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.