1) BACK TO BLACK – Star Marisa Abela is doing the best she can to elevate Matt Greenhalgh’s derivative screenplay, but she’s a good actor trapped in a project that feels doomed from the outset. Sam Taylor Johnson should be in director jail forever. I would have welcomed some more dry, inoffensive biopic cliches. Instead we have a wildly dishonest, crass, vile film that doesn’t seem to understand why Amy Winehouse was important or why she mattered. This is the cinematic equivalent of kicking the casket at the gravesite.

2) MEGALOPOLIS – Have you ever visited your dementia stricken grandpa in the nursing home and you just let him ramble on and on for two and a half hours about the good old days and how we live in a godless, hedonistic dystopian society today and we’re doing everything wrong, and then he goes on to whine about how his worldview would have led to peace on earth? That’s kind of what watching Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis felt like.

3) BORDERLANDS – Based on a massively successful video game series, but I question who this movie is for, as it’s a fan base that doesn’t leave their homes with any kind of frequency. Video game movie adaptations have a reputation for being terrible, and Borderlands reminds you why for 102 excruciating minutes. This kind of thing should be fun, it should be an easy late-summer good time, and the last thing it should be is boring. But the amount of times I fought the urge to fall asleep during this film should not be understated.

4) THE CROW – A film I saw out of some morbid curiosity and I was kind of surprised to find the film not to be the complete and utter disaster I was expecting, but it’s close! But for the most part it just kind of sits there on the screen, weakly hanging on for dear life. Maybe it needed more style, maybe the romance needed to be more enveloping, maybe it just needed something – anything worthwhile to say. Because the pieces do not add up to anything resembling a movie with any compelling reason to exist.

5) EMILIA PEREZ – A lot of critics (not viewers) are loving this, and I always admire it when a filmmaker is taking a big swing, and trying to do something this deeply original. But that’s all dependent on if the execution of said original idea works. And I feel like everything in Emilia Pèrez is so half realized and so jarring from a tonal perspective, that it was never clear to me why I should care about any of these people, and I left the film having felt nothing. The performers here are doing the best they can with a film that is never doing anything for them. It’s also rather problematic in a number of ways, and as a musical, literally nothing ever works.

6) MADAME WEB – Pretty much an unmitigated disaster.  It does not feel like anyone here is even trying here or particularly wants to be here. It’s almost so bafflingly terrible I kind of want to recommend it, just because it isn’t often we see this legendary a trainwreck. This is like, hands-over-your-face, can’t look away because you’re shocked by the dreadfulness in front of you, but also you want to fall asleep midway through because it’s boring as all hell. It might also just be a bleak representation of studio interference in the media that gets funding to be made in our current era. I’m hoping there is a brighter tomorrow for the female led superhero movie, because as it stands right now, it’s looking pretty grim out there.

7) CIVIL WAR – The messaging in Alex Garland’s Civil War is meant to be ambiguous. It’s clear this is a story about the hell that breaks loose after two political sides can no longer coexist. However, the movie is just vague enough about who’s doing what, that it has the potential to give the worst people in the audience the ability to make it whatever they want it to be, which is especially dangerous in the dystopian nightmare we currently find ourselves in. And since that’s what we have going on here, this film is extremely dangerous and irresponsible.

8) JOKER: FOLIE A DEUX – Todd Phillips seems insistent on burning this franchise to the ground and he has made a $200 million film designed to appeal to no one. And hiscontempt for this material is evident in almost every frame. Having not liked Joker (2019), I was actually excited about this due to the creative swing of making this a musical, and the inspired casting of Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn. But as I sat in the theater watching Folie à Deux unfold, it became increasingly clear…this time, the joke was on me.

9) SUMMER CAMP – Diane Keaton needs to get out of this habit where she makes the same damn movie over and over and over again. Literally. I beg you to tell me the difference between this character and the character she played in Book Club (tolerable, pleasant, borderline good), and the more terrible Mack and Rita, Love, Weddings and Other Disasters and Poms. I’d say Diane Keaton is essentially doing a drag version of the Diane Keaton performance at this point, but that would be offensive to drag queens. Kathy Bates should have whoever made that wig for her shot. Alfre Woodard just seems bored. The audience is too.

10) RED ONE – It’s big, expensive, ugly and dumb. We’ve got some really good actors here basically wasting their time in this CGI-heavy cluster of several ideas that could be fun on their own, but together, don’t amount to much of anything. Red One tries to bridge the gap between the action movie and the Christmas movie, but at over two hours long, it wears out its welcome long before we get to the holly-jolly of it all.

11) Y2K – Despite a good premise – what if the global tech apocalypse they predicted would happen at the dawn of the new millennium actually happened and the machines turn on everyone, etc. But after a few scenes of funny mayhem, the tone keeps shifting out of control and you’re presumably meant to care about these characters, but I never connected to anyone or anything even once.

12) THE GARFIELD MOVIE – The biggest problem this film has is Chris Pratt is the one doing the titular feline’s voice. Pratt is so horribly miscast and sticks out like a sore thumb here. As with his voice performance in The Super Mario Bros. Movie, his line readings are always a little bit off. He has no enthusiasm for what he’s doing, and that should be fine for a deadpan character like Garfield, but Pratt just sounds smug and I think it’s time we stop hiring him for jobs like this. Also the film is never witty or funny or charming. It’s all Mondays and no lasagna.

13) AFRAID – There’s potentially interesting stuff here, but to say this story isn’t fully realized is an understatement. This legitimately feels like an incomplete film, and it’s such a poorly put together piece of work, I could barely believe it. It feels like maybe the story Chris Weitz wanted to tell was muddled by some horror elements that the producers at Blumhouse shoehorned in. Because when this film remembers it has to be a horror movie, anything somewhat interesting that was going on goes right out the window.

14) THE FRONT ROOM – A concept for a juicy, campy horror comedy that in execution just kind of lingers on the screen, waiting to die, much like its antagonist. It’s lifelessly devoid of anything that justifies a trip to the movies, or even a click on a streaming service. Hagsploitation is alive and well in the bargain basement section of the A24 horror library, but The Front Room forgets to be scary, or funny, or worthwhile in any way. Brandy [Norwood] deserves better. And so do we.

15) HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA – CHAPTER 1 – This is excruciatingly boring stuff. You don’t find yourself connected to any particular character. No one is very interesting and there are so many people to keep track of. And none of them matter. The vistas and locations look nice from a cinematography standpoint, but that’s about it here. This is a three hour journey to nowhere that ends on a clip reel of what’s to come. And that movie has been delayed indefinitely because this did so poorly at the box office. Kevin Costner should be ashamed this is what he chose for his big passion project. There’s no spark or life here at all. Nothing is interesting. I will not be back for part two.

16) BOB MARLEY: ONE LOVE – When I saw the introduction from Bob Marley’s son, who is a producer on this film, that showed before the Paramount logo, I suspected we might be in trouble here. And I was right to be concerned. Bob Marley: One Love feels like every moment of it was signed off on by the family of the legendary musician, and the parts we gloss over feel very intentional and calculated. It’s everything I hate about the traditional Hollywood music biopic.

17) THE WATCHERS – Ishana Night Shyamalan’s debut film, and like any of her father’s films, The Watchers starts off with an interesting premise, and just becomes less interesting the more it goes on. You start to not care about the people at the center and you start to get bored. And then when we get to the third act, the script keeps explaining things to you. It wants these moments to be like big reveals, but instead they just feel like the script trying to cover its own tracks, so everything is wrapped up with a bow at the end. Instead, it becomes mind-numbingly stupid by the time we get to the end.

18) IF – John Krasinski’s attempt at a live-action Pixar movie is not whimsical or fun enough for children, and isn’t smart or thoughtful enough for adults. He wanted to make a film that had as much to offer adults as children, and yet it doesn’t really click for either, at least from this viewer’s perspective. And it leads me to wonder who this movie was really for, as it seems to be for almost no one? Maybe it’s for the mentally ill child that exists in every viewer?

19) TAROT – A teen horror flick that thinks the teens that are watching it are idiots. Tarot features every cliche imaginable, and nobody here is interesting. Its jump scares are derivative and expected. And the movie never leans enough into the campy nature that is baked into this stupid premise. I went to a theater for this and I feel like I left with a few hundred brain cells having committed suicide by the end of it.

20) TUESDAY – Sounded like it would be an emotionally powerful story, but this is a giant mess. Tuesday is so heavy handed and so repetitive and so bogged down in metaphor, I feel like the script often loses sight of what it’s trying to say. It’s depressing but it’s silly and weird and never in a way that works. I also don’t really know what we were trying to do here? What was the goal the filmmaker set out for? I’ve seen so many films about grief and death and dying (this reminded me a lot of the much better A Monster Calls) that seem much more focused in what they were going for. This one just left me very cold.