Taccone can’t find the right mix of comedy and horror in “Over Your Dead Body,” which is a faithful — perhaps too faithful — remake of a 2021 Norwegian film, “The Trip.”

Cast adrift in this aimless movie, Ahmed seems lost. His performance is one in an unfortunate tradition of weepy Hamlets, and his problems are compounded by the fact that his weepiness is unconvincing. Each time he teared up while delivering a soliloquy, I felt that he was trying to sell me a used car.

It’s bigger, vibrantly colorful and slightly more ambitious, with glimpses of an interesting movie trying to break through, but it keeps snapping back to what’s safe.

It’s billed as another horror comedy, but when tidbits of humor manifest, it feels forced. There are few notable moments.

When you walk out of the theater feeling more empathy for the tortured monster than his Bride, the experiment has failed.

Scream 7 is anything but cutting edge.

Sirât is a film of impression and feeling, not logic or plot.

Fennell (“Promising Young Woman,” “Saltburn”) is a skilled filmmaker who can put over her ideas. The problem is that all her ideas here are bad — self-defeating, enervating and, in several places, unintentionally hilarious.

It’s a train wreck, but certainly a watchable one that almost plays like fan fiction.

At its best, it captures the last-days-of-Pompei feeling that was in the air at the time — a mix of frenetic celebration, paranoia and despair. But alas, the documentary soon derails into bogus history, specious arguments and a self-blinding variety of political bias.

Cameron is such a good filmmaker that even though he seems to be out of ideas, the three-hour, 17-minute running time chugs along efficiently on pure craftsmanship. But is that enough?

Needless to say, the actors are better than the material.

Badly cast and unevenly acted, “Regretting You” features the least healthy mother-daughter relationship since 1975’s “Grey Gardens.”

It’s not a cookie cutter superhero film or predictable horror film. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s form without enough content.

A House of Dynamite is an attempt to make a white-knuckle thriller, but there’s very little suspense to it. We have a pretty good idea of how it’s all going to end even before the first segment is over. And after that, we really know it, as we’re forced to watch the same events play out two more times.

Daniel Day-Lewis has emerged from retirement to do something he has never done before — make a truly horrible movie.

One reason why “The Conjuring: Last Rites” is so uninteresting is it takes one hour, 21 minutes for the Warrens to agree to enter the haunted house that we all know they’re going to enter from minute one.

By taking the “dark” out of the dark comedy, “The Roses” can’t decide what it wants to be, and becomes as flimsy as its setting: Mendocino is played by a seaside town in Devon, United Kingdom, and it looks more like New England than Northern California.

The movie doesn’t just suffer by comparison to “High and Low” (itself adapted from Evan Hunter’s novel “King’s Ransom”); taken by itself, its pace drags, its tone staggers and its ideas are muddled.

Opportunities for comedy are missed by miles. Davidson gets gonzo gags, Palmer is 007 with a heart, Murphy and Longoria try to exist in reality. That halfhearted miasma of genres results in tonal confusion. Murphy throws in what seem like ad libs to spice up a moribund script, but it’s not enough to add flavor to a bland stew.

While the original was serious, Old Guard 2 is merely forlorn. Its story holds little interest and, to make matters worse, it doesn’t even end. Instead, it stops mid-story, promising a sequel that feels less like a promise than a threat.

All that said, this movie is likely review-proof. The franchise is doing just fine without critical approval. This one is less of a slog, but there is precious little interesting or new in Jurassic World Rebirth. It’ll likely earn a billion dollars anyway.

The Unholy Trinity is a passable, 95-minute diversion, but an unremarkable one.

The movie goes to Vienna, to Egypt and to Italy and was probably more fun to make than watch.

Hartnett is naturally engaging, and one can see why, with the movie plummeting to earth, the filmmakers might decide to pull the humor ripcord. But here it smells of desperation.

Once the fleeting novelty wears off, what remains is a movie caught in tonal limbo. It’s too convoluted for kids, too slight for adults and too self-aware to be taken seriously.

Cave, who gained notice with much-lauded Hulu feminist horror film “Fresh” (2022), is too busy condescending to her characters to be invested in what happens to them.

What can you say about a comic sci-fi adventure that’s neither funny nor thrilling, but is packed with awesomely rendered visuals of dumb-looking things?

The last half-hour of “Opus” is an unbearable slog, with an unsatisfying ending.

All this could work, but Perkins never finds the proper tone in what is almost a spoof of the horror genre.

Complete with cliches and culturally cringe-inducing stereotypes — poor but happy villagers, sweaty villains — Peruvians will hardly use this film in their tourist advertising.

It can be charmingly elliptical at first (and even again toward end, when things get momentarily, gleefully weird), but the film gradually loses its power as Parthenope’s life becomes a kind of pointless merry-go-round showcasing new permutations of her seductive beauty.

It’s a film that feels instantly antiquated, despite its attempts to capture Gen Z angst.

It’s just not very fun or engaging.

At its core, Star Trek: Section 31 suffers from a kind of existential emptiness. It appropriates some of the surface-level iconography of “Trek” but fails to uphold its spirit. It nods to continuity, but the dense lore feels like a gatekeeping exercise and the breezy tone undermines the gravitas of its own premise.

Wolf Man does not fully compel until it becomes ridiculous, employing a wolf-cam perspective that shows what a werewolf sees when he encounters people: glowing-eyed figures who look like AI-hallucinuted Teletubbies.

Mary is a fictionalized and heavily dramatized account of the life of the Virgin Mary, but the movie’s great and only pleasure is in watching Anthony Hopkins play King Herod as a homicidal maniac.

Moana 2 is finally here, ready to assault audiences this holiday season with one of the most ill-conceived sequels in Disney history. It took three directors to sink this movie — Dana Ledoux Miller, Jason Hand and David Derrick Jr. — and it’s so bad it feels like they did it on purpose.

Either “Nightbitch” shouldn’t have been made or its premise should have been transformed and built upon.

If you’re talking about “Venom: The Last Dance,” you know you’re talking about something unimportant. If you’re writing about it, you know you’re doing something embarrassing. But what about the people who made this movie? What level of awareness do they have?

I can’t imagine who would want to make a movie like this, much less who would want to watch this. It says nothing real about life or death, and it’s not as though it’s telling us something we don’t already know.

How can you screw up a movie that has Lady Gaga? Here’s how: Make it claustrophobic, with the first half a brutal prison picture and the second half an excruciatingly dull courtroom drama.

Think of all the ways “Apartment 7A” could have slyly addressed these times, or, conversely, more fully explored the practices of the Castavets’ cult. Instead, it's just a retread, and that’s why it’s bad. The devil is in the details.

See No Evil directed by James Watkins (“The Woman in Black”), is not that interesting. Nor is it much of a horror movie or psychological thriller, despite carrying the Blumhouse imprimatur. For more than half of its nearly two-hour length, it plays more like the James McAvoy variety hour — which can be highly enjoyable if you do not mind one actor being the entire show.

The Front Room becomes an exercise in psychological torture porn; it’s a movie you endure rather than enjoy.

Daniels has the talent to make a genuinely complex horror film. What was “Precious,” if not a horror movie made all the more chilling by its lack of supernatural elements? But for “The Deliverance,” Daniels simply dusts off the same crab-walking, veins-a-popping demon moves we have seen a million times.

The foundational mistake came when someone said, “Hey, let’s make another ‘Alien’ movie.” Newsflash: The alien concept is dead. Leave it alone, and leave poor Ian Holm out of it.

Jackpot! involves a fight to the finish between the abundant charisma and likability of leads Awkwafina and John Cena and the impossible material they were given. The actors lose, because nobody could survive so many jokes based on groin kicks and bathroom humor or a movie premise as lacking in context as it is sky-high in concept.

Sadly, fun is a rare element on Pandora, as “Borderlands” trudges through its treasure hunt scenario and endless ripoffs of better franchises from “Lethal Weapon” to “Star Wars.” It makes you want to go home and blow up your Playstation.

Fly to the Moon is absolutely awful. The only interesting thing about it is how long it takes for a viewer to figure out how bad it really is.

A Quiet Place: Day One is about a cancer patient in hospice who hopes to die with dignity. Also, there are terrible monsters threatening humanity. What an odd idea for a horror prequel.

A Family Affair never even makes the case as to why these people should be together.

The best thing that can be said for “Kinds of Kindness” is that it’s never quite boring, despite being 164-minutes long and lacking much of a story.

The tone of “The Exorcism” is deadly serious, but one wonders if the premise might have worked better as a scary comedy rather than as a scary drama.

The Watchers just doesn’t connect on anything deeper than a surface level. Given material that isn’t about looking at the same boring thing over and over, Shyamalan might have been able to really make something.

In “Atlas,” Jennifer Lopez does everything she can to act her way toward a good movie. Unfortunately, she can’t do it well enough to make a difference.

The Garfield Movie is a reheated tray of stale lasagna.

It’s awful. But it could be where movies are going — into a wasteland.

IF may have the sheen and aura of an expensive, important production, with a good cast and lots of famous names in voice roles (Steve Carell, George Clooney, Richard Jenkins), but the movie is a disordered wreck that confuses impulse for inspiration and dissipates any impossibility of impact by constantly switching focus.

Like “Chinatown” with no stakes or “The Big Lebowski” minus the laughs, Poolman is a neo-noir comedy that shares just one quality with its superior influences: a palpable love for Los Angeles in all its corrupt, cruddy glory.

For all the beautiful scenery and Thoreau-like contemplation, Evil Does Not Exist stalls, then implodes.

There’s no apparent human feeling on display here, just scene after scene of protracted martial arts combat that goes on and on, while providing no rooting interest.

The only inspired part of “Abigail” is the performance of Weir, a 14-year-old Irish actress best known as the title character in Netflix’s “Matilda the Musical.” She brings verve and joy to her vampire ballerina, dancing circles around the rest of the cast.

There’s one unalloyed good thing to be said for Damsel: It marks the end of Millie Bobby Brown’s apprenticeship. Her child actress years are over. She’s grown up and ready to star in movies that audiences can take as seriously as she does.

The Peasants is filled with sniping, fistfights, brutal violence and sexual assaults and becomes unbearable through its nearly two-hour running time. Most of these characters you wouldn’t want to spend more than five minutes with, if that.

The only thing to take from the wreckage of “Lisa Frankenstein” is the performance of Soberano, in her Hollywood debut. She finds comedy in a weak script and radiates goodness without being boring. Let’s hope she has better movies in her future.

What has gone wrong in director Matthew Vaughn’s process that he can offer up an awful mess like “Argylle” and just hope that nobody will notice? He must notice.

Snoop has obviously made a real-life impact in his community. Too bad he couldn’t make one in reel life as well.

Maybe Glazer’s movie will be of use to people naïve enough to believe that nobody without horns and a pitchfork can be the devil. Everybody else will learn nothing from this film.

The good news is you can bring the kids. When it comes time for swimming lessons next summer, there’s nothing they’ll remember from this that’ll make them afraid of the water.

While many of the film’s action sequences are in slow motion, it’s the story’s narrative (credited to Snyder, Shay Hatten and Kurt Johnstad) that really crawls.

The verdict is sad but unavoidable. Poor Things is a 141-minute mistake.

The only surprise is that there are no surprises.

There’s a weepy turn in the sentimental third act, and why not? Nothing else was working.

Saltburn is a remarkable combination of smart and stupid. Its problem is that it’s superficially smart and deeply stupid. It’s clever and amusing in 20 different ways, but when it really matters, it descends into ridiculousness.

The only thing that keeps Wish afloat is DeBose’s voice, who elevates so-so songs such as “At All Costs” and “This Wish” with a powerful lilt.

The problems with Thanksgiving are many, starting with the awful script by Jeff Rendell. Not only is the story — concocted by Roth and Rendell — predictable, but there is not one clever line of dialogue in the whole 107-minute film. The cast and characters are bland.

Thankfully, the movie clocks in at a mere 105 minutes. The Marvels doesn’t have much to say, but at least it says it quickly.

The problem with Fingernails is it takes itself too seriously. Co-writer and director Christos Nikou takes a clinical, dramatic approach to such a high-concept, over-the-top and ridiculous premise. He seems so enamored by the concept of the movie that he forgot that the movie was supposed to be about relationships and not the testing.

The Persian Version tries to pivot and fashion itself as a celebration of women’s strength across the generations, but it’s transparently something else — a daughter’s attempt to come to terms with a problematic mother. And it’s an effort in which there can be no suspense because Keshavarz’s strenuous effort to whitewash mom tells us that the movie, and the relationship, can only resolve in one way.

First-time director Lindsey Anderson Beer and her co-adapter Jeff Buhler have some nice ideas that never quite gel.

If The Creator were any more slanted, any more in the tank for the coming AI onslaught, you would think it was produced, written and directed by AI.

It seems Joris-Peyrafitte can’t decide what film he is making, and as a result we’re left with a jumbled mess with a slapped-together resolution that will satisfy no one.

Director Sammi Cohen takes an attention-deficit disorder approach to storytelling, in which every feeling and plot twist is punctuated by a current pop song, and any hint of emotion or thoughtfulness is interrupted by a needle drop.

Gran Turismo is just the same cars, going around and around and around.

Petzold said he conceived of the film during the pandemic lockdown — that makes sense, considering the sparseness of the setting and small cast — and was inspired by the character studies of French filmmaker Éric Rohmer and Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. Unfortunately, he needed inspiration from another great artist: Christian Petzold.

Haunted Mansion shouldn’t have been rebooted, but if made, it should have clocked in at a modest 90 minutes.

If anything keeps “Red Door” going, it’s Autumn Eakin’s exquisite cinematography. The Further looks like a shadow reflection of the real world, and she and Wilson never fail to come up with aesthetically interesting and sometimes ingenious light sources to illuminate portions of it.

The Out-Laws is dead on arrival.

This film never had any business being stretched into a feature, much less one running 106 minutes. At that length, Biosphere is soporific and repetitive and puts viewers in the position of always being two steps ahead of it.

By the time we get to a kaiju-inspired third-act throwdown involving multiple giant sea monsters and a mystical trident, this story feels like it’s gotten too big for its small frame.

Will-o’-the-Wisp, a flight of fancy from Portuguese provocateur João Pedro Rodrigues, has a few ideas, a fun little musical sequence and quite a bit of eye candy. But it seems like a series of tonally different short films mashed together — an art installation rather than a movie.

A distasteful, overlong slog, but at least the filmmaker appears to have put everything he wanted to up on the screen.

The Flash gets credit for effort, because this superhero movie isn’t trying to be stupid and convoluted. It gets there by accident.

The only people to feel sorry for in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts are Anthony Ramos (“In the Heights”) and Dominique Fishback (“Swarm”) who play actual humans trying to save the planet, when in real life they’re just humans trying to save a movie. They’re fine, but they can’t make a dent in the awfulness.

There is not one line of dialogue or one sight gag in About My Father that can’t be found in other bad comedies, and Maniscalco . . . and director Laura Terruso seem to believe the path to humor is to go as far over the top as possible.

After 96 minutes with these people, you’ll care even less than you do now.

Smith deserves a 21st century reassessment, but you won’t find it here.