Arnaud Desplechin’s film only flirts with questions about the sacrifices made for art.

The film turns the realities of a tragic, deeply complicated life into a sanitized popcorn film.

In lieu of any competently developed drama, we get a blitzkrieg of scares and gooey body horror that can best be described as arbitrary.

The film has, figuratively and literally, somehow even less gravity than its source material and predecessor. The visual language is divorced from reality and referent to the games; even Looney Tunes action is grounded in the real world—the better to subvert it.

Vanessa Caswill’s film feels reverse engineered to maximize emotional impact.

In the Blink of an Eye feels less like a film than a commercial for life insurance that got out of hand, or perhaps more accurately one for the kind of hollow Silicon Valley tech optimism that has been thoroughly exposed as a sham by now.

The film struggles to bring its non-zombie characters to life.

Only cheap shock value can be gleaned from the film’s cavalcade of blood, semen, animal carcasses, dick pics, and erotic toothbrushing.

It’s easy to imagine the nihilistic avenues that Renny Harlin’s trilogy capper could have gone down.

Jimpa’s exploration of non-binary identity ultimately proves superficial.

Not even a typically scenery-chewing Christoph Waltz can enliven the proceedings.

Christophe Gans’s film does away with all the psychosexual nuance of Silent Hill 2.

Ryan Prows’s film comes across as just straight-up exploitative.

The film at once wrings this premise for whimsical absurdism and slow-burn suspense, on each side vulgarizing the memory of the Holocaust.

The Housemaid’s twist is a doozy, but it falls just short of being a deconstruction of tradwife values.

Whatever the post-colonial lessons are, I Only Rest in the Storm’s characters articulate them too evidently, as if preemptively justifying the making of a film in or about “Africa” on the condition that the white man’s presence is relentlessly denounced.

The film’s writing is the sort that begs you to find it cute and quirky, which makes it quite grating if you don’t.

Osgood Perkins mistakes abstruseness for surrealism, and an oppressive atmosphere for palpable tension.

The Carpenter’s Son fails to even offer decent frights, unless one finds the preponderance of CGI snakes particularly scary.

The third film in the series reliably delivers on the promise of both flamboyant showmanship and a steadfast refusal to adhere to more than just the rules of physics.

This is an overtly political film that’s hesitant to express its own political views.

The decision to have Allison Williams and Dave Franco, both in their late 30s when the film was shot, play their characters as teens may be the most egregious example of Regretting You’s indifference to verisimilitude.

This is a historical drama with a handsome enough period setting and a couple of pleasant musical moments but whose roteness keeps it from resonating.

For a story that seeks to champion the unpredictability and finite quality of life, Ares ultimately feels trapped by the inertia of working within the parameters set by its no less flimsy predecessors.

At times, Resurrection seems to outright taunt viewers for trying to make sense of it all.

Shane Black’s film plays like a misguided action extravaganza from the 1980s.

The horror here proves as much a dead end as the main characters’ relationship.

Mostly notable for its distracting resemblance to Rick Rosenthal’s Halloween II, Chapter 2 suggests for a while a needlessly extended epilogue to the first film.

The film cloyingly asks us to embrace the sincerity of its impersonal romance.

Olivier Assayas’s knack for fostering insight through irony is nowhere to be found in the film.

Swiped’s story sits right at the center of so many vital issues, and a smarter, braver rendition of it—that is, one interested in actually probing beneath the surface of things—might have yielded a film truly worthy of comparison to The Social Network. Instead, we get a piece of corporate hagiography that sweeps all those issues aside to celebrate another tech billionaire.

The few glimpses we get of the supporting cast suggest a more exploratory film, but these strands only exist to be woven back into Philip’s formulaic journey of self-discovery.

Where Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married completely immersed viewers in the sometimes messy intimacies of family, My Mother’s Wedding feels more like a stage production that forgot to include its first act.

As The Home trudges along until its inevitable rug-pull, its obnoxiously loud and incessant score tries to convince us of the sinisterness at play at the retirement home. And by the time the rubber finally hits the road well into the third act, the twist is aggravating not only because it’s so patently absurd, but because so little in the previous hour feels remotely connected to what occurs in the homestretch. All of the horrific imagery and supposed clues that came before are revealed to be signposts signifying nothing. Even the outbursts of violence in the climax do nothing but remind us just how empty and cynical the whole charade has been.

Its pastiche of Into the Spider-Verse is revealed to be nothing more than window dressing.

Late in this reboot, a character states “Nostalgia is overrated,” and it feels like an indictment of the film we’ve been watching. Far from making a case for the original I Know What You Did Last Summer as one with its own identity and a legacy worth turning over, Robinson’s update is so cynically made and self-indulgent that it will at least leave you respecting the workmanlike scare-making that director Jim Gillespie brought to the 1997 film.

It seems unsure whether it wants to be a campy slice of macabre in the vein of Dexter and American Horror Story, where the religious imagery and bloodletting are played for both chills and thrills, or a genuine rumination on death, faith, and the morality of doing bad things to bad people.

There’s a grating meta-ness to Gareth Edwards’s Jurassic World Rebirth that speaks to the filmmakers’ knowledge that they’re at the mercy of pressures to bring something new to a franchise that’s now on its seventh installment.

The film limply gestures at ideas around women’s rights and athlete boycotts.

A story that might have been benefited by being allowed to breathe over a six-episode arc instead feels rushed and schematic rather than lived-in.

Like any number of Exorcist wannabes, David Midell’s film is a special kind of hell.

Mike Flanagan’s film doesn’t escape the mires of unpersuasive pop psychology.

Jonathan Millet’s film is unconvincing and unnaturally contorted into its shape.

Like its predecessors, the film is an often awkward mix of YA drama and R-rated gore.

The film desperately tries to convince us that it’s peeling back the layers of the Weeknd’s persona in order to show you what’s really going on inside his head. But, in defiance of Anima’s wishes, Hurry Up Tomorrow lacks the honesty to confront what’s there.

Ultimately, Henry Johnson’s cynical assertions about society and human nature are the only aspects that end up resonating, for better or worse.

In the end, Nicolas Cage can only do so much to bring this hastily assembled oater to life.

There’s a self-reflexivity to the game’s artifact-y textures that’s lost in this film adaptation, where the finely detailed look of just about everything says nothing in itself about the endless possibilities of a digital world’s malleability.

David Ayer’s film proceeds as an unambiguous celebration of its hero’s vigilantism.

Throughout, the filmmakers’ sympathies are lost in a confusing haze of cynicism.

There's nothing behind its contemptible eyes, no spine to house the fading diode that once contained a soul.

The discomfort in watching Holland is not knowing if something is intended or, like the main character, you’re looking for things that aren’t there.

The film takes dozens of different anecdotes about cults and celebrities and manages to render them pedestrian, unoriginal, staid.

The film exposes the incontestable American art of getting more with blunt obviousness.

Instead of delving into what lay behind John Allen Chau’s recklessness, the film scatters itself across multiple plot angles that confuse more than clarify.

By the time You’re Cordially Invited finds the correct mode to operate in, it’s about five minutes before the end credits roll.

Given that Mel Gibson makes little attempt to instill any sense of physicality to this dispiritingly paint-by-numbers affair, it becomes easy to understand the marketing of the film’s 4DX theatrical option as an act of overcompensation.

Its bizarre mismatch of form and content mostly saps it of life, tamping down the tension and frequently suggesting an accidentally distributed proof of concept for a project that never managed to secure funding.

Seth Gordon’s film is largely, and awkwardly, beholden to the most banal of spy tropes.

Wolf Man neither embraces the fundamentals of the werewolf folklore from which it draws nor convincingly reinvents them.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson skulks and slays across a slew of gory insert shots that scream “reshoots” from the highest mountain, and while he certainly looks the part with his shirt off, there’s little here that Hugh Jackman hasn’t delivered multiple times over the years and with a deeper well of earned pathos to draw from.

The bevy of documentaries, narrative films, and books about Bob Dylan’s breakout, ascent, and impact on the 1960s pop zeitgeist could fill a library, which makes this oversimplified retread of the same topic all the more tedious and superfluous.

The film isn’t interested in anything that would detract from providing audiences with the sustained pleasure of watching a clock-ticking thriller.

Here is all moments, some small and many big, but it’s lacking in gravitas, concerned as it is with tugging at our heartstrings by serving up little more than signifiers that we can project our own memories or personal baggage into.

If a musical is supposed to communicate things that can’t be conveyed through normal dialogue, Emilia Pérez’s biggest problem is that it falls prey to redundancy, regurgitating the same ideas about identity, desire, violence, and redemption, betraying how little it has to say in the first place.

In grappling with the implications of its story, Folie à Deux’s every attempt at showcasing cleverness, verve, or engagement is held cruelly underwater by staid direction, shoddy emotional plotting, a gleeful sense of cruelty, and a grave nihilism that makes Zack Snyder’s work seem like a season of Bluey.

There’s a certain pleasure in basking in the anarchic behavior of the SNL cast as depicted in Saturday Night, but it’s rendered hollow by the film’s often grating mythologizing of them, which includes trying to turn the 90 minutes before the first episode into a frenetic comedy of Safdie-esque proportions.

Perhaps there are limits on how deeply a film can explore the psyches of people who so nakedly show us their worst qualities.

Rather than deepening or complicating the original work, Apartment 7A engages with it purely on franchise terms, as in how it foregrounds the Castavets for much of the runtime.

As the film goes on, it stretches its own internal logic and, following a genuinely shocking third-act twist, renders the world that it’s created virtually incoherent merely in a ploy to keep the audience on the edge of their seats.

It’s only the winking malice of Ian McKellen’s title character that prevents the film from imploding entirely, dirigible-like, as the haywire plot begins to nosedive.

Jam-packed with his familiar brand of vulgar yet verbose stoner humor and free-flowing riffs on movies—especially his own—the vibes are certainly off the charts in Kevin Smith’s film.

This hollow attempt to turn a provocative showpiece into a crowd-pleaser makes you wonder if the filmmakers are actively disdainful of the original.

The film resembles less a realistic peek into the modern slavery of immigrants in America as it does grist for the torture porn mill.

The film’s treatment of its subject is belligerently hamfisted, disingenuous, and incurious.

This remake is absent the far richer character development that made the original as much a melodrama as a shoot-’em-up.

The remake gets bogged down by a superfluous, hackneyed backstory and narrative threads that are conspicuous for their lack of emotional gravitas, causing the film to feel like a wheel-spinning exercise.

The film makes mind-boggling choices for an adaptation of a game series so inseparable from its obnoxiously rough-and-tumble tone, characters, and humor.

Rather than grappling with the mind and soul of the man who birthed bizarre, fatalistically funny and existentially unsettling works like Waiting for Godot, James Marsh’s film seems content to merely adapt the “Personal Life” section of Samuel Beckett’s Wikipedia page.

My Spay: The Eternal City is derailed by how readily it succumbs to the ludicrousness of a plot that generates stakes that are far too heavy for the threadbare structure to support.

The film proceeds as a jumble of poorly sketched backstories and subplots, half-hearted topical references, and tepid fan service.

The film is as tedious and predictable as its traffic-clogged Long Island Expressway setting.

The film is all table-setting, with the stories lacking in polish and dramatic momentum and the characters never developed beyond archetypes.

The abstraction is presented with cloying cuteness, the sadism is juvenile and purposeless, and the humor is stomach-turningly glib.

Ultimately, in trying to make Katherine both a historical girlboss and a near-martyr to a vaguely articulated cause, Firebrand’s meandering, under-baked screenplay manages to neither have its cake nor eat it too.

The film leaves no room for doubt about what Trudy Ederle will accomplish, and thus creates virtually no dramatic tension in her inevitable rise to the top ranks of women’s swimming.

This film’s approach to slasher film mayhem is liable to induce some serious déjà vu.

Like the real Countess du Barry, it’s eventually caught up in the very pomp and splendor that it initially lampoons.

If you’re looking for flash and snark, Boy Kills World has them in spades, but it’s too punch-drunk on its own juvenile grandiosity to bother offering even a whiff of substance.

The film presents Amy Winehouse’s demise with a sad shrug, as one of those tragic things that just sort of happens.

The last 20 minutes live up to the promise of bludgeoning viewers with plenty of rock-‘em-sock-‘em combat and demolished human landscapes, but what any of it is actually for will be forgotten even before the dust begins to settle.

Dogman seems outwardly enamored with cosmic possibilities of meaning, but Luc Besson’s script remains earthbound and unimaginative.

Shove everything into the meat grinder of cynicism and, in the end, your insights come to feel purely incidental.

There are versions of this premise relevant to a modern world, but the film’s point of view on the state of race relations feels stuck somewhere around 1954.

Not quite a grim-dark reimagining of a cult favorite, this Road House is still a needlessly un-nice rework that takes the business end of a broken beer bottle to the soul of the original.

Spaceman seems to want to be an allegory about men’s emotional unavailability and its impact on heterosexual relationships, but instead of coming across universal, the film’s human characters, along with much of the drama, are mostly empty space.

The film shamelessly announces from the very start that it’s an attempt at atonement for disgraced designer John Galliano.

The film never thinks to lean into the blatant silliness that its premise invites.