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.