Skyscraper downplays one of the main reasons we go to see an action movie starring The Rock. As a result, our beloved pro wrestler turned movie star feels a little miscast, even as he gets to once again assume his favorite role as the ultimate superdad.

Dumbo’s great skill, flying around a tent in a circle, becomes a little old after it’s repeated ad naseam over the course of two full hours. Adorable though he may be, Dumbo’s kind of a one-trick pony, in a matter of speaking.

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.

The world-building is engrossing. The premise is refreshingly peculiar. The action grabs your attention. As long as the movie keeps a lid on what precisely is going on, it works.

Whether its unique release strategy makes it a historical footnote or an important turning point in the history of an industry will only be clear in hindsight. For now, it’s just a colorful kids movie.

If you're looking for something lean and unpretentious, you should be pretty satisfied.

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.

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

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

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

I don’t know if Legacy is Jody Hill’s first real misfire or his first earnest attempt at making a “normal,” relatable family movie.

I’m not sure The Gray Man fully qualifies as a “good” movie, but I will admit I wasn’t bored by it. It has a knowing sense of its own absurdity and a really fun Chris Evans performance. As long as the action remains at a smaller scale, it’s satisfying.

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.

The screenplay, written by director Peter Landesman and based on books by Felt and John D. O’Connor, does a fine job of condensing a sprawling conspiracy into a digestible feature, although it sometimes favors clarity over nuance and winds up enunciating important plot points in glaringly unnatural dialogue.

Fundamentally, its creators course corrected from the first movie a bit too drastically. Where Venom was a grim body horror movie with a very broad and sometimes extremely silly comic performance at its center, Let There Be Carnage is practically a romantic comedy between Eddie Brock and Venom.

Live by Night is a very mixed bag: Earnest, handsome, even passionate — and also slow, digressive, and a little bland.

In a world where it will be available right alongside the original film — both at a click of the exact same button for the same monthly price — I’m not entirely sure why it exists, beyond refreshing this particular IP, reminding customers about the original movie, and slightly padding out Disney+’s lineup of “original” offerings. It is harmless, and pointless.

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 best performance in the film actually comes from Gillian Anderson as Julian’s overbearing mother.

Don’t get me wrong, the Hugh Jackman-led P.T. Barnum circus musical is a bad movie, but one that’s just enjoyably bad enough to keep you entertained. If you loathe musicals, this definitely ain’t for you. But if you indulge in gaudy show tunes, and can relinquish all desire for a logical plot and developed characters, then, in the melodically whispered words of Hugh Jackman, The Greatest Showman is everything you ever want, it’s everything you ever need, it’s where you want to be.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you want to see a lot of strange CGI visuals and the you’re interested in the groundwork of the next phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you’ll likely walk out satisfied (if maybe a little confused about the specifics of Kang’s larger plan). If you want to see an Ant-Man movie like the previous two Ant-Man movies — with wry humor, simple stories, and inventive uses of Ant-Man’s shrinking powers — you’re as out of luck as Scott Lang after Kang drags him to the Quantum Realm.

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.

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.

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.

Haunted Mansion does at least represent a small measure of progress for Hollywood. People always complain that studios remake beloved movies — which do not need improvement — when it would be wiser to remake a movie that contained the kernel of a good idea but failed in the execution. Haunted Mansion is absolutely a remake of a bad movie, and it does represent a slight improvement over the previous version.

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

It’s Verbinski’s eye that makes A Cure for Wellness such a wild, nightmarish treat.

Never Go Back could have used a bit more personality in the bad guy department, and the middle section sags a bit before the inevitable (and satisfying) denouement. But everyone involved seems to understand exactly what kind of movie they’re trying to make, and they deliver on just about every promise made by the title Jack Reacher: Never Go Back.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard is not the best movie of the summer, but it is easily its most pleasant surprise. An unapologetically violent and vulgar buddy action comedy, it updates the template set forth by Lethal Weapon and particularly Midnight Run for a new era.

Masterminds stars some of the funniest names in comedy. Kristen Wiig. Kate McKinnon. Zach Galifianakis. Jason Sudeikis. Leslie Jones. Too bad the movie isn’t funny.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire serves one valuable purpose: It proves once and for all that bigger is not better.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Like director Jon Turteltaub’s underrated National Treasure movies, The Meg has an innate understanding of its own absurdity, and is at its best when it embraces and amplifies that impulse.

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

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

Rampage won’t set the world on fire (our world, at least; it sets plenty of its world on fire when George and his two giant pals arrive in Chicago), but it does exactly what it says on the tin: It’s a big, goofy romp about creatures who lay waste to a major American city while the Rock cracks jokes in a light brown shirt.

Power Rangers is fun when it leans into the original series’ campy sensibility.

This isn’t quite solid-gold filmmaking. But it might be gold-plated.

The Legend of Tarzan is too boring to be truly offensive. In spite of some impressive hand and brow acting, Skarsgard’s Tarzan is a frustrating blank and Margot Robbie’s Jane is a simple damsel in distress.

There's certainly a thrill to watching a single woman lead a movie where she's chasing down criminals like an unstoppable killing machine. Is Kidnap inane? Totally. But fun? You bet.

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.

It’s got more than its share of disturbing sequences, and a string of brutal murders. It’s also got surprisingly decent special effects for a movie that was surely made on a fraction of the budget of a DC Comics film. And it has a perfectly cast Jackson A. Dunn as Brandon.

I never would have thought I could get so little amusement out of a film where Hugo Weaving dramatically intones nonsense like “Prepare to ingest!”

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.

Frankly, the original Mortal Kombat arcade game had a better sense of narrative momentum; at least there the fights progressed toward a final showdown with the big bosses. Without spoiling this Mortal Kombat, it mostly feels like a giant prologue to something else. Still, for sheer visual panache, intricate fight scenes, and the fact that it’s not an out-and-out embarrassment, Mortal Kombat rates very highly on the list of video game movies.

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.

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.

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.

It takes the most popular G.I. Joe character and totally demystifies him until all that’s left is a blandly hunky dude with a sword.

Despite a rapidly escalating plot, The Circle lacks any momentum, a problem that’s only made worse by woefully underdeveloped characters delivering painfully earnest and stilted dialogue.

Given the visual and intellectual sophistication in the superhero movies Hollywood now churns out at a regular clip, Glass just doesn’t cut it.

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.

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.

With a cast this good and this likable, it’s hard to completely hate Office Christmas Party. Still, with a cast this good, it’s also hard to believe how consistently dull the film is.

Frankly, the whole movie industry could use more original ideas and fewer looks back to the past. But this one is entertaining enough that I’ll give it a pass. By a small margin, it’s probably the best I Know What You Did Last Summer ever.

This whimper of a farewell somehow feels right. It also feels like a mess — if an endearing one at times— that has been heavily reworked in the editing room.

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.

Like I said: Inconsistent.

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

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.

The most disappointing part of Reverse Panic Room is how little it exploits its high-concept premise after spending so much time establishing all the particulars of this fortified lake house.

Halloween Kills is a mess.

The movie cuts back and forth between the two, and their themes speak to one another in some ways, but the competing narratives barely intersect. At times, it seems as if director and co-writer George Clooney made a movie where separate but equal is not only the subtext but also the organizing principle.

A bloated action movie with occasional breaks in the monotony. It’s Perfectly Fine™; entirely competent but unexceptional in just about every way.

This is a blast of Bayhem so pure and unfiltered that when a detached human eyeball gets used as a “funny” prop during the first action sequence, it feels like Michael Bay declaring his intentions: This movie is going to blow your f—ing eyeballs out.

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.

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 movie around Jordan is just like Kelly himself: Cold, detached, and brutal.

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.

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.

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.

From the first scene to the last, it’s an absolute mess.

The movie is over 90 minutes before the slasher component kicks in — and by that point, I was too bored to find much of anything endearingly silly.

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.

People routinely label Exorcist II: The Heretic as one of the worst sequels ever made, but at least that movie was going for something. Whatever its flaws, it had some ideas and it is never boring. The Exorcist: Believer commits that sin, and so many more.

Dead Men Tell No Tales is the sort of sequel that’s so bad it makes you retroactively wonder why you liked the original film so much in the first place.

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.

Despite all the fairies and waving of wands, there’s just not much magic here.

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.

Lee has already made another movie in high frame rate, and seems to have a solid handle on how to use it to his advantage. “HFR” makes water and cityscapes look spectacular, and Gemini Man has plenty of both. And it makes action scenes even more visceral, especially ones that utilize long takes to allow for a lot of movement through the frame towards and away from the camera. There’s a long take of Smith’s character riding a motorcycle in Colombia that will go down in history as one of the coolest bike stunts ever.

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).

Chaos Walking isn’t the sort of disaster that inspires so-bad-its-good appreciation, and it’s not quite interesting enough to become a genuine cult object. It’s more of a noble misfire. And I would love to hear its creators’ thoughts on why they made certain choices.

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

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.

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.

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