Hyperactive, incredibly gory, gratingly sentimental, The Killer is pure cinematic junk food for those who are into blood-and-guts highs.

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.

Board games, threats from Howard and desperate escape planning by Michelle take up most the picture. And then, first-time feature director Dan Trachtenberg and the screenwriters, apparently realizing that not much has been going on so far, ramp up to a full-bore CG explosion extravaganza finale...Too little. Too late.

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’s a problem with Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. It’s attempting to mock something that is beyond mockery.

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.

This wildly overpraised Belgian mock-documentary might have been a lacerating 10-minute Swiftian satire of the media's never-ending thirst for blood. Instead, it's a 95-minute reiteration of the obvious that manages simultaneously to offend and bore. [11 June 1993, p.24]

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

You loved “The Conjuring” in 2013. Now here’s “2,” with more, more, more of what you adored the first time around.

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

Writer-director Ti West brings not an iota of originality to his handling of this material. Plods, the picture does, through its predictable paces.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mark this one down as a sequel that should never have been made.

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.

The best thing about The Greasy Strangler: that title. The worst thing about The Greasy Strangler: everything that follows that title.

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

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

Maybe there's a serious movie to be made about professional soldiers who can't thaw out now that the Cold War is melting. But The Fourth War plays like Laurel and Hardy's Tit For Tat in slow motion. [23 Mar 1990, p.24]

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.

Maybe the Arthurian legend is unfilmable. There has never been a successful cinematic adaptation. There still isn't. Bad films are forgivable. First Knight is not. [07 Jul 1995, p.H3]

Unfortunately, Craven's constant emphasis on cannibalism, child abuse and incest adds up to more unpleasantness than thrills. [02 Nov 1991, p.C3]

[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.

Despite claims to the contrary, Van Peebles has no apparent desire to accurately reflect history. Instead, he caters, with an ugly lack of integrity, to a twisted perception of "popular taste," spinning an ego-trip that steals a numbing variety of Western cliches while betraying them with contemporary flavoring. [14 May 1993, p.20]

So consistently unexciting, so monumentally unconvincing, so silly. [28 Sept 1990, p.22]

Megalopolis is a misfire from the start.

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

Coerced jollity is the order of the day in the kingdom of trolldom in this animated kids movie from DreamWorks. And I do mean order.

In space, everyone can hear you yawn.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The Last Boy Scout is no worse than Lethal Weapon, and it's slightly more tolerable than Hudson Hawk. The action scenes deliver, the storyline is efficiently handled (if utterly unoriginal), Wayans is an appealing foil, and Willis' wiseacre personality fits the character he's playing. [13 Dec 1991, p.35]

Some of the most preposterous fights ever captured on film ensue with a baby-faced hero who sports an aerodynamic mullet. Also, Thomas does flips as he takes on two roles in an imaginary conversation. [28 Jan 2007, p.K5]

It’s pretty. It’s empty. It’s pretty empty.

Almost nothing works here.

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

Much of the time, for all the leering effort she puts into portraying this demonic tease, Barrymore just seems to be playing dress-up. She also needs a more responsive co-star than Gilbert, who gives a one-note performance in the part that should be at the story's center. [29 May 1992, p.18]

There must be dozens of film buffs out there with an unsatisfied hankering for Cinemascope Westerns. It's too bad, then, that Quigley Down Under fits the label, but doesn't deliver the goods.

This isn't a B-movie, a C-movie or even a Z-movie. In fact, there isn't a letter far enough down in the alphabet to cover Popcorn. [01 Feb 1991, p.22]

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.

An indigestible blend of sentiment and gross-out humor, Cadillac Man is an appalling choice for Robin Williams to have made at this stage in his career. [18 May 1990, p.28]

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.

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.

Passenger 57 is so completely routine and devoid of imagination that it seems to have been directed on auto-pilot. [09 Nov 1992, p.D4]

It’s all very bizarrely, pointlessly complicated.

Just as there can be fresh angles on the old story, there is a growing number of urban-survival cliches that lose their dramatic impact as they grow tiresomely familiar. Sugar Hill is a virtual catalog of these cliches - a serious, well-meaning film that offers no new insight into the crises it professes to understand. [25 Feb 1994, p.D21]

Just another big dose of mindless violence. [06 Oct 1990, p.C5]

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.

Dennis the Menace is essentially a live-action, 90-minute Roadrunner movie in which Dennis is the Roadrunner and Matthau and Lloyd take turns playing Wile E. Coyote. It's a lot funnier when it's seven minutes long and the tortured Coyote is made from oils, ink and paper. [26 June 1993, p.C5]

Species doesn't scare or dazzle you. [07 July 1995, p.H25]

By any sensible standard, and from any ethnic perspective, this is juvenile trash of the lowest order. Never rising above its own crotch-obsessed level of would-be satire, it fails to examine the social issues that give rap music its aggressive vitality, and completely misses every opportunity for intelligent comedy that lies neglected beneath the surface of its imbecilic, gutter-minded excuse for a plot. [12 Mar 1993, p.3]

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.

Tokyo Decadence includes what may be the only near-death experience ever played for laughs in a movie. [15 Oct 1993, p.D26]

An incredibly lame attempt at '90s-style camp horror.

It’s a mishmash in which characters are thrown from dimension to dimension and from dream to dream. The main character, played by Bannister, is forever baffled as to what his actual reality is. His bafflement is shared by the viewer.

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

This stupefyingly unfunny attempt to create a midnight cult movie stars Judd Nelson as a talentless stand-up comic who becomes a celebrity when he grows a third arm out of the middle of his back. [26 Mar 1992, p.E2]

Generic abuser, generic victim, generic nice-guy-next-door, all going through highly predictable motions. [08 Feb 1991, p.21]

“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.

With their white-boy blues grimaces, Aykroyd and Goodman are almost unwatchable.[06 Feb 1998]

There's not much any actor can do with material as woeful as this. Pierce seems as charmless at the end of First Kid as he is in the early scenes, while Sinbad seems lost without a stand-up shtick. [30 Aug 1996]

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.

A movie that numbs the head. [12 July 1995, p.E1]

There are some genuinely funny bits but, alas, far too few.

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.

Unfortunately, the script is so hopelessly superficial that very little of this registers. It's the work of Eric Roth, who wrote the unspeakable Billy Crystal comedy, "Memories of Me," and Michael Cristofer, a playwright whose most prominent previous screen credit was the disastrous "Bonfire of the Vanities."

The dumbest, goriest bone-cruncher of the season: an unnecessary and Arnold-less sequel to the Schwarzenegger science-fiction hit of three years ago. [21 Nov 1990, p.C3]

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

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.

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.

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

Cameos by Mel Brooks and Whoopi Goldberg add nothing, and there's not much of a storyline to stitch together the gags. [05 Aug 1994, p.E3]

The plot is so filled with inconsistencies and lapses in logic, especially during the desperate concluding reels, that it's difficult to take seriously its proposition that some people are born evil. [24 Sep 1993, p.D12]

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 more disagreeable collection of cynical, backstabbing, self-aggrandizing, shallow, vicious and vile specimens of humanity gathered together in a single motion picture would be difficult to conceive of.

Unfortunately, everyone's trying too hard to recapture the original's wry tone, and Culkin lacks the gawky, impish charm that Billingsley brought to Shepherd's childhood alter ego. [06 Jul 1995, p.E1]

What began as a feature-length toy commercial instantly disintegrates into MTV fodder. [22 Mar 1991, p.24]

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.

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 best that can be said of this campy but witless time-travel thriller is that it's acted with some authority. [12 Jan 1991, p.C7]

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

Earning instant shame as the worst film of the year so far, "Chasers" offers all the proof anyone will ever need that a theatrically released feature film can be just as bad - and far worse - than the most inanely boring garbage that passes for television these days. [23 Apr 1994]

We can see everything that Manhattan Night has in store from a mile off. Every step of the way it’s predictable. And that predictability makes it tedious.

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

With his inspiration trapped in a time warp two decades old, Brooks' humor reminds you of the annoying uncle who would repeat ancient jokes at family gatherings. You smile politely, but you wish he'd just go away. [28 July 1993, p.E5]

Many decisions...make “Batman v Superman” a joyless slog.

A supernatural thriller that would like to be the new Exorcist, this hapless film has a promising villain and a sympathetic hero, but their confrontations are mostly anti-climactic. [02 Sep 1995, p.F3]

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.

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.