The sole thing it instigates is frustration over its lethargic unoriginality.

[Song’s] sophomore effort embraces a lighthearted rom-com template and then plays its material inaptly seriously—making it the cinematic equivalent of a sugary soda gone terribly flat.

The best one can say about it is that it at least doesn’t feature a lovably cartoonish genocidal dictator.

A pedestrian thriller that never generates a modicum of suspense.

Strives for stratospheric emotional heights and yet proves so self-seriously somber and saccharine that it plays like a leaden parody.

Arguably the most derivative offering the tired genre has yet to offer, borrowing elements from so many forebearers that it plays like a conventional pastiche.

Even the least violent passages of this follow-up are a tedious drag, courtesy of a story that asks nothing of its lead Charlize Theron and her underwhelming co-stars except endless, enervating moping.

The Garfield Movie fundamentally misunderstands the charm of Garfield.

Aiming for the stars, it proves a laborious affair that rarely gets off the ground.

Terrifier 3 is a juvenile splatterfest with an ignorable plot, and its performances veer from the competent (LaVera and Thornton) to the inept (most everyone else).

This sixth chapter boasts not a single genuinely unnerving jolt—a consequence of tepid writing as well as the familiarity of Ghostface’s tactics, which have long since become their own genre clichés.

We Strangers constantly tries to hold onto something that was never there in the first place. It’s a movie that’s sort of about community, sort of about racial assimilation, and sort of about the lies we tell ourselves and others to wrestle with life’s mundanity.

In a streaming landscape already saturated with takedowns of Big Pharma and its pill-popping perfidy, it’s a generic version of far more powerful originals.

A work of tremendous look-at-me energy: all prolonged close-ups and studied master shots of actors weeping, screaming, laughing, longing, and freaking out with sweaty, grimy intensity.

Lacks any sense of internal logic and is even lighter on surprising scares, dispensing only clichés that are as moldy as the haunted house in which his characters are confined.

While the star adequately acquits himself, Neil Jordan’s throwback noir is a cover song that knows all the notes but can’t capture its predecessor’s spirit.

Diaz and Foxx still got it, the film constantly screams. The evidence on display, however, suggests otherwise.

A franchise farewell so underwhelming, nary a tear will be shed over its passing.

Its comic touch almost as heavy-handed as its slow-motion-drenched action is dull, it seems primarily designed to answer the question, “How many movie stars can one fiasco squander?

Just a pale imitation of scarier bloodsuckers gone by.

Kids will undoubtedly chuckle at their familiar exploits; the rest will view the film as an excuse to take a nice air-conditioned nap.

The meager surprises it does contain aren’t particularly effective, considering that early clues suggest only one possible twist and the proceedings do little to mask it.

Designed in every way to make one bleary eyed, it’s the new year’s dreariest, and goofiest, film.

Block-headed from start to finish, it’s cinema in service of nothing more than IP exploitation.