The nostalgia of “Michael” is for more than Michael Jackson. But blindly believing only in that celebrity, in that fantasy, is repeating a sad history all over again.

The tagline for “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is “Some things are meant to stay buried.” That also applies to the misguided “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy,” which should definitely stay deep underground for eternity.

Maybe [Borgli's] trolling America but “The Drama” is clearly the worst thing he’s ever done.

They Will Kill You may remind you of the marriage between madcap, social satire and bloody mayhem from “Ready or Not” but it’s a warning of how hard that combo is to get correctly.

Lumbering along while fatally wounded, this is a franchise that doesn’t know it is dead, staggering ever onward without an ending in sight.

It’s not as funny as it thinks it is and tiresome in its overly familiar redemption arc.

For how reliant this movie is on screens and keeping Pratt alone, one might assume that “Mercy” was a socially distanced, COVID-era leftover instead of something made in 2024.

This sequel may be focused more on emotion and character — since the whole comet thing happened long ago — but the problem is, none of this is compellingly rendered, and is forgotten when convenient.

Overall, it’s just not so good, so good.

It’s hard to understand how “Ella McCay,” the first original feature from writer-director Brooks in 15 years, goes so utterly haywire.

It’s an incoherent mess, something that, back in the day, would be straight to DVD. Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 has an after-school special vibe with no real horror and no real awareness that it should.

A satisfying conclusion awaits but, truth be told, it has been a bit of a slog, with soft digressions into social critiques and the meaning of faith grafted onto a setup that, by the third movie in the franchise, shows its seams instantly. Wake up, indeed.

There are some sweet kisses (otherwise, it’s very chaste) and some nice declarations of motherly devotion (credit to Williams for doing her best) but the cheese factor is regretfully high.

If the issue of some thrillers is that they have nothing to say, the problem with “Him” is that it has exactly one thing to say, which it does again and again and again. “Him” does have some style, though.

Spinal Tap II is filled with ghosts. It’s like watching a cover band playing the hits but then realizing it’s actually the original band onstage after all.

Somebody, anybody, should drag Odenkirk away from this nobody franchise.

The Bad Guys 2 has clearly lost its moorings.

Rihanna voices Smurfette and supplies a new song, giving a half-hearted injection of star power to an otherwise uninspired, modestly scaled, kiddo-friendly cartoon feature.

Look, we hate to break it to you, it’s not going to end well for many of this privileged set, as they hunt whoever is hunting them. Coherence is also stabbed a lot because a clear motive for the mass murder is really hard to understand.

The vaguest hints of real-world intrigue only cast a pale light on the movie’s mostly lackluster comic chops and uninspired action sequences.

Bride Hard — which combines thrusting male strippers dressed as Vikings as well as deadly automatic weapon fire — isn’t funny or thrilling. It has the kind of lazy pacing you’d usually find on the Hallmark Channel and a level of acting not much better than porn.

Part of the problem is that the movie takes itself so seriously, making some of the irreverent humor of “Cobra Kai” unattainable.

Disney should have left the original alone.

Woven throughout is some conversation about absent fathers and fear of abandonment, with unearned delivery and first-draft acuity — something gesturing at depth without piercing the surface.

Yes, the cinematography is what stands out here. There are also several compelling performances, though Baldwin’s somewhat halting, somber turn is not among them.

If an algorithm designed a classic, big-screen spectacle for the small-screen age, “The Electric State” probably wouldn’t be too far off the mark.

Green wobbles as he tries to land this plane and what had been an intriguing premise to talk about fame and the parasitic industries that live off it turns into a gross-out, run-for-it bloodfest and a plot that unravels. It becomes what it intended to satirize — a pop spectacle.

Old Guy feels very of this moment in the fact that it looks good and has a good cast and yet can’t seem to deliver something that’s either entertaining or meaningful. But unlike so many of its peers, this one amazingly was not made by a streamer.

The tonal swings, not to mention the gloss that covers the whole enterprise, make “The Gorge” an intriguing but empty genre mash-up and streaming-only exercise.

Director Julius Onah does well with the action but fumbles the quieter moments and supervises editing that’s the opposite of crisp, not helped by script writers who ape military language — “Negative, the package is the priority” — and grandiose sentiment — “The country is lost.”

Artificiality as an aesthetic is all fine and good, but Love Hurts feels a little too much like the charmless, ripped-from-the-Magnolia-showroom homes that Marvin is hawking to perky yuppies around Milwaukee.

But no one emerges unscathed from this funny-when-it-shouldn’t-be mess. The movie’s slogan is the weird “Y’all Need a Pilot?” but it should be “Y’all Need a Filmmaker?”

Slack when it should be terrifying, “Wolf Man” suffers from cheap sentimentality, laughably obvious script reveals, poor continuity and a creature that is less predatory than painful. Pity comes to mind.

Kraven the Hunter can climb sheer walls like a gorilla, snatch fish out of streams like a bear and outrun deer. But there’s something this slab of human beef can’t do: Anchor a decent movie.

The film, set 183 years before the events of “The Hobbit,” is a return to Middle-earth that, despite some very earnest storytelling, never supplies much of an answer as to why, exactly, it exists.

Red One comes off a little like the holiday version of “Cowboys and Aliens” — enough so to make you nostalgic for leaner tales about folkloric figures starring Johnson, like “The Tooth Fairy.”

The saddest thing about “Transformers One” is the wastefulness of another dull outing in a universe geared toward kids just learning to transform themselves.

This is a 135-minute film that demands a lot more depth. And, so, to co-opt a political phrase from Bill Clinton, whom Quaid also has played: It’s the script, stupid.

There’s just not enough there — action, comedy, romance, art — to demand (or, rather, earn) your full attention.

But It Ends With Us doesn’t end quickly enough — more than two hours drag — with tangents and poor editing, like sudden scene cuts that leave viewers looking for clues to where they are.

The force is not strong in “Skywalkers: A Love Story,” a shallow “Man on Wire” for social media influencers about a pair of Russian daredevils who stealthily scale urban heights to attain the precious treasure of a much-liked Instagram post.

Part of the problem of “Chapter 1” is that in addition to overstuffing it with too many characters, the editing is pretty bad. Viewers will struggle with some violent cuts in which Costner has jumped the action forward months within the same chapter without any clues.

Atlas, an often ridiculous sci-fi epic with dialogue cheesier than a Brie wheel but also an old-fashioned, human heart o’ gold, is a J.Lo movie. Through and through.

A curious new animated attempt to monetize the comic icon again by giving him an origin story and then asking him to do things a galaxy away from what he does in the funny pages.

Was it attempting a freewheeling jazz form, or is it just messy?

There’s only so much heavy lifting a picturesque location, photogenic bodies and enviable resort outfits can do to make up for a lame story.

A bewildering 90-minute, narrator-less and wordless experiment that’s as audacious as it is infuriating. It’s not clear if everyone was high making it or we should be while watching it.

The one bright spot is Cena, who is quite good. Like his character, who goes above and beyond to adeptly play Ricky Stanicky, Cena really and truly commits and brings a kind of unexpected depth and pathos to Rock Hard Rod. He’s flexed his comedy muscles before and should again, soon. Is it enough to save the movie? Not for me.

It’s too bad because there could have been a more fun movie in here — Clarkson imbues it with a distinctly feminine and teenage energy that makes good use of its soundtrack. But it spins itself into a knot trying to justify a silly story instead.

This is pure lazy storytelling, like thinking that just showing us a clip of Bob Ross painting is somehow uproariously funny.

Criss-crossing patterns of ridiculousness and self-satisfaction run through “Argylle,” a tiresome meta movie that puts an awful lot of zest into an awfully empty high-concept story.

Orion and the Dark is about fear and overcoming it but this movie directed by Sean Charmatz has too much junk clogging up the vision.

Jenna Ortega’s stark rise as Gen Z’s goth-glam princess takes a pointless, awkward turn in “Miller’s Girl,” a new romantic horror movie about cerebral people that’s simply tiresome.

Caught between PG and R, as well as lost at the crossroads of inadvertent comedy and horror, the PG-13 Five Nights at Freddy’s has to go down as one of the poorest films in any genre this year.

It’s so dated there’s even a mention of Halliburton.

The dialogue is head-spinningly mundane. The flow of testosterone is, well, head-spinning.

A new directing and writing team fails to shock or scare with a color-by-numbers plot and a meandering, languid wannabe frightfest.

All the pieces here are fine but nothing is distinct from dozens of films before it. You would swear that the movie’s star AI wrote it — and even gave itself first billing, too.

There is no thrill, entertainment or insight to be gleaned in watching the myriad ways people can die by their own hand. It’s just awful, and this is not a film that is interested in grappling with the trauma in any interesting or helpful way. Instead it is two hours of unpleasant drudgery.

The problem with Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is the same problem faced by all of the installments — balancing the humanity with the metal.

Comedian Sebastian Maniscalco has co-written and stars in this big sloppy Italian American kiss about family that not only leans into stereotypes — working-class Italians on one side, WASPs on the other — but plows the field with them.

This limp, half-hearted, breezy remake makes some modest improvements. The film, directed by Calmatic, bounces to a hip-hop beat and the gameplay action is smoother. But the drop off in personality from that original trio is like going from the Lakers to the G-League.

Showing Up may be a rallying cry to let artists just be artists — Reichardt is famously an artist in residence at Bard College, in large part to have health insurance — but she may have miscalculated how much compassion is generated by a supposed lover of beauty who is as cold and off-putting as her figurines.

The filmmakers are also clearly trying their hand at satire, but ham-fistedly. Set during the Reagan-era “Just Say No” period, “Cocaine Bear” hopes to remark on the demonization of drugs and it also seems to have something to say about how humans misunderstand the balance of nature. Neither work.

Director Kyle Marvin fails to build any real tension as he frighteningly shifts from farce to cringe to melancholy, but real footage of the big game is nicely knitted into the second half.

This party isn’t worth a trip much further than living room.

Amsterdam reaches for something contemporary to say about race relations, concentration of wealth, veterans and fascism but ends up with a plodding, mannerist noise.

It should surprise no one that a movie marketed with creepy smiling fans at MLB games might not actually have genuine concerns about pain and healing on its mind. But it still makes “Smile” a cynical and shallow piece of work unlikely to put a you-know-what on too many faces.

The filmmakers employ all kinds of ways to try to keep viewers interested, like split screens, some farce and a surreal dream sequence, but there’s not enough humor or grit or anything other than actors swanning around in period clothing.

Me Time somehow squanders a solid premise, a stacked cast and a seemingly unlimited budget. It didn’t need to be anything great in this movie comedy drought we seem to be in. But considering who was involved, it really should be better than it is.

As for the documentary about the man of the hour, do as the title suggests: Run away.

Virtually no one associated with this film should be congratulated in any way, having ruptured any bridges between Hollywood and senior citizens or for the shocking misuse of Diane Keaton’s considerable skills.

Paramount’s limp, animated remake actually triggers new stereotypes in the service of trying to expose racism for a pre-teen audience. The studio seems to have reached for legitimacy by bringing the venerated Brooks along for the bumpy ride, darkening both legacies. What emerged sits uneasily at the corner of tribute, parody, theft and laziness.

The problem with Men isn’t with the acting. It’s with a script that could be described as attempting at something like arty horror and can’t stick the landing. Often it is tedious, slow to build and pretentious.

There wasn’t a great reason to take another shot at Firestarter. Besides, even if it’s lacking in originality, it’s also lacking something even more important: A personality.

There’s always something a little off about Father Stu, a sense that the filmmakers have taken a lot of liberties with a real life to make it extra saintly.

Though it starts off promisingly enough with Carrey’s character marooned on a “piece of shitake” mushroom planet, it soon becomes evident that this outing is a soulless attempt to up the stakes and cash in.

The filmmakers — director Daniel Espinosa, hobbled by a meandering script from Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless — simply do not know what to do with this creature once they’ve given us his backstory.

Deep Water, despite an all-star team behind it, barely makes a splash. Although it is being billed as an erotic thriller, it’s tedious and clunky. Trips to the supermarket are more exciting.

As an acting exercise, it’s intriguing — barely any scene partners and all unfolding in real time. As a film, not so much: After a plodding, placid start, it goes from first gear into fifth and never relents as the woes pile on.

The question does arise not long into this, the 10th movie in the “Chainsaw” oeuvre: Did we really need another? And sadly, given the lack of imagination, creativity or even basic attention to logic in a perfunctory and downright silly script, the answer seems a resounding “Nope.”

As for Neeson, what can we say? He could keep doing this ’til he’s 80, but surely there’s something better out there.

January is often where bad films are stashed, but “The King’s Daughter” isn’t just bad, it’s a cloying, cliched mess that’s not worth even the slightest risk of contacting COVID-19 to see in theaters.

Like a drug store chocolate bar, it just is. It might not be good for you, but it’ll go down shockingly easy, give you a minor sugar high (and possible headache) and disappear from your memory just as quickly, leaving you defenseless for when the inevitable sequel comes along.

It’s a basic format that’s been trotted out for plenty of reboots before. But aside from its frequent stabs at self-referential comedy, “Scream” proceeds with a dull repetitiveness.

It’s hard to overstate just how garish and frenetic this whole endeavor is. Even with the explosion of colors it still strains to hold interest.

There is perhaps an intriguing movie here somewhere — “Who decides what is God’s will?” is one lingering question —but to find it you have to slice away all the bawdy and ultra-violent excesses that are clearly intended to push buttons, like a 5-year-old testing her parents’ patience. Yawn.

It is more like half a movie, standing in the shadow of its parent. It is a film made to sell us more lunchboxes.

Ron’s Gone Wrong thinks it’s being subversive when its really being very corporate. It wastes its voice cast — including Olivia Colman, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis — and it never really connects, ending as awkwardly as a modern-day seventh-grader with a rock collection.

The big problem is that Halloween Kills is less of a sequel than a half-baked interlude before the finale. It is a bloody, violent, chaotic and cynical mess and not even in a good or particularly scary or insightful way.

The film is apparently supposed to be a meditation on masculinity, with Eastwood’s one-time rodeo star Mike Milo taming and rebuilding his young rebellious charge into an honorable young man. Instead, it’s a meditation on clumsy and predictable filmmaking.

Malignant at least has originality going for it. It’s also a thanklessly humorless and offensively sadistic film that fails to capture any sort of authentic emotion or make any meaningful statements about trauma.

At the film’s center is Q but there is a hollowness there. She can rappel down a staircase using a fire hose, endure waterboarding and use a dinner tray as an assault weapon, but there’s little insight in her inner life or emotions and her backstory appears too late.

If there was a stylish chic in the first film, it’s gone in the second, which sometimes seems cloying in its attempt to recreate the first.

It’s a tedious mess to endure and seemed like way more fun making than watching.

Overly long, bombastic and poorly focused.

Christmas on the Square is pure, studio-lot fantasy and not really trying to be anything else.

The best thing that Holidate has going for it is that Roberts and Bracey do have great chemistry, but they just don’t have a story or a script that can do it justice.