Ali, in his first lead role, is let down with a hollow script and sanitized surroundings that his character barely struggles against.

Perhaps the film’s thematic intentions are noble. But its execution is glib, never finding the right balance between compassion and leering.

It is the film’s bitterest irony that a story about a man controlled by a domineering force seems itself unwilling to give its subject true autonomy, lest that distract from its director’s aesthetic interests.

With its limp humor, canned sentiment, and over-egged efforts to gross us out, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a waste of a good cast and a defacement of a classic film’s legacy. Most galling of all, it was summoned willingly by people who should know better than to mess with what’s long been peacefully laid to rest.

All the arch gloss that McKay covers the film with isn’t earned, not when the movie’s foundation—intellectually, politically, artistically—is so rickety.

S. Craig Zahler's controversial movie about a pair of racist cops gone rogue has more bark than bite—and that’s telling.

The film looks pallid and cheap, with pretty much zero nod to the style and panache of Wes Craven’s original. The jokes are heavily telegraphed as Clever Jokes, the references to cinema culture and film structure landing as obligation rather than organic bursts of analytical wit.

What might have been a somber and carefully considered study of a lonely man grappling with his past becomes a posturing labor.

Being the Ricardos reduces the physical comedy that made I Love Lucy work night after night to a series of explainers. Speech after speech drills into the workings of a comedy script or gag, yet nothing makes you laugh.

I’m a pretty easy scare, but I sat through this Pet Sematary mostly unbothered. Which is certainly not the takeaway one should have from an adaptation of a Stephen King novel, let alone the one that King has said frightens him more than anything else he’s written. In this new film, you almost can’t see what he was so afraid of.

The studio has stumbled into what may be the worst film yet in its long line of spectaculars, an erratic and fatally dull morass of limp jokes and aimless plotting. The magic is decidedly gone, and the film left me wondering, on a more macro scale, if this whole cinematic universe machine has any idea where it’s headed.

Intricately crafted as it is, Campos’s film is downright simple. It’s sloppy pulp packaged as prestige, which makes the meanness of its condescending gaze that much meaner.

The Prom is a shellacked lump of Hollywood product, all canned fabulousness—including Corden’s noxious mugging—and none of the difficult, awe-inspiring technicality that makes musical performance truly snap and sing with theater’s scrappy magic.

The film doesn’t actually show character growth so much as it tells you it’s happening.

Scattered, confusing, and haunted by past grandeur, Crimes of Grindelwald perhaps marks the landmark moment when, alas, the magic finally flickers out.

There’s Bullock, doing something good and interesting. Though it does ultimately prove frustrating and sad, watching her so desperately grasp for a finer film—one that lies just beyond what Bird Box allows us to see.

My Policeman is studied and plodding in its period-piece solemnity, a dirge of a movie about reckless people that is never warmed by their implied inner fire.

Bohemian Rhapsody’s problems aren’t specific to this movie. They are the bane of biopics broadly speaking, especially those tackling artists. I want to leave this kind of movie with a sense of the artist’s art, not just of the headlined subsections of a Wikipedia summary.

Every actor, bless them, works hard to sell the movie’s overweening moxie, leaning into the mannered quirk with admirable, if ultimately doomed, commitment. Pitt and Taylor-Johnson are perhaps best suited to the movie’s patter; they manage to give some actual fizz to leaden material. But those moments are short lived, and then it’s back to the awkward squirm of watching talented actors debase themselves for laughs that never come.

The writing and direction is so erratic and confused that it’s near impossible to figure out who several characters are, let alone what they are seeking to accomplish.

While I wasn’t exactly expecting greatness from the film, I did think it would contain a few thrills and maybe some laughs. Having Lara Croft leap around and avoid traps should be an easy formula—but for this crew, it remains an unsolvable puzzle.

Halloween Ends is a bizarre hash of tones and theses, stitched together into a movie that’s neither fun nor frightful.

There is, alas, nothing enriching about Capone. It offers none of the robust competence these dwindling-culture times are running low on. Perhaps more dismayingly, it’s not even entertaining. The film’s arresting oddity is fleeting, and then we’re just made to sit with it for another humid 90 minutes.

The film is, plainly stated, terrible, and I’m sorry that everyone wasted their time and money making it—and that people are being asked to waste their time and money seeing it. I hate to be so blunt, but it simply must be said this time.

Very little happens beyond those walls, reducing the film to cramped psychodrama. It’s startlingly dull, a pointless procedural that seems to disdain its audience.

Mortal Kombat is a disjointed, halfhearted trip to the past, where things probably should have been left finished for good.

Rather than honoring any specific place, or people, or mode of living, Where the Crawdads Sing cheaply develops its land. It’s a pre-fab oceanfront condo of a movie that prizes a pleasant view over all else.

Scoob! is a dumb movie, full of creaky topical references and jokes that are above kids’ heads but below adults’. It’s also pretty boring, because it makes no real effort to give the plot any sort of cinematic build.