The truest test for unrepentant treacle like this is to imagine how invested one would be if Lewis weren’t headlining his first movie in 20 years.... The answer is, barely invested at all, considering how simplified and pandering is Noah’s approach to issues of grief, aging, and family dynamics.

Douglas and Keaton conjure just enough empathy and optimism and cozy charm between them to make us believe that anything can happen at twilight.

If Jennifer Westcott’s animated kids’ movie Elliot the Littlest Reindeer was a Christmas gift, it’d be the toothbrush at the bottom of your stocking. It’s well-intentioned, and you might get some use out of it, but let’s just pray it’s not the highlight of your holiday season.

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.

Third Person is an intricately constructed but unaffecting bore. Kinder people might call it an “interesting failure,” but to earn that label it would need to be interesting.

Reitman clearly wanted to create a mosaic of sharp-edged shards held together by the mortar of art; with Men, Women and Children, what he's delivered is a group of broken bits mired in the morass of pretension.

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.

Mawkish, bland and banal, this dreary love story — and it’s no “Love Story” — seems to think it can throw together dying girl and handsome prince, and that’s all there is to it.

The other generous read, although it’s damning with faint praise, is to call this the best “Jurassic” movie since the original in 1993, but that doesn’t mean this one’s not, much like its predecessors, a hot mess. It’s just a hot mess with some effectively scary bits, a cool car chase and Laura Dern.

Does Tulip Fever feel like a precious bulb poorly nurtured? Primarily it comes across as something laboriously over-handled, and any flower so treated is bound to lose its luster. After waiting so long, the strongest fragrance on display is one of sweat and mediocrity.

Hillbilly Elegy isn’t interested in the systems that create poverty and addiction and ignorance; it just wants to pretend that one straight white guy’s ability to rise above his surroundings means that there’s no excuse for everyone else not to have done so as well.

It would be one thing if the film was fully committed to its nastiness — a type of comedy we don’t see much of these days at all — but “The Estate” is too often hampered by its own self-awareness.

Building on 2019’s solidly entertaining animated entry, The Addams Family 2 remains kooky and fun, yet it lacks the warmth from the previous film and feels more juvenile, too.

There are some potent shocks here, but the strongest aspect of the film is the unmistakable odor of squandered potential.

It’s kind of hard to know where to begin with what’s wrong in Traffik, a movie where every scene takes about twice as long as it feels like it should, and the characters far too often make an escalating series of implausible and/or stupid decisions.

A summer franchise movie that can’t decide if it wants to be a hard-R bawdy comedy, a d-bag-comes-of-age tale or a fairly unironic reboot of the glossy TV show (which ran from 1989-2001), Baywatch fails at all three, despite the best efforts of the perennially game Johnson and Zac Efron.

The ending of this movie is monumentally, historically, even catastophically bad. Its big reveal is so mind-numbingly asinine that it nearly retroactively erases any intelligence you may have had before watching this movie. Yes, it’s that agonizing.

It’s sweet, just like the original movie. It was faint praise then, and it still is.

Aardvark is the sort of movie that gets by with its unpredictable where-is-this-going vibe for about a half-hour or so.... But it becomes apparent at a certain point that the set-up is pretty much all there is to this movie.

Serenity is a twist in search of a movie, a film noir in search of a purpose, and a great cast in search of better material.

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

Hidden somewhere beneath all the generic dialogue, embarrassing plot, mediocre action and oddly ineffective performances, there’s a good idea in Brad Peyton’s Atlas. It’s a shame the filmmakers never found it.

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?

The late-60's Satanic panic and housewifely ennui make for a surprisingly complementary mix of fear and paranoia in Annabelle.

Fist Fight is so ineptly assembled, shoddy-looking and devoid of comic tension or creative lunacy — like a movie comprised of outtakes — that you half-expect the filmmakers not even to deliver a fist fight.

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.

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.

The movie’s big-heartedness is what makes it so essential and, potentially, to those not enamored by its oddball charms, so cloying. But given the state of the world, with each new day bleaker than the last, a movie that is this unabashedly sweet is something that should be treasured, protected and celebrated, not frowned upon.