The irony and meaninglessness of the violence rankles, especially when Ulysses is presented as such a nice guy who is prone to de-escalation and community care in his day-to-day work.

The film doesn’t have much to say about its central questions, and its ending feels inevitable but also unearned.

Powell’s charm, along with some fun rich-person interiors (there’s a library near the end that gives a stellar performance), does a lot to get “How to Make a Killing” to the finish line. But you may well lose interest, as I did, before the murder countdown concludes; this one feels more like a rough draft than a truly well-thought-out movie.

Shouting and struggling, poor Pratt vainly tries to give his character dimension and some sense of sympathy. So genial and engaging in the Guardians of the Galaxy series, Pratt flails grouchily and ineffectively in Mercy.

It doesn’t hold a candle to the game, but there’s enough here to warrant another visit to this tragic little town.

Greenland 2: Migration offers up a proudly, even defiantly, optimistic view of what comes after disaster, which can serve for the viewer as either cathartic fictional balm, or Pollyanna-ish fantasy — pick your poison.

There are moments now and then that register, particularly early in the movie when we meet the regulars on the musical-impersonator circuit.

It’s a decent action movie that wears its influences on its sleeves. Some feel like intentional homages; others feed into the aforementioned identity crisis.

With the dour drudgery of “Last Rites,” it has never been more clear that it’s time to move on from their story, even as the memories of better installments linger.

The satisfaction of a cozy mystery doesn’t always come exclusively from a complex puzzle solved; it also comes from justice done and, ideally, comeuppance savored. Despite being beautifully made, this tepid, moralizing story denies us any of those pleasures. Rude.

This “Naked Gun” tries hard, but the magic simply isn’t there.

It’s not terrible, but it’s an elegantly filmed stumble.

This flick isn’t a masterpiece, not even a vulgar one, but it’s cheeky and entertaining enough in its giddy hyperviolence, thanks almost entirely to the star turn of Josh Hartnett, who has proved in his recent renaissance that he’s especially great in bozo mode.

The plot’s a mess, the run time is overlong and ultimately the movie feels like a slew of good actors trapped in a gorgeous place, wearing beautiful clothes and gazing at the impossibly blue water.

Horror comedy, alas, is a tricky balance, and making a movie dance on a unicorn’s horn is trickier still; this one clearly needed a little more unicorn dust.

The film is a loving tribute from a son to a father figure, but perhaps Deen is too close to the story to have much perspective on it. We’ve seen this story before and Brave the Dark doesn’t shed new light.

Betrayals, narrow escapes and much battle action ensue in the course of the picture’s paint-by-numbers plotting.

Ultimately, it’s a wild experiment that mostly falls flat.

In the midst of all the mayhem it’s sometimes hard to stay awake.

Awkwafina and Cena, who gamely tolerate everything this movie throws at them, deserve better. Would somebody please make them a smart rom-com, soon?

Someday, someone will pair up Johansson and Tatum in a better movie. In the meantime, watch this one with low expectations, and dream.

None of this is especially promising or, frankly, funny. In fact, for much of its length, “Despicable Me” is painfully unfunny.

Ultimately, Argylle is mostly bad CGI, action sequences that go by so fast you wonder what Vaughn is trying to hide, and a lot of strange tangents.

It’s all big action. Big colorful visuals. Outsized vocal performances.

Humongous undersea cities, enormous herds of aquatic creatures and a superabundance of monsters are laid before the viewer. The goal: Make people go, “Wow!” Pardon me, but the overall effect is more like, “eh.”

By the time the big reveal comes along, it’s almost beside the point. The audience, so numbed by the gore, is likely to barely care who indeed did it.

Mostly Next Goal Wins just plods along, agreeable and familiar and instantly forgettable.

The gunplay is primary though there are some obligatory scenes of martial arts fights.

Every plot twist is easily anticipated...The ending hints at the possibility of a sequel, but that’s a prospect that leaves one cold. As far as “Demeter” is concerned, enough is enough.

Ultimately, Haunted Mansion feels like the ghost of a movie — just a fleeting shadow, one you can barely remember in the morning.

You know, there was a time when “Guardians of the Galaxy” was fun. That time was 2014, when the first picture came out... Now here’s “Vol. III.” And it’s no fun at all.

As a creature feature, Cocaine Bear isn’t bad. Not great, mind you. But not bad.

This final installment finds Soderbergh and Tatum toying with audience expectations to disappointing results. There are a few flashes of the original magic, but it’s lacking in the energy that made the first two movies a thrill.

There’s nothing special about any of this, but as a generic thrill machine, Plane certainly delivers the goods.

So yes: Wow! Gasp! There are some really pretty pictures here. But wow! Gasp! The story is really pretty … stupid.

The uneasy marriage of clunky psychodrama and overwrought special effects along with the fact that none of these characters are particularly likable make Strange World a chore to sit through.

Bacon’s performance as well as Finn’s detailed craft manage to hold tension, and the audience’s attention, for the hour and 55 minute runtime of this horror curio, which is as opaque and somewhat silly as the smiles that drive it.

There’s nothing original in the movie. Indeed, the off-screen controversy that’s been consuming social media lately over the casting of pop superstar Styles and whether Pugh and Wilde are at odds overshadows the movie itself.

Medieval is a film with an identity crisis, caught between its lowbrow sword-and-splatter charms and grander ambitions. As a quick and dirty 90-minute corker, it could have been a nice and nasty slice of genre filmmaking, but Jakl aims for something more epic in scope, and the film drags, easily 30 minutes too long.

Originality was on vacation when this picture was made.

The entire film feels like an exercise in dashing expectations, for both our heroine and the audience.

Leitch’s emphasis on excessive and nearly nonstop stunt-filled action is hardly surprising. His lack of directorial discipline, however, is. The guy apparently couldn’t help himself, piling on the action beats until they become numbing. By the end, you’re more than ready to get off this Bullet Train, feeling drained and disheartened.

If you want a quick diversion, take a trip to Fire Island — but don’t go looking for something that will last.

So it goes, with Sonic, fleet of foot and quick of tongue, racing from one dire situation to another. It’s exhausting, but the makers knew exactly how to tailor it to its game-mad audience.

Smith, on the other hand, throws himself avidly into his work, communicating a, uh, biting malevolence and sick glee in his portrayal. The picture only truly comes alive when he’s masticating his scenes. Otherwise, “Morbius” is dead at its center.

I don’t know about you, but this particular time in history does not seem like the moment for a movie that will leave you a) miserable and b) wondering why nobody in Gotham City seems to have heard of light bulbs. Your mileage may vary, but for me — who loved both the Tim Burton and the Christopher Nolan “Batman” universes — this one feels like an earnest but bloated misfire.

You wait and you wait, through many overamped special-effects action sequences, for the cavalry to save the day, but by the time it finally appears, the picture has been long dead.

Director Scott Cooper really lays it on thick. He brings no modulation to the horror elements in his frightfest. Everything is gloom, gloom, gloom. And doom.

For most of its length, Stillwater goes along as a meticulous examination of its central characters. And then suddenly near the end it jumps the tracks.

French Exit isn’t without its pleasures; but you watch it dreaming of the movie it might have been.

We can’t travel these days, so it’s fun to wallow in the scenery and its vivid colors. Want a great movie? Go watch the original Rebecca instead, but you probably knew that already.

This is a picture whose subject, loudly and frequently proclaimed, is magic. But there is precious little of the genuine article to be found in it.

If Like a Boss had a decent screenplay, and was competently directed, it might have been pretty good.

Ultimately, the film’s unwillingness to go deeper makes it fall flat.

Its central characters never find much chemistry — Clarke’s Kate is a one-note character, which is one note more than Golding’s character gets — and I left Last Christmas with many, many questions, none of which I can share here without giving away too much. The elf costume, though? Just right.

Motherless Brooklyn is lovely to look at — the cast, in addition to their acting talents, all look great in ’50s styles — and I enjoyed the noir-y jazz of the dialogue. (“Everybody looks like everybody to me,” a bartender tells Lionel, who’s looking for someone in the shadows of a club.) But it’s easily half an hour longer than it needs to be, and it’s full of moments that don’t go anywhere.

While Portman’s performance is skilled, she doesn’t have enough to work with — the character, as written, just isn’t there.

The Goldfinch feels like a series of often-elegant moments, in service to a story that never quite comes into focus.

Rather than using the extended running time to dig deep into these characters, director Andy Muschietti, who also directed the original, piles on the frights in a manner that builds to an ending drenched in hysteria.

Angel Has Fallen plays out exactly as you would expect from a potboiler of this type. No surprises here, other than that it exists at all. It’s the kind of movie one expects to be released at the shank end of summer. Time to turn the page to fall.

Like Bernadette, the movie’s lost; you’ll need to read the book to truly find her.

Very, very late in ECCO’s two-plus hour running time, answers come. It’s a long wait for clarity. From the viewer, much patience is required.

If “golden retriever voiced by Kevin Costner” rings any alarm bells for you, steer clear.

Ultimately, despite Nanjiani’s best efforts, it’s a disposable fast-car summer movie, neither terrible or good, for those biding their time before the next “Fast & Furious” installment.

What we have here is a standard-issue comedy-tinged crime thriller indifferently directed by Tim Story (the “Think Like a Man” and “Ride Along” movies). Its nothing-special plot, the product of writers Kenya Barris and Alex Barnow, features ill-defined villains and briefly touches on Islamophobia and military veteran PTSD and drug abuse — and never follows up on any of those issues.

Phoenix goes off the rails in the second half when Kinberg piles fight scene atop CG-enhanced fight scene, backed by Hans Zimmer’s oppressive pounding score, until the picture devolves into a chaotic mess.

Curiously though, director Michael Dougherty and his filmmaking team obscure the battle footage in darkness, smoke and downpours, making murky much of the imagery.

It’s a haunting, heartbreaking story, told by a movie that never quite makes a case for itself to exist.

Overlong set-piece action scenes pitched in the key of chaos, full of running and screaming and a whole lot of falling down, ultimately turn “Pikachu” into a wearying slog.

There’s exactly one good jump-scare, which probably would have caused me to drop my popcorn if I hadn’t finished it already; otherwise it’s fairly uninspired. But something about Quaid’s delivery had me giggling throughout — or, at least, until things got rather too dark in the final minutes.

It’s colorful. It’s predictable. And also quickly forgettable. Genuine wonderment is in short supply in Wonder Park.

The Wedding Guest is a thriller without thrills.

There’s gunplay aplenty here, but nothing about “The Kid” sets it apart from the many Billy the Kid movies that have preceded it.

Greta is a disappointment from Jordan, who’s made far better movies (“The Crying Game,” “The End of the Affair” and, more recently, the elegant vampire film “Byzantium”), but Huppert seizes hold of the film and chills it, in a way that’s both shiver-inducing and bracing.

With tonal inconsistencies and poorly written characters, any awe inspired by Alita: Battle Angel is replaced with a profound sense of confusion.

Rodriguez does just enough to keep things mildly interesting.

The picture’s ultimate destination is marked with an obviousness so bright it can be seen from space.

The Aspern Papers, brief as it is, needed more of a lightness of touch; if you weigh down melodrama too much, it dies.

For his live-action debut, Knight slips into Bay boomboom mode.

The dour environment doesn’t help, the humor doesn’t pop and, disappointingly, the scares just don’t land. There are a few jumps and bumps, but there’s no real sense of dread or unease or questioning.

While it’s often great fun to look at, “Crimes of Grindelwald” fails at what should be Rowling’s great strength: storytelling. Three more to go, and an infusion of magic is desperately needed.

The “Dragon Tattoo” series continues with “Spider’s Web,” but it seems as though the franchise is running out of gas and fresh ideas.

You don’t really watch Suspiria, you endure it.

Except for its songs, Bohemian Rhapsody too quickly becomes forgettable; something the real-life man at its center, who died of AIDS-related illness in 1991 at the age of 45, never was. Watch the real footage; you’ll see.

In between all of these delights is an awful lot of filler

Political satire is one of the trickiest of genres; this one, running out of steam and nerve, ultimately becomes a too-familiar example of another genre: the 93-minute movie that feels way, way too long.

Themes exploring redemption and forgiveness fall flat because it’s impossible to empathize with these characters. Mostly, this is an exercise in style; a slick tribute to righteous trash that promises a lot more fun than it actually delivers.

Happy anniversary, Little Women, but I think I prefer you back in the 19th century; dreamy professors aside.

You get a sense [Eli Roth]'s struggling to rein in his penchant for gory frights, and for that reason “Clock” feels like a movie at war with itself.

Similar to the scenario of the original picture, it’s a band of grizzled soldier types who battle the alien menaces. Missing, however, is a formidable leading-man presence in the Schwarzenegger mold.

Hughes’ handling of the material is unfailingly serious but the picture’s tendency to stray into the ridiculous robs it of the majesty the director so clearly hoped to achieve.

Dog Days is in some ways a very strange movie, in the way it straddles the worlds of weirdo comedy and family-friendly fare. But ultimately, it’s the pooches who steal the show.

Skyscraper, which lacks the lunkheaded charm of “Rampage,” isn’t the ideal vehicle — its special effects are murky (I saw it in 2D; it’s probably even muddier in 3D), and a bit of wit wouldn’t have been unwelcome. Nobody in this film has a personality; they’re just evil, stoic, mildly badass (particularly Neve Campbell, as Will’s resourceful wife) or The Rock.

There’s a lot going on here, which leads to a whole lot of gassy exposition to explain it all.... Think of it as torture by blah-blah.

There is advocacy. And then there is propaganda. The Trolley, with its overcooked rhetoric, falls into the latter category.

Even the heavenly chorus that’s working overtime on the soundtrack can’t drown out the lack of chemistry between Howard and Pratt. And the movie too often defaults to people running around screaming — which is, to be fair, the backbone of this franchise, but it gets awfully old here.

The cast is a likable bunch, and I can see how Tag might go down nicely with a couple of beers beforehand; it’s definitely funny in spots, in a we’re-making-this-up-as-we-go-along sort of way.

Despite this rich emotional material (not to mention some gloriously shabby drawing rooms), the film feels surprisingly dull and conventional — two things its heroine most definitely was not.