It’s just feature-length publicity, and it plays like damage control.

A subject as slippery as “cancellation” needs a firm grip, and Hill, who came in for his own public criticism a few years ago, seems to have little worth saying on the matter other than celebrities are as imperfect as anyone else. The lack of specificity makes Outcome painfully broad both thematically and comically where it seems more like a collection of half-sketched ideas of Hollywood life rather than anything substantive about the unique social relationships formed by fame.

So lacking in substance and purpose that after a while you can’t even hear the dialogue over the incessant sound of Aristotle’s ghost punching himself.

Sadly, Psycho Killer wasn’t made with style in mind. Actually, it doesn’t seem to have anything on its mind."

They just tried to do the same schtick, but longer and worse, and let’s face it, 'longer and worse' is only the goal if you’re trying to torture somebody.

It’s just shameless promotion for a book about relationship advice, released on a streaming service that also sells happens to sell the book. It even features lines like, 'This story hit so hard I Amazoned a copy of ‘Relationship Goals’ right away.

Melania is the feature film version of that wedding video in Love Actually, the one where the best man spent the whole event obsessively filming the bride ... Ratner made a film that makes Ratner look more invested in Melania Trump than her husband, which is a really weird vibe to shoot for.

This new Anaconda is so busy talking about how silly it is to make a new Anaconda that it never actually makes a good 'Anaconda.

Goodbye June is just hyperemotional tourism. We’re lookie-loos popping our heads in for the saddest moment in this family’s lives. We don’t even get to know them very well.

Ella McCay' is a film about American politics in the same way that Pixar’s 'Cars' is a movie about cars. As in yes, these are definitely films about politics and cars. But no, politics and cars don't work like that.

Even as all the comedy to be found within this setup had already run dry a full movie ago, The Family Plan 2 keeps going back to the well in the desperate hope that there are still a few drops left.

A slapdash effort from an otherwise great artist.

Yes, the movie looks scary. So scary it could almost be confused for a scary movie. Almost. But only if you’re not paying attention, and miss how shallow, derivative and underwritten it is.

Set aside for a moment that the movie is literally hard to look at: it’s also tonally chaotic, and repeatedly trips over its own unspeakable horrors, before falling face-first into bowls of insufferable sugar.

The film aspires to be yet another eat-the-rich parable in our time of oligarchs, and while there’s no rule that these stories need to be dark comedies, they should at least aspire to have some kind of personality.

Tron: Ares has, in no uncertain terms, a great frickin’ soundtrack. The movie, on other hand, completely sucks.

The Strangers: Chapter 2' is an improvement on 'The Strangers: Chapter 1.' Then again, a moderate case of food poisoning is an improvement on a severe one.

You learn about as much from the movie as you do from the trailer, and the trailer is free to watch and saves you a lot of time.

Though this film does gesture towards urgent issues, like misogyny being endemic to the modern tech industry, and is genuine in how it seeks to talk about them in a more crowd-pleasing package, it never amounts to being more than one note.

Each empty bump in the night lands with a dull thud. Even a terrifying dog that becomes crucial to the film has a bark that’s worse than its bite.

It’s so divorced from reality that it’s practically grounds for divorce.

A feeling of sparseness permeates Tim Story’s new action-comedy The Pickup. You see it in the small cast, the desolate settings, and the meager production values. If this movie were a western, then these elements might play to the film’s favor. But as an action-comedy starring Eddie Murphy, Pete Davidson, and Keke Palmer, it all reeks of overbearing cheapness to where we’re left to wonder why anyone would bother.

Daniela Forever is afraid to ever dream big, leaving nothing more than a banal nightmare.

There’s an old expression that goes, 'If you can’t think of anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.' I propose we update that a little. 'If you can’t think of anything nice to say, you’re probably talking about Bride Hard.

It’s impossible to watch a film in which Jesus Christ says it’s wrong to profit from religion and then watch the filmmakers panhandle for profit at the end. At least, not without imagining the screen getting struck by lightning.

There’s nothing wrong with Disney’s live-action remake of 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' that couldn’t be fixed by making it 26 minutes shorter, 88 years ago and in hand-drawn animation.

So let me be absolutely, 100% clear: “The Alto Knights” is indeed a bad movie, but not the good kind. It doesn’t make you feel alive, it makes you feel dead. It’s a tedious, directionless, bumbling chore of a gangster picture, incoherently written and edited, featuring two of the limpest performances of Robert De Niro’s career.

Everything in The Electric State feels done for convenience, so there’s no tension in the storytelling or the emotional stakes. It glides on a smooth track from point to point without ever considering how narrative friction would deepen the characters and the story.

There’s nothing brave about this movie. There’s nothing new either. And sure, it technically takes place in the world, but one out of three is bad.

For thousands of years it’s been believed that laughter is the best medicine. Unfortunately, it appears that the laughs in the new Netflix comedy 'Kinda Pregnant' have been recalled.

Last Days is a film that is so contrived, superficial and misconceived, it does a disservice to the story with every choice it makes.

Some B-movies, of course, are highly entertaining. This one, though, seems like it was as much of a slog to make as it is to watch.

There’s no rule that every criminal has to be charismatic, or all their heists have to be heart-pounding. They just can’t commit the one sin that’s truly unforgivable: leaving us bored.

A sex comedy lacking in sex, silliness or subversion, when just one would do.

While Stoller’s script does boast a few solid laughs, everyone involved deserves and can do better.

It’s a cute premise that ultimately gets wrung so dry that you’re left waiting for it to finally stop. The majority of its jokes either land flat or are run into the ground. Even worse, it pulls on the heartstrings with such force and impatience that the audience manipulation is palpable in every painfully predictable scene.

Anyway, it’s also weird to find a mediocre straight-to-DVD action movie inside of a major movie theater, instead of in the bargain bin at a Big Lots in 2010.

Even as Paulson is putting her all into the film and can firmly grab hold of you at some moments as her strong-willed matriarch comes undone, much like the dust that is floating around the confined setting, it all slips through her fingers.

It’s a meandering experience defined by the broadest of narrative strokes, cardboard cutout characters and musical numbers that start fun before growing more oddly obligatory in nature.

This void of a movie has plenty of the right pieces to work with at hand, but continually arranges them in the most blunt, least interesting manner possible. It’s a film that bolds, underlines and then shouts at you what it’s about, though never authentically earns your emotional investment.

A superficial illustration of the artist’s allure, interspersed with endless, increasingly comical shots of people watching him perform and smiling beatifically.

Neeson]’s trapped once again in tired tough guy material, bringing gravity to a film that’s already dragging him — and the audience — down.

A cheeseburger on Amazon Prime’s value menu, but they left out the cheese. And the meat.

A road trip fugitive movie which barely works as a road trip, or as a fugitive movie, or as a movie.

A textbook example of what happens when movies are treated like content, something to fill a quota, not to be thought about or enjoyed, so that Netflix can tell their subscribers technically they have a new exclusive movie this week, quality be damned. And in this case quality was indeed damned. It was damned straight to hell.

Since Håfström and his crew stick their landing, those who particularly enjoy second-hand claustrophobia may find it worth the long journey. Everyone else, however, will be better served by more engaging enterprises here on Earth.

Sean McNamara’s fawning and superficial biopic about the 40th president of the United States treats the political figure as a godlike messiah who was placed on this Earth to vanquish America’s enemies, foreign and domestic, and fall perfectly in love with the perfect woman while riding horses dramatically across the California hills.

When you stifle the emotional simplicity of a story like The Crow to emphasize the plot, the plot had better make sense. And it doesn’t. It’s got perplexing rules and a vague chronology and nothing seems like it matters anymore.

The problem is that not enough of the fun rubs off on us, the audience, to make this experience truly worthwhile.

It’s a film that’s full of love, but it’s an unhealthy love that’s detached from reality and the movie seems detached as well. It’s too maudlin to convey its own moral complexity and too foreboding to be sentimental.

It’s a pat retread of all the violence from the original film, with no emotional investment and no creativity in the mayhem department.

Trying to overwhelm the audience with spectacle, as “Kingdom” attempts to do, is a sorry substitute for the detailed characters and thoughtful conflicts that populate prior entries in the series.

If you thought Jerry Seinfeld’s funniest moments were in his American Express ads, then Unfrosted is the film for you.

The Fall Guy feels like an entire feature of scattered ideas that have been done better elsewhere.

It’s an interesting enough premise, even if you divorce the film from its comic book origins, but bland direction and awkward dialogue overtake the film and add a sheen of mediocrity to the entire thing.

Exactly the kind of insipid malarky superhero movies spent the last few decades trying to prove that they’re not.

Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget is something sadder than the worst movie of 2023. It is the year’s most disappointing.

So if you’re in search of a new horror film to watch in the countdown to Halloween this October, look elsewhere—no need to go exploring this particular noise in your streaming pool.

When 'The Banana Splits Movie' got there first, and did it slightly better, you’re in trouble.

The first thing you need to know about Expendables 4 is that its studio somehow made the grating decision to fashion its title as Expend4ble. It’s a needless spelling challenge for a dull and vulgar flick with a lot of empty-calories muscle, but little-to-no skill or fun to spare.

The problem with describing a movie like The Nun II is that its many inane moments sound entertaining when you list them all on one page, but they’re so spread out through this movie that the entertainment is usually quite scarce.

There is a big difference between a campy film that doesn’t take itself too seriously and one that is just wall-to-wall miscalculated execution. For clarity, “The Trench” is firmly in the second camp.

This is a movie that neither works as a quirky dark comedy about the hapless people of a small town (on that note, the film is painfully unfunny), nor as a period piece on the anxieties of the Reagan era, no matter how many “1984” references the characters throw at you.

Sadly, the film is a tedious and erratically cut caper, whose shape-shifting story feels like an uneven and over-plotted rehash of various recognizable films that we’ve seen before.

Millepied’s debut . . . is a woefully pretentious and uninvolving slog, an arthouse screen-saver only sporadically ignited by its two best components: composer Nicholas Britell and Almodovar regular Rossy de Palma as a flamboyant nightclub owner-performer.

A slight comedy that sadly embraces neither the worthwhile questions that surround its central premise nor the story’s dark humor potential.

Setting aside the half-baked characters and a plot so raw it’s probably got salmonella, Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is staggeringly inept in surprisingly obvious ways.

It’s a film with violence but no edge, just a disturbing idea which plays out to a grim and unsatisfying conclusion, unexplored and uninteresting.

Some high-concept set pieces rise above shoddy execution and creative mismanagement, particularly any wire stunts involving helicopters, byplanes, or rocket-powered jet packs.

It’s difficult to imagine anyone watching Life Upside Down out of anything other than abject desperation.

Despite its A-list cast, can’t escape its shoddy writing and worse filmmaking.

Unfortunately, though, the leads — both of whom radiate individual charisma — are entirely lacking in chemistry. And it’s not just them. There is little connection between anyone, or even any event, in a project that takes all its assets for granted.

Forster’s haphazard direction is so checked-out it’s painful – he shows no interest in giving anyone a scene that isn’t wholly about snapping something into place, and his comedy mise-en-scène and timing in even the simplest moments of humor is flat. And the less said about Thomas Newman’s phoned-in score, the better.

Too self-serious to be comical and too strange to be earnest, The Almond and the Seahorse traps viewers in a purgatory where every occurrence feels equally cumbersome and meaningless.

It’s a hyped-up cocaine conversation of a movie, throwing out lots of ideas and images and mammoth set pieces without ever amounting to anything.

It is an often nasty film, with little regard for anyone on screen, far more content to grasp for false depth rather than logic. It’s a shame there’s nothing to root for other than its dwindling runtime.

Even Downs, so appealing on Nickelodeon’s “Henry Danger,” can’t fight the forces of this soulless script (which was based on a potentially promising story idea by Wenonah Wilms).

The cars are the stars in Lamborghini: The Man Behind the Legend, a pamphletized biopic that does the easy thing — beautifying Italy and vintage automobiles — but stalls with everything involving humans.

Too much of Dear Zoe, though, feels factory-designed to engineer emotion rather than aiming to earn it organically.

Bajestani is believably repellent as someone whose split lives as an obsessive loner and respected family man are disturbingly concordant. And Nadim Carlsen’s gritty camerawork pushes the film’s sense of grim social realism further still, providing a viscerally authentic horror. Abbasi doesn’t seem to realize, though, that he’s creating much of that horror himself.

Most disappointing of all, Black Adam is one of the most visually confounding of the major-studio superhero sagas, between CG that’s assaultively unappealing and rapid-fire editing that sucks the exhilaration right out of every fight scene.

The Loneliest Boy in the World mostly bobs along without incident, never challenging viewers’ assumptions nor giving us much to sink our teeth into.

While not enough to sell Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, Bardem’s mission to out-cartoon his animated scene partner (admittedly not difficult) still feels like a blow struck for old-school flesh-and-blood eccentricity in the age of blah digital cutes. May that battle continue.

Russell’s brand of Sturges-inspired madcappery has always been a high-wire act of energy and tone, but Amsterdam doesn’t even feel like an “I Heart Huckabees” or “Joy” misfire. It’s sloppy and disconnected, crammed with thinly drawn characters play-acting ‘30s screwball as Russell’s unmoored camera and jarring editing force the issue instead of capturing something genuine which, even with a game cast, clearly wasn’t there to begin with.

The early scenes are at times surprisingly awkward – and while things get better when Chickie gets to Vietnam and Russell Crowe shows up to (briefly) ground the movie with his quiet gravity, “Beer Run” still lurches from silliness to preachiness in a way that’s rarely satisfying.

If you set out to combine the worst parts of Hallmark holiday movies with the worst parts of frenetic ‘90s rom-coms, you’d probably wind up with something a lot like About Fate. The women are nuts, the men are clueless and the production is so cheap you could pass the time spotting every mistake no one bothered to fix.

Zemeckis and co-writer Chris Weitz do make some attempt to dust off the concept, but the modernized moments further undermine their efforts. When they add empathy, the story loses its soul. And when they jam in easy updates, it just highlights how out of touch the rest of the script feels.

The whole film feels like filler, an empty space waiting to be padded with plot points, characters and jokes that are so generic it was incredibly easy to transform them into product placement.

Maybe if you hate movies, LaBute’s attempt to bore us to death with classic noir material is a nifty prank. For anyone else, you’re better off revisiting Garfield and Turner, or Stanwyck and MacMurray, or Hurt and Turner — or even “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.”

Hints of Koy’s stage charm burst through occasionally in Easter Sunday — mostly because he’s also playing a comedian trying to hit the big time, so stand-up-like bits are built in (or crammed in) — but as directed by Jay Chandrasekhar (“Super Troopers”), who also has a small role as an agent, this feature opportunity is a woefully run-of-the-mill, laugh-challenged attempt to translate Koy’s comedy to the big screen.

All Bullet Train had to be was high-gloss, all-star, late-summer nonsense, but instead it gives high-gloss, all-star, late-summer nonsense a bad name.

Unfortunately, the movie’s unexpected plot twist violently re-directs its treacly uplift narrative for the sake of a Hail Mary conclusion that’s almost ridiculous enough to be campy fun. It’s not though, since the twist in question feels like a last-ditch effort to convince viewers that the movie’s otherwise plain story, credited to Vera Herbert (series writer on “This Is Us”), has more depth than it does.

Following her well-received debut “First Match,” Newman hits a sophomore slump with this literary reinterpretation, where the performances in general renounce nuance for theatricality and most storytelling decisions unfurl like a subpar pastiche of vague components we’ve seen and heard plenty of times before.

The Princess somehow manages to be both under-written and insultingly obvious.

While Sniper: The White Raven sometimes delivers solid meat-and-potatoes action movie violence, the rest of the film only confirms the hellish nature of war, which we’ve all seen before.

It’s so talky and un-visual that despite it taking place in multiple locations, including the California coastline, it feels like a play barely opened up for the cameras.

It’s a film full of boring conversations, daft sci-fi conceits, and confusing suspense, which add up to practically nothing. “Zero” indeed.

18 ½ attempts to be part cloak-and-dagger thriller, part romantic comedy, part screwball comedy, and part mood piece, and its plotting is slapdash, to say the least.