A.A. Dowd

Here, the Texas writer-director revels in the opportunity to create image after image worthy of immortalization: The Green Knight is his most purely striking achievement, offering sprawling forests bathed in ghostly orange light and overhead shots that suggest the surveying eye of a curious god.

The film has flashes of clumsiness that should be familiar to those who have stepped before into the Twilight Zone of its maker’s imagination. But Old is also, in its most intense moments, one of his most genuinely disturbing visions: a horror movie about that most universal of horrors, inescapable mortality.

1666 offers about the best you could expect from it: a modestly rewarding resolution, like a finale that makes you glad you finished up the season but not convinced you’ll tune in for the next one.

Maybe the rabbit and his studio both took a wrong turn at Albuquerque. Space Jam: A New Legacy takes almost nothing but wrong turns, all leading to a glittering CGI trash heap of cameos, pat life lessons, and stale internet catchphrases. Its first misstep: keeping Bugs, Daffy, and the rest of the gang on the bench for about as long as it would take the audience to watch three and a half Merrie Melodies.

The kills come and go with a perfunctory swiftness that suggests a condescension to the material, not a genuine affection for it. That’s why the gore feels like scant reward: There’s plenty of blood but no heart put into pumping it.

1994 channels that legacy of give and take, between teen horror of the page and screen, into a polished nostalgia object of secondhand thrills, a throwback to a throwback.

For all the work this spinoff puts into generating a traumatic origin story for its moonlighting superhero, it would be a stretch to say that either Johansson or the filmmakers finally find the real Romanoff—or even that they much deepen the various versions of her we’ve met already.

At least Ruben maintains his comic instincts and crack timing throughout. The film possesses a strong touch of Edgar Wright in how it manages both the humor and horror of its conceit.

Even when the story takes on biblical overtones, the melodrama never blossoms. And in terms of suspense, Gaia doesn’t so much tighten the screws as endlessly turn them in the wrong direction.

The generous read on Luca is that it has the sweet simplicity of a fairy tale, something that tired kids and the exhausted parents reading to them could follow even while on the verge of slumber. Less euphemistically, this is an exceptionally mild addition to the Pixar canon, pleasant but nearly as shallow as a bathtub.

What Infinite fatally lacks is personality. It’s all sci-fi table setting all the time, racing through introductions and plot points at a mercenary pace, its wheel manned by a star whose default mode for this kind of movie is hunky frowning.

What the set pieces have in common with everything else in this dunderheaded, insultingly mechanical franchise hopeful is the overwhelming feeling that everyone involved said “good enough” at every turn. It’s savvy only in the way it lowers the standards for this kind of thing, assuring that any future sequels that give half an ass instead of barely a quarter of one will prompt more enthusiasm, or at least relief.

The Amusement Park passes in a deranged blur; it’s a glorified PSA made with the means (and in the spirit of) antagonistic outsider art.

The problem here isn’t the dramatic liberties, though. It’s that they’re much less, well, dramatic than the real events the film leaves curiously off screen: the sensational trial of one Arne Johnson, who made history (and headlines) by insisting in court that he was under demonic influence when he stabbed his landlord to death.

At just 97 minutes (only a hair longer than the first Quiet Place), his sequel feels pared down to a fault, with no room to further flesh out this world or its occupants. As a piece of storytelling, it’s skimpy and vaguely unsatisfying. As a series of fight, flight, or bite-your-tongue set pieces, it delivers.

Agreeably straightforward, Those Who Wish Me Dead is also thin as kindling: It threatens to disperse into embers as you watch it. And there are limits to its ruthless economy. For as unsentimental as Sheridan’s approach looks from a distance, everything with Jolie’s anguished Hannah feels hoary and even a touch maudlin.

In a way, this B-movie on an A budget gets closer to the values of George Romero, the godfather of zombie cinema, than Snyder’s actual, hyper-adrenalized remake of Romero’s masterpiece.

The film’s lone value may be setting up the perfect answer to that “improve a movie with one letter” challenge: Add an indefinite article to the front of its title, and you’re left with one of the great films of the new millennium—and, incidentally, a much more unnerving portrait of a marriage on the rocks.

It’s an ode to the way that even impermanent relationships can be profoundly meaningful.

In The Earth feeds the indiscriminate appetites of gorehounds and bong-rippers alike. Everyone else may find it as ghastly boring as the violence is just plain ghastly.

Maybe the film’s escalating conflict would be more exciting if the characters themselves (played by the likes of Tye Sheridan and Lily-Rose Depp, among an ensemble of fellow twentysomething model types) weren’t such blank-eyed nothings.

This is the flimsiest of hokum, possessing all the gravity of a bible salesman hocking his wares outside the subway.

Make no mistake, this is pure caveman bullshit. Yet it’s caveman bullshit made with style and wit, qualities that extend from its screenplay to its performances to its staging.

The reality is that Justice League’s problems go beyond who was behind the camera. The villain is still generic and silly-looking. The plot is still assemble-the-team boilerplate, hinging on the hunt for glowing MacGuffins with a goofy name.

As the film begins to reveal its easily guessed secrets, it also doubles as a resonant tale of misogyny in the face of exposure: an allegory about how male rage grows directly out of male insecurity and is fortified by religious zealotry. Miss those themes announced like thoughts put into words, and there’s still the way Liman and his writers play their Philip K. Dick-worthy concept for screwball comedy and suspense.

This is a film with nothing new to say about love, war, trauma, addiction, crime, or America. It blows through these topics on a bender of hyper-stylization, indifferently twisting its true story into the shape of other, better movies.

Willy’s Wonderland is a jokey elevator pitch in search of a movie. It’s the kind of genre junk—a low-rent, one-gag cartoon slasher—whose supposed gonzo appeal begins and ends with a description of its premise.

The Map Of Tiny Perfect Things wouldn’t fall anywhere near the bottom of a time-loop power ranking—it’s a divertingly fizzy bit of PG-13 puppy love. But its characters are basically stick figures of unblemished youth, pretty virtuous from the very start, and so their astrophysical dilemma never accumulates any dramatic or comedic urgency.