The movie is dreck made just acceptable enough for children with still-developing frontal lobes, one that would bore most adults to tears if it didn’t stop to do things like give a dragon a colonic.

The utter stupidity of Replicas sometimes makes it feel almost daring. It goes to some dark, counterintuitive places out of a seeming obliviousness to both what science fiction audiences might want to see, and how actual people might behave.

The Predator comes across like it’s too timid to fully commit in any one direction, perhaps for fear of alienating some potential segment of the fanbase, and ends up feeling like the least inspiring combination of all possible elements instead.

Instead of building on its most pertinent themes — or on any themes — The Darkest Minds wanders around haplessly in a fog of tired tropes and unmotivated bits of plot. It has neither inspiration nor purpose, and it eventually, almost literally, effervesces into blank irrelevance.

Unlike the first two films in the series, Cloverfield Paradox doesn’t stand on its own as a horror movie, or even as a standalone story. There’s no central idea, no governing principle, and more to the point, virtually nothing frightening about it. No one involved in creating this movie seemed to have any clue what kind of tale it’s telling from one minute to the next.

On the surface, American Satan is a horror movie about how the devil is bad, and entering into vague contracts with him will not make you happy. I’m not sure what audiences are supposed to get out of it otherwise.

Every retread of a familiar story has to bring something new to the table, if it’s going to justify its existence. Instead, this is yet another cinematic Frankenstein’s monster, stitched together out of scavenged parts, and shocked back to life for no clear or compelling reason.

Any pretense of storytelling gets thrown out the window as our emoji crew stops to play some quick nonessential games of Candy Crush and Dance Now, which basically act as elaborate commercials for apps desperately trying to hold onto their waning relevance.

King Arthur has a vulnerable heart beating somewhere under all the grimy, sweaty muscles lovingly displayed for the camera. It’s just buried too often under narrative chaos, and the inexplicable ideal that if a story runs at double speed and triple energy, the gaping holes in the story will outpace anyone’s notice.

An exceptional cast does their damnedest with what they have, but the lines hang dully in the air. It’s like watching a high-school play starring a gaggle of anxious teens.

It’s largely a frustrating clone of the original movie — same songs, same script, often even the exact same shot choices — but it replaces every moment of authentic or moving emotion with bombast and hyperbolic overemphasis.

Rings is a phenomenally distracted film, and it can’t focus on any one concept for too long.

For all its visual flourishes and fair-to-decent acting, Passengers is a failure of a movie full of missed opportunities.

There’s a hint of Aja’s old love of shock-value horror in this film, but it’s blunted by syrupy fake sentiment, mismanaged twists, and half-baked plotlines.

This is a familiar tale: man creates monster, monster runs amuck, man regrets playing God. It's just never remotely clear what Scott and Owen found so compelling about this story that they wanted to tell it again, without meaningful variations, and in the immediate wake of better, smarter, more thrilling versions.

Batman v Superman addresses Man Of Steel's problems in words without learning anything from it in tone. Instead, the new film doubles down on the grimness, the ugliness, and the indifference to human life.

The scenes in which Efron performs a nearly-naked version of the Macarena and sings Céline Dion’s "Because You Loved Me" at a karaoke bar are the rays of light that creep into Dirty Grandpa’s subterranean torture chamber.

The action is frequently too chaotic to register, and the performances are monotonal. There's no personality in this story, or the way it's told.