I wanted to root for and care about the world of “Night Raiders,” but I never felt like Niska and her daughter said more about themselves than their predictable behavior advertised.

Unfortunately, Mary's concept - and it's a good one! - doesn't blossom into the truly spooky, the truly eerie, even though it's given countless chances to do so.

The latest animated blockbuster from Illumination is their most soulless to date, a film that feels like ChatGPT produced it after data and imagery from the games were fed into a computer.

This new holiday chiller mostly idles when it should charge at its most unsound ideas.

It’s all just really bizarre, limp copies of better films.

Worse still: because The Emperor's New Clothes is often beholden to the whims of Brand (star of "Get Him to the Greek," and that tedious "Arthur" remake nobody saw), it too often feels like "Button-Pushing Encounters with Russell Brand."

Bland and bordering on nonsensical, Haunt trots out all the standard haunted-house tropes without breathing any new life into them.

The Scribbler never clicks into the escapist mind f**k it really needed to be to work. It can't maintain its style and never finds its substance.

A frustratingly inert film in every way, The Beanie Bubble has no POV and nothing to say.

There is little else worth mentioning about this derivative, clunky, haphazardly written and visually dull sports movie except the performances by Christopher McDonald and Michael Nouri.

The Prodigy doesn't work because Buhler's scenario is too predictable to be involving and McCarthy's direction is too indecisive to be gripping. One of these two problems might have been surmountable, but both, at the same time, is lethal.

As for Paxton, he enters the story with an edge, establishing the authority and revealing sensitivity of a single father with a powerful job. It’s not a career-topping role by any means but it is a reminder of how the late actor could take on a role with sincerity and breathe some type of life into it.

You’ve got to lower the bar for a cliche-at-best thriller like Survive the Night. If it keeps you awake, consider that a success.

Absolute Dominion is a high-concept sci-fi flick whose many pieces move but rarely settle in satisfying positions.

For the most part, A Farewell to Fools rollicks along on its own bizarre and not successful path, comedic moments falling flat, emotional moments running shallow, but in that moment we can feel something else striving to break free.

The kind of lazy genre hackwork that will inspire more yawns than screams—at least until the final reels, when the sounds of incredulous laughter will no doubt take over.

It lacks both the delicate artistry and warm wit of its predecessors. The subtle sense of spirituality is long gone; in its place are frantic action sequences. Whereas the previous movies operated on various levels to resonate with adults and entertain kids, this one is geared mainly toward younger audiences in ways that are frequently silly and insubstantial.

It’s just a flat and suspense-free tale of pretty people in peril.

Still, there is more pleasure to be had in the dwindling returns of CMT's “Nashville” than in this country soap-opera.

Old Dads has a great cast, but it's barely a movie. That's a shame, because it's the directorial debut of Bill Burr.

The appeal of such stories is obvious. Breakthrough, though, is less a story than it is a sermon, aimed directly at the choir and nobody else.

I don’t think I've witnessed a film this year that managed to so completely and utterly collapse into crass garbage in its last few minutes while abusing what little good will it has.

Vampire stories can be so rote that it’s noticeable when the rules are even slightly changed, and that's when Boys from County Hell shows a little spark. But this is more the clear case of a horror movie that forgets to have fun.

Back and forth The Oak Room goes, without ever building the tension it ostensibly seeks. Instead, it meanders from tale to tale, and the writing isn’t sharp or specific enough to sustain this kind of complex framework.

There are moments of tenderness and honest human emotion buried in the frustrating A Long Way Down but one has to work far too hard and give far too much credit to the over-qualified cast to grab at them.

By the time you’re meant to learn just what the tie is between John and Louis, you’ve stopped caring. But, thanks to the excellent if a little on the obviously-pictorial-side cinematography by Robert Barocci, you’ve seen some lovely vistas on the way to indifference.

Had this been the work of a young novice filmmaker, I would say it showed some promise. But as it happens, Mr. Martin is approaching his mid-fifties. He should look for better writers, to begin with.

The circumstances of “Couples Weekend” are simply too convenient. Its simplicity hinders absorption, shielding viewers from taking in its vulnerability or lessons to heart. And with its similar struggle to elicit its intended laughs, Kirkpatrick’s film is a flat rendering of its jagged proposal.

Ostensibly a commentary on celebrity culture and the fawning journalists around it, “Opus” is one of those movies that throws talking points at the wall without having an actual point of view on any of them.

Although Pet Sematary is a largely dreadful film, it is slightly better and never as offensively bad as the first version.

It’s more rote than revelatory, and the possibility of a sequel in the final shot plays more like a threat than a promise.

As tedious as much of this sounds, an odd thing happened around “Allegiant’s” midway point. The fairly packed audience started vocally reacting “Rocky Horror”-style to some of the more overtly melodramatic turns with “oohs," “ahhs” and even laughter.

A couple of pedal-to-the-floor melodramatic twists suggest that “Founders Days” might’ve been a bolder or just meaner genre movie, but its toothless satire, like its timid horror drama, sadly doesn’t cut it.

Vita & Virginia wastes the talents of four people — its two subjects and the two women that play them. It is a deeply frustrating movie, a film that not only can’t find the right tone from scene to scene but feels disjointed in individual moments too.

Southern wields the tropes in a stylistically over-determined way–jump-scares and all–which cheapens the delicate and poetic narrative.

The film adds up to a lot of bad ideas and very few good ones, wandering around Roth's footsteps in search of purpose.

This is not a terribly plot-driven movie; indeed, at two hours and twenty minutes it’s rather a ramble.

Still: the cold half (ie: the important half) of Lords of Chaos is so ugly and mean-spirited that I couldn't really enjoy the other parts of the film that work, not even Rory Culkin's fantastic lead performance, or the on-screen chemistry that he shares with supporting actress Sky Ferreira (as photographer/love interest Ann-Marit).

The supposedly original script from writer Zach Dean offers very little that’s innovative or inspired.

Generic dialogue and lack of character depth kills the sometimes promising “Sunrise,” which works best when it has a grit that reminds one of the best vampire flicks of all time, “Near Dark,” but that doesn't happen nearly enough.

Ross always preached that there were no mistakes, just happy accidents. A mess like Paint—all broad strokes and no point—proves that he wasn’t always right.

It’s not hard to think that there could be an interesting remake of “Going Places” or an interesting spin-off “The Big Lebowski” to be made — it’s just that this film doesn't work as either.

The movie is fairly faithful to the book, and yet so much is lost in the transfer.

Looking as if it was often shot in complete darkness or something like it, Agent Game is murky nonsense that aspires to get by on what it considers to be a trenchant cynicism about geopolitical chess.

Everything about Free Birds feels perfunctory, from its generic title and holiday setting to its starry voice cast and undistinguished use of 3-D.

Eventually, the lack of werewolf-related carnage is the least concerning thing about My Animal.

Quirky to an extreme with not much to say about the millennial resistance to maturity and grown-up responsibilities, Larson’s film feels like a perplexing stylistic disagreement between its creative parts.

Entries in this genre like “The Same Storm” and “Together” made us care about the characters who were isolated or stuck with each other because of COVID. “Life Upside Down” never does.

Affluenza thinks it is deep when it is merely trite. It illuminates nothing.

Unrest is an intriguing period piece but a flawed curio that never quite achieves its soul-stirring goals.

Not since Morgan Freeman’s Joe Clark in “Lean on Me” has a real-life person’s ass been kissed more by a movie. At least that movie had superior lips.

So much money, so much charm, so much movie, and yet it adds up to so very little. Red Notice is as disposable a movie as you’ll see this year, something that most Netflix subscribers will have trouble remembering exists weeks later.

Coming across as little more than a filmed adaptation of the first two-thirds of Neil Bogart’s Wikipedia page, Spinning Gold is a mess that even those with a keen interest in the subject will find both ponderous and uninformative.

It takes great effort to find what interested director Wash Westmoreland and company in the source material in the first place, but it feels like a project that reaffirms something I’ve long argued: just because something works in one medium doesn’t mean it will in another.

The film lacks the underlying subtext that grounded similar hopeful-yet-doomed-romance stories in the past.

The Unheard has its shining moments, but they are not enough to cover for some duller missteps. Although the premise is strong, its execution is less-than-convincing.

This second sequel is escapist in a next-level way: it escapes from drama as well as life.

It’s an unfortunately apt demonstration of what can befall a clever filmmaker who gets too clever.

The third chapter is better than the middle one by virtue of having at least a few new ideas and one less CGI wild boar, but it’s still a shapeless mess, a movie that might have worked as the final act of one film.

The problem is that the filmmakers' aversion to any hint of storytelling originality means that the main impression The Colony leaves is one of almost stupefying over-familiarity.

Flat is the kindest way to describe A Good Marriage, a King novella turned feature that could have worked as a short or an episode of “Masters of Horror” but truly tests viewer patience at 102 minutes. It’s arguably the dullest King film yet, despite solid work by LaPaglia to save it and a decent set-up that goes absolutely nowhere.

From the “how do you mess that up” school of filmmaking, Blood Red Sky takes a phenomenal concept that mixes genre hits like From Dusk Till Dawn, Snakes on a Plane, and Train to Busan and just blows it on poorly choreographed action, momentum-draining flashbacks, and an interminable runtime.

Ad Vitam, which in Latin means “for life,” is at times brisk but narratively unclear, delivers its share of action, but not the characters to keep you emotionally invested.

As a full movie experience this did not drop my jaw in a consistently enjoyable way. And the movie’s Trump joke is pretty ineffectual. Sad!

Experienced performers take the film partway, but the script kneecaps everyone—especially MacDowell, who suffers the worst of the film’s dialogue-based indignities. Happy or not, you might find yourself wishing it would end already.

The oddest thing about Besharam, in a litany of incredibly perplexing elements, is how cheap and small it seems.

Dan Fogelman’s Life Itself packs in enough narrative twists and turns to leave viewers with a sense of emotional whiplash. One tragedy bleeds into another so often that the events begin to blur.

I came to McGuckian’s film knowing nothing about Gray and left feeling frustrated that I hadn’t learned more about her, apart from the boorish chauvinists in her life.

Perhaps die-hard fashionistas would find this reasonably diverting, but to everyone else, it is guaranteed to grow tiresome very quickly.

Now, Diaz and Segel co-star for Kasdan again in Sex Tape, but their characters are so indiscernible as actual human beings, it’s hard to tell who they are, much less whether they have any sort of enjoyable, raunchy chemistry.

Butcher’s Crossing is unfocused, distant, and flat.

While the script from John Gatins, who wrote "Flight," is mostly decent (there is some laughable dialogue peppered throughout), Dean Israelite's direction is so fussy, frenetic, and disjointed that it renders moot any charm the story may have once contained.

It is not merely a bad film. It is a collection of notes for a film that never quite evolved to the rough draft stage, much less cohered into a finished movie. That makes it more dispiriting than other notorious Woody Allen misfires.

Even if you allow for the the fact that the film is geared towards the 5-year-old set, it's still a pretty dreary experience, made even more so by screamingly vivid colors, uninspiring animation and grating songs.

All these folks are pretty bland, really; then again, even gorgeous, charismatic actors like these can get steamrolled when Hart is around.

This might have been a better movie if its creators embraced their fitful bloodthirst. Instead, they seem to hope that you like these stock characters enough that you’ll gasp when their friends and enemies inevitably bite the dust. A machine to kill vague people, “Whistle” never delivers on its frightful promise.

The film makes one damning if unoriginal observation—the "reality" presented on reality TV is manufactured—and then does nothing to expand on it.

“Don’t Look Up” told a story while jackhammering its message, but “2073” plunges its audience right into police violence and terror with little thought in the sci-fi aspect of the narrative. It’s merely the aluminum foil to deliver the filmmaker’s thesis.

Without Piven and Dillon to keep it entertaining, it would be absolutely dreadful.

Confuses repetitive raunchiness with daring humor. It hammers us over the head with the same handful of jokes in the hopes of beating us into submission. And it strains the screen appeal of a group of actors who normally are enormously likable.

With less textbook dedication to its metaphors and more sleight of hand in its structure, “Cellar Door” would accomplish the tension it intends, but its bland approach fails to inspire investment.

The storyline is complicated but not particularly engaging. There are elements that are too arcane or unsettling for children and not of any special comedic value for adults.

When one considers how good this material might have been if placed in the right hands, to see it squandered this way makes it almost more painful to view than the typical Sandler stinker.

The film ends with footage of his corpse on the sidewalk, and then a scene from "Rebel." From the first footage of the newscast on Mineo's death to this last tasteless film of his body lying in the street, nothing much has been learned about Mineo.

Few threats are more pertinent to the earth's future than deep-sea mining. I can think of no documentary as ill-equipped to inform viewers of this peril than director Matthieu Rytz’s scattered and vague documentary Deep Rising.

The Book of Clarence, the religious epic by multi-hyphenate talent Jeymes Samuel, is a handsomely crafted picture that simply loses the plot.

Whatever is keeping Neill Blomkamp so reserved that he delivered a film as dispiritingly rote as Demonic—that’s what needs an exorcism.

It is a joyless, lifeless, boring affair that repeats ideas from better X-films and feels more like an obligatory reunion cash grab than a deeply considered goodbye to iconic characters.

Unfortunately, The Stanford Prison Experiment is a dramatization, and no matter how much it may adhere to the well-documented specifics of Zimbardo’s work, it is a massive failure.

It’s amazingly relentless in its naked borrowing from other, better horror and sci-fi movies that I was able to keep occupied making a checklist of the movies referenced.

Emancipation becomes an exhaustive, vicious, and stylistically overcooked recounting of a man whose very visage led the abolitionist charge. Emancipation is a hollow piece of genre filmmaking that rarely answers, "Why this story and why now?"

While I might actually go out and buy the soundtrack album, the last thing I’m gonna say about the movie is friends shouldn’t let friends pay money to see We Are Your Friends.

This is part of the movie’s problem. Aside from it being another how-I-made-out-in-an-“exotic”-locale narrative. The film means for us to delight in Jay’s flouting of conventions.

Duchovny the director never bothers to ground his melodrama in something that feels real, missing the target on the period in which it’s set and an honest understanding of the people who live and die on the success and failure of their favorite teams.

All of the personages in this slight movie are relatively one-note. It’s a shame that actors as searching and scrupulous as Strathairn and Keener are so ill-used.

Although a surprising number of plot machinations from the original film remain fully intact, usually accounting for anything that seems remotely clever, what is missing is the type of hold-your-breath tension provided by good thrillers.

The balcony scene takes a tumble. This is movie's greatest disappointment. Really, if you can't get this right, then why even do Romeo and Juliet?

One of the many problems is that Logan can’t find the tone, making something campy in one beat and deadly serious in another. The whole film falls in the valley in between, unable to find any identity at all.