One of the big problems with Paradox is that 85 percent of the film is explanation, leaving very little time for character development.

| Mar 5, 2018

There are humanist bits and chunks of "Interstellar" and "Arrival," though in order to set up another chapter of this loosely assembled saga of woe, "The Cloverfield Paradox" eventually, dutifully gets around to a nonhuman adversary in close-up.

| Feb 9, 2018

Its twists feel routine, its narrative spine limp and its conclusion especially rushed.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Feb 9, 2018

The fastest turnaround from must-see event to disappointing dud in history.

| Original Score: C- | Feb 9, 2018

I'm still not sure what the paradox of the title is. Perhaps it refers to the impossibility of offloading a film to Netflix at the 11th hour, as Paramount has done, and still expecting it to be a hit.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 9, 2018

Yet as obnoxiously convoluted and overwrought as everything is, somehow [director Julius] Onah manages to still present things in a way that's fascinating no matter how pointlessly bizarre much of what is transpiring undeniably is.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 9, 2018

The story reaches a critical mass of muddled implausibility when an already suspicious protagonist is revealed to be homicidally untrustworthy and the Cloverfield beastie gets a moment in the sun.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 8, 2018

Somewhere along the development trail, someone in charge should have said: Arm! Get me a rewrite, arm!

| Original Score: 2/4 | Feb 7, 2018

Paradox is a dramatically indecisive, tonally convoluted, poorly written mess.

| Feb 7, 2018

Ten years and three films deep, the loose trilogy is a case study in marketing, a portrait of how the noise around a franchise starts to matter more than the movies that form the franchise.

| Original Score: C- | Feb 7, 2018

Somewhere in "The Cloverfield Paradox" is an excellent sci-fi thriller but one that's in desperate need of sharpening. It's no disaster, like Netflix's recent "Bright," but it tries too hard to give something to everyone and ends of unsatisfying...

| Original Score: 2/4 | Feb 6, 2018

In the end, the plot is disappointingly simple. The terrors of the first two movies are explained away in a summary flourish, and their mysteries neutralized. The script is not good.

| Feb 6, 2018

The characters are all painfully sincere - but they're also generic, bland, and barely developed. When they inevitably start dying, there's no sense of loss, either for the audience or the crew.

| Feb 6, 2018

Here's what it looks like when a routine bad movie goes off its rocker.

| Feb 6, 2018

Much has been made over the years about Abrams' "mystery box," a storytelling model of pure tease. In the case of The Cloverfield Paradox, it's just a fancy word for "junk drawer."

| Original Score: C+ | Feb 6, 2018

Director Julius Onah's film strands its solid cast in the vacuum of space with that most terrifying of monsters -- an utterly convoluted script -- producing a few tense moments but a general takeaway that's much closer to puzzling than profound.

| Feb 5, 2018

The Cloverfield Paradox tries to tie into its 2008 forebear in a much more literal sense, and the result feels spectacularly inept.

| Feb 5, 2018

It's worth remembering that the Cloverfield movies were only able to successfully disrupt conventional distribution methods because they're good. The best thing you can say about this one is that it's free with your Netflix subscription.

| Original Score: D | Feb 5, 2018

It's a horror movie one moment, a comedy the next, as if Netflix were streaming several different titles at once.

| Original Score: C+ | Feb 5, 2018

What excitement this movie is able to muster soon gives way to the startling realization that virtually none of its twists, for all their dimension-hopping audacity, have been coherently or intelligently thought through.

| Feb 5, 2018