Berger’s “Ballad of a Small Player” is one of the most over-directed films I’ve ever seen. And I’ve been playing this specific game for a long time.

Geostorm fails to work either as awe-inspiring spectacle or as campy silliness.

Isle of Dogs does not have a compelling story, and even worse, it has the most egregious examples of its director’s privilege since “The Darjeeling Limited.” This movie really pissed me off, and the only thing I found soothing while watching it was silently repeating to myself “the dogs are very furry.” Reminding myself of the film’s best asset kept me from walking out.

A dull retread of ideas explored more interestingly in other films and TV shows. Even the always-welcome Stanley Tucci can’t add any flair to a movie that feels so much like a relative of John Krasinski’s 2018 smash hit that one has to wonder if Netflix didn’t try to convince the producers to rename it “A Quiet Paradox.”

Sure, the events are scrambled, with minor changes here and there, but if you know what happens in “Madame Bovary,” you will not be surprised by this film. In fact, you’ll probably be as irritated as I was by Gemma Bovery’s attempts to be clever and meta.

Lily James brings a refreshing straightforwardness to the role in the second half, as the character takes the reins of the situation, but has a difficult time convincing us in the first half that she is susceptible, cowed, in thrall.

Django is for the most part everything Reinhardt’s music was not: listless, glum and meandering.

There’s more than enough meat on the bones of this true story for a film like Above Suspicion, but director Phillip Noyce can’t figure out how to tell it in a way that's more interesting than a Wikipedia entry.

Dark Meridian ends up being is a generically violent gang drama full of bad guys standing around grungy warehouses, explaining themselves before shooting each other in the head.

Although it has a solid cast, some amusing bits, and lots of imaginative violence, “Play Dirty,” a comedy-thriller-action movie about the theft of already-stolen treasures in a plot to topple a dictator, is easily the most forgettable of Shane Black‘s films, as both writer and writer-director.

It makes sense that another of Flynn’s novels, the sinister Dark Places, would get the cinematic treatment as well, although this failed exercise could be used comparatively with “Gone Girl” as a What Not to Do cinematic lesson.

A coming-of-age drama that's also Southern Gothic ghost story, is an unusual, ambitious failure, mostly because the film's hyper-naturalistic style is meant to evoke a supernatural mood.

Let’s look on the bright side. The running time is barely 90 minutes. And there are but three fairly amusing characters who save this inferior attempt at family entertainment, at least for me.

It’s a slog at over two hours, much of it spent with Marinelli screaming or acting coarse.

With a documentary as flabby but well-meaning as Best and Most Beautiful Things, you have to savor the small stuff.

Victor Frankenstein is, despite bravura performances from committed young leads Daniel Radcliffe and James McAvoy, all kinds of obnoxious and pointless.

In the true spirit of this profoundly uninteresting movie, Donald Cried can only shrug through its central notion that men will be sad boys.

As movie-going experiences go, there is nothing worse than to sit through what purports to be a comedy and never have a reason to engage your laugh reflex. Exhibit A: The gender-switch remake of the 1987 screwball farce, "Overboard."

There are some very funny bits here, but unfortunately the concept takes too long getting off the ground, leaving the first three-quarters of the movie floating in limbo, waiting for it to all make sense.

It’s not as abrasively awful as the worst of Netflix/Madison projects (“The Ridiculous Six” still holds the standard), it’s just forgettable. It’s akin to a mediocre sitcom you might catch on network TV on a Monday night. You won't hate the experience of watching it, but you’ll forget you saw it before it’s even over.

The new Death Wish is a vigilante film that's also about vigilante film cliches, when it remembers to think about such things, which is only occasionally. Most of its attempts to subvert or freshen up familiar elements aren't well developed, and they're certainly never strong enough to counter the bloodlust and gun worship that's invariably going to power this kind of project.

There are a few decent performances, a nice riff on the technology fears that drove the original movie, and a centerpiece of horror that works, but never once do you get the feeling that the people behind this remake are here because of artistic passion or creative drive.

American Ultra tries to combine a sweet, slacker romance with a slick, super-violent action flick. If that sounds jarring to you, that’s probably because it is.

At least until its bonkers final act, Choose or Die consistently fails to fulfill on the truly hallucinatory promise of its premise. Without that, it’s a choice that’s ultimately forgettable.

The most noticeable influence is “Universal Soldier,” a film that shares so many plot elements that Bloodshot can be classified as a blatant rip-off. That movie spawned three sequels; I can only hope Bloodshot’s bloodline ends here.

Instead of being a creepy B-movie about the necessity of suppressing one's animalistic urges, The Purge is just an uninspired film.

It’s a privileged perspective with nothing to share for the rest of us.