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?