Do Hollywood suits think we want nothing more from a Christmas movie than to feed on the dead carcass of an undeserving horror franchise? The scary part is they may be right.

Props to Charli xcx for grabbing her brat moment at Sundance. The dance-pop princess shows real acting potential, even though this misbegotten mockumentary gives her few chances to show her range.

Watching Lesley Manville and Ciarán Hinds is usually time well spent, but this woebegone wintery love story makes you want to jump into an Amsterdam canal.

Jokester Karl Urban leads a cast of battling gamer brawlers against a plot that doesn’t exist. No matter. All you need to love it is blind devotion

This sugarcoated and sanctified biopic sees Michael Jackson as a creative musical genius with a terminal case of arrested development. Except for the glorious music and star Jaafar Jackson, this is an insight-free gloss on a life minus anything raw, relatable and scandal adjacent.

The visuals dazzle, the plotting not so much in this gender-switched take on “Hamlet” as a warrior princess revenge epic from Japanese anime master Mamoru Hosoda.

The bloodsucking Count is back again, but this time in a strangely bloodless love story that even wickedly seductive fangboy Caleb Landry Jones can’t save from the cliché stockpile.

Jack Black and Paul Rudd can’t carry the unbearable weight of massive missteps in this comic remake of the 1997 snake movie that was always funnier when it tried to be serious.

Lee Cronin makes two hours of borrowed horror inspiration—The Exorcist should sue—feel like an eternity.

Director Jonah Hill’s satire of Hollywood cancel culture in the age of TMZ leaves out all the laughs that define character and sinks Keanu Reeves and an all-star cast in a muddle of jokes creaky enough to qualify for assisted living.

Oh, What. Crap. This lump of coal in our holiday stocking entraps Michelle Pfeiffer and is flat, stilted, lazy and so stretched out with Xmas clichés that you want to scream, bah-humbug.

Colin Farrell rolls the dice that maybe he can save this mess of an Edward Berger movie about a gambler’s addiction. Not this time

A numbingly dull follow-up to two “TRON” epics that even Jared Leto and a great score by Nine Inch Nails can’t make great again.

Ruth Ware’s murder-at-sea bestseller is star powered by Keira Knightley, but this water-logged whodunit sinks like a stone.

Everyone looks pretty and cries ugly in this glossy, grit-free tearjerker from the bestselling Colleen Hoover that traps the actors in marshmallow and gives soap opera a bad name.

Seven is not a lucky number for this amateurish return to the well of a once hella horror franchise that drops the ball on gore, giggles and a reason to care. Its disposable, defanged thrills feel like chatgpt prompts fed the wrong info about what constitutes scary.

Chris Pratt sits in a witness hair for most of this action movie while I sit in wonder about how a movie with such timely potential—an AI arbiter (Rebecca Ferguson) serving as judge, jury and executioner— manages to fall so hard on its fatuous pretentions.

George Orwell’s dystopian satire of aggression in the form of anthropomorphic farm animals becomes a cutsey, cardboard kiddie cartoon of staggering ineptitude and an endurance test for audiences of all ages.

A low point in the career of the legendary James L. Brooks, starring gifted actors who seem, all of a sudden in a fit of group amnesia, to have forgotten how to act.

This medieval borefest drags down the talents of Sophie Turner and Kit Harington, but can be commended for one thing: truth in advertising. It’s dreadful to the max.

Shallow, sycophantic and absent a single unguarded moment, Melania is a near-two-hour infomercial disguised as a documentary. What’s the movie actually worth as entertainment? I’ll start the bidding at two cents.