It’s the very definition of a film with its heart in the right place. And also a prime example of how good intentions don’t automatically make great movies.

There are some highlights — mostly the lead performances.

Beyond a few flashes of visual ingenuity, though, there really isn’t much to recommend about this movie.

Why make a Venom movie (much less three of them) if the character will never get to meet Spider-Man? Beyond the fact that it is sort of fun to see Tom Hardy act like a weirdo, I don’t think Sony ever came up with a satisfying answer to that question.

The BFG’s sluggish pacing will test even older viewers’ attention spans. The visuals are potent, but the story is never urgent. The crux of the movie, inspiring people to dream, is a noble, beautiful thing. But not when you put them to sleep in the process.

Here Today is too peculiar and heartfelt to be truly bad, and it does make an interesting companion piece to Mr. Saturday Night, with Crystal working through same issues from an older perspective. Together, they feel like the work of an artist baring their soul in a sometimes unpleasant way.

If you are going to Venom for cool superhero action — or for compelling characters, pulpy science-fiction, impressive special effects, a parable about corporations run amok, or a single significant connection to Spider-Man — you will be sorely disappointed. If you can look past all of that (and the dreadful first hour), your reward is Hardy, delivering one of the all-time great unhinged performances.

Quan remains an extremely likable actor, as well as an impressive martial artist. (Even before Everything Everywhere All at Once, he had worked on several Hollywood productions as a fight choreographer.) It’s great to see him back on the screen, but he’s let down by his material here. When he’s not kicking butt, Love Hurts is downright painful.

The Last Knight is not, in any conventional sense, entertaining or good, although parts of it are spectacular.

Blair Witch does deliver the requisite shocks demanded of a horror movie for a multiplex audience, but maybe it’s time for filmmakers to stay out of these woods for a while — at least until there’s a new technology for the Blair Witch to mess with.

With little drama or humor, it mostly amounts to watching a guy complain about his fairly decent life for 100 minutes.

A superficial sequel that lacks the first movie’s unique quirks and soul.

The nicest thing I can say about 2019’s Aladdin is in its best moments it reminded me of a movie I liked a lot as a kid.

At pretty much every step Folie à Deux feels like one big middle finger to fans of the original movie. I just wish it was less of a middle finger to the rest of us at the same time.

It’s not just that Michael’s portrait of its title character is incomplete. He’s depicted as so pure that he becomes uninteresting; a moonwalking and talking human jukebox with little in the way of a compelling story. The only thing this basic rags-to-riches narrative has going for it is its non-stop parade of Michael Jackson and Jackson 5 hits, music so good it will surely turn Michael into a major box-office hit.

Although Malek looks the part, and has Freddie’s dance moves down, his performance is all stiff British accent and overbite (Mercury was born with four extra teeth). Singer never gets beyond the superficial to tell us anything profound or meaningful about Queen or Freddie Mercury or the perils of rock stardom.

Fifty Shades Darker is a very faithful sequel; a milquetoast continuation of a bland romance between two boring people.

The movie around him is a mess at the best of times and a disaster at the worst, but Aykroyd always looks like he’s having fun, even if no one else is.

True, Out of the Shadows is an improvement over the last Ninja Turtles movie, but only in the way that a mild cold is an improvement over the flu. It’s not good, but at least it’s not so terrible that it makes you want to lie in bed for a few days.

The premise of I Feel Pretty would work better within the quick-hit comedy structure of an Inside Amy Schumer sketch. Stretched across a nearly-two hour runtime, the joke gets old fast.

Rebel Moon is the kind of movie that seems overwrought and underbaked all at once. So much care has been given to the style and the design of every little element of the sets, the costumes, and the props; yet so little concern has been given to populating all those background elements with fleshed-out human beings with lives that feel like they exist beyond the edges of Snyder’s immaculately composed frames.

The first half of the film setting up the characters’ meager backstories and conflicts is boring. The second half is livelier but dumber, with the kaiju rising yet again from the depths of the Pacific to rampage through some extremely computer-generated cityscapes. There isn’t a single second where anything involving the jaegers or the kaiju looks real.

McGrath and screenwriter Michael McCullers are too preoccupied piling on chase and action scenes to exploit their title’s potential to its fullest.

Between the haphazard zooms and the odd editing meant to evoke the way we re-stitch fragments of memory in hindsight, Porto reads like a short student film pointlessly extended to feature length.

Clooney and Roberts are both good fits for their roles, and they do what they can with the material they’re provided. It’s just that the material they’re provided is so crummy.

When all is said and done, The Alto Knights imparts very little about these two men that couldn’t be gleaned by reading their respective Wikipedia pages, and it does it at a sluggish pace and with little visual flair. Some of the biggest and best names to ever work in gangster movies contributed to this film; De Niro and Pileggi, obviously, but also producer Irwin Winkler and director Barry Levinson. Despite their many contributions to this genre in the past, they’ve got nothing new to say here. And they provide zero evidence that casting De Niro in both lead roles is anything more than a gimmick.

Kelly’s generic characters, stale humor, and dated storyline about the macho father rejecting his gay son have all been done before, and no longer feel relevant.

Now You See Me 2 is an essential example of how inessential movie sequels have become. It ignores what was good about the first film, abandons its defining characteristics, and tells a story nobody asked for.

The biggest problem is that Ghost in the Shell has nothing smart or interesting to say — it just thinks it does.

It’s a prime example of taking a known property and lazily gender-flipping the cast without putting in the work to pair them with a worthy script or direction. Ocean’s 8 tries to pull its biggest con on us – burying a disappointing movie behind the flashy allure of an A-list cast.

Some of The Little Things’ little things, like the nuances of Washington’s performance, are outstanding. This film is a reminder that the big things are important, too.

There’s almost nothing in this movie that hasn’t been seen elsewhere before. And done a whole lot better.

Hollywood has gotten so good at boiling down comics mythologies that it’s easy to forget how hard it can be to distill a sprawling adventure stretched across decades of stories into two entertaining hours. Bloodshot serves as a painful reminder of that fact.

For a couple minutes, it starts to feel like the film is building on top of the Super Mario mythology rather than simply regurgitating it. The rest reminded me of the attract mode that would automatically start to play on old arcade games if no one pressed start: A bunch of computerized images going through the motions over and over.

To her credit, Vikander works hard and looks the part. She also has some chemistry with Daniel Wu, who plays the guy who helps Lara get to the island and then sort of becomes her sidekick.... By the standards of video game movies, Tomb Raider is not terrible, but by the standards of video game movies Plan 9 From Outer Space is practically an Oscar winner.

As a purely technical achievement, the new CGI cast of The Lion King is impressive. As a means to tell its fictional story, it is deeply misguided.

While Deadpool’s core audience will appreciate the way it flatters their knowledge of genre conventions with winking, cynical humor, too much of this stuff just plays like smug self-satisfaction. The movie is so impressed with itself that the viewer’s satisfaction seems completely irrelevant.

Even when the film does try to rouse emotion, it feels like a last minute attempt to make up for lack of character development.

The movie gives us fragments of characters and rich flashbacks, but they’re not supported by a fully-formed narrative. Lee has boldly introduced a new technology, but that technology was a bad fit for this project.

In Snyder’s formulation, protecting the world from evil isn’t a gift or a calling; it’s a burden. And that feeling is reflected in the movie itself, a burdensome 150-minute slog about two men fighting over who is in the right when both are very clearly in the wrong.

The film never figures out how to merge Jeannette’s younger and older perspectives into one cohesive voice.

Maybe there’s just no time for things like “cohesive character development” or “a compelling story” when you’ve got to service as much Nintendo IP as humanly possible in barely 90 minutes before credits.

As an entertainment, Godzilla vs. Kong is as hollow as the Earth upon which its set. Here, the human characters’ irrational decisions do not feel like part of a cohesive statement about our species’ self-absorption, but rather the byproduct of a superficial screenplay that cares only about the excuses needed to get Godzilla and King Kong into several extended (and undeniably impressive) CGI scuffles.

Kate McKinnon deserves better. Until then, she’ll continue to be Hollywood’s most reliable comedy savior, a one-woman circus act on a tightrope, juggling and balancing on one foot, all while holding up lousy studio comedies with her bare hands.

If the goal here was to really understand how a brash kid from a backwater planet became an amoral smuggler, Solo failed. Han’s evolution in this movie is entirely superficial. He doesn’t become the character we recognize. When you get right down to it, the biggest thing about him that changes is he goes from wearing a vest to a jacket.

Every scene is burdened by an uneven cast and a leaden script crammed with millennia of backstory that repeatedly kills the story’s momentum.

Black Phone 2 conjures an artful milieu out of those disparate elements, and it’s saturated with the chilly ambiance of a classic campfire ghost story. But the actual story it tells never quite measures up to its superior influences, or even the previous entry in this series.

If Angry Birds fully embraced its message, it could have been a refreshing surprise. But like the mindless video game that inspired it, there’s little here beyond fleeting satisfaction.

What remains is the seed of a very good idea — the clashing personalities of fangirl Ms. Marvel and battle-hardened loner Captain Marvel — and a very talented, very charismatic cast trapped in an exhausting and gimmicky tale that involves the heroes gradually coming together as a team while they constantly swap places due to their entangled powers.

The whole movie hinges on Jean Grey, a character we hardly know (the Sophie Turner version was introduced in a minor role in X-Men: Apocalypse) and her relationships to a team of heroes we’ve hardly seen.

Bates notwithstanding, Bad Santa 2’s supporting cast just isn’t up to snuff.

There could still be some cinematic potential in Black Adam, perhaps in contrasting his grim demeanor with the eternally sunny Shazam in some kind of crossover sequel. But this Black Adam was already a long time coming. And it wasn’t really worth the wait.

It’s raunchy, rowdy and almost completely insane. Unfortunately, it’s just not very funny.

Turning Mufasa’s rise to power into its own movie makes sense, although doing it in this style, and with so much prequelitis about less-essential elements of The Lion King mythos, still seems like a strange choice to me.

The nonsensical story would matter less if The Mummy would get out of Cruise’s way and let him do what he does best. Instead, it buries him beneath punishing dialogue scenes and surrounds him with unconvincing and unoriginal special effects.

Pretty much everything in Wonder Woman 1984 that’s not an excuse for a Gadot and Pine reunion flops. That includes both of its villains.

The last thing America needs is a historical movie correlating white people problems with those of people of color.

There’s a decent amount of craft on display, along with a filmmaker of genuine chutzpah. Throw just a little restraint into the mix, and you might really have something.

As a piece of moral commentary cloaked in a sci-fi gimmick, Overlord is uninspired. As an action thriller, it’s just aggressively boring. Maybe because it exhaustively recycles imagery from any number of genre films that came before it...or because the action sequences are bizarrely monotonous, save for the occasional bit of gory VFX.

While the leads mostly coast along on sheer charisma, Fishback makes the biggest impression.

You may not particularly enjoy Warcraft, but you kind of have to admire the audacity of its existence.

Characters repeatedly yell jokes from offscreen or while their backs are turned to the camera. They are, almost without exception, not funny. And they’re indicative of a movie that feels like it was worked and reworked in the editing room almost to its literal death.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods is just sort of there, coasting on the residual good vibes and talented cast of its much-superior predecessor.

In a world where the lacerating corporate filmmaking satire The Studio already exists, broad jokes about wacky animal trainers and ego-driven actors trying to influence their projects to benefit their own roles just won’t cut it.

Justice League is a collection of missed opportunities and flubbed ideas.

It’s honestly a little baffling how so many good choices could produce something so frustrating.

Hocus Pocus 2 doesn’t necessarily demand Kubrickian levels of visual splendor, but it’s still a film, and film is a visual medium. If there was anything even remotely interesting to look at on the screen, that would be nice.

Forget about three branches from one tree; this is the first branch presented for the third time. They might as well have called it Karate Kid: Déjà Vu.

Unfortunately, Mid90s isn’t anything you haven’t already seen numerous times before.

The best vocal performance in Transformers One by far comes from Brian Tyree Henry, who puts so much feeling into D-16 rapid transformation into the menacing Megatron that you almost buy that he goes from Orion’s loyal bestie to his sworn mortal enemy in the span of about 10 minutes.

The Predator gets off to a promising start, and there are a couple of memorable flashes Black’s verbal wit. Then the action kicks in and the film gets worse and worse.

The film is a bit of a mess; a heartfelt, scattershot, mostly unfunny, intermittently moving polemic about our country and its people.

The movie just doesn’t seem that interested in doing anything with them beyond polishing up some dusty IP for another shot at the mainstream.

Lots of mystery hangs in the air of the El Royale, but when all is said and done there aren’t a ton of surprises in Bad Times at the El Royale’s story, or the way that story is told. Even with a bunch of twists, things progress largely how you expect, only slower.

The degree to which Men in Black International wastes Hemsworth and Thompson’s talents — and in the process almost makes them seem like bland, uninteresting actors, despite all the previous evidence to the contrary — is almost an accomplishment in and of itself, and the rest of the film is equally useless (not to mention long, at just under 120 minutes).

Daddy’s Home is the white bread of family comedies, stuffed with everything you’ve seen before.

When the world of a movie is so palpably fake, it’s hard for the people or the stakes to feel real.

Until today, I’m not sure I would have believed a movie with this much theoretical “excitement” could be so boring.

A film is not how it’s made; it’s how it plays. And Don’t Worry Darling plays very poorly. It’s the sort of sustained puzzle of a movie that is very hard to pull off especially for over two hours, and here, Wilde was simply not up to the task.

Trevorrow and his team have steadfastly refused to learn their own film’s message: You should never bring a dead thing back to life, no matter how beautiful or unique it was.

None of the life we see J.R.R. Tolkien live in the film illuminates his great works of art — or even makes for a particularly compelling tale.

In Mortal Kombat II I truly did not care who lived or died for a single second — mostly because the film made it very clear that death is basically meaningless in this story.

It’s a movie that loudly yells at audiences they need to have some fun, while not actually providing any fun itself.

It’s a comedy that seems perpetually in search of laughs it almost never finds, as if the filmmakers showed up on the first day of production, looked at the script, and realized they’d forgotten to write any jokes, and then had to scramble to find some on set.

Taylor’s film lacks the suspense required of a thriller. It’s a cheap exploitation of the horrors of alcoholism, depression, and domestic abuse that thinks it’s much smarter and artsier than it is.

Him fumbles a solid premise with a tedious, one-note execution that delivers very few scares and zero insights into either of its central subjects.

The fights and shootouts are too choppy to be clear and too bloody to be fun. It’s basically an over-caffeinated lecture about geopolitics with frequent cutaways to grisly murders. It didn’t necessarily need a page one rewrite, but a better and less hectic edit could have done wonders.

The first Fantastic Beasts was a bit of a mess. The second one is actively bad. The longer this spinoff franchise goes on, the more damage it does to the legacy of the Harry Potter series — which knew not to overstay its welcome. Fantastic Beasts 2 has plenty of spells, wands, and wizards — and absolutely no magic whatsoever.

Good or bad, it’s undeniably one of the most depressing comic-book movies ever made. (It’s also got one of the most depressing comic-book movie scores, an endless dirge of droning strings by Hildur Guðnadóttir.) The calls from some corners to ban the film because it could incite violence give the movie too much credit. It’s not irresponsible. It’s just immature.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters is as narratively incomprehensible as it is visually, with an even-more-talented roster of overqualified actors tasked with carrying the film’s insipid story and trying to make their characters’ bizarre decisions seem halfway plausible.

Even when the movie around him is total garbage nonsense, it is fun to watch Idris Elba; the way he walks, the way he stares at people with eyes blazing with intensity. He is an ideal action hero. He looks like the coolest man who ever lived in his fantasy Western garb, and he moves with a rare combination of grace and force, like the greatest possible combination of Gene Kelly and Chow Yun-Fat. He makes an amazing Gunslinger. Sadly, he’s trapped in a not-very-good Gunslinger movie.

The Da Vinci Code wasn’t Da Vinci, but it was an actual movie with texture and characters. Inferno is dumbed down to a shocking degree.

Halloween Kills is a mess.

Baywatch’s comedy (credited to six different writers) is second-rate and its action is even worse, with special effects that rank among the absolute worst I’ve seen in a big summer movie in many years.

Walker’s presence in the Fast movies was the sweet, underplayed counterbalance to Vin Diesel’s ultra-sincere, ultra-sleeveless bombast, and the franchise still hasn’t found a way to fill the void he left behind. In hindsight, the series probably should have stopped after Furious 7, which not only marked the franchise’s farewell to Walker’s character but also to any semblance of logic or cohesion in its ongoing mega-narrative. Since then, Fast & Furious has basically been running on fumes.

That’s Kraven the Hunter, and all these Sony superhero movies, in a nutshell: Bait and switches designed to maintain a license until the next actual Spider-Man film.

If Passengers was about two people who woke up at random and fell in love, it could be a pretty decent sci-fi adventure. Instead it suggests that consent doesn’t matter, codes stalking as romance, and lionizes its male lead while turning its female character into a love-sick damsel.

You can try to enjoy The Great Wall as a delightfully crappy blockbuster, but when you remember this is a Zhang Yimou film, it’s just a disappointment.