The film doesn't go far enough in setting its own course. Ayer works to establish those villains as gleeful fantasies of unfettered freedom, then fetters them with maudlin backstories that make them all sad, soulful, misused, and misunderstood.

Where the first film was content with straight-faced silliness, Zoolander 2 tries to blow the same silliness out to epic, world-spanning proportions, and it just winds up feeling overstretched. Like Stiller with his ridiculous characters and stylized performances, it's consistently trying way too hard.

It’s beautiful, bombastic, and nearly indistinguishable from those that came before it.

For a mainstream supernatural-fantasy war film, Spectral is curiously devoted to rhapsodizing about science, and considering the moral implications of scientific discovery. It’s also appealingly certain that science is the answer to all problems, including what appears to be a supernatural attack.

The book is a charmingly quaint, deeply eerie supernatural mystery about grief, necromancy, and the apocalypse. The movie version is a shrieking CGI carnival full of poop jokes and barfing pumpkins.

It’s a pretty take on the story, but it’s also a frustratingly safe and squishy one. It’s infinitely well-intentioned, full of warm self-affirmation and positivity, and absolutely nothing about it feels emotionally authentic enough to drive those messages home.

Unfortunately, The Addams Family is so bland, unfunny, and poorly structured that even the best intentions can’t elevate it.

There are a few scary seconds here and there, but for the most part, this is a version of Dahl with the claws clipped, and it feels not just safe, but downright sleepy.

It would be easier to buy Jexi’s more intentional absurdities if its reality wasn’t so elastic, stretching to accommodate poorly staged large-scale slapstick.

It’s a train wreck of a movie, mixing and matching wildly dissonant tones, bizarre plot contrivances, and a truly unique lead performance.

Just as trying to keep up with every geopolitical crisis on the planet all at once can be overwhelming, trying to track Geostorm’s name-checked concerns and its barely present characters is likely to tax viewers’ attention spans. Horror movies help people process some of our worst fears, but there’s a reason most movies don’t try to address every human fear at the same time.

Virtually none of The Circle has any emotional or narrative impact.

It’s frustrating that a movie that seems so improbable actually got made, only to fall so incredibly short.

Howard shows his viewers what happened to these sailors, but he rarely offers any sense of who they were, or what it felt like to face their situation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Joy has neither comedy nor nuance going for it. Every character feels like a half-sketched first draft, awaiting development that never comes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As an action movie, Bloodshot is the worst kind of uninspiring: not bad enough to circle back around toward fun, not good enough at action to be even momentarily impressed by a fight scene.

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