The code talkers deserved better than a hollow tribute.

You leave Lady thinking there are still voices in Shyamalan's head well worth a listen.

This is not so much a horror movie as a lookbook for one – an assemblage of scary-flick odds and ends slotted next to each other with the thinnest of connective tissue.

What a shame, though, that the movie isn't a livelier business.

I'd see Tina Fey and Paul Rudd in anything, but this is pushing it. Admission is so slight that a breeze could flatten it.

Without the unyielding forward charge of the original, however, the far-fetched story doesn’t really work. And the movie’s attempts to explain its characters doesn’t make them any deeper; quite the contrary, it renders them simplistic.

You long for things to go bump in the night, but the movie muffles every risk in a blanket of bland.

Like the 2010 original, The Expendables 2 is all sound and fury signifying nothing, when at the very least it should add up to big, dumb fun.

What should have been an affecting film becomes a rank blend of sentiment and sadism in the hands of Bruce Beresford, the Australian writer and director.

The film is largely a competent but uninspiring telling of his tale.

Josh Lucas plays Haskins with a no-bull vigor that comes in handy when the script saddles him with all-bull platitudes.

That remembrance of Saturday matinees past is there for a bit in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Until it very much isn’t, and you’re largely left with what you imagine you’d get if you programmed a 21st century A.I. program to write up nostalgia-bait for the children of the late 20th century.

Paltrow looks glam even in death, which only supports the notion, raised by Plath’s daughter Frieda Hughes, that the movie would be about a "Sylvia Suicide Doll." Good call.

Kid'n Play have charm, but it's disturbing to see them settle for the slick. Their rap used to stand for something; now it's just easy listening.

There is one high note. You can approach Speed Racer as the trippiest stonerfest since Stanley Kubrick took his space odyssey.

It’s a new chapter in a saga, yet like its characters who’ve been practicing the art of war since Sun Tzu coined the term, the sequel somehow feels ancient and a little creaky.

A sweet, soft-centered pastoral drama that’s never as tough-minded as you want it to be. Thankfully, in her feature debut as a filmmaker, playwright Jessica Swale shows a genuine flair with actors.

Open Range copies the rain and flood of the Clint Eastwood classic but can't match it for dark-night-of-the-soul brilliance.

Pretty cast. Potent premise. Piss-poor execution. And so dies In Time.

You leave Red Tails thinking of what might have been instead of what is – a missed opportunity.

This is what it looks like when you Glee a beloved Broadway production to death.

It’s just that the delivery system designed to get you from one showstopping mano a mano to the next begins to feel so derivative that not even the pulp pleasures of Beetz kicking mondo ass can keep this from feeling like a reheated fast-food binge.

The dramatized version simply floats, roils and plods forward as if being tugged dutifully along, ticking off checkpoints along the way. That IRL ending still reads as miraculous. Yet the whole thing feels still feels starved for creative oxygen.

Spiderhead was adapted from a short story by George Saunders, but halfheartedly and with decidedly less wit.

There’s a true-crime aura that hangs over every scene like a shroud — an unshakable sense that you’re not watching a Western so much as a ghost story.

A tale of alien abduction, Proxmity serves as an in-and-out impressive calling card for debuting feature writer and director Eric Demeusy.

A bit of a stiff as cinema, rich in atmospherics but starved for the human spark that might uncover the man behind the myth.

By the fourth clone, played as a babbling simpleton, Keaton has exhausted the gimmick and the audience. I’d trade a dozen Dougs for one Beetlejuice.

Self-importance sinks this one like a stone.

An erotic thriller with flaws.

It’s essentially the Snyder Cut of every science fiction and fantasy touchstone of the past 100 years — a jam-packed, ransacked greatest-hits reel posing as a saga.

You don’t blame Braff for wanting to craft a movie around [Pugh]. But you can blame him for the movie itself that surrounds that performance, as well as a seriously ludicrous climax — one of several — set in a Williamsburg house party and a coda so self-aggrandizingly lachrymose that you’ll have to resist the urge to scream.

By the end, when the three Shafts hit the streets in identical long coats like something out of The Matrix, the message is clear. Rough justice is back to stay. Women are out of the picture, except for sex. Dinosaurs again walk the earth with misogynistic and homophobic impunity. These are the laughs, folks. Don’t be surprised if they stick in your throat.

Peet does it with a twinkle, finding class among the crass.

The comic screenplay...pivots on a toothless premise: Russ needs to get in touch with his inner child.

It can give you something approximating action. What it can’t give you is a watchable action movie. That’s where it truly fails to go the distance.

For the 148 minutes it takes "The Messenger" to deliver its message, being John Malkovich or Milla Jovovich is really no fun at all.

Director Elie Chouraqui, who co-wrote the script, catches the chaotic horror of war, but why bother if you're going to subjugate truth to the tear-jerking demands of soap opera?

Like any weird internet rabbit hole you might fall down when you know you should be reading a book or brewing kombucha or going to sleep, this thriller is almost annoyingly slick and moreish.

Stuber traps two talented dudes — Kumail Nanjiani and Dave Bautista — in a car that’s going nowhere so fast that Thelma and Louise would hop right on.

Wherever you find yourself in the Perry equation, Medea herself deserves a final high-five. Perry hints that she may come back in a younger version, not played by him. But Medea will never be the same without her creator. In A Medea Family Funeral, she hosts a memorial service that defines the term hellzapoppin. And Perry correctly and adoringly gives her the last word in which she lets all the women have for letting any damn man abuse them. Hallelujah, sister!

No judgments here if you just want to hang back and let nonstop gore, gunfire, and explosions numb you into submission. Take that, COVID-19.

No dice...But no apologies are needed for Shannon--she earns her star spot.

It’s too bad the script never allows their ethical battle over human guinea pigs to rise above the level of plot device. With these actors, the debut film from Grant and Hurley should have soared above TV mediocrity. What the hell were they thinking?

Enter at your peril…of major eyeroll strain.

Quite a spectacle, but the movie falls flat.

Even before an ending designed to avoid resolution and cause moviegoers to stifle screams of “Wait, seriously?” this well-intentioned look at how close we are to the brink of extinction is the cinematic equivalent of an unexploded ordnance. For something so blessed with timeliness and talent, it leaves you feeling like you’re buried in a hovel of disappointment.

This is vintage B-movie material, and if you really want to catch a vintage B movie that uses the material effectively, try the original 1952 version of the same name.

Credit writer Robbie Fox for the fertile comic premise of equating marriage and death in the male mind. But the story, involving Charlie’s cop buddy (Anthony LaPaglia) and Harriet’s artist sister (Amanda Plummer), is too convoluted. Juggling mirth, romance and murder requires a deft touch — think of Hitchcock’s Trouble With Harry. Axe is a blunt instrument.

Not even the haunting images and Garfield’s haggard intensity can disguise the gaping void where the film’s soul should be. There’s no there there.

Henson looks ready to come out firing on all cylinders, but the comic cowardice of What Men Want leaves her shooting blanks.

Eternals is good at telling us where to look, at impressing us with its manufactured sense of grandeur. What it lacks is any credible sense of what’s actually worth seeing.

What started as cute becomes cloying and bloated. Charm should never feel like it weighs a ton.

As with so many middle parts of proposed trilogies, Halloween Kills feels designed to get you from Point A to a future Point C. It forgets, however, that a middle chapter still has to work on its own, and that stranding fans, completists, casual moviegoers, etc. in a weak-link entry runs the risk of permanently turning people off of the whole endeavor.

Forget the title; the film barely works itself up into a half-hearted trot. It isn’t even howl-worthy in its campiness or badness, with one notable exception.

The basic spell remains the same, updated for the age of inclusivity, toxic masculinity and Princess Nokia. The magic, however, is M.I.A.

It’s a mediocrity no matter when you release it.

The Grinch offers a solid service to anyone with kids in need of a nap under a blanket of bland.

There’s a simple reason why it’s hard to imagine why anyone, much less everybody, would willingly spend time with Frank and Lindsay in this agonizing endurance test of a movie. They’re no damn fun.

The fight scenes grow numbing as the birds take on the goons in melees that add up mostly to noise. All you feel is numb as Yan piles on one brawl after another to give the illusion that something is happening. Nothing really is. Birds of Prey and its ilk are empty calories, not meant to disturb when they dazzle. Joker, whatever its shortcomings, tackled a festering society that created its own monsters. Slapping the topical theme of female empowerment on a story that trucks in business-as-usual violence does not qualify as a game-changer — or a reason to go to the movies.

Alleged family fun.

A product that will delight car junkies and drive cinephiles to swear off film until fall.

Somehow, Lucille's plight is meant to comment astutely on the civil-rights movement. Now that IS crazy.

Although Reminiscence doesn’t try to hide any inherent metaphors — what are most movies these days, really, but nostalgia machines, designed for those stuck in the past? — it doesn’t do much with the material besides fashion something like a dull-edged Blade Runner.

Funny but perilously slight.

Distressingly shallow.

There will be fresh heroes to cheer, fresh villains to hiss at, fresh metaphors about power and corruption and history repeating itself to scratch your chin over. Yet a curious sense of staleness starts to set in even before the first act of director Wes Ball’s entry pits ape against ape.

Hit-and-mostly-miss.

Tries for deadpan laughs but is merely lifeless.

Seriously, this should have been either a “special episode” played out over 45 minutes or a six-hour miniseries, in which the relationships among this trinity could have been better fleshed out and the jarring tonal shifts relegated to separate chapters.

The experience is not Rashomon Redux so much as enduring a bad rash.

The whole thing feels so stiflingly familiar that you wonder what has more spare parts, the robot or the movie it’s in.

Lawrence forgoes his knack for verbal comedy and replaces it with crude nonstop mugging.

After all the hype, the movie of Dick Tracy turns out to be a great big beautiful bore.

Despite the mix of succession-focused handwringing and a lot people busily running around, extremely little actually happens in Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale — certainly not enough to justify a third feature.

It’s too chintzy to be a proper high-octane action flick and not nearly over-the-top campy enough to be the conduit for a great B-movie endorphin rush.

Ephron, try as she might, can't give her codified champagne spin to a Resnick script that all too quickly runs out of fizz.

Whether the ideas they’re toying with here offer a booster shot of relevance to a modern slasher story is, frankly, debatable. What we can say is: congratulations on being both first out of the gate and an instant subgenre footnote.

It has homicidal fantasy critters, lots of sharp and pointy horns, and absolutely no teeth.

By the time Darling‘s revelations are supposed to double as a call to revolution, you’re left with the sense that you’ve just witnessed the most well-designed, aesthetically pleasing angry tweet ever penned.

This new take on horror is more of the bloody same.

Downhill is sure as hell not the farce it’s been advertised to look like in the trailer. And you’ll search in vain for "Force Majeure’s" grounding in existential crisis. I don’t know what the Swedes would call Downhill. What’s Swedish for an unholy mess?

The sixth time isn’t the charm here. And it’s certainly way, way less fun and clever than it thinks it is.

The movie certainly has heart; its purpose is unmistakable. But the spark — for which it has all the necessary ingredients — is somehow missing.

You can feel the desperation of the filmmakers as they throw in fist fights, car chases, and, yes, more wig changes to give an illusion of momentum to a grab bag of botched ideas. No sale.

It’s content to be just one long, sick joke without a punchline, designed to occasionally punctuate a stylishly nihilistic P.O.V. with a lot of OMG moments. You may love it or hate it.

(Shelton) knows how to write pungent dialogue that covers a multitude of sins when the film goes off the rails.

The "Citizen Kane" of flatulence.

Christensen is the only jolt of excitement in this turgid soap opera.

Offers action in the Arnold Schwarzenegger style. Well, not right away.

In story terms, Dinosaur lays an egg.

Even in these pandemic times, when we all hunger for escapism, this long journey to a lame ending hardly fills the bill.

Though the film has an evocative look reminiscent of Matthew Brady’s period photographs, Zwick has stuffed the actors’ mouths with numbing bombast. Glory is a shame.

Even an Oscar-nominated GOAT can’t escape something that seems so perfectly put together on the outside and is so flawed, easily trashed, and barely held together on the inside.

The fact that Elemental can’t seem to get past its own elevator-pitch premise or avoid tripping over its teachable lessons, much less wring laughs and sobs from an opposites-attract love story, is a bit of a shock. It’s so busy trying to pen an op-ed that it forgets to give it a narrative structure and make it emotionally resonate. That’s just elementary.

It’s tough to shake the feeling that you are watching human mouthpieces lob rhetorical talking points in the name of achieving some sort of profound insight and, more often than not, failing to hit their targets.

You can look past it muting the spiky chemistry of Rudd and Coon, who deserve more scenes and their own rom-com together, or the way the narrative’s father issues feel so incredibly forced, or how so many of the sequences appear to simply be killing time until the final act. What’s less forgivable is the way that it gets so caught up in the mythology of its hollow nostalgia that is misses why the original meant so much to so many of us way back when.

Not even the presence of Money Heist‘s Úrsula Corberó as a slinky villain known as the Baroness could stave off a sense of disappointment.