Eternals (2021)

Terrible. Almost the entire runtime was taken up with exposition and flashbacks and changes to status quos that hadn't been established and twists that had zero impact because we'd only just learnt the thing being twisted. I didn't care about a single character, they weren't funny or charming or likeable and most of them had no personality, purely there to flip-flop allegiances to keep the story crawling along. One character takes up a bunch of runtime and is there purely to set up another movie or whatever (I don't know which, please consider that a spoiler for now). It looked quite nice in parts but not particularly striking, and the action was mostly bland CG flubber. Even Ramin Djawadi did a particularly forgettable sub-Howard Shore score.

Rating: Awful.

Ghostbusters Afterlife (2021)

SPOILERS BELOW

An utterly joyless retread of the first film's iconography, it spends most of the film acting like a slice-of-life drama while slowly teaching the characters what ghostbusters are, and has pretty much zero jokes.
It has constant logic bumps, both with established lore (why are little Stay-Puft guys appearing? Why is a Terror Dog eating dog food?) with what characters know or don't know, believe or don't believe (do they not believe in ghosts or are they bizarrely blasé when they see one? Have they never heard of ghostbusters or do they know what full-roaming vapors are and how to work Ecto-1's RC car ramp (??)), and just the basics of conversations not really making sense.
The characters are mostly children, so it doesn't have the adult energy of the first movie, but it also doesn't feel like it's aimed at kids - this isn't a Goonies set in the GB universe.
The three living original cast members get wheeled out for what seems like a couple of hours shooting time, and do a vague approximation of their characters, and it's all a bit depressing. The CG Egon ghost isn't handled as awfully as it could have been, I guess, but it stops the climax of the film for a five-minute maudlin teary-eyed tribute.

That's now three out of three sequels/remakes that ended up a mix of slavishly copying the original and misunderstanding its charms.