Normally, the creatures lend this series a built-in sense of awe and wonder. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom strips that majesty away and turns the focus on the human characters, who are markedly unengaging.

[Bay's] tremendous sentimentality is a major issue, bogging down his efforts at realism in flag-waving, tear-jerking scenes that try to make every heartfelt emotion land with mortar-fire force.

Valerian isn’t a movie about plot, characters, or action; it’s a movie about places. True to its comic book roots, the larger arc exists to draw viewers into the beautiful, far-flung corners of Alpha. This makes it strangely episodic for a film, but also refreshingly light on complicated lore.

While it's admirable that Guest is enthusiastically rooting for his characters, there's nothing particularly funny about it.

Café Society is an incredibly pretty movie, and a generally unobjectionable one. But like so many Allen films, it feels like it was made primarily for his therapist, and letting the rest of the world in to see it and make their own diagnoses is an afterthought.

The film never comes up with a mission statement or a message that might tie together its wandering scenes, or explain its vague melancholy.

Lee sometimes gives the impression of a virtuoso guitarist, needlessly gussying up his act with double-necked axes and pyrotechnics. When a filmmaker has skills like Lee’s, all the bells and whistles just seem to get in the way. God willing, his acoustic days aren’t totally behind him.

Concussion may start off as a stirring conspiracy thriller with the best performance from Will Smith in years, but it's hard to care when it's wrapped in a two-hour after school special.

While The Coming Race might not sell the need for this absurd series to continue, it at least provides a reason to go back and watch the original, and help its creators get the money they need to try to recapture their uniquely bizarre form of movie magic.

The film leans hard into dark comedy rather than outright horror, which saves it from seeming like technophobic scaremongering or a “kids these days” moral panic. If you’re the kind of person who can laugh at slapstick murder vignettes, a lot of Spree works very well.

It’s a scattered film, making too many vital points at once. By neglecting to bring them together into one single story, Clooney undercuts them all.

Filled with flashes of visual beauty and a fistful of interesting ideas, Knight of Cups is — like much of Malick’s most recent work — something that asks to be experienced rather than understood, but by pushing his experimental inclinations further than ever before, he’s ended up with something that’s strangely bereft of poetry or emotional resonance, resulting in a movie that may be off-putting to all but the most ardent Malick die-hards.

It’s the visual language of video games, but video games pull it off because that distanced voyeurism also comes with something additive: interactivity. Eventually, you will become involved. That is not something a film can offer.

Eventually, even perpetual pursuit gets dull, and Jason Bourne finds that point early, then just keeps charging monotonously forward.

Cianfrance pushes too hard for his audience's emotional response, with little nuance and strange selectivity.

The filmmakers aren’t much interested in developing these characters out of their original two dimensions, or leaning into the character dynamics that make Ritchie movies distinctive. As a result, the whole endeavor feels unfinished and unresolved.

It’s both a calculated attempt to recapture some of the emotional magic of his successes, and a clinical analysis of how exactly humanistic but effects-driven filmmaking is supposed to work. These qualities make it fascinating, but ineffectual as a narrative — or even as a demo reel. Zemeckis seems to think he’s showing heart. Instead, he’s messily dissecting it.

The movie focuses so intently on technical craft that it sometimes zones right out. Hawley is still stretching boundaries, often literally, while disregarding the human experiences they’re supposed to contain.

The world, the movie seems to be saying, expends a lot of energy on blithely incoherent messages to women, based on half-baked ideas rather than their actual experiences. As it turns out, Unicorn Store does the same thing.

Trailers that highlighted circus performance and relied heavily on the magic of the flying elephant and the colorful world of Dreamland made Dumbo seem like it was meant as a memorable spectacle. If that was Burton’s intention, he failed. Dumbo quickly becomes the Panda Express of films — technically a full meal, but not satisfying or substantial.

Over the course of two hours, the mania becomes exhausting and numbing.

The film doesn't lack nerve-racking sequences or well-tuned jump scares. But it stitches them all together with a profound lack of character consistency.

Not all superhero action films need the MCU's banter or Deadpool's smarm. But you can't play a symphony with a single note. With Apocalypse, Singer never gets around to varying his single, gloomy, dreary tune.

At its best, My Friend Dahmer makes some weak attempts to reckon with virulent homophobia in an Ohio suburb in the late ‘70s. But for the most part, it’s just a movie about the sick thrill of watching someone become progressively stranger and then a murderer.

The film spends more time dramatizing the scandal’s worst-case scenario than examining the facts — producing compelling personal narratives at the cost of valuable context and perspective.

With jump scares and cornball demon faces lurking around every corner, the more ambient (and important) existential despair of Aokigahara is lost.

Maybe it’s instructive that Ghost in the Shell is a solid film made on a broken foundation. Maybe this is the movie that needed to be made so the backlash would help Hollywood question the kinds of cross-cultural adaptations it can make.

Yesterday is a breezy, moderately funny romantic comedy with an excellent soundtrack — but one that never commits to its characters, themes, or clever premise.