Some might be willing to find depth in his stylish, stylized but gossamer-thin depiction of a woman at the height of her performative powers struggling to bear the weight of her stage persona. I found it a bore — self-consciously cool but distancing and empty.

Sadly, there’s no trace here of the authentic fondness for his characters that illuminated Hill’s directing debut, Mid90s. Just a load of solipsistic L.A. brain rot trying to pass for satire.

Sorry, but you need to have something to think about during this latest edition of a franchise that is dead creatively if certainly not commercially.

After a very effective opening scene, it starts to go off the rails and finally derails completely.

Laborious and dull, I Can Only Imagine 2 only comes to life in the comedic scenes featuring Ventimiglia, who buries his handsomeness in a buzz-cut, full beard, and Buddy Holly-style glasses to resemble Timmons.

The Dreadful is the sort of film that prides itself on being a slow burn but ultimately more resembles a fizzle. Except for Marcia Gay Harden. By all means, give her character a sequel.

To say that Melania is a hagiography would be an insult to hagiographies. This is a film that fawns so lavishly over its subject that you feel downright unpatriotic not gushing over it.

Much of the original cast and creative team have reunited for this wholly unnecessary sequel, which once again proves that oversized animatronic animal figures, no matter how homicidal their behavior, are more laughable than scary.

For all its visual stylishness, The Carpenter’s Son feels like such an essentially misconceived project that it seems destined for future cult status, with audiences at midnight screenings shouting out the more outrageous lines in unison with the actors. Which may not be what the filmmaker intended, but sounds like a lot of fun.

As Shelby Oaks moves further away from its original conceit, it grows ever clunkier, ever more derivative. Stuckmann’s dialogue is stilted and generic; his storytelling and world-building even more so.

What truly hampers Regretting You is its inescapable unoriginality, its plodding, uninventive, unthoughtful attempts at swoon and heartbreak.

For all I know, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey actually takes place on the Holodeck of the Starship Enterprise, so phony is everything contained within it.

Like the first film, the sequel (directed by Kyle Newacheck) proves moronic, witless and relentlessly vulgar. Which is to say, Happy Gilmore fans will love it.

This latest incarnation represents the sort of charmless, wildly chaotic animated effort that has the unintended effect of reminding us why cutting publicly funded children’s television is such a terrible idea.

It’s all about as predictable and rote as could be.

When a movie is so dire you begin to suspect you’re in for a bad time before the title card drops, you cling to what tiny scraps of fun are to be found like shards of wood in a shipwreck.

This is the sort of movie in which even the opening credits, which continue until nearly the half-hour mark, are unbearably pretentious.

The charisma-endowed Washington and Sy do all they can to make the proceedings engrossing but even they are hard-pressed to make it interesting.

The comedy lacks the stakes to engage more than passing interest. And while there are plenty of sole-related puns, the film is so frenetic in focus that most of them don’t really land.

What makes A Minecraft Movie so dispiriting is how it fails to spark the imagination, betraying a core tenet of the game on which it’s based.

The actors are all game for anything, but this is thankless work, in which the mix of live action and animatronics has no magic. The same goes for the talented voice cast, which also includes Colman Domingo and Hank Azaria in small roles.

Unlike so many of Anderson’s efforts, In the Lost Lands isn’t adapted from a video game. But it sure as hell feels like one, and not one that would be fun to play.

Deva is a diluted, labored retread.

Like so many pictures about artists, be they visual artists or composers or even writers, Modi, Three Days on the Wing of Madness doesn’t dare to engage with any seriousness about craft, application and technique or any of the nitty-gritty stuff that truly makes their creations important.

Punishingly dull.

To their credit, the directors aren’t afraid to take things way too far — which could be considered a quality in and of itself, but not one that’s sustainable for nearly 90 minutes of action.

This is a high-concept, CG-saturated bore that lacks heart and infectious humor, even if it huffs and puffs its way to a little poignancy in the end.

Chris Weitz (most famously About a Boy and most recently Operation Finale) works hard to make Afraid a smarter-than-average horror movie, but the effort is conspicuous, and in the end the film is bland and obvious. And if horror can’t make us feel frightened in a way we couldn’t imagine ourselves, why bother?

Most of the major events in Reagan’s life are covered, but few of them are recounted in an incisive fashion.

The Crow is a sluggish, overly self-serious gloomfest that never takes wing.

Roth’s messy storytelling is so anxious to get to the next blast of rote action — amped up by Steve Jablonsky’s hard-working synth and orchestral score and lots of shoddy CGI — that the characters have scant opportunity to form real bonds.

Veteran television director Greg Berlanti (Riverdale, Everwood), who demonstrated real cinematic talent with Love, Simon, is unable to make any of this remotely convincing or, more problematically, entertaining. The wild tonal shifts leave the viewer in the dust, and not even the two stars are able to make any of it work.

Instead of being drawn in by Daniel’s spiral, we observe it from a distance. The result is that Longing, presumably intended as a cathartic meditation on grief, simply feels absurd.

Other viewers are likely to be more entranced by the film’s borderline magical realist elements, but for this viewer the story felt rote, on the verge of trivializing and exploiting the horrors of the Holocaust. Mileage will certainly vary, but for me there’s very little that’s either original or artistically interesting about The Most Precious of Cargoes.

A hodgepodge of movie clichés and overwrought scenes, directed with zero tact and plenty of pounding needle drops, actor-turned-director Lellouche’s third stab at the helm after his rather likeable ensemble comedy, Sink or Swim, is less a disappointment than a serious assault on the viewer’s intelligence.

Alas, the film is an inept, ill-made mess — or as my grandmother would call it, a mishegoss, so muddled and misbegotten it’s hard to perform an evidential postmortem, based strictly on one viewing, of where it all goes wrong.

Crowe himself, as usual, is the best thing in the film, once again upgrading less than optimal material with his indelible screen presence.

A sad demonstration that what was once considered outrageous, transgressive and anarchic now just seems crass, tired and witless.

It is an airless and stilted endeavor driven by a mechanical screenplay (written by Matt Sazama & Burk Sharpless and Claire Parker & Clarkson). Its lack of imagination would be astounding if it wasn’t so expected.

Sure, it’s entirely possible that the film will find a constituency who will love its mirthless, shouty performances, its tortured random plot twists and its appallingly shonky-looking CGI. But there is also a distinct possibility audiences will turn up their noses at this like it’s a fresh litter box deposit.

It’s a shame, because Cuoco’s well-honed comic skills are very much on display and Oyelowo, working in a lighter vein than usual, seems to be enjoying himself. Which is more than you’ll be able to say about the viewers of this tired action-comedy retread.

Young audiences may well be enchanted, but I’m sad to report I found the whole confection sickly sweet and hopelessly twee.

Freelance fails to deliver on every front. Worse, it barely seems to try.

The contestants just lack dimension. And Lawrence’s journeyman handling of the more character-driven drama provides sputtering momentum at best.

Expend4bles — the number is in the middle of the word, get it? — represents a nadir for a series that began as an entertainingly nostalgic throwback to old-school action movies and the square-jawed muscle men who starred in them.

While Pine is undeniably a charismatic actor, that likability can only generate so much audience good will in a production overstuffed with cartoonish caricatures lacking any sort of deeper connective tissue.

It’s full of flashy technique and ostentatious stylistic flourishes but has almost nothing of note to say about the supposed burdens of privilege.

Directed with pedestrian competence by Thaddeus O’Sullivan, The Miracle Club is about secrets that are all too obvious, and forgiveness you can see coming from the start.

She Came to Me is a movie whose strained eccentricity gets positively goopy, conveying so little genuine feeling that the stakes for any of the characters never feel terribly high.

But the film is so baggy, so preoccupied with its own ambitions — re-establishing its support of women’s desires, addressing a new generation, etc. — that it deflates into flaccid fluff.

Lead actors Cole and Latimore are competent enough, but they don’t come close to approximating the original film’s stars’ charisma or likability, with the result that their characters’ ill-advised activities leave a sour taste. This is one party you can’t wait to be over.

This sub-Hallmark dreck made by a bunch of hacks that don’t deserve to be named is the first film out of Lohan’s Netflix deal and her first feature in three years. Not to beat up on a former child star who has overcome more than her share of demons, but if this is the best vehicle she could find, waiting another three might not have been a bad idea.

Despite participation from many bigwigs within the Biden team, Year One fails completely as any sort of chronological overview, which is how the documentary presents itself. And the argument that it seems to actually be making is far too complicated to be made by people still embroiled in the middle of it all with no space for introspection.

This is a uniquely tiresome slog — madly over-plotted, thuddingly derivative, insanely overlong and slathered in a big symphonic score that strives to infuse momentum into a saga with minimal emotional stakes.

A sluggish exercise in formalism ... [Monica] feels like a movie perpetually struggling to connect.

Farrelly’s loftier impulses work against the material. The result is a meandering, disjointed production that struggles throughout to find a satisfying tone.

There’s nary an amusing or unpredictable moment in the film.

For a movie with so much volatile physicality and bruising punishment, there’s an inertia about the whole thing, a soullessness that makes every contrived smirk grate. We don’t care about who gets pounded to a pulp or shot to pieces because there are no characters to root for — good guys or bad.

The film, like the novel it’s based on, skirts the issues — of race, gender and class — that would texture its narrative and strengthen its broad thesis, resulting in a story that says more about how whiteness operates in a society allergic to interdependence than it does about how communities fail young people.

This utterly toothless, glorified Hallmark movie for Paramount+ proves the director is only as good as his material.

Whatever goodwill superfan director Colin Trevorrow earned with 2015’s enjoyable reboot, Jurassic World, he pulverizes it here with overplotted chaos, somehow managing to marginalize characters from both the new and original trilogies as well as the prehistoric creatures they go up against in one routine challenge after another. Evolution has passed this bloated monster by.

What this twisty espionage thriller ... doesn’t have enough of is character depth or storytelling coherence.

As Finley, Hopkins displays his usual magnetism, even taking the opportunity to play one of his own musical compositions on piano.

At a lean, mean 90 minutes or so, Ambulance might have been a guilty pleasure. Instead, it’s the sort of cinematic thrill ride so overstuffed that you can’t wait for it to be over.

Viewers who’ve never seen a Dobrik video and have only cursory (if any) knowledge of the allegations that briefly interrupted his career will come away feeling they understand the buoyant, boyish 25 year-old’s appeal — but they may be frustrated by the film’s less-than-probing look at behavior that should have caused him much more trouble than he endured.

The Cow is depressingly slack and indecisive, neither leaning hard enough into its B-movie preposterousness nor taking the time to build any real, sustained suspense.

Lyne’s take on the material, scripted without distinction by Zach Helm and Sam Levinson, manages to drain all the subtlety and psychological complexity from Highsmith’s story of marital warfare, transgression and obsession.

The result is neither funny nor thrilling, just exhausting.

Imagine the rise of the machines prophesy made popular by the Terminator franchise, but done as a freaky sitcom that’s part Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, part French sex farce, and you’ll get an idea of the bizarro concoction that is Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s new film, Big Bug.

Featuring many of the same grandiose elements as those predecessors, Moonfall looks and sounds like a would-be cinematic blockbuster but comes up painfully short in its ham-fisted execution.

A cynical, insufferably smug satire stuffed to the gills with stars that purports to comment on political and media inattention to the climate crisis but really just trivializes it. Dr. Strangelove it ain’t.

There’s plenty of imagination on display in The Blazing World, but it’s buried amidst the narrative and stylistic self-indulgence that assumes we’ll be interested in going on this very strange and ultimately enervating journey.

At 93 minutes, The Addams Family 2 feels longer than it actually is, and nothing, not even the new music from contemporary stars like Megan Thee Stallion and Maluma, helps it move any faster. Part of the problem is that even with a relatively well-constructed script (there is a bit of a timeline snafu near the end), the film itself is mostly boring. The one-liners are more corny than clever.

The buddy comedy does a better job of betraying its filmmakers’ lack of imagination than it does conjuring any real laughs.

This is a story so crusty and antiquated in its conveniently resolved conflicts, contrivances and drippy sentimentality that it should have been left on the shelf.

For all its high style and aestheticized visuals, this is a work of self-conscious posturing with nothing to say.

The movie, with its numbing overload of pastels and prayer, is too tonally uncertain to yield any fun. It’s a depressing window into the worst excesses of faith racketeering that has little to offer in the way of commentary.

With a predictable trajectory and cringeworthy metaphors, The Starling is so slushily sentimental it makes the typical tearjerker look like a noir. Despite the lived-in performances from its three high-profile stars, this attempt at heartfelt drama is hopelessly by-the-numbers.

Like a beltway surrounding its hero’s bloviating ego trips and massive libido, the film keeps turning in circles around a subject that’s only truly interesting if you’re Philip himself.

The best that can be said about When I’m a Moth is that it is not lurid, although it does seem pointless.

Sans a compelling marriage of danger and eroticism, much of the third-act suspense fails to captivate

In a movie this overloaded with plot, the revelations are like a leaky faucet, just like that purple voiceover. In fact, there’s so much going on, much of it behind the literal curtain of memory, that Joy leaves little room for the characters to establish themselves in the here and now.

The movie, which bills itself as a crime-thriller-mystery, doesn’t come close to fulfilling even the lowest of expectations; it neither takes its characters seriously nor commits to its superficial attempt at topicality.

The animation, consisting of both traditional 2D and CGI, is impressive, and there’s certainly a lot of it. But it never feels as joyful as you’d hope, too often coming across like corporate machination than inspired imagination.

Returning director James McGrath and screenwriter Michael McCullers had an opportunity to build on an entirely workable formula, but instead have settled for a frenetic sugar rush of a retread that rapidly wears out its welcome. Pint-sized viewers might be distracted by the noisy, chaotic result, but most others will be hard-pressed to find the proceedings cute and adorable.

The film trades the agreeably limber storytelling and seeming spontaneity of Leon’s previous work for a narrative both aimless and inert.

Infinite is a soulless grind. Juiced up with a succession of CG-enhanced accelerated chases and fight action interspersed with numbing bursts of high-concept geek speak, Antoine Fuqua’s sci-fi thriller isn’t helped by a lead performance from Mark Wahlberg at his most inexpressive.

Gallo displays none of the screenwriting elan he's exhibited in such previous efforts as Midnight Run and the Bad Boys films, although here it's hard to separate the ponderous dialogue from the way it's delivered.

It's never remotely involving, and you can feel the lead performers straining to handle their acting chores. The exception is Haddish, who is so convincingly scary and menacing here that you wish her character were in a better, dramatic movie.

The movie's soul, such as it is, remains unimproved, and at 242 minutes, very few of them offering much pleasure, it's nearly unendurable as a single-sitting experience. If it were watched in parts — title cards identify six chapters and an epilogue, and some rumors suggested it would be released as a series — those segments would fail to deliver the shapely balance of energies and pacing that one expects these days from even a merely competent TV show.

It's parental wish-fulfillment that isn't at all interested in what being a kid actually feels like.

The characters are uninvolving, the emotional stakes never fully take hold and the physical action invariably promises more than it delivers.

Tim Story's Tom & Jerry is five to ten minutes of action that might have worked in one of the cartoon duo's shorts, surrounded by an inordinate amount of unimaginative, unfunny human-based conflict.

Walker's story no doubt is grounded in a very real milieu that reflects the grim existence of countless Americans returning from active duty to a country blighted by economic downturn, shrinking opportunity and substance abuse. But the only reality Cherry reflects with numbing insistence is that of co-directors getting high on their own high style.

In its tiresome attempts to send up its star's image and not take itself too seriously, the film becomes exceedingly laborious.

While it has a few incidental felicities to admire, by and large Music is a sentimental atrocity so cringe-inducing it should come with an advisory warning for anyone with preexisting shoulder or back injuries.

A lo-fi treatment of a high-concept crime rom-com deficient in sexual chemistry, laughs and suspense, this is a grating stunt in which actors who ought to know better, led by Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor, play synthetically movie-ish characters meant to tickle us with the all-too-real trials of the COVID era. If you still think frozen screens and kids disrupting Zoom business calls are a hoot, it's all yours.

Grizzly II: Revenge is so bad, it's just bad.