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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s rare that a blockbuster movie feels this competently, serenely middle-of-the-road, but maybe being this safe in an era of easy outrage is its own form of mild, moderate, entirely bland achievement.

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.

Assassin’s Creed’s creators have the courage to always take themselves seriously, even when they’re working with material that sounds fundamentally silly. There’s no great leap of faith in Assassin’s Creed, but a surprising amount of the time, it at least finds steady footing.

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.

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

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

The Dark Tower, helmed by Danish director Nikolaj Arcel, is so simplified in places that it seems outright generic.

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.

Given that The Mummy only barely works as a movie on its own account, the question becomes whether it works as a franchise-starter. And the answer is that while its franchise elements are foregrounded, they still aren’t terribly compelling.

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 a knock-down, drag-out fight between storytelling, franchise-making, and fan service, and some casualties were inevitable. But even a messy fight for nuance is better than an apathetic sell-out.

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

Bright is a series of disconnected action vignettes that work as standalone sequences, but don’t hang together in any kind of meaningful way. It’s impossible to not think of Suicide Squad’s similar failings as Bright barrels from one dark, noisy scene to the next.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

What Herce and his crew have accomplished is an invaluable feat of cinematic empathy and vision.