Outcome—and it’s bad scenes shot behind obvious blue screen and fake, manufactured sunsets—is terrible. But what makes it memorable is the queasy way the movie keeps collapsing into the very pathology it thinks it is exposing. It wants to mock the famous for living inside a bubble of privilege, paranoia, and vanity, yet it ends up sounding like it was made from inside that bubble.

Alas, for a film that sets out to understand the specific malaises of the bourgeoisie at a time of increasing sociopolitical unrest around class inequality, Mundruczó’s drama feels not only tone-deaf but also egregiously vapid.

Let this film with no bite serve as rock bottom for the IP era.

Call it “naïve-core,” perhaps, as the film so thoroughly loses touch with reality by avoiding conflict of any kind. His empty platitudes like “humans help humans” are rendered useless and risible inside a work that seems to lack even a basic understanding of humanity in 2008, 2025, or any time at all.

With nothing but artful austerity to offer as a tether back to reality, The Ice Tower shatters.

Credit where credit is due, Sacrifice ultimately made me seriously consider the prospect of death while watching it. However, this mostly came from a desire for it all to end so we no longer had to keep enduring the inescapably vapid and shallow film unraveling before us.

This film is like some kind of corrupted, infectious, cinematic black hole that obscures and swallows all other sins in and around it. Artistically irredeemable and impossible to recommend on any basis whatsoever, about the only thing Ebony & Ivory succeeds at is matching the artistic value of the eponymous song: a dubious distinction if ever there was one.

For anyone who even gives even the remotest care about movies, god forbid you dare to waste your time with this utterly disposable discard.

Earnest, pulpy fun at the movies is always a welcome sell. Still, it’s hard to settle into the easy rhythms of amusement when looking for answers not to the film’s central mysteries but to the nagging gaps in a story that seems carelessly scribbled together to accommodate a character that, although compelling enough, has very little to chew on.

Pleasant enough to look at but impossible to care about, this movie isn’t bad because it fails at what it sets out to do, but because of the most evil of all reasons: it never figures out its reason to be at all.

Fountain Of Youth may feel superficially dynamic, and cinematically, it sure tries its best to trick you into thinking it’s a vigorous thing, but it’s just a cup filled with empty calories, sustaining nothing and ironically, only just wasting precious minutes off your life.

This pleasingly mellow portrait of a bunch of kids making movies is also an instance of defanged nostalgia — when it was an occasion to highlight the economic, political, cultural circumstances that made this kind of creativity possible.

There is a winning buddy comedy deep inside The Accountant 2, but it’s buried under so much tedious meandering that it never gets to fully see the light of day.

With a weak script, no visual engagement, and limp comedy despite the comedic actors on board, Kinda Pregnant was always a sure-fire miss.

In the depths of the abyss below, The Gorge mostly turns into a high-concept action film that’s so dull, predictable and ugly to look at it’s extremely easy to tune out and have your mind go on autopilot while the otherwise charismatic Teller and Taylor-Jones are wasted.

Uneven pacing and an anemic plot hamstring the film, which has a couple of interesting ideas yet precious few about how to convey them to its audience.

While it’s nice to see Toni Colette and Chris Messina face off both in and out of the courtroom and Zoey Deutch gives a strong dramatic performance as Ally, even the best acting can’t make Juror #2 make sense.

It’s unclear if Steffen & Flip believe in a hell for their characters. But their 85-minute torture device disguised as a movie proves they believe in one for their viewers. Not even cheese ‘n’ rice can save this dismal enterprise from doom.

Contrarian so-bad-its-good specialists with PhDs in advanced irony once hailed the “Venom” films as entertaining campy classics and tongue-in-cheek antidotes to the more conventional superhero genre, but you will not be surprised when none of those scholars pipe up in support of this grueling cinematic slog that further underscores just how bad the entire affair was all along.

Hold Your Breath is a strange beast—there aren’t enough thrills for horror heads nor any blood and gore for slasher fans. Even as straight drama, it isn’t entirely successful.

For as many laughs as they’re trying to get, only about half of them land. All told, Jackpot is an action comedy that is light on laughs and heavy on repetitive droning fights. Jackpot even fails as a social commentary.

This is a B-movie of the week at best, which should be starring also-ran actors looking for a paycheck, not some of Hollywood’s finest.

Atlas is rote and routine, using the concept of sci-fi and artificial intelligence in the most obvious way: A.I. runs wild, attacks humans, and becomes the central enemy of the entire world; the ultimate threat that humanity must face, battle, and hopefully defeat. But all of it is conventionally realized, uninspired, dull, and something you’ve seen done more inventively a thousand times before.

It’s maybe not excruciatingly bad, but certainly even less nourishing and satisfying than even the most fleeting and calorically empty of sugar highs.

Much like ‘A Child Of Fire,’ “The Scargiver” is exhausting, enervating, and exasperating, frantically flailing around with explosions, lasers, laser lightsaber-like swords, grenades, et al., but always failing to make you give a damn.

At this point, the Monsterverse needs the much simpler, dumb-fun, pleasurable joy of “Kong: Skull Island” because ‘New Empire,’ just ain’t cutting it beyond loud and senseless brawls that aren’t even a delight to watch.

The Greatest Hits is way worse than just a sophomore slump, more accurately, a long-the-works opus that should have just stayed in the vaults.

It’s all largely an ugly, vulgar, vacuous time that’s disposable and never as amusing as it clearly thinks it is.

The heroine of the film may not be in distress, but oh boy, is this movie in desperate need of saving.

First Time Female Director is a tremendous disappointment because Peretti is such a gifted performer; it’s understandable to go in pulling for her (this viewer certainly did), but those layers of goodwill just peel away as scene after scene simply does not work. Too much of what she’s assembled is just half-hearted cringe comedy—much of it without the comedy half of the equation.

With Another End, Messina unites one of the most gifted actors of the last two decades with one of the most gifted of the last two years to venture into one of the most fertile territories of any creative practice, the questioning of life and death, body and soul, presence and absence. It is almost unbelievable to see it result in an apathetic exercise of low-fi sci-fi that drags its way toward an eye-rollingly predictable twist.

Not only is Madame Web a mess of a movie it doesn’t even qualify as a “it’s so bad it’s good” moment of escapist entertainment. It suffers from a much worse fate: it’s utterly forgettable.

“Rebel Moon” is nearly unwatchable and one of the most stunning misfires of this scale in quite some time.

No One Will Save You is a very bizarrely unremarkable, abnormally lifeless movie, seemingly starting right out of the gate in the second act and then trying to reverse engineer the audience’s sympathy—and everything else— for the unknowable protagonist.

The bitter aftertaste of dullness remains in its place, an unforgivable sin within the art form Constanzo seems so set on paying tribute to.

Trained to precision and cute to the bone, the four-legged cast serves as a much-needed distraction from the trainwreck labeled by many as Besson’s return to the limelight. If this is all he’s got, then I guess the director will deservedly remain in the murky limbo of mediocrity.

Heart Of Stone purports to have characters made of sturdy, gritty, golden, unbreakable stuff, but that’s a tagline, not a movie or story; it’s really just flimsy work easily tossed off and broken as it tumbles into the ever-filling bin of barely-one-use Netflix movies.

Hamm makes himself look bland, which is no small accomplishment. But he’s also smothering much of what makes him an exciting actor.

The flaccid script, co-written by Stupnitsky and John Phillips (“Dirty Grandpa”), addresses timely subjects like income inequality, helicopter parents, Gen-Z’s addiction to screens, and the compulsion to record everything, but never actually seems to have a point of view on any of these subjects. Instead, this shallow film uses these topical issues to propel its characters from one preposterous comedy set piece to the next.

Hamm can be a stealth comedic force in any project, adding a slight escalation or modulation of the energy level to alter the stakes. He has a unique talent for somehow fusing the comic man and straight man personas into one. Yet Maggie Moore(s) gives him no chance to play either because Slattery cannot decide if his “Mad Men” co-star is the lead of a romantic drama or a heist flick.

If it wasn’t for the highly-publicized scandals that envelop “Jeanne du Barry,” it is likely the film would make a swift turn from the red carpet into ostracism, and while the hubbub certainly delays the process, it will do little to prevent Maïwenn’s dire latest from the merciless hands of oblivion.

Unfortunately [Lopez's] hampered by a character that is simultaneously overwritten and underwritten, while trapped in a film that never gives any of its characters room for the type of nuance a performance at that register requires.

The puzzling thing about Italian director Gabriele Mainetti’s feature set in 1943 in German-occupied Rome is that, rather than embracing tastelessness a la John Waters, it guns for earnestness despite not having a thoughtful bone in its body.

It’s incredibly soulless, disposable, and as generic as they come.

Like its lazy title, Murder Mystery 2 settles for the lowest version of itself.

The movie’s practical and special effects are a rogues’ gallery of gougings, stabbings, shavings, and scalpings; those who like to have their stomachs turned will find much to cheer about. But is it actually scary – suspenseful, tense, trafficking in more than the cheap shock of a jump scare or vivid effect? Not really, no.

Sadly, good intentions aren’t enough, and as good as the organization’s work is, the film feels like a letdown to the very women whose stories kickstarted the whole thing in the first place.

If a filmmaker can’t be bothered to try, then audiences shouldn’t be asked to care.

Penn’s admiration for Zelensky, the people of Ukraine, and their unified commitment to democracy is sincere, but Superpower is so stupid a film it’s galling to watch.

We Have a Ghost tries to add too many elements to the mix–the horror, the comedy, the drama, and the message about how we need to leave our dead behind. Without committing to a tone, it all feels a bit mangled. It’s a movie that wants to be a mix of everything but, in the end, winds up being nothing.

Golda fails as a war movie, impenetrable to those unfamiliar with the Israeli-Arab conflict. It fails as a biopic, too, by refusing to scrutinize how Golda rose to power — and, most importantly, how she kept at it.

As the train goes, so does Terror Train: going around and around in its redundancy that the audience can’t wait to disembark.

Run Rabbit Run does nothing to transcend its influences, finds nothing insightful to say about the various familial relationships its fails to explore, traps its talented cast in unmemorable characters, and — worst of all for a horror film — contains no scenes that are truly chilling and or any imagery that will stick in the viewer’s mind once the film is over.

Unfortunately, memorable moments are few and far between here, and those are mostly spoiled by the film’s trailer.

If nothing else, Babylon is a giant swing, a three-plus hour orgy (sometimes literally) of sex, drugs, and cinema, a respected young artist reaching for a profound statement about art and commerce and America. He misses it by a country mile, but hey, he sure does take that swing.

The People We Hate at the Wedding is a career nadir for this cast, an asinine, poorly executed-excuse for a comedy. A little advice? Save yourselves and just RSVP no to this disaster.

A joyless, glacially paced compendium of interchangeable scenes of people floating around in their goofy masks and capes, tossing clichéd dialogue and CG lightning bolts, and punching each other into buildings.

And the score, again by Carpenter, his son Cody Carpenter, and Daniel Davies, is another banger, often lapping the action onscreen for mood and dread. It almost becomes a provocation, forcing us to long for more active involvement by Carpenter, a filmmaker whose skill and restraint frankly puts Green to shame. Who knows if Halloween Ends will actually conclude the slasher series (let’s not forget that “Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter” was the fourth of twelve installments). But I’ll say this: even as a fan of the franchise, when the title came up at the end of Halloween Ends, I found myself hoping to God they weren’t kidding.

Peter Farrelly’s “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” isn’t so much a bad movie — though it’s certainly that — as an inexplicable one, a comedy/drama set in the Vietnam War that somehow believes it’s saying anything that hasn’t been said a million times already about that conflict, and far more skillfully.

Somewhat ironically, like the social unrest that underpins much of the footage featured in Riotsville, U.S.A., the documentary is well-intentioned yet hampered by a lack of direction, clearly defined goals, and the support of a larger, established apparatus to lend it legitimacy.

That this catastrophe is director Wanuri Kahiu’s follow-up after her sublime debut “Rafiki” makes it all the more disappointing. Where that film has rich characterization, this has generalities. Where that film has vibrant cinematography, this has dreadful, bland compositions. Where that film has a detailed sense of place, this film has a disjointed, geographically murky portrait of L.A. and what appears to be a sponsored by SXSW and Whataburger view of Texas.

The beloved characters constructed by Austen are rendered insipid in this retelling that can’t quite seem to find its footing, trapped between a desire to dip into hip modernism and an inherent pull towards the original material.

The Man from Toronto could have been sharper with much more care all around, but a glaring problem comes from how Hughes isn’t a funny filmmaker. He might have the self-awareness to slap his name on a food processing plant that hosts the movie’s climactic kill, but his sense of making an action scene comedic is seriously lacking.

It’s tempting to take it easy on Alone Together, because harsh criticism feels somewhat cruel – it’s just such a gosh-darned nice movie, about two nice people who meet up and are nice to each other. But this is one tepid piece of work, a story of bland people doing and saying bland things as the world burns around them.

Prior and Zagorodnii are at their best in casual conversation, either exchanging sheepish glances or knowing pleasantries under the base’s Big Brother-ish nose. But as soon as things get serious or even faintly sentimental, they talk like the guys in the movies.

We never get a full sense of what these people went through after finding out that Cline was their biological father, mainly because Jourdan doesn’t seem particularly interested in unpacking these issues, or giving enough narrative space to explore the psychological toll.

In “Final Cut,” the realism that grounded the humor of the original film turns into outright cynicism ... The film’s lazy, anti-intellectual and reactionary perspective is felt in the severe lack of laughs.

It’s unsettling how every minute of this 94-minute flick delivers a new level of boredom. You have to feel for the actors.

As the clock ticks, the film asks, who can this qualified woman trust, but mostly, we’re just looking at our watch, waiting for the dull torment to end.

The biographical and fictional afterlives of Monroe are particularly interesting, and probably tell us more about the authors who choose to dedicate their lives to researching her than anything new about Monroe, herself. One wishes that Cooper, and Summers, would’ve realized this.

We’re a dozen action thrillers deep now, and you start to wonder: is Neeson really making these for us anymore?

A film that takes so many below-the-belt jabs at the idiocy of Tinseltown blockbusters must, at the very least, be a few IQ points higher than the stuff it makes fun of for being stupid.

The nicest thing I can say about it is that it’s short.

I Love My Dad cannot overcome its off-putting premise. Nothing is out of bounds, of course (especially in comedy), but if there’s an approach to make the material palatable, either played straight or broad, it is left undiscovered here.

Maybe one day folks will come around to “Mother Schmuckers” as something so sincerely and unintentionally terrible that’s it’s worth watching if only as a joke, yet even that is a longshot.

No matter how one tries to unpack the curious contents of “Big Gold Brick,” they’ll likely be unable to find much of anything outside of an unintelligible failure.

It’s a twisty tale of secrets, cliches, and Lifetime characters that could only come out this month–it’s impossible to imagine this coming out in December, that’s for sure.

Neither an exciting thriller nor a satisfactory (“elevated”) horror metaphor for one of society’s ills, FRESH is certified meh.

Given how poorly made, poorly written, and poorly crafted “The 355” is —with action that is casually visceral, but actually borderline incompetent and super sloppily staged—the final product reeks of superficial vanity project intended to “let girls be badass” rather than trying to circumvent, better, or elevate the genre (or women for that matter).

It’s cheap, and crass, and by the conclusion, downright infuriating.

Never once does it carry any of the unclassifiable “It factor” charm that sometimes elevates a mediocre movie. Nope, “Red Notice” is just deeply unexceptional and pedestrian: a lot of lights shining on three worldwide-class superstars, with perfect white teeth with explosions and gloss all around them, and never once creating anything that resembles a captivating spark.

One Shot is merely an experiment in filmmaking chutzpah, and a failed one at that.

The thrills here, whether you want to believe what Hypnotic is hawking, are far too mild to be satisfying for even a mindless viewing.

A Mouthful of Air is a Lifetime Channel take on a delicate subject.

As the film builds up to its climax, we realize Young’s understanding of mental illness lacks any real depth or complexity, betraying the artist’s limited worldview. The Blazing World is female trauma in the form of an amusement park funhouse.

Chunks of childhood trauma, a dash of the opioid crisis, a few drops of environmental distress, and Native American mythology swim together in a foggy concoction of a plot without meaningfully merging.

A chaotic mishmash of ideas searching for a movie, Black as Night suffers significantly from truly awkwardly amateurish dialogue and performances.

In doubling down on would-be humor, the already poor, perspiring, flop-sweat CGI mess of Venom actually gets worse and arguably even more incoherent, thanks to the unbearable, overweening quarreling between Brock and Venom and the vaudevillian crazy legs antics and presentation.

Surge takes pointlessness to a whole ‘nother level: cruel, empty, airless; a glass storefront with nothing to see inside.

Philip Noyce is a natural choice for this kind of film. He’s great with actresses in peril and at keeping tension ramped up to eleven. But using the collective trauma of a generation of parents and children as the backdrop for a real-time thriller, whose lives have proven time and again to matter less than the right to own an AK-47, remains unconscionably distasteful.

The gore is top-notch, and things take a turn for the better in the last 25 minutes, yet it’s not enough to save the movie, which is decidedly not good, no matter what the octopus drummer-lovers in your life might tell you.

Frankly, the musical, with music and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, and book by Steven Levenson, itself is where the fault lies. There were few redeemable qualities to begin with, and Chbosky’s dreary, washed-out direction adds nothing to its already bleak, vapid existence.

Though the comedic talents of its supporting cast (mainly Acaster, Ranganathan, and Brown), and the veteran performers (Brosnan, Driver, and Menzel) do their best to anchor the haphazard, bloated mess of a film, Cinderella is an uninspired fairytale that feels less like an empowering, new twist on a classic and more of a lazy, virtue-signaling attempt at cashing in on Cabello’s fame and legion of fans.

Desplechin and his film seem to have a perverse and single-minded fixation not on “dazzling, interesting” women, but lost, tragic ones—women who can gravitate toward and glom onto Philip (Denis Podalydès), an inexplicably francophone version of the author, who lavishes the attention.

Water’s film is merely bland, a boring hodgepodge of Gen-Z references and a workmanlike script that never seems to understand what it’s trying to say.

No one should ask Sweet Girl to be something it isn’t, namely an affecting drama about pharmaceutical evils. For one, it’s self-serious enough as is. But there’s a vast difference between self-seriousness and taking the subject matter seriously.

The picture is hobbled by the bland, lifeless color palette of too much contemporary genre filmmaking, as well as a buffet of unintentionally hilarious dialogue, and when the big third act reveal arrives, it’s comically dopey. And once that turn is taken, well, you can pretty much predict every beat that follows.

To call it undercooked is an understatement.