‘Ant-Man,’ ‘Cat Person,’ ‘You People’

A blockbuster featuring Adam Driver as a rogue space explorer fighting dinosaurs, directed by the writers of A Quiet Place, and produced by Sam Raimi, should have been a recipe for plenty of outrageous fun. Sadly, it was anything but. A relentless slog through Earth 65 million years ago that plays like a lame sci-fi spin on The Last of Us (Driver escorts a young girl named Koa, played by Ariana Greenblatt, through this hellscape) sans thrills or chills.  

There was a time, not that long ago, when every Marvel movie was greeted with rabid anticipation. That time is over. The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase Five has been one stinker after the next, and it all began with this visually drab jumble of a film that excised all the fun banter that made Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man likable (with Michael Peña’s Luis, who’s sorely missed here) and whose sole purpose is to introduce a villain in Jonathan Majors’ Kang who will now be replaced due to his alleged off-screen penchant for abusive behavior.

Netflix has been desperately trying (and failing) to get an action franchise off the ground, from Red Notice (also starring Gadot) and the Russo Brothers’ anemic The Gray Man to this Mission: Impossible knockoff starring Gal Gadot as an international agent who’s been tasked with guarding “The Heart,” an artificial intelligence system, lest it fall into the wrong hands. Unfortunately, the film has next to nothing to say about AI, while Gadot and Jamie Dornan deliver low-energy paycheck performances.

Not content with reviving the Halloween franchise before driving it into the ground with one poor sequel after another, director David Gordon Green was tasked with rebooting the Exorcist series of films with star Leslie Odom Jr. and the return of Ellen Burstyn’s Chris MacNeil (who I hope was paid handily for this). Unlike his new Halloween series, which offered a moderately exciting first chapter, this one lays an egg from the jump. As our critic David Fear wrote, “You simply won’t believe how The Exorcist: Believer somehow manages to get virtually nothing right about this whole endeavor — not the jump scares or sense of supernatural dread, not the subtext about the world falling apart and thus being primed for otherworldly evil, not the handling of Christian mythology, the concept of God or even the real object of its worship, the I.P. itself.”

Kristen Roupenian’s New Yorker short story about Margot, a 20-year-old college sophomore, who has a regrettable sexual encounter with a 34-year-old man with a loose grasp of the truth and then feels his wrath when she doesn’t respond to his texts, was an impressive encapsulation of the pratfalls of modern-day dating, though its provenance raises some interesting questions. The decision to turn it into a heavy-handed “social thriller,” and expand on its ending with a clichéd man-chases-young-woman-around-the-house horror sequence, was a regrettable one — despite Emilia Jones and Nicholas Braun being well-cast as its leads.

Whose idea was it to remake Ron Shelton’s 1992 cult classic, starring a never-better Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes, into an unfunny mess with rapper Jack Harlow? Harlow’s Jeremy, who has a habit of meditating on the court, is one of the more annoying ballers you’re likely to encounter (he makes Patrick Beverley look charming by comparison), and the entire premise of the film — that Jeremy and Kamal (Sinqua Walls) could team up to bilk people out of their money in pickup games — doesn’t even make sense given that Kamal was once a basketball prodigy and top prospect. Who could possibly mistake him for an average Joe?

Chris Evans and Ana de Armas are too talented, and too appealing, to be stuck in this lifeless action romcom about a D.C. honey farmer (Evans) who meets a lovely woman at the farmer’s market (de Armas) only to discover that she’s a deadly CIA operative known as “The Taxman.” Naturally, they go off on an exciting (and dangerous) mission that involves her repeatedly saving his ass and him learning to man up. Too bad the mission is a colossal bore, filled with mind-numbing action sequences, and these two somehow have zero chemistry together.

This is black-ish creator Kenya Barris’ second appearance in the top five of this list, since he also co-wrote the aforementioned White Men Can’t Jump remake. And this contemporary spin on the Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner interracial-relationship formula somehow manages to produce not a single laugh despite a cast that includes talented comedians Eddie Murphy, Jonah Hill, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Sam Jay, and Rhea Perlman. It’s cut like a sitcom, with grating interstitials; isn’t sure whether or not it’s a romcom (its kiss at the end between Hill and Lauren London was done with CGI for some reason); presents antisemitic conspiracy theories that go unchallenged, like the myth of Jews controlling the slave trade; and even features Andrew Schulz, one of the hackiest stand-up comics going.

There have been a flurry of recent documentaries that attempt to recast so-called “troubled” pop culture figures as victims of a rapacious tabloid culture, from Amy to Framing Britney Spears. Those docs also sought to humanize their subjects. Not so here. Ursula Macfarlane’s Netflix documentary about the trials of the late model and reality star Anna Nicole Smith is nothing more than unsavory voyeurism with a shockingly low opinion of its subject. By focusing solely on her scandals at the expense of her humanity, it’s guilty of the very thing it’s trying to condemn.  

On Jan. 1, 2022, A.A. Milne’s 1926 book Winnie-the-Pooh entered into the public domain, meaning anyone could adapt it into a movie. And that’s precisely what director Rhys Frake-Waterfield did here, shooting this slasher flick about Pooh and Piglet, now a pair of bloodthirsty murderers terrorizing college women (and Christopher Robin), in 10 days on a budget of $100,000. It’s an unimaginative torture-porn shlockfest that comes across like the most banal of student films and a vulturine I.P. play.