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!