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

The Ice Road is so often inept and heavy-handed that not even the reliable presence of Liam Neeson can rescue it.

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.

Even if you agree with everything The Confessions has to say about the problems of our era and who caused them, you’ll learn nothing new and will find little entertainment in hearing your opinions espoused.

Ron Howard allows all manner of contrivances to pile up in David Koepp‘s screenplay, as if relying on constant reference to Dante’s Divine Comedy would make people think, “Ooh, this is clever stuff.”

The awkwardly titled gay rugby romance In from the Side is so padded out at 134 minutes with both rugby games and sex scenes that the final effect is numbing, and writer-director Matt Carter doesn’t bother much with either plot or character to fill out his narrative.

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.

Burnt ultimately feels like those sous-vide bags that Adam finds so worthy of mockery: trapped in plastic, with the air sucked out of it.

A few sharp moments can’t compensate for a film that feels half-developed, and only half-heartedly told. Like its protagonist, Bad Samaritan isn’t quite as bad as it could have been, but it’s not good either.

Whether or not the word “whimsy” makes you flinch is probably a fair indicator of whether Wild Mountain Thyme is for you, but if you’re looking for the cinematic equivalent of a hot cup of tea on a blustery day, you might find yourself developing a taste for its particular brand of quirky romance.

Well-intentioned but at times insensitive, Papi Chulo is a complicated movie. It wants so badly to do the right thing when the situation is all wrong.

It is her performance that ensures every tonal shift lands as it goes from playfully comedic to delightfully dark and back again. Despite how overstuffed and unwieldy it gets, seeing Kidman work her magic at every turn will never not be a joy to see.

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

It’s one of those films that badly tests the patience as each storyline waits to tie itself up neatly and resolve — after two bursts of “Five Years Later” captions — into a honey pot of Italian optimism.

Ferrell and Wahlberg are both game, but the material only sporadically lets them let loose and do something truly creative, while poor Cardellini transitions from naggy to unreliable.

If you calibrate your expectations to “monster movie for eight-year-olds,” you may find some fun in this energetic and blissfully brief (a mere 103 minutes!) tale of the Chinese army battling alien beasties in the Song Dynasty era.

Certainly among the worst films of the year considering the reputable talent involved, this inspirational drama stains Washington’s directorial filmography.

Opus is a Cheeto without the Cheeto dust, so of course we feel cheeted.

Almost Love is one of those ultra-mild movies that is reliant almost entirely on the likability of its large cast.

Lost River is little more than Detroit-based ruin porn, an aesthetic exploitation of poverty and hardship punctuated by splashes of neon and blood.

The screenplay by Ryan Engle (“Rampage,” “The Commuter”) squanders its potential for emotional depth, making Breaking In a serviceable, but indistinct product.

Guns Akimbo may be too mild to be memorable, but it is a mostly satisfying time-waster.

It would be easy to write off 'Sneaks' as a hack job, a sole-less riff on a tired premise, but there’s more afoot here.

Endings, Beginnings takes a young woman who tries to be in the corner but must find a way to train a spotlight on herself — and if you have to lean in to appreciate her journey, Doremus and Woodley make it rewarding if you do.

Killerman lacks personality both stylistically and in its overall story construction.

#Horror” is fueled by the despairing fear and misanthropy you can only get from reading needlessly malicious Internet comments. But it’s also made with verve, style, and sparing gore by writer-director (and fashion designer) Tara Subkoff.

Content with dipping its toe into a social issue without risking much, what’s most revealing in The Jesus Music is what’s left out.

The indisputable star here is Johnson. She balances Anne’s dissonant scorn and sweetness with aplomb, her usual soft-spoken, sarcastic shtick perfectly suiting the character. Even when forced to do truly regrettable things, like wink directly at the camera, she exudes charm.

The House Jack Built feels slightly gratuitous, at times trying to be artistic while simultaneously begging for people to love it, or to love von Trier, pretty pretty please. [R-rated Version]

Whether playing off his returning company of co-stars or swapping barbs with fellow drag comic O’Carroll, Perry’s giving one of his best self-directed performances.

Nearly free of gore, the film taps into the deep and always welcome vein of the opulently bizarre things that rich, emotionally stunted people get into when they’ve got too much money. Stacey Menear’s script is careful and clever about revealing what Brahms really is, for he’s certainly got a mind and will of his own.

A joyless exercise in IP mining, Cheaper by the Dozen is all the more depressing for its glimpses of unfulfilled potential.

Fanning and Bardem deliver two utterly devastating performances that show the power of despair met with unyielding love.

This new “Jem” might be pure cubic zirconium, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be part of a fun night out.

If you’re going to see a comedy that isn’t all that funny, you could do a lot worse than the slapdash all-ladies feel-good of A Bad Moms Christmas.

The results are an uncomfortable mixture of sanctimony and silliness.

Green seems less interested in rewriting the “Halloween” playbook than in giving audiences what they came for, from ghastly scares to a ghoulish score. It’s a strategy that promises to make the series as immortal as Michael Myers himself.

Given the outlandishness of the material here, it would have been easy to start getting unwanted laughs in the second half of the film, but Pettyfer and his actors find the truth in it, even in a very long and demanding take where Harley confronts his mother in prison.

Deception, as a novel and as a film, offers a curio for obsessives, a postcard for archivists, and a not-too-interesting bump in the road for everyone else.

The film veers back and forth between the obvious and the ridiculous.

Every good idea this sequel has to offer winds up taking a backseat to the most obvious cat-in-the-closet “BOO!” moments imaginable.

There are quick cuts and CG imagery and bro-ing out in nearly equal proportions; I found some of this excess to be heady and exciting, but by the end of the film’s running time, it all became a bit tiresome, to say nothing of tiring.

The predictably loud and shockingly boring action caper 6 Underground is one-man-brand director Michael Bay’s answer to the “Fast & Furious” series.

Interestingly, it’s Cena — and co-lead Awkwafina — who give the two-dimensional structure some three-dimensional heft. But they have to work pretty hard to bust out of its repetitive cycle of low-stakes comic violence.

Fear Street: Prom Queen is not the best Fear Street movie. But to be fair, it’s probably the third best Prom Night.

Memory often feels more like a direct-to-video threequel than an actual movie.

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.

In Superintelligence, an average human being must convince a sentient AI program not to wipe out humanity. Lucky for all of us, the film Superintelligence is not entered as evidence that our continued existence is justified.

Cinderella has far less substance than [Cannon’s] other features, ultimately making this a one-time, forgettable watch.

The filmmakers are more concerned with shock-cuts, loud bangs, and creating Indian characters that are either servants or monsters, than with pushing the genre forward into satisfyingly visceral or psychological territory.

I would seriously consider cutting off one of my own fingers if it meant I didn’t have to spend two hours alone in a room with John Krasinski’s protagonist from Guy Ritchie’s Fountain of Youth.

Unfortunately, to follow these characters around is to experience not great theater, nor rich cinema, nor architectural wonder, but rather the itch of the restless spectator.

Despite the powerhouse presence of Reese Witherspoon, this limp little midlife crisis comedy leaves out the comedy and the crisis, and it certainly never comes to life.

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

There are few surprises or misdirects or red herrings involved with this all-too-solvable mystery, let alone subtext or commentary. With Marlowe, a very talented cast of actors and a legendary filmmaker have assembled to make a Philip Marlowe movie you can fold laundry to.

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 grim slog through the wastelands of human civilization, which makes a big deal about the generic parts and glosses over all the thrilling weirdness.

Cummings may have taken the easy way out here and there, but she largely delivers a film that kinda sorta makes you think, which isn’t a characteristic the genre is known for. Throughout, your feel-good chemicals will be flowing.

That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime: Scarlet Bond mostly lacks the animating unpredictability and sugar-rush energy of its source material.

Director Daniel Espinosa’s Child 44 turns a best-selling period-piece procedural into a slow, tedious thriller almost totally devoid of thrills. While the cast is full of exemplary performers — Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Noomi Rapace, Joel Kinnaman and more — the fault here is not in the stars, but in the material.

It’s a stolidly 80s action movie, from its Russian villains to its third-act plot twist that can be seen from space, but it’s lucky to have Michael B. Jordan giving an actual performance in what could have been an even more generic shoot-em-up.

Absurd as it is, Moonfall represents yet another bold stroke of maximalist grandeur from a filmmaker who excels at making overwhelming chaos look beautiful.

A sword-and-sorcery epic that can’t swing the 'epic' part.

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.

"Louis Drax” is a curious melding of sensibilities, as eager to show off its mysteries as it is to neatly resolve them. It’s a pleasant enough reverie, but one from which you won’t mind waking.

It isn’t to say that The Curse of La Llorona is bad; it definitely had the crowd I watched it with screaming in horrified delight and laughing at just the right moments. But it lacks any cultural understanding of its subject and is a missed opportunity to connect to the plethora of ghost stories the Latino culture contains in its soul. Que pena!

There is a tug-of-war here between [Bailey's] attempt to explore her characters in a very serious way with a consistent emotional basis and the demands of the material as written by Glen Lakin, which is clearly meant to be played as farce most of the time, particularly towards the end.

It doggedly follows the well-worn rom-com path, down to saving all the personality and occasional laughs – very, very occasional ones – for the supporting cast.

A B-movie effort from an A-list production team, Joe Wright’s The Woman in the Window buckles beneath its aspirations almost immediately.

"When the Game” is like a bad seven-layer salad: it's tempting in theory, but it's really just a jumble of random ingredients that wind up supremely unappetizing in the aggregate.

Sunsets, cellphone-lit melancholic music shows, and clichéd references to stars and constellations abound.

As a big sci-fi entertainment, it hardly feels like a movie about the problems of two emotionally desperate people in a crazy situation, and therein lies the problem.

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.

Levy and Till prove to have chemistry together despite their predictable romantic arc. Wedge (whose other previous credits include “Robots” and “Epic”) knows how to keep the proceedings generally casual and breezy. The action sequences unfold with an air of lightness and youthful irresponsibility.

Most of this new House Party is relatively uninspired, a modest and mediocre comedy that relies more on its high-concept plot to capture the audience’s attention than on interesting characters or, you know, jokes.

The movie seems to be trying to be quirky, but it’s never quirky enough, and it’s hard to feel much for the characters or feel that there’s much in the way of healing going on. But it’s breezy enough to be mildly diverting and gently nostalgic.

What this new version forgets, to its detriment, is that Gloria’s strength doesn’t come from finally holding the gun; it comes from being a survivor.

Before I Go To Sleep‘s combination of talents on both sides of the camera means that while it may not rocket you to the edge of your seat as quickly and cruelly as the recent “Gone Girl,” it's hardly a snooze.

Even though they sometimes land a great joke, the troopers aren’t inherently amusing or even all that likable this time around. They’re undeniably corrupt cops, even if they are relatively benign about it. Super Troopers 2 still manages to be funny quite a bit of the time, but the word “funny” needs an asterisk next to it, warning that the laughs might carry with them a certain amount of guilt.

Summer Camp is not a particularly good movie but it’s the kind of movie that makes a film critic wonder what 'good' really is, anyway."

The Grudge 2020 is a prestige drama sidelined by lackluster, incoherent horror, ruining the scares and undercutting the humanity of its characters.

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.

A rock musical like 'O’Dessa' only works if it sufficiently rocks, and 'O’Dessa' somewhat rocks.

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.

The Most Hated Woman in America is ultimately a simplistic approach to a fascinating figure, more Lifetime than a woman’s life and times.

It’s too bad that neither the philosophy nor the pyrotechnics on-screen in Chappie can distract you from your own sinking feeling that you’ve seen almost all of this before.

A tightly-drawn Bullock is fully in tune with Ruth’s pain, making her extreme introversion an evident side effect of trauma rather than personality. Because Ruth keeps so much inside, Fingscheidt uses every element to create a sensory connection between this difficult character and the audience.

Despite its outstanding performances, The Quiet Ones remains the very thing its protagonist scoffs at: a pointless story about “evil begetting evil for the sake of evil.” Evil can be defeated, but emptiness always prevails.

Here Today tries hard to be warm and witty and ultimately devastating and poignant, but it remains firmly in the mushy middle of sitcom sentiment, with lessons learned and hugs exchanged and an “aww” from the studio audience.

The goals of Fatman exceed its grasp; it wants to be funny but also grim but also realistic but also about Santa Claus. Had the film moved a few degrees in either direction, upping the dark humor or concentrating more on minimalist despair and brutal action, the Nelms brothers might have been onto something.

Besson’s film feels like a relic by most modern standards: It’s a formulaic thriller from a director who invented this very specific formula, and just about all it’s good for is introducing audiences to Sasha Luss, who carries the film with elegant strength and unleashes a satisfying fury whenever she’s allowed to destroy or humiliate her oppressors.

Like pouring yourself a warm glass of milk or slipping into a hot bath, the languid and visually sumptuous romance lulls you into a sleepy sense of calm, never asking for more than gentle aesthetic appreciation for its impeccable craft.

When Table 19 tries to be a goofy humiliation comedy, it’s barely engaging. (The pratfalls are numerous and laugh-free.) But when it settles down into something like an indie ensemble about disappointment and the comfort of strangers, Blitz finds a more effortless tone.

It isn’t comedy, and it isn’t drama, much less comedy-drama.

The Carpenter’s Son' is a Biblical horror movie with interesting ideas. They just don’t seem interesting because the perspective is cockeyed, which nullifies the film’s ability to trouble our hearts.

A movie called Horrible Bosses, or even a movie called Horrible Bosses 2, should essentially write itself. Unfortunately, that's exactly what the creators of these two movies wanted their cast to do, and the result is puerile, ugly and painfully unfunny.

A brutal action flick that’s running on ugly from start to finish, the film from director Derrick Borte flirts with having something to say about stressful, angry times and toxic masculinity, but settles for letting Russell Crowe glower, seethe and leave a whole lotta destruction in his gruesome wake.

Though there is a comforting nostalgia from seeing the Shaft men stick it to the man while simultaneously holding on to their old-school alpha-male swagger, Junior’s presence adds a much needed reproach — and smartly comedic element — that ultimately doesn’t blame them but instead makes them take a hard look at the error of their ways in the face of justice.