We can confirm that Morbius is, really and truly, a movie. Granted, it’s not much of a movie, but it’s a movie nonetheless.

The first “Point Break” was absurd and hyper-macho, but the director committed to the story enough to make it, at the very least, vibrantly watchable. This remake offers nothing but the absurdity, along with a handful of impressive stunt sequences that are both its reason for being and a complete distraction from what little story is happening here.

Gender inequality may be a potentially complicating factor when it comes to sexual trauma (i.e., men can also be abused by women), but that provocative conceit isn’t considered with much care or intelligence.

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.

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.

Iranian-born director Babak Najafi (“Sebbe”) and the four credited screenwriters... make things move fast enough to keep you awake, but not fast enough to finesse its plot absurdities past an alert viewer’s mind.

This Ben-Hur may not be an epic fail, but its steady stream of shortcomings are certainly a cautionary journey for anybody with the hubris to try and rebuild the monuments of movies past.

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

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.

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.

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.

Cox’s film plays like a pureed mash-up of “The Wolf of Wall Street,” “The Social Network” and last month’s indie heist film “American Animals” — without the richness or texture of any of those films.

Neither intelligent enough to be involving nor fun enough to be trashy, this is a movie that would only work if it were a little worse or a lot better.

Poltergeist ultimately plays like the most perfunctory of remakes, one born of rights ownership and title marketability rather than a burning desire on anyone’s part to do something interesting or provocative with a classic. The 1982 original remains unassailable, all the more so when stood side by side with its pipsqueak descendant.

There’s plenty of fart jokes, forward motion and bright colors to engage easily-entertained children, but their parents will be subjected to yet another movie that has all the zing of watching evolution in real time.

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.

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

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.

Even a weirdo drug comedy needs some clarity. And there’s not much to be found here, either in the muddy visuals, familiar special effects, or pursuit of psychotropic faux-wisdom.

At best, The Green Inferno is a reliable shock and disgust-delivery system. At worst — and it certainly veers toward the worst — it’s a racially reprehensible work that exploits one of the world’s most powerless peoples. And no number of movie-geek references to “Cannibal Holocaust” is going to change that.

Sam Raimi is a producer here, and it’s hard not to think about how he might have mined this material both for provocation and for fright; his “Drag Me to Hell” remains the gold standard of how to scare the heck out of an audience within the restrictions of PG-13. What we get instead here is a tepid little chiller with an overqualified cast.

The Face of an Angel is opaque in every way. Winterbottom will make another great movie. But if he didn’t want to make the Amanda Knox story, why did he so halfheartedly try?

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.

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.

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

It’s a frustratingly superficial, judgmental, surface-level thriller that undermines all its scariest moments by getting distracted at all the wrong times.

It lacks character, it lacks morbidity, it lacks subtext, it lacks suspense. It just kinda lays there like Hannah, but without any of her sinister magic.

While we can perhaps be grateful that the superficiality of Brightburn probably kept it from opting to exploit elements of disturbed-kid narratives that have been all too common in our more tragic news stories, what remains is still never terribly entertaining as either popcorn or a bent take on superhero myths.

A shabby low-rent thriller with a few vaguely interesting ideas and an ensemble that deserves better material.

If you were trying to produce a parody of what a Tolkien biopic would look like, you’d get the exact same film.

From “Vanilla Sky” onward, unfortunately, Crowe seems to have been stricken with some form of tone-deafness that curdles quirky into shrill.

Lacking appealing characters (or character design), this misfire will, with any luck, eventually become a forgotten footnote among the output of a production company that has, up until now, shown real promise at making films that defy the usual tropes and storytelling mechanisms in contemporary family-friendly animation.

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.

It would have behooved Simpson to consult others — not just regarding direction, editing and writing, but perhaps just to speak to someone else before taking on this particular narrative and creating yet another Native American story told through a white man’s lens that benefits absolutely no one.

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

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.

It's hard to get invested in the father-son dynamic here, even it when it represents a diversion from the limp comedy bits and the flatlined suspense.

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.

Unfortunately, it's just when Jessabelle looks like it might transcend its haunted-house trappings that the Southern Gothic clichés rear their tortured, screaming heads.

It’s confused about whether it wants to be a ticking-bomb tale of heroics or a complex insider account.

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.

Even if you’ve been longing for a more grounded, gritty car-chase movie since the “Fast” franchise left physics behind ages ago, Bay’s addiction to confusion and pointlessness as operating visual/narrative principles keeps even this shoulda-been auto-pocalypse from being in any way pleasurable.

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.

The writer-director never finds a coherent point of view (or a way out of Strindberg’s three-wall play structure), and Miss Julie ends up merely a whirlwind of moods without a center, as changeable and as random as a TV flipping channels.

The plot is that most dreadful of mixes: both laughably silly and needlessly complicated.

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.

Who knows what Pelé: Birth of a Legend could have been had it tapped more into that mysterious life force and the true messiness in harnessing it and making it glorious. Instead we get what the man himself was canny enough to ignore: a familiar game plan tediously followed.

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

The overall mood created by the crummy, pinched visuals and logic-strained rhythm is of something scanned and discarded, like a tabloid article or a Lifetime movie.

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.

The movie’s few bright spots feel unintentional, like mistakes left in because no one else noticed the absurdity of some scenes or the comic potential in others.

It’s not inherently misguided to use a current tragedy as the jumping-off point of a genre movie, but any filmmaker who decides to do so had better create something provocative or interesting or at least competent to justify it.

The best way to watch Chronically Metropolitan is to think of it as a parody of a particularly pretentious brand of indie romance. Unfortunately, though, director Xavier Manrique and writer Nicholas Schutt (“Blood & Oil”) play it so solemnly straight for their feature debut that it seems unlikely they’re aiming for satire.

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 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.

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.

The humor is way more miss than hit, prone to the kind of raunch (analingus debates, homophobia teasing, who’s-hot-who’s-not) that feels available, not thought-out, and pain gags that don’t get funnier the more they’re repeated.

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.

[McCarthy] and her husband Falcone (who also directed) have created a character comedy that's missing both comedy and character.

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.

A spectacularly misjudged mix of humanitarian intentions and gonzo-terrible execution.

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.

The canned British character study Mogul Mowgli disappoints on a few levels, especially given its admirable focus on authenticity and cultural identity in a kitchen-sink drama about Zed (Riz Ahmed), an aspiring British Pakistani rapper.

It’s better than nothing to mark the cheesy holiday, but the lack of effort shows.

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.

Gallo, whose direction has an undeniable paciness but a numbing competency, seems eager to check things off a list and move on.

The self-serious meditations on fate and responsibility — as well as the uneven but ever-charged flare-ups between Izzy and whoever she’s talking to — recall exercises in an acting class. By the end, we understand her motivations and recent biography, but precious little about who she is as a person.

Collide has been sitting on the shelves for over three years; no need to get up now and see it.

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.

The excellent cast of This Is Where I Leave You cannot be faulted; all talented performers, they collectively make a constant effort to bring some sort of life to the limp script and uninspired direction.

The meager tension generated by characters discovering their survival instincts, and why you might not want to be next to them when they do, is quickly dissipated by the realization that, at a certain point, the movie is an assembly line of killing, and not a terribly exciting or entertaining one at that.

Overall, The Little Things — which is how Deke refers to the details that lead to killers being caught — isn’t much of anything.

The cast of old pros (including Bruce Willis as a soldier of fortune) amble through amiably enough, but a few laughs here and there aren’t enough to make this movie come together in a satisfying way.

Whether or not one should tamper in God’s domain remains a matter of opinion, but Victor Frankenstein provides evidence that mere mortals should not mess with what Ms. Shelley hath wrought.

If you hired an independent filmmaker to create a perfume ad, and then turned that ad into a full-length movie, you’d probably get something that looks a lot like Dimitri de Clercq’s directorial debut, “You Go to My Head.”

The Intruder rings incredibly hollow.

Despite its feel-good title, The Kindness of Strangers is a rather bleak movie, one so tied to the miseries of its characters that it’s difficult to see the point of it at all.

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.

Combines the barely-there characterization and irritating cutesiness of “The Smurfs” with the hideous character design and awful pop covers of “Strange Magic.”

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.

Overall, the whole project feels weirdly empty and off-puttingly self-congratulatory, as though the very idea of turning women into action heroes is revolutionary.

Ultimately, Equals fails because Silas and Nia aren’t all that much more interesting as a romantic couple than they are as zombie-like individuals.

The loss doesn’t hit, and the comedy doesn’t land, leaving Dean a wasted opportunity that offers a few talented artists the chance to do fine work in the service of an empty vessel.

This true-crime saga of the Gucci family losing control of their own fashion empire could have been a full-blown camp classic were it not so frequently dull and tentative.

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.

There’s no shortage of imaginative sci-fi details or of talented actors on-hand, but the film boils down to characters we barely get to know chasing each other and yelling. That it hardly matters who’s being chased or what, exactly, is being yelled — mostly “Stop her!” and “AAAUUUGGGHHH!” — is just part of the trouble here.

The Masked Saint didn’t screen for critics, but it’s no worse than any other faith-based film, which as a canon tends to sacrifice story for the sermon. A movie that can finally combine the two — now that’d be a miracle worth beholding.

The characters, the dumb dialogue, and the story mechanics are the biggest problems with “Hot Summer Nights,” which never convinces, while it uses an annoying, legend-building voiceover narration from an unseen local to keep hawking the notion that we’re seeing life-changing, mythic events.

The battling, metallic heroes have never looked better, but Michael Bay's choppy, dissonant storytelling methods remain as audience-punishing as ever.

For all its cheap talk about the importance of innovation, Agent 47 just feels like a copy of a copy of a copy.

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.

First-time feature filmmaker Dave Wilson and cinematographer Jacques Jouffret (“Mile 22”) can manipulate the speed of combat scenes all he wants (the stylistic crutch of a slo-mo point of contact is evergreen) but dull choreography, CGI overuse and Cuisinart editing are still the bane of today’s action sequences.

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.

There’s ultimately too much strained seriousness in The Song of Names' dramatically flimsy and symbolically heavy episodic narrative, making Girard and Caine’s already dated feel-good historical drama seem especially tacky.

Bloated, inexplicably un-entertaining.

Effectively acts as an animated ode to heteronormativity, toxic masculinity and patriarchal worldviews, passed off as harmless plot points to entertain young audiences.