Reaching for meaning in The Nun II is as fruitful as a wander down a dark and dusty old hall. You’ll find things that go bump in the night but not much else underneath all the doom and gloom.

The script is standard sports movie fare without much subtext — in the mouth of anyone other than Harbour, some of these motivational lines would be real clangers, but he sells the material with his rugged soulfulness, and there’s true chemistry between him and Madekwe, as the unlikely sports star and his demanding coach.

One can’t help but feel that the man himself — grill and all — is so much more fascinating than this rote representation.

Pasek and Paul’s songs end up having to do much of the emotional heavy lifting, and the rest of the film feels cobbled together from random parts scavenged from other kids’ movies and pop culture ephemera.

In the end, The Predator is a killer when it comes to action. But, when it comes to the script, it’s just dead on arrival.

Skyscraper clearly aspires to be a 21st-century update of “Die Hard” (1988), one of the best action thrillers ever made. Instead, it’s just another film that squanders the movie-star charisma of Johnson, who should consider lending his box-office clout to more worthy projects.

Perhaps it’s time for a moratorium on road movies. Despite its strenuous efforts to come across as quirky and original, Boundaries goes nowhere.

Working from a screenplay that he co-wrote with McCarthy, director Ben Falcone (who happens to be her husband) keeps things moving but without much of a spark.

This film might give you the urge to check out a comic-book movie.

Clearly, this is a star vehicle — and the eminently likable Johnson is unquestionably a star. Through sheer force of personality, he elevates Rampage into something reasonably entertaining.

It’s downright depressing to see Oscar winners Hunt and Hurt struggling to make something meaningful out of their superficially written characters.

Based on true events, 7 Days in Entebbe pulls off the difficult trick of making terrorism boring.

It’s hard to understand what went wrong — the cast couldn’t be more appealing, and the film is bursting with special effects. But as an emotionally satisfying experience, it’s a bust.

This is a generic, uninspired and mind-bogglingly boring comic-book movie that’s out to steal your money and time.

Valerian has some cool visuals. But there’s more to science fiction than pretty pictures.

It doesn’t help that Weisz and Claflin have zero chemistry, and both come across as miscast. She lacks the aura of mystery that her character requires, and he’s woefully low on the charisma required of a romantic hero.

The franchise has sadly devolved into a cynical cash grab.

The best indicator of whether you’ll like the film version of Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul is whether you think flying vomit is funny.

If being seated at Table 19 is a drag, watching the film of the same name is worse.

Inspired by a true story, Gold is a major disappointment — a film of admirable ambition but woefully underwhelming execution.

Nocturnal Animals is far less imaginative than even your most banal nightmare.

This halftime walk is more like a long slog.

Don’t get burned by Inferno.

Keeping Up With the Joneses is hardly worth the effort.

Only when there’s an opportunity to blow things up does Fuqua seem fully engaged. Another Western bites the dust.

Genius, like most films about the literary life, has trouble dramatizing what’s involved and making us care.

McAvoy and Fassbender appealingly reprise their frenemy chemistry. But Lawrence has little to do but look perplexed.

A Bigger Splash? More like a small trickle.

Offbeat and unpredictable, Demolition takes a wrecking ball to audience expectations.

If you’re interested in Williams and his music, this film is better than nothing — but not by much.

There are some laughs in The Bronze, but more time in which we might wish it would end already. When it does, just like on Hallmark, lessons are learned. Perhaps for Rauch, the lesson is to write herself a better movie next time.

This is the kind of film that makes moviegoers long for good, old-fashioned storytelling.

There’s a sharp comedy to be made about America’s misadventures in Afghanistan. This isn’t it.

In a small role as a self-absorbed film producer, Mark Wahlberg is touchingly effective.

Most. Depressing. Christmas. Movie. Ever.

In a way, Stonewall is proof that the gay community has fully made the transition to the mainstream. It’s now subject to the kind of Hollywood nonsense that was previously reserved for heterosexuals.

Lovely to look at, and Vikander does nothing to derail her inevitable ascension to the A-list. But as a story, it evokes a word that no battlefield nurse would ever apply to her experiences: sterile.

Minions is product, pure and simple. Little kids will love it, but grown-ups will feel like they’re being held hostage in a Fisher-Price test laboratory.

With stingy portions and plenty of filler, Magic Mike XXL is the worst sausage party ever.

This mash-up movie is like a greatest-hits collection for obsessive collectors. On its own terms, Terminator Genisys makes virtually no sense.

Saint Laurent was a truly mythic figure. It’s a shame that Bonello’s film doesn’t do him justice.

The documentary Live from New York is a separate thing. It doesn’t try to be wild and crazy, and it can’t be comprehensive. Like a land shark, it’s an uncomfortable hybrid that bites off more than it can chew.

The setting and offbeat tone may remind some viewers of another recent comedy, but whereas “The Descendants” was a substantive meal, Aloha is a pu pu platter.

It doesn’t help that the characters caught up in this fact-based melodrama aren’t particularly engaging. Or that Téchiné doesn’t seem to have much of a feel for the material.

We need to have a dialogue about the wages of war in the remote-control era. But it’s hard to spark a good dialogue with movies whose dialogue is so bad.

Second verse, not as good as the first.

This undramatic and flat peek “inside” the sewing rooms of Christian Dior holds little in the way of entertainment.

Starved of sufficient comedy or drama, The Age of Adaline is a pipsqueak.

If you don’t crave the taste of motor oil on your popcorn, Furious 7 can’t end fast enough.

Based on an acclaimed novel by Ron Rash, Serena is like a towering tale that’s been fed into a woodchipper.

For the hour or so it’s on screen it’s a harmless, little chiller that doesn’t scare much but serves as a holdover until something truly scary comes along.

If you can’t guess that the whole thing ends with a big dance number, you’ve been snoozing in your samosas.

The movie version of Fifty Shades is better than the book. It's still awful, but when a filmmaker starts with stupid source material, he's handcuffed.

Squeezes plenty of color and noise from a thin concept, then runs with it until non-fanatics can’t keep up.

It’s unashamedly of the B-movie variety — a quick and easy time-killer.

The special effects remain good, but the jokes are creaky, the sentiments are forced and the pop-historical lessons are obligatory.

Whose story is this? There’s an old saying that history is written by the winners. The screenplay for The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies must have been written by elves.

A handsome movie with a handsome leading man. Christian Bale is widely considered the finest actor of his generation. Yet here he’s adrift in the bulrushes. This might be the most indifferent performance of Bale’s career.

Strives to be entertaining, but for much of its run time it is so emotionally uninvolving that even the smallest children might find themselves bored.

Further proof that likable actors have to take an occasional sick day.

Laggies is the kind of indie film that gives the genre a bad name.

There’s a good movie to be made about the alienating effects of modern technology. In 2013, a little-seen indie called “Disconnect,” starring Jason Bateman, came closer than this well-intentioned failure, which has virtually no heart, humor, sense of place or central point of view. In trying to be a big, important movie, Men, Women & Children is about none of the above.

Although the ratio of comedy to drama becomes increasingly weighted toward tearjerking, few of the emotional moments are realistic or effective.

Although The November Man shows us some attractive people in motion, the cumulative effect leaves us neither shaken nor stirred.

The settings and supporting roles suggest that If I Stay started out as someone’s passion project, but the final product only requires its star to sleepwalk through buckets of schlock.

Land Ho! is a tepid little movie that goes almost nowhere, and if I had to sit in that rental car for one more boob joke, I’d rather jump into a volcano.

Third Person doesn’t lack for ambition, and it’s nice to see Neeson in the kind of role that he excelled at before he morphed into an action star.

Because the affable Wahlberg is making the sales pitch, you could kid yourself that this is just a high-tech vacuum cleaner, built to siphon loose change like popcorn. But our failure to understand the terrifying significance of the “Transformers” series is why we're in the age of extinction.

By design it’s monotonous, and with so much clunky hardware, Liman can’t generate the same pace he produced in the “Bourne” movies. Edge of Tomorrow has neither an edge nor a vision of tomorrow that matters today.

’Round these parts, when a movie promises a million laughs but only delivers a dozen chuckles, that’s a hanging offense.

As usual for the comedies he produces, Sandler keeps pooping in the sandbox, and he expects the audience to give him a cookie for it. It’s a shame that he forces Barrymore to get soiled too.

The latest Hollywood version of the Godzilla story is neither fun nor fearsome. It’s an empty spectacle in which the humans are as meaningless as the monster.

Yet if you’re old enough to read this and you find yourself at a screening, try thinking about the munchkins who worked so hard on the psychedelic scenery.

Colin Firth is an Academy Award winner, so perhaps his lack of chemistry with fellow honoree Nicole Kidman is a carefully laid clue that his middle-aged newlywed Eric Lomax is damaged goods. Yet to the drama’s detriment, Lomax is about as poisonous as a week-old crumpet.

An ambitious movie, but ultimately there’s too much “artificial” and not enough “intelligence.”

Written, directed and acted by Hollywood pros, Heaven Is For Real is a polished little movie with a hopeful message, but when it literalizes the divine mysteries, it opens the door to a Doubting Thomas.

The flashbacks, which get almost as much screen time as the present day story, are far more compelling.

This is an extremely gory flick, with autopsy scenes to complement Schwarzenegger’s usual shoot-first sensibilities. After 30 years, it’s pointless to complain about the collateral damage in his movies, but here Schwarzenegger is taking vigilante justice to dark new levels that can only be reached via plot holes big enough for a Hummer.

The way that Muppets Most Wanted grabs for the green is criminal.

A faithful remake of RoboCop would be timely. Instead, the producers of this new version have retreated back to the lab, concocting a creaky hybrid of “Frankenstein” and “Call of Duty.”

Although it’s superficially grungy, this true story isn’t much more substantive than something that star Vanessa Hudgens might have made for the Disney Channel and considerably less shocking than her career gambit in “Spring Breakers.”

Kevin Hart hits the vicinity of humor with a few of his drive-by wisecracks, but the movie itself has nothing under the hood.

OK, the musical ode to Doby the shark elicits a grin, but the low-percentage script is loaded with buckshot, not harpoons, and Anchorman 2 ends up sinking.

We were promised desolation, but “The Hobbit” just keeps dragon on.

Out of the Furnace is hot air.

Count Black Nativity as a more noble than notable effort.

It requires a mild suspension of disbelief to accept that slacker David would suddenly intervene in so many lives, pretending to be a good Samaritan.

Ender’s Game is a blandly sanitized spectacle.

Shakespeare’s play evokes the poetry of undying love, but this Romeo and Juliet is prosaic.

The most grievous sins here are sins of omission.

Austenland is as frustrating as a blind date with Almost Mr. Right. It’s impossible not to fixate on how close this was to being a lot of fun.

Spurlock teases the baby sitter contingent with a brief scene where a scientist discusses the neuro-chemical appeal of pop music, but thereafter the film is aimed squarely at face-value fans of the Pre-Fab Five.

Closed Circuit is not a tense thriller about the new era of surveillance — it's a tepid thriller about the old notion that no leader can be trusted.

To stand out in a crowded marketplace, a sequel can’t just kick ass — it has to blow minds.

We're the Millers is nothing but stems and seeds, with less buzz than a bag of oregano.

Savvy filmgoers will know they are getting a stale product as soon as they see the wrapper: one of those vintage muscle cars that screams “stakeout.”

The mediocre mushy stuff isn’t alleviated by enough action.

Red 2 is not just a bad movie, it’s bad karma. And the target audience of adult moviegoers who respect the names in its once-vital cast have a bull’s-eye on their collective cranium.