As a professional film critic, I’m also obliged to tell you that The Mountain Between Us isn’t a very good film. But it’s not unwatchable, either, probably owing to the fact that its two leads are great actors in their own right, and they’re willing to take the whole thing quite seriously.

Somehow, in this fantasy of mermaids and magical spells and a world compelled by curiosity, there’s a frustratingly fastidious commitment to terrestrial dreariness. And it’s not a world I’m longing to be a part of, not even for two hours.

So The Lion King now has its very own pristine cover album, rendered in intricate, realistic detail, a high-fidelity B-side for its many devoted fans. But it might, in the end, leave you wishing for the slightly scuffed-up vinyl original.

Motion capture is a great way to achieve certain effects. But it turns out when you use it to graft human expressions onto animals, you end up with the first movie to star an all-Tuunbaq cast.

The Cloverfield Paradox has a great cast and an interesting setup, but it feels extremely — almost painfully — derivative of other science fiction films. It’s not nearly as good as its predecessors.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard is strangely soulless, particularly for a movie that wants to be about murder, morality, and revenge. Those elements are there only to serve up the appearance of a smart film, when The Hitman’s Bodyguard would have been better served by sticking to pure action and stupid humor.

The Greatest Showman is not, in any traditional sense of the phrase, a biographical motion picture about P.T. Barnum. It is a high-energy, breathless fantasy. Employing sleight of hand, some fast talking, and a lot of tall tales, it exaggerates the legend until the illusion takes on a life of its own, turning into the promised “fever dream” that, while admittedly stuffed with some truly excellent musical setpieces, has something sinister at its core.

It’s a movie ostensibly interested in how comic book stories work, but it has the same problems as a lot of the comic book movies hitting the big screen these days. The big twist: Shyamalan seems to have not learned very much at all from his own movies.

There’s a potentially funny movie in here somewhere. But it lumbers along, wasting some of its greatest assets and, in the end, overstaying its welcome.

If we learn anything from the story in Richard Jewell, it’s that truth is truth, whether or not it fits your pet narrative. So either the movie fails at understanding its own message, or it flat-out lies. What a disappointing way to undermine your own valid point, in a movie that’s otherwise well-acted and competently filmed.

In the hands of Jon Turteltaub (National Treasure), it’s just a shark movie, and a kind of inert one at that.

I think I’d rather re-read The Goldfinch than watch it again. Straughan’s screenplay strips out most of the novel’s heart in favor of plot fidelity, albeit with the pieces told out of order. No longer does it feel like we’re on a journey with Theo. Instead, we’re just observing what happened to him during his life, and there’s no reason to care about any of it.

Unfortunately, it’s not a great film. But it’s an enjoyable one, if you like fine wine, beautiful countrysides, and a little frisson of flirtation.

For all its screenplay’s threadbare talk about the importance of cultivating deep understanding, Mulan stays superficial and perfunctory. It gets down to business — and little else.

Casting the movie as Marshall’s story — and then skimping on Marshall himself, one of the most interesting figures in US history — winds up skewing the film in ways that end up inadvertently denigrating the subject.

Extremely Wicked gives off the distinct impression that it finds Bundy far more fascinating than anyone who suffered at his hands.

What’s most interesting about Pacific Rim: Uprising isn’t the movie itself — it’s how the cause of the impending apocalypse has evolved from the first to the second film, and how that maps onto apocalyptic stories more generally.

Wine Country is a pleasant enough comedy about friendships in middle age and learning to embrace change. It’s surprising, though, that the film isn’t more fun. The pacing feels oddly slow, which blunts the edges of some of the jokes. For a group of actresses with improv comedy chops, it feels labored at times.

It’s not that Tulip Fever is incompetently made or unpleasant to look at or offensive in any way. It’s just that it is very, very boring.

The Mule is a thinly characterized, clunkily realized showcase for its director, who may or may not be working out some personal issues on screen. Yes, there are some very funny moments, and Eastwood retains plenty of charm. But too often, the film feels slapped together, half-assed, and lacking some much-needed care. And nowhere is that more evident than in the way the characters themselves are written.

Welcome to Marwen is a disastrously misconceived movie, but in such a boring way that it’s hard to imagine its target audience. Most of the time, big-screen disasters are hugely ambitious tales that completely miss the mark. This one hits the mark, but it’s probably not a target anybody should have been aiming at.

The Rise of Skywalker falls somewhere between an overstuffed fan-service finale and a yawnfest. If The Force Awakens kicked off a new cycle in the franchise and The Last Jedi set it up to push beyond its familiar patterns, The Rise of Skywalker for the most part runs screaming in the other direction.

It makes a run at cleverness, trying to be a dark screwball commentary on America’s race problem. But instead it’s just a spectacular flop.

Bernadette is a soggy misfire, with sparks of possibility peppering a weirdly plodding tale.

It’s the worst of the bunch, a continuation of the franchise’s swan dive into joyless mediocrity, while managing to destroy any affection one might have for Marvel’s merry mutants.

The new third entry in the series isn’t interested in character development or logical storylines or anything resembling innovation. It’s lazy and limp and profoundly weird, and not in any meaningful way a “good movie.”

To be fair, it’s not all unpleasant. The joyride through the Warner Bros. IP universe is not quite as soul-busting as the trailer led me to believe it would be, though I suspect it benefited only in comparison to my expectations.

It’s inexcusable for a movie that tries to say daring and surprising things about a very urgent matter of cultural and political importance to be so thuddingly predictable in so many places.