A fleet running out of fuel becomes an oddly fitting centerpiece for The Last Jedi. Rey and Kylo Ren’s uneasy connection supplies genuine tension, but the casino detour and stop-start pursuit keep interrupting it. Rian Johnson’s visual imagination survives the muddle; the awkward jokes and prolonged misunderstandings make this galactic crisis feel exhausting for the wrong reasons. | © Lucasfilm
Christian Slater commands a lunar base where meteor-borne spores begin replicating living tissue, which ought to be sufficient grounds for a nasty little creature feature. Stranded instead cycles through familiar contamination scares and dubious decisions without establishing much atmosphere. Its cramped corridors suggest claustrophobia, but spending this long with such interchangeable astronauts mostly produces impatience. | © Minds Eye Entertainment
Apparently, Frankenstein’s creature needed abdominal definition and a supernatural faction war. Aaron Eckhart’s Adam gets caught between demons and gargoyles in I, Frankenstein, an action fantasy that buries its potentially interesting outsider beneath mythology briefings. Immortality, resurrection, and humanity become background noise while weightless digital creatures battle across another gloomy city. Even eternal life should offer better evening entertainment. | © Lakeshore Entertainment
Biblical prophecy gets a software upgrade in The Omega Code, with Michael York’s powerful public figure exploiting hidden scripture to advance his sinister ambitions. The setup could support a feverish conspiracy thriller, but suspense keeps giving way to explanations. Casper Van Dien spends much of the adventure catching up with revelations that the audience has little trouble anticipating. | © Gener8Xion Entertainment
Humanity’s first contact with aliens becomes an excuse to consider wiping them out in Cosmic Sin. That moral ugliness might have powered an unsettling military thriller; instead, Bruce Willis and Frank Grillo are stranded amid bulky armor, muddy action, and cumbersome exposition. An interstellar conflict somehow feels smaller than the average warehouse shootout, despite all the solemn talk about extinction. | © 308 Enterprises
Explaining the ruined Norwegian outpost from John Carpenter’s The Thing was always a risky assignment. This prequel carefully connects the evidence but struggles to recreate the suspicion behind it, favoring exposed monsters and frantic attacks. Mary Elizabeth Winstead provides a capable lead, yet the extensive digital creature work leaves the horror feeling curiously less tangible than its predecessor’s. | © Universal Pictures
Empty packages arrive at a programmer’s apartment, and One Point O spends its running time making everything around them increasingly unpleasant. Jeremy Sisto fits this sickly world of surveillance, consumer manipulation, and suspicious neighbors. The trouble is dramatic movement: cryptic encounters accumulate faster than meaningful developments, leaving an intriguing corporate nightmare trapped inside a mystery that keeps stalling. | © Armada Pictures
Rebecca Hall gives Transcendence an emotional question worth pursuing: would you recognize your partner after uploading his consciousness into a computer? Unfortunately, Johnny Depp’s digital afterlife expands into a lumbering technological siege. Nanotechnology supplies increasingly extravagant possibilities while the characters debate them in solemn, lifeless exchanges. The marriage is compelling material; the film keeps wandering away from it. | © Alcon Entertainment
A severed arm crawling around a space station should be a reliable attention-grabber. In The Cloverfield Paradox, it becomes another unexplained oddity in a succession of emergencies caused by a particle-accelerator experiment. Gugu Mbatha-Raw brings feeling to the chaos, but the arbitrary hazards make suspense difficult: when apparently anything can happen, anticipating danger becomes a rather pointless exercise. | © Bad Robot Productions
The extended McDonald’s dance sequence in Mac and Me is practically a declaration of commercial intent. Around it sits an alien friendship story that borrows heavily from E.T. without finding comparable warmth. Young wheelchair user Eric deserves a better adventure than this procession of rubbery extraterrestrials, sugary refreshments, and peril staged with an alarming disregard for believable human reactions. | © Mac and Me Joint Venture
Buying somebody else’s memories should feel dangerous, seductive, and strange. In Total Recall, it mostly gives Colin Farrell a reason to run through immaculate futuristic scenery while Kate Beckinsale pursues him. Len Wiseman stages plenty of movement, but the remake’s polished surfaces leave little room for the grotesque humor or slippery sense of identity that made the premise so enticing. | © Columbia Pictures
Mark Wahlberg attempting diplomacy with a plastic plant neatly captures the tonal problem in The Happening. M. Night Shyamalan begins with disturbing images of mass death, then asks stiff dialogue and rustling vegetation to sustain the dread. The ecological premise has potential, but the performances make ordinary conversations feel stranger than the catastrophe supposedly threatening the entire cast. | © 20th Century Fox
Eddie Murphy owns a lunar nightclub that gangsters want to buy, giving The Adventures of Pluto Nash a serviceable crime-comedy setup. Then the jokes have to happen. Elaborate sets and a robot bodyguard cannot compensate for scenes that shuffle toward punchlines without reaching them. Murphy’s usual verbal electricity barely flickers in a future that makes organized crime seem painfully routine. | © Castle Rock Entertainment
Ray Bradbury made a crushed butterfly terrifying through its consequences. A Sound of Thunder expands that elegant idea into waves of evolutionary disruption, sending Edward Burns through a city increasingly populated by unconvincing digital hazards. The suspense gets buried beneath explanations and creature attacks, while Ben Kingsley’s flamboyant safari entrepreneur suggests a much livelier film happening just offscreen. | © Franchise Pictures
Digitally moving a baby’s mouth does not automatically create a joke, a distinction Baby Geniuses never quite grasps. Kathleen Turner and Christopher Lloyd play researchers investigating infant intelligence, while a separated-twins plot supplies opportunities for miniature mischief. The adult voices and manipulated faces make the children oddly unsettling, and the relentless slapstick offers little relief from the central visual gimmick. | © TriStar Pictures
For a while, Downsizing has a wonderfully nasty proposition: shrink yourself, and your modest savings can buy a mansion. Matt Damon’s leap into miniature luxury opens up questions about class and consumption that the film soon scatters across several competing stories. Hong Chau supplies much-needed personality, but the shift toward extinction anxiety leaves the original social satire frustratingly underdeveloped. | © Paramount Pictures
Roller-skating warrior nuns patrol the post-apocalypse in Roller Blade, a premise with enough nonsense to fuel an entire video-store shelf. Donald G. Jackson surrounds them with bargain-basement villains, awkward combat, and exploitation detours that repeatedly stall the adventure. The homemade weirdness has novelty value, but watching people wobble through this wasteland eventually becomes less entertaining than describing it. | © New World Pictures
A small plane and a Commodore 64 provide the time-travel hardware in Time Chasers, which certainly earns points for resourcefulness. Trouble starts when its inventor trusts a corporation with the discovery. Flat performances and conspicuously ordinary locations undermine the ensuing adventure, while the screenplay struggles to make its escalating timeline complications feel like anything beyond additional errands. | © Edgewood Studios
Bring two magnificent movie monsters together, then make their fights almost impossible to see. Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem buries its Colorado invasion beneath murky photography and teen-drama filler, squandering the appeal of its central matchup. The maternity-ward sequence pushes toward outright nastiness, but cruelty cannot substitute for tension when the human characters barely register before becoming potential casualties. | © 20th Century Fox
The Moon is falling, and somehow the family problems still require equal billing. Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall surrounds its enormous catastrophe with strained relationships, familiar redemption beats, and exposition that becomes increasingly difficult to deliver with a straight face. Its lunar secrets are gloriously ridiculous on paper; the long stretches between revelations make the surrounding destruction feel more dutiful than exhilarating. | © Centropolis Entertainment
Under layers of alien makeup, John Travolta plays humanity’s oppressor with the subtlety of a pantomime landlord. Battlefield Earth surrounds his performance with relentless tilted framing and a rebellion that turns primitive survivors into combat pilots with absurd efficiency. Its alien occupation depends on conquerors so spectacularly incompetent that the bigger mystery is how they managed to win initially. | © Franchise Pictures
Having the games’ creator direct Wing Commander sounds reassuring until Chris Roberts’ space combat starts resembling an awkward submarine movie. Freddie Prinze Jr. and Matthew Lillard supply youthful enthusiasm, but the solemn military dialogue and thin relationships give them little support. The Kilrathi menace never acquires much presence, leaving humanity’s survival dependent on dogfights with surprisingly little urgency. | © Digital Anvil
The Rapture empties seats aboard Nicolas Cage’s passenger jet, and Left Behind turns that extraordinary event into a sluggish emergency-landing drama. Panic in the cabin alternates with chaos on the ground, yet neither develops convincing momentum. Cage’s unusually restrained performance cannot rescue the flat dialogue or the drawn-out realization of something the audience understands well ahead of the characters. | © Stoney Lake Entertainment
Dinosaurs finally roam the planet, so Jurassic World Dominion devotes a major storyline to genetically engineered locusts. Reuniting Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum offers an immediate nostalgic lift, but the crowded plotting soon turns everyone into exposition couriers. Escapes and familiar callbacks keep arriving until creatures that once inspired awe begin to feel like obstacles on a scheduled tour. | © Universal Pictures
A prince searching for medicine, an android discovering independence, and rival wasteland tyrants should give Future World plenty to work with. James Franco and Bruce Thierry Cheung instead assemble a dusty succession of threats, chases, and exploitation clichés. Milla Jovovich contributes some manic energy, but the film never develops a world interesting enough to justify another trip across its desert. | © AMBI Group
Accepting time travel is easy. Accepting that a spaceship’s entire crew would make the same idiotic decision takes more effort. The worst science fiction movies test that patience with mangled science, expensive ugliness, and dialogue no human should have to deliver. A handful are hilarious accidents; others make a two-hour runtime feel like a sentence in cryosleep.
