The new Spenglers have the potential to be as memorable as the original cadre of Ghostbusters, but between the cameos by the 1984 cast (whom the film uses more as goodwill ambassadors than like the talented comic actors they still are) and the callbacks to Slimer and the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, they tend to feel like afterthoughts.

Tear-jerkers are valuable to cinema; they can provide emotional catharsis as satisfying as any other kind of popcorn entertainment. It’s hard to get misty-eyed, however, over a film that never stops reassuring you that everyone’s going to get a happy ending. Let the audience feel bad for a while, so they can feel good after; failing that leaves everyone feeling nothing.

Hawke remains delightfully disturbing, however, and some fans of the original may find the character’s return worthwhile, even if Black Phone 2 twists itself into narrative knots to make it happen.

Jurassic World: Rebirth doesn’t go anywhere particularly unexpected — besides being a big-budget, corporate-backed franchise film advocating that medical advancements should go public rather than be patented by drug companies — but the cliffhangers are choice.

The MCU train is back up and running, but this latest entry sees it jerking in fits and starts as it leaves the station.

The film’s best moments are an outlandish pleasure, far outshining the highlights of the similarly-plotted and mostly by-the-numbers sequel Ready or Not 2: Here I Come. But the latter at least maintains a consistent level of energy from start to finish. The initial dynamism on display in They Will Kill You contracts and collapses. Death be not dull.

Dowd and Burstyn’s performances will endure even as the rest of it fades into the memory hole of unnecessary sequels.

It proves that this mechanized world and its inhabitants are better suited to cartoon form than the headache-inducing Michael Bay movies, but it’s ultimately another piece of elaborate fan service that will bore the uninitiated.

The pleasurable jolt of a silent scare has given way to predictability.

Cuckoo would have benefited from explaining itself much less or much, much more; as it is, it lives in the atmospheric middle of the road, confused by itself.

The film’s intentions are unquestionably noble, but the execution falls wildly short, even with so many talented artists involved.

Veers off in so many exhausting directions that it ultimately amounts to little more than sound and fury. She’s alive, alive, but she can’t maintain this pace.

Most strikingly, for a murder thriller, Killers of the Flower Moon is fatally lacking in dread or suspense.

The first movie, for all its fluff, gave Miranda that eminently quotable “cerulean sweater” monologue, but this follow-up has nothing as interesting to say about fashion, or journalism, or life as anyone leads it. It’s sending nostalgia down the runway and expecting us to wear it, when the perfectly comfortable original already fits just right.

At nearly every juncture, the filmmakers display a lack of nerve, exercising restraint precisely when restraint is anathema to their goals. They’re cautious rather than crazed.

For all its craft, though, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes never finds the “aha” moment that justifies returning to the well for reasons more pressing than branding and global markets.

This new Haunted Mansion feels like a real movie (even if it’s rarely a good one) instead of a chaotic cavalcade of bad jokes and whatever the cinematographic equivalent of “shrill” is. (If nothing else, we can say this is the best haunted house remake Owen Wilson has ever been in.)

This update brings nothing particularly new to the table of the writer-director’s work.

There’s a history of great directors going out on a lesser film, and unfortunately, Friedkin joins their ranks. He leaves behind an extraordinary filmography of groundbreaking work that will inspire generations to come, but The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial will exist, at best, as a footnote to this legendary career.

There’s a lot to like about the world of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, from the mid-century kitsch to the progressive social ethos to its generally upbeat demeanor, but the movie itself lacks the nerve to carve out a memorable personality. Bespoke costumes and vintage Lucky Charms boxes are the empty props of a timid movie.

A small-town coming-of-age story blown up to rock-opera dimensions, And Their Children After Them puts a roaringly romantic widescreen frame around some well-worn dramatic themes, but never quite hits the epic emotional high notes it strains to reach.

Even with De Niro (and De Niro) in the leads, this is mob-movie cosplay, a hollow shadow of previous triumphs. As a mob lawyer might bellow, “Nothing to see here.”

It’s always applause-worthy when a biopic focuses on a few key years rather than try to tackle the span of a notable life, but Cooper never fully captures the mental anguish or the artistic glory tied up in Nebraska’s creation. It’s as spare as the album it chronicles, but never as subtle or satisfying.

The conflict is pretty obvious and the film’s naturalistic shooting style can’t take it to another symbolic level, so as drama, what you see is what you get.

On a pure craft level, The Creator delivers as a sweeping, big-screen science-fiction experience. What dazzles the eye, unfortunately, fails to connect with either the head or the heart.

Whether the eventual people-eating of the film’s final act merits enduring the turgid early portions of Meg 2: The Trench is, of course, a matter of opinion, but viewers might be well advised to wait until they can see the movie in a medium that involves a fast-forward button.

F1 doggedly follows the expected ups and downs of most sports-movie narratives, and it’s clearly more interested in recreating the experience of racing than telling a story or crafting a character piece.

So confoundingly ridiculous that it takes mediocrity to another level; narrative cinema rarely cares this little about actual narrative, transforming what’s supposed to be the concluding chapter of an ongoing saga into little more than pure sensation — blobs of color, bursts of sound.

If The Flash proves anything, it’s that the fans won, and that’s a loss for everyone else.

Despicable Me 4 plays like an assemblage of note cards that have been stapled together in a rough approximation of a screenplay. There are about 20 different plot threads that aren’t woven together as much as they’re shoved into one ungainly knot.

Every few scenes, there’s a chuckle-worthy bon mot or sight gag, or the animation style will alter radically for some plot-driven reason, but there’s far too much downtime between Smurfs’ sporadic delights.

As with so many of the ideas on display here, Snow White can’t have it both ways or even decide which way it wants.

And while it’s always commendable when a disaster movie establishes early on that any member of the cast can die at any moment, the film makes a fatal error in killing off the funniest of its teen characters, with only a bunch of earnest Breakfast Clubbers in their place.

Last Breath was made by someone who clearly connects with this material, but somewhere between the non-fiction and fiction versions, the emotional impact has been rendered unfathomable.

Hindered by extremely predictable character development and a mosaic-like approach to narrative, making it hard to really get to know and empathise with any of the characters.

Wish plays more like a collection of deleted tracks than greatest hits.

One of the film’s best features is that it does a minimum of seeding the ground for the next five MCU sequels; one of its worst is that it generates little enthusiasm for ever seeing these characters again.

With The Conjuring: Last Rites, this venerable franchise finally (one hopes) gives up the ghost, not with a bang, but a whimper.

I Can Only Imagine 2 is a Marvel movie for Evangelicals, but not in a good way: it rehashes the emotional beats of its predecessor to sell audiences an exercise in diminished results. With its reliance on familiar tropes and story clichés, it’s a movie that, even if you haven’t seen it yet, you can probably imagine.

Movies about artists, ideally, celebrate the art while also providing a glimpse into the blood, sweat, and tears behind its creation, but any exciting moments here can be found in their original, natural state on YouTube. Michael has no ambitions beyond being its own commemorative souvenir booklet.

It’s an effect that gives viewers the feeling of being an audience member at a play or, more appropriately, at Disneyland’s old Carousel of Progress attraction, where a rotating stage showed tourists the same living room over the course of decades as fashions and technology evolved at each stop.

It’s entirely possible that Benny Safdie was out to craft a different kind of underdog sports movie, one where the audience isn’t manipulated into raising a triumphant fist at the end. But surely the writer-director-editor hoped for more than a disinterested shrug.

Usually, the architecture of a thriller involves introducing a complicated scenario and then slowly but surely ratcheting up the tension; with Trap, Shyamalan has chosen to set it and forget it, spelling out the circumstances of the titular snare and then rarely bothering to introduce new elements or to elevate the suspense.

It’s an earnest attempt at a warm embrace that squeezes the life and charm out of itself.

The film commits a sin that is new to cinema: it’s a boring James Wan movie.

Ultimately, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 makes no effort to expand its appeal beyond its built-in audience of gamers.

It’s the absence of Lawrence — or at least of any young performer matching her charisma — that’s a key part of the problem here.

The barely-crafted romance between Marvin and Rose — for all the individual charisma of Quan and DeBose, there’s no sense that these two have ever experienced affection for the other — relies upon the screenplay telling us (via clumsy internal monologues) that they love each other rather than showing it, which is just one element of the bad writing on display here.

Behind its superficially avant-garde aesthetic, Baby Invasion is a shallow, conservative, masturbatory piece of work. It leaves behind an uncomfortable choice: either Korine has run out of anything interesting to say, or he has actually been trolling us all along.

Spending its entire running time between quotation marks, this tedious exercise represents one of the most egregious wastes of talent in recent memory, from a talented cast (led by Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell) to legendary composer Joe Hisaishi to director Kogonada, whose previous films After Yang and Columbus conveyed emotional truths that exist beyond the understanding of this cutesy waste of energy.

The fourth film of a franchise that probably should have packed it in at least two movies ago, this by-the-numbers sequel offers absolutely nothing unexpected, starting with its opening beaches-and-bikinis montage to the climactic standoff with the villain.

Drunk on its own noble aims and rich ingredients, Megalopolis is a muddled misfire of overcooked kitsch and undercooked ideas.

If you find yourself revolted by the low-budget slasher movies made by such recently-released-from-copyright characters as Winnie the Pooh, Popeye, and Mickey Mouse, apply some of that distaste to Juliet & Romeo, which turns Shakespeare’s work into quite the horror show.

Freddy’s is rarely frightening — a crowd-friendly PG-13 means fear and carnage are suggested but almost no blood is shown — and it doesn’t have much to say about its underlying subject matter besides, “Hey, wouldn’t it be weird if those musical pizza robots came to life and had sharp teeth?”

Drive-Away Dolls is, at its core, a comedy about eccentric people contending with inept but still deadly criminals. But neither the eccentrics nor the criminals feel remotely like real people, and their hijinks never summon up much hilarity or suspense.

While sitting through its interminable 133 minutes, I found myself parsing the difference between the unsettling and the merely unpleasant, and between the grotesque and the icky. In both cases, the former requires some engagement with human experience and consciousness while the latter — where this film permanently resides — merely relies upon witless bad taste and simple-minded gross-outs.

What we’re left with is an unromantic romance that’s as generic and forgettable as its title.

For all its potential, Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken remains stuck in the shallow end.

Obvious jokes, facile insights, and emotional Band-Aids are all that’s on the menu.

Director Matthew Vaughn, fresh off the success of his irritating Kingsman franchise, makes Argylle utterly weightless, both literally (the stuntwork all seems to be taking place in zero gravity) and figuratively (the barely-there characters never register).

While Pratt has become the most stultifying of screen presences — he was a lot more fun to watch back when Bekmambetov cast him in a small role in 2008’s Wanted — Ferguson and Reis are both as electrifying as the material allows them to be.

Lisa Frankenstein is a deadly dull and stitched-together effort that doubtless worked better on paper than it does in execution

The idea behind the series has always had potential — round up some beloved action stars of yesteryear and give them one more chance to ply their trade — but the expected fun has never materialized, with this latest entry lacking any sense of urgency, wit, or grace.