The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is the 15th feature from Guy Ritchie, and while it’s not very good, it’s also hard to dislike something that has the genial tone of a day-drunk romp.

The glee everyone involved obviously felt in getting this improbable flick made is never balanced out by a sense of why anyone would need to actually watch it.

As an action flick, Monkey Man is often quite entertaining, but it keeps distracting you with images of the film it’s trying, and often failing, to be.

There’s style and skill to spare in Asphalt City, but the movie also feels like a victim of the very numbness and emotional emptiness it seeks to expose.

Wicked Little Letters delights in its naughtiness, but it really should’ve embraced its perversion.

The cast makes Late Night With the Devil more than watchable, but they also raise our hopes for something better. While the talk-show approach makes perfect structural and narrative sense, it also drains the film of suspense, as we pretty much know where everything is going.

To damn by faint praise: Shirley is a perfectly serviceable film.

The jokes are witless, the emotions artless, and the film joyless. At the same time, there’s also little to repel or offend, which, after all the truly idiotic culture-war battles fought over the Ghostbusters franchise, probably counts as a win. Maybe one day we’ll get an actual movie.

The best parts of Problemista, which is a charming film without ever becoming more than semi-successful, bend the world through his perspective with the help of some Michel Gondry–esque DIY Surrealism.

The film presents Jakub’s memories in such fragmented fashion that we can’t really piece together any kind of emotional through-line; we’re told about it, but we can’t really feel it, which renders the movie didactic and tedious.

One senses this is a mundane story that’s trying to be something stranger and more buoyant — the film’s off-kilter sensibility keeps threatening to fade away, like it’s stuck at the tail end of a high.

Lisa Frankenstein just doesn’t seem all that interested in what its main character is going through, which leaves it feeling lamentably flimsy, just a collection of references assembled around a hollow center.

The more turns Jason Fuchs’s script takes, the more monotonous everything feels. And because Vaughn never drops his fantastical, cartoonish style, “reality” ceases to have any true meaning within the context of the film; he keeps trying to up the stakes even as what we’re watching becomes less and less consequential.

The Beekeeper takes a Mad Libs approach to moviemaking.

There are bits and pieces of Lift strewn throughout that hint at the better movie it could have been with some inspiration and discipline.

It turns out that Mean Girls: The Musical: The Movie is pretty good, and likely to succeed at its primary purpose, which is to remind you that the original Mean Girls is fun.

It begins as a comedy, takes a turn toward the earnest, and ends with a sort of genial blasphemy. There’s definitely nothing else like it out there, for better and worse, and even if it doesn’t work, there’s something admirable about how at ease the film is with its own erratic rhythms.

The Color Purple is not a particularly intimate or introspective musical; its numbers are big, very much meant to be sung to a big audience, maybe even to have the audience sing them back to the stage or the screen. For both movie and play, it feels as much like a trip to church as it is a trip to the theater.

Winningly goofy but blemished by behind-the-scenes tinkering, The Lost Kingdom is disappointing in the usual sequel way: It rearranges without deepening the elements people liked about its predecessor.

Late in The Iron Claw comes a sequence that departs from everything that’s come before and drops us unabashedly into Kevin’s mind at a time of intense grief. It’s earnest, and corny, and utterly devastating, and it makes you yearn for a film that wasn’t so intent on holding its tragic subjects at a brawny arm’s length.

Unfortunately, the film doesn’t demonstrate any kind of interest in, or affection for, its characters. They’re cardboard cutouts, there to represent postures rather than evoke our sympathy or humanity or even curiosity.

There is no star of such magnitude who more cunningly positions themselves as apolitical than Beyoncé. Her performance as an icon is meant to connect with the broadest number of people possible. To do that, her refusal to stand for anything specific beyond the watered-down treatises on Black excellence must be maintained.

Napoleon is not, thank god, a hagiography. But it has the faltering rhythms of a rough draft — it plays as though Scott gave up on trying to carve a good film out of what actually ended up on screen.

All in all, one walks away from Rustin enchanted with Domingo’s performance, while feeling that a character as larger than life and momentous as Bayard Rustin surely deserves a film less dutiful and more inspired.

It’s all thematically muddled, narratively regurgitated stuff that makes the film feel like a nearly three-hour backsliding of this franchise’s onetime political forcefulness.

Roth has a talent for anticipation, but not really for suspense. We don’t watch Thanksgiving wondering what’s going to happen next to these people. We watch because we know what’s going to happen next to these people.

Saltburn’s seductive imagery outweighs its obvious attempts at provocation. And while it does end up making being rich look pretty sweet, that’s not exactly a revelation worth hanging a whole movie on.

Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario starts off with a rich, surreal premise, and for much of its running time, it mixes playful, cringe-comic energy with an undercurrent of existential anxiety. But it eventually manages to undo much of what made it so tantalizing by turning metaphor and subtext into a more narrow-minded satire.

The best parts of What Happens Later are when it lets its characters just be people who still want to find love and find some of its warmth in the embers of this long-ago relationship. It’s too bad there aren’t more of those moments.

As a movie, Sly is something of a mess. But as a portrait of a messy man, it can be quite moving.

The frustrating thing about Fingernails, which is directed by Christos Nikou from a script he wrote with Stavros Raptis and Sam Steiner, is that it’s so disconnected from the physical side of romance even as it has an intensely anatomical phenomenon at its center.

When The Persian Version shifts to the film-within-the-film Leila is writing and nudges her aside to tell her mother, Shireen’s, story, Keshavarz’s feature finds its performative core and explodes into emotional vibrancy.

Dicks: The Musical is never as outrageous as it clearly would like to be . . . But its determination to avoid any trace of self-importance or greater meaning is admirable in its own right — embracing the freedom to just be ridiculous.

The most compelling moments come from watching Braun and Jones advancing toward and retreating from each other. It doesn’t sound quite right to say they have good chemistry; it’s more accurate to say that both actors understand how to make the lack of chemistry between their characters real and tangible.

Chloe Domont’s film divides the entire world into binary moments of understanding and misunderstanding — without the shades of gray that would make Fair Play and its characters more tangible and its central tension less didactic.

For all that Nyad is happy to show its subject’s personality flaws, it has trouble finding her humanity,

Filled with expertly composed sequences undone by the protagonist’s relentless observations about the meaninglessness of existence, the movie feels like an attempt to highlight its own emptiness.

Dreamin’ Wild, as I’ve noted, has its issues: There are lines of dialogue so blunt that I actually found myself bursting out laughing during some pretty serious scenes. But great performances don’t happen in a vacuum, and credit should go to Pohlad for knowing exactly what to do with Goggins.

Disney’s new Haunted Mansion is a hot mess, but it’s a sporadically entertaining one.

There’s a streak of defensiveness to Barbie, as though it’s trying to anticipate and acknowledge any critiques lodged against it before they’re made, which renders it emotionally inert despite the efforts at wackiness.

Watching the film is a reminder that the most boundary-pushing comedy isn’t about risqué content but a willingness to get uncomfortable and the confidence to assume audiences will join along in that journey. Joy Ride instead seeks out the warm fuzzies in a way that feels like a surrender.

Writer-directors Àlex and David Pastor have come up with a tantalizingly evil idea, but they’re not cruel enough to see it through to its conclusion.

The Blackening gets halfway there, and has the benefit of some gifted performers and some very good ideas. It just never really figures out how to be a movie.

While Sohn has said Elemental was inspired by his parents, his upbringing in multicultural New York City, and his own mixed marriage, the lack of deeper consideration his film gives to its ideas leads to some ugly reductiveness.

There’s a disconcerting shrewdness underneath its patina of tastefulness — it’s too calculating to achieve the transcendent almost-romance it strives for but never inhabits.

In order for the film’s stylistic conceit to work, the protagonists need to pop more. We need to want them to break free of their grief and find ways out of the darkness.

It’s warm and inveigling, but what it could use is a little more emotional ugliness.

The film plays more like it was made by an AI versed in the existing movies but not quite up to spitting out something coherent itself.

Master Gardener plays less like a thematic finale and more like the director is trying to exorcise himself of his perpetual idée fixe.

The sheer joy of watching characters in full bridal splendor preparing to plunge into combat can’t be underestimated, but it’s never as satisfying as it should be.

The problem with Peter Pan & Wendy is all too often one of subtraction, not reinvention. You can almost read the tsk-tsking studio notes as you watch the movie.

For much of its running time, director Ritchie’s war movie manages to be topical, suspenseful, and moving. But partly because the story is fiction, Ritchie takes a few genre liberties that threaten to undermine the sincerity of his tale.

It packs the screen with witty details, features some brilliantly directed sequences, sets up downright baroque punchlines, and is anchored by an incredibly game performance by Phoenix. But ditching the genre framework doesn’t make it feel more honest — its self-deflating comedy is, ironically, that of someone afraid of being taken seriously.

Hoult, playing a pallid, anxious, disconcertingly dreamy Renfield, and Cage, fully Cageing it up as the count, manage to be compelling even when vamping (sorry) with all their might to make this material work.

It allows Crowe to have fun with the part of Father Amorth, but the film forgets to have fun along with him.

The results are dispiritingly pleasureless, as though to fully embrace the idea of a penthouse prison would get in the way of the movie’s nebulous ideas about art.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods isn’t unwatchable. It’s competent, uninspired swill, undone largely by the fact that it’s following up a superior first movie.

Scream 6 does distinguish itself in the horror set pieces. Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (who also made the previous entry) clearly grasp that these movies are, at their best, mean.

Despite being half–“Let’s put on a show” movie and half–romantic comedy, two genres dedicated to delight, Magic Mike’s Last Dance never achieves satisfaction.

M3gan’s reach is never in danger of exceeding its grasp. It wants only to provide a diverting 100-odd minutes of horror comedy, with a heavy emphasis on the comedy.

Babylon is a film too busy writing an elegy for the still-breathing body of film as a medium to capture the true beauty and complications of being alive.

The pleasures of Bones and All wind up being incidental and, sadly, fleeting — an effectively grisly scene here, an arresting performance there. The film, as a whole, never quite hangs together, because even as it goes through the motions of both the road movie and the romance, it never really finds an animating energy to drive it along.

This isn’t an organic continuation of Giselle’s story so much as an uninspired knockoff of the original, yet another attempt to use existing IP to attract viewers and subscribers besotted by the prospect of watching something familiar on a Friday night.

This fake Weird Al movie could have used some of the real Weird Al’s cleverness. Weird doesn’t feel like a parody; it feels like an impostor.

To say the film is overtaxed is an understatement. Regrettably, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever tries to do so many things that it comes across as threadbare and pallid — less a failure of imagination and more of circumstance, time, and narrative constraints.

The film ultimately overloads us with so much amazing nonsense that we sort of give up and give in.

By framing Mamie’s story entirely in the context of her son’s death, Till keeps us on the outside of her transformation from a woman focused on her own life to one who believes, as she says in a speech at the end, that “what happens to any of us anywhere in the world had better be the business of us all.”

We get a reboot that takes no risks and steers away from the uncomfortable sexual jolts of its predecessor. This movie doesn’t raise hell. Honestly, it barely raises heck.

Whenever it’s operating on that edge of uncertainty, the picture works marvelously. But the freewheeling freewheeling-ness can get to you after a while. As it accumulates running time (and characters and plot points), Amsterdam starts to get exhausting when it should perhaps feel liberating or intoxicating.

Smile has such a visually powerful concept that it might take a while before you realize the movie is blowing it.

It’s hard to tell if The Greatest Beer Run Ever is a comedy that wants to be a drama or a drama that wants to be a comedy. Of course, a film can be both. This one, alas, is neither.

The picture’s surface austerity and simplicity have a crystallizing effect, drawing our attention to the coldhearted, transactional nature of this world.

The Woman King is strongest when it immerses itself in the dynamics and the personalities of the Agojie.

The film is smooth, competent, (mostly) well-acted, and merely tedious.

Iñárritu has a flair for the cinematic, for bold and striking images, but he is not an experimental filmmaker. He doesn’t have that kind of deft touch, that willingness to throw ideas at the wall, see what sticks, and — most importantly — move on.

The movie Honk for Jesus: Save Your Soul belongs to Regina Hall. By the end, she has seized it with both hands thanks to a performance that, especially in the film’s second half, is explosive, multi-layered and, unfortunately, much more purposeful than the film itself.

A debut as packed with promise as with underdeveloped ideas.

The appeal of the cast can’t change the fact that its members are playing incredibly soft targets instead of real characters.

In fitting with its main character’s desperate aversion to vulnerability, Vengeance squirms away from any satirical or emotional territory that might genuinely hurt.

Netflix’s previous attempt at an extravagantly priced star-driven action movie, Red Notice, felt like it was written by an AI and performed in front of green screens without ever requiring its stars to be in the same room. The Gray Man at least feels like a middling studio movie that wasn’t worth catching in theaters but that would comfortably fill an afternoon if you stumbled on it airing on cable.

Waititi hasn’t always been the most precise at mixing pathos and humor (Hunt for the Wilderpeople, yes, Jojo Rabbit, no), and the calibrations in Love and Thunder are all off.

It’s too gutless to actually untangle the web of selfishness, Islamophobia, and privilege it weaves around its protagonists.

For all its efforts at wild humor, The Rise of Gru never quite builds up a comic head of steam. It’s filled with laugh lines, but they feel like placeholders — a lot of middling bits about the time period plus a tired assortment of anachronisms.

While the movie feels empty and pointless overall, it’s not without its scattered interesting elements.

Seydoux may exude voluptuous sensuality, and Stewart may be performing a whispery, dystopian take on a sultry librarian, but the film itself has an aloof, clinical quality. What interests it is not the potential of our physical forms for pleasure and revulsion, but their inevitable failure.

Despite all the broken bones, the graphic deaths, and the copious amounts of blood, the driving idea behind Men is not bold enough to feel frightening. Instead, it’s remarkably tepid.

Thyberg clearly set out to create a hysteria-free look at the industry, taking on the challenge of critiquing structural issues without casting judgments on the idea of having sex on camera. Pleasure succeeds at this, though not without a cost. It’s a clear-eyed treatment of porn wedded to a character study that never comes to life.

It’s a lot more like the movie we were worried the first one was going to be: baggy, bloated, and only sporadically engaging.

The film’s litany of details about growing up in the Houston area in the ’60s isn’t enveloping — instead, in its drone of vintage sitcom titles and reminiscences about fecklessly riding in the back of a pickup on the freeway to the beach, it feels, for the first time from Linklater, like a lecture about how things were better back then.

The Lost City isn’t terrible, just aggressively mediocre. It is the kind of movie you put on in the background after coming across it on TBS while you fold laundry on a Sunday afternoon. If anything, The Lost City makes evident not a lack of stars, but a persistent inability on the part of contemporary Hollywood to know what to do with them.

Deep Water, which was written by Zach Helm (of Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium) and Euphoria Svengali Sam Levinson, never creates any sense of internal coherence in its toxic main pair.

Like a lot of movies these days, Fresh feels like it was conceived through its themes first and then written to bolster those ideas, rather than from the perspective of character or story.

Dog feels like it should have been bigger and braver, but by the end, it also feels as if it could have been improved by being much smaller, closing in until it was just a guy and a dog and some of the country’s most beautiful scenery. What else do you really need?

Part of the fun of movies like this is the opportunity for the audience to immerse themselves in the procedural minutiae of these worlds, but there’s precious little of that here. Everything is so empty, so incomplete. Blacklight feels like a synopsis waiting for a story.

For all that it has been positioned as the comeback of the rom-com queen, Marry Me isn’t really a return to form for the genre. Instead, it aims to have things both ways, to have the glamour and the buoyant fantasy and to also be more textured in its treatment of its characters and their relationship.

It has the air of a television-show fragment, and not just because its initial entanglement feels like the stuff of a pilot, something that has to be gotten out of the way to reach the actual premise. It’s also because it introduces characters who feel like they have storylines in the wings.

This new Scream is so determined to be a Scream movie that it forgets the primary, unstated rule established by the original Scream: You can sell anything to us, so long as you make it scary.

While there aren’t any genuine belly laughs in the new movie, there are plenty of modestly likable, chucklesome ones. That ain’t nothing in this terrible, terrible world.