If The Black Phone dabbles in crimes that are taboo, even unforgivable in its depiction of brutality against innocent children, Black Phone 2 commits its own unforgivable crime of being dreadfully boring. This movie is a snooze — and not just because all of the action takes place entirely during Gwen’s dreams.

A soggy thriller in which every scene, even a daytime one early on at the newspaper where Lo works, seems to take place in ominously blue darkness.

Him is a bit like the red-faced drunk next to you at the Seahawks game: loud, fun at first, wearing thin after a few drives — asleep by the end.

As "M3GAN 2.0" drags on, it's impossible to shake the sense that Cooper's voice was the key to the original.

You expect lots of fight scenes in a Wick movie, and Ballerina certainly delivers on that score. Overdelivers, in fact. It’s one damn dust-up after another.

While the film’s execution seems expert on the surface, the internal narrative design is unfortunately ham-handed and woefully dull.

Ultimately, all we come away with is a few cheap laughs at online culture, which dates Love Me to its own time and place, an artifact not even of now, but the recent past. This love story isn’t futuristic at all.

Kraven may be the world’s greatest hunter, but next time, he needs to track down a better movie.

“The Last Dance” brings nothing new to the series. In fact, it brings less than the previous two movies

Megalopolis is a misfire from the start.

The movie’s unrelenting sensory onslaught is exhausting. It’s torture to sit through.

A film is a different experience from a book, and the movie “It Ends With Us” doesn’t really bring us inside Lily’s head; it simply leaves us puzzled and horrified.

Nyong’o’s prodigious talents are sadly wasted in this noisy, pointless movie, which never approaches the cleverness — or the genuine scariness — of the first two in the franchise.

The funniest element of what vaguely gestures toward dark comedy is how poorly written this story about writers is.

By the end, it’s made glaringly obvious that the people who made Madame Web intended it to be the prelude to sequels featuring the three proto Spider-Women. Spare us.

You watch hoping that the always-splendid Condon, an Oscar nominee last year for “The Banshees of Inisherin,” is getting a really good paycheck, and wondering why writer/director Bryce McGuire saw fit to expand his very effective four-minute 2014 film “Night Swim” into this soggy mess. Don’t go in the water, indeed.

There is real passion in DeBose’s vocal performance as she tries to elevate the rote music. I just wish she were in a better movie.

The game, propelled by twitchy point-of-view camera work and abundant jump scares, is fast-paced. The movie is anything but.

A more self-impressed movie than Dicks: The Musical would be hard to imagine.

It wants to make a joke at its source material’s expense, but all it ever accomplishes is making you want to watch those classics instead.

Toula and Ian are sweet and bland; their relatives are predictably wisecracky, and the whole thing just feels like watching someone’s extremely well-produced vacation video.

Although the sense of being inside a video game is strong, one critical element is lacking: interactivity. Players are always working their controllers to send characters on their complicated journeys. They’re participants. A movie, by its very nature, turns everyone into spectators. We watch, but have no control over what we see. And what we see in “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” is nothing more than empty-calorie visuals.

It is as if Pugh is having to push her way through narrative waters that threaten to wash away her performance. No matter how she continues to rise to the challenge, the film’s cascading of contrivances drown her out.

With scenes of epic destruction uncorked with numbing frequency, the picture drags. It’s two hours and 10 minutes long and you feel every last second.

“I’m tired.” — Overheard from a member of the audience at the end of the seemingly endless closing credit crawl at the critic’s screening for “Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania.” - I hear you, lady. Believe me, I hear you.

Once it gets going, Black Adam feels like a continuous closed loop of destruction where the moments of mayhem blend darn near seamlessly one into the other. And those special effects look incredibly cheesy.

The whole picture is an exercise in obvious effort, try, try, trying really hard to win the audience’s affection. However it only succeeds in trying the audience’s patience. It’s a trial.

Amsterdam is not entirely without small pleasures: Emmanuel Lubezki’s sepia-toned cinematography is lovely to look at, and it’s fun to play spot-the-movie-star with the talented cast, and to note with pleasure how Washington’s scratched-velvet voice sounds so much like that of his father Denzel. But ultimately it’s a big disappointment.

Bandit wants you to believe there’s some kind of moral underpinning to all this. There isn’t. There’s only another place to case, another outfit to don, another person to lie to, another bank to rob. No one’s born bad, but that doesn’t mean Bandit, the film or the man, is good, either.

Elba, always a powerful presence in whatever role he takes on, does the best he can in Beast, but the threadbare nature of the plotting and dialogue ultimately defeats him.

I wished I was actually watching “Batman and Robin” or “Superman IV,” because for all their camp, those movies felt less pointless and more human than “Thor 4,” a cheap corporate commercial for upcoming Marvel content.

As terrible as it is — and make no mistake, Moonfall is epically awful — it is also undeniably entertaining. A guilty pleasure, if you will. See it on the biggest screen you can. It’s a, er, riot.

The plot proceeds at a punishing clip but there’s a tediousness to the proceedings, even at a rather tight 97 minutes, because no dramatic weight is given to anything that unfolds.

Stuck in this largely infantilized role, Cowen imbues Angel with as much verve and spunk as she can; she’s often funnier and darker than necessary, offering a refreshing dash of acid to temper the sickly sweetness.

In trying to do too much, Halloween Kills ends up doing nothing at all, other than tarnishing this franchise’s good name.

The Addams Family 2 feels as if it’s lost the spark of the first one. The jokes that felt fresh in the first film are stale here, with the story’s twists glaringly predictable.

The effort put into making this film work is palpable, but the result is something deeply surreal and strange. Perhaps this story simply can’t work as a film, or perhaps it wasn’t a very good musical to begin with. It’s a question that may be debated for years to come.

It’s frustrating, because a couponing crime lord (crime lady?) being pursued by an obsessed grocery store employee is a story that has so much potential, but the lazy storytelling and on-the-nose direction suck all of the laughs that could come out of the situation.

The fight scenes, full of swordplay and gunfire, are choppily edited and somehow lackadaisical. It’s as though Schwentke was operating from a checklist of expected action-movie clichés and hurries through them all.

It wants to comment on the algorithms that rule our lives, spewing constantly recycled content at us seemingly at random, but it is exactly the thing that it points to: an upcycled Frankenstein’s monster of intellectual property spraying a stew of Easter eggs and Halloween costumes at the viewer, praying that something sticks.

You watch wondering what good actors like Lively, Law, Jeffrey and Sterling K. Brown (as a former C.I.A. officer) saw in this muddy screenplay, and why Morano, best known for the Hulu series “The Handmaid’s Tale,” couldn’t find a way to make them spark.

The first creature feature of the new decade is here, and boy is it dumb.

“Cats” the movie is deeply, deeply weird, and not in a good way.

The Dead Don’t Die isn’t just deadpan — it’s dead.

You feel for the actors, who you know are better than this stuff, and you wonder if director F. Gary Gray (“Straight Outta Compton”) just threw up his hands. And you wonder if, somewhere, Smith and Jones are chuckling. At least somebody was.

It’s got a flying carpet. It’s got an enchanted lamp. It’s got a shape-shifting genie. But alas, Aladdin lacks real magic.

Hathaway and Wilson, instead of exuding odd-couple comic chemistry, seem to barely be in the same movie; they don’t click, with each other or with a bland Alex Sharp as their tech-bro mark.

The picture’s real weakness is that the reanimated dead display a great deal more vitality than the characters in their pre-killed state.

The changes Bissell makes to the story are overly contrived, and the writing and editing are shaky. Most egregiously, Ann’s perspective is completely underwritten, without any personal history and the single humanizing factor of one daughter, who appears only briefly.

Let’s just say that things aren’t always what they seem, and that there is not enough popcorn in the world to make this particular twist go down.

It seems director James Wan had one overarching goal in making “Aquaman.” His prime directive? Crush the audience into submission.

Mortal Engines hasn’t much in the way of originality, other than its rolling city, to distinguish it from other, better post-apocalyptic tales.

Eastwood is known for his ruthless efficiency as a filmmaker, but The Mule feels dashed off at best, barely even a movie. It’s a strange rough draft, poorly executed and disastrously performed, despite the starry cast.

Zombies. Nazis. Clichés. Insane violence. Overlord delivers a whole lot of much too much.

The basics of Draper’s story hold promise, but the film derails because Jack and Oliver just aren’t charming as social pariahs.

A picture in the running for the dubious distinction of being perhaps the worst Marvel-derived origin story ever.

Director Malcolm D. Lee, whose previous movie, 2017’s raucous “Girls Trip,” gave Haddish her star-making breakout role, does her no favors here. In this mess of a movie, her performance is merely adequate. She, and the audience, deserve better.

The worst thing about Life Itself is not that it is emotionally sadistic. It's just how much it wants to be emotionally sadistic, while missing the mark by a mile.

Director Corin Hardy lards on the frights so relentlessly that the moments don’t build to any sort of sustained narrative momentum.

A joyless experience.

Watch this movie and you might die, of boredom.

Gringo has no spark, no fizz. Its scenes sag like overstretched taffy. Flavorless taffy.

Johnson and Dornan’s performances are wooden and their chemistry nonexistent (particularly in the movie’s more-of-the-same sex scenes), but think of it all as ultra-deadpan entertainment and it kind of works.

As long as the third and, one hopes, final installment is, it feels even longer. There’s more of it, much more, yet paradoxically, much less.

[Neeson's] impressive physicality, (a tower among men), his rumbly basso-profundo voice and his impressive demeanor give him a natural gravity that allows him to rise above the most absurd material. And he does exactly that in The Commuter.

It’s just the same movie over and over, until the end of time and everybody dies, in which case “Pitch Perfect 45: A-Ca-Wait-Are-We-Dead?” might be a thing.

It’s just a bad movie; a flat melodrama in which some lovely camerawork and a ferocious central performance from Winslet can’t conceal the rote tiredness of it all.

Only the super-speedy Flash, played by Ezra Miller, lightens up the proceedings. Miller’s goofy eager-beaver take on the character, very reminiscent of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man, is the picture’s saving grace.

A colossal waste of time and the moviegoer’s dollars. That’s the bottom line of Daddy’s Home 2.

A deeply uninspired sequel to last year’s surprise (and surprisingly sweet) hit “Bad Moms,” this movie was made in a hurry and it shows.

Sometimes, all the pieces are there, but it just isn’t worth putting the puzzle together. Such is the case with Tomas Alfredson’s The Snowman.

It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but for those who already love it, it’ll be just right.

Sadly, Friend Request is not even the first movie to travel that harrowing Dead Girl Who Still Maintains an Active Facebook Presence road.

It’s all instantly forgettable. Except for the tulips — which, for the record, look stellar.

Childhood: courtesy of Mr. King. Filtered through the pedestrian sensibilities of director Andy Muschietti, who seemingly never met a horror-movie cliché he couldn’t incorporate into his adaptation of King’s thousand-page-plus mega-opus.

There are some fleeting moments of inspiration — the music by Rob Simonsen is a master class in sudsy melodrama, and Nixon turns in a great performance — but The Only Living Boy in New York is rotten to its Big Apple core.

Kidnap has a tossed-together sameness to it, like a salad made up only of tired lettuce.

The whole purpose of this teen horror movie is to show creatively gruesome deaths. If you prefer your horror flicks with a dash of wit or suspense, look elsewhere.

There is absolutely nothing new under the many suns in Besson’s universe. This is a voyage not worth taking.

When words fail in The Last Knight, the crunching and crashing and KLANKing of the special-effects scenes take up the slack. Punishingly overwrought in every aspect, Last Knight is a KLANK! KLANK! KLUNKER.

Directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg (“Kon-Tiki”) seem to not have the slightest idea how to make this material sing; instead, it’s mostly a noisy, dark 3D blur in which the characters run around a lot, seemingly looking for the exits

It’s all just a day at the beach, harmlessly fun and instantly forgettable.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword” lumbers on for more than two hours, weighed down with oversized elephants, excessively populated action sequences, and weirdly sudden occurrence of slow motion, as if the film is yawning.

It’s a rare misstep for the usually sure-footed folks behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

That’s a lot for a viewer to take in, and as pleasing as some aspects of Your Name can be, there’s no question Shinkai’s overstuffed movie often trips over itself.

It’s all very bizarrely, pointlessly complicated.

In space, everyone can hear you yawn.

Despite the stakes, Mendeluk can’t scare up any particular urgency, largely because everything is so contrived and inauthentic.

What a pestilential little picture is Fist Fight.

It’s not a terribly good idea to base a movie on a book in which almost nothing happens for 500 pages, but that’s what we have here.

The nonstop silliness of this picture leaves one choking on stifled laughter.

Every scene in this film, which stars Robert De Niro as the washed-up title character, is dragged out — kicking and screaming — far longer than it needs to be.

Cute and daffy enough to make your molars ache, Bakery in Brooklyn is the kind of romantic comedy that lacks all conviction.

xXx: Return of Xander Cage is the movie equivalent of cotton candy: all empty calories. Excessive consumption of this product is likely to give a body the queasies.

The main monster communicates in noises that sound like belches. Appropriate for a picture that’s the equivalent of a cinematic burp: gassy and inconsequential.

What say we tiptoe quietly away and pretend this movie never happened?

The film is ponderous, the performances mostly subdued.

Collateral Beauty is a pretty terrible movie, but it left me with one overarching thought: My life, and surely yours, too, would be vastly improved if only Helen Mirren were perpetually lurking nearby, offering advice.