Adrian Horton

The mood is light, the stunts impressive and, mercifully, the film is not nearly as cheap-looking nor dull as Netflix brethren such as The Man from Toronto or Lift.

That Splitsville stays on track to the finish is mostly credit to chemistry – that ineffable, unpredictable thing between two, or three, or maybe four people, with just enough variation for each relationship here. Splitsville may take shots at the loose-boundaried, but they’re laced with truth: partnered or single, open or closed, we’re all working with the same raw material.

It is neither suspenseful nor thrilling, but something else: a movie so confidently ridiculous, so stylishly absurd and so self-aware of its mandate for fun that you can’t help but enjoy it, reasonable wariness – and all reason, really – be damned.

It may not always land and gets lost in itself on the way there, but Jackson has crafted a beautiful experiment indicative of ambitious vision, one whose magic outweighs its weaknesses.

This specific concoction of absurdism, sentimentality, childish humor and dark punchlines may have stayed off-key for me, but seemed to strike a chord with others, at least judging from the many guffaws at the screening I attended.

At worst, as often is the case with the finished product, it’s so focused on recapturing long past, hazily remembered magic as to be cringe-inducing.

By large, this beastly feature is exactly what you would expect it to be: fashioning itself different but in fact much like the others. A unicorn, this is not.

It squanders the talents of its star, especially for this particular brand of unsettling, on a bizarrely paced script that adds up to nothing.

British actor/writer Nathaniel Martello-White’s directorial debut nudges at some uncomfortable fault lines of race and class, but tends to over-index unearned suspense for character development or insight.

It’s the same feeling, really, as watching a bunch of straight TikToks. While Rae offers flashes of promise, especially when she pops her genuinely winning smile, she doesn’t make the case for TikTok-to-film-stardom here. The chemistry between her and Buchanan is stilted, at best.

There are kernels of something interesting here: an interracial best friendship and business partnership in today’s America, or navigating best friendship on the cusp of middle age, or maintaining the ethics of your business and passion under the growth mandate of capitalism. It would take thought, and jokes constructed with a motivation other than how to include the word coochie. It would take an understanding that women want to see sex and their bodies talked about filthily on screen, but are smart enough to know that’s not always enough.

The movie asks the audience to not look at two elephants in the room, and unfortunately, no amount of soaring music can relieve that heavy a burden.

Regretting You seems unsure of its own melodrama, and careens between what should be tear-jerking moments of unfathomable grief and too-cutesy romcom fluff like a teen learning stick-shift.

The ambition of Horse Girl ultimately gets the better of it, turning what could be a dark but insightful depiction on signs missed in a mental health crisis into an agreement on one’s madness – a game of what’s real, and what’s not, that feels unsettling to play.

The gimmicks are unfunny, the romance inoffensive, the happy-ever-after straightforward. For all its waxing poetic on the specific luxury of champagne, no one is pretending this is anything other than a mass market item; the things to hate are also the things to like. One might call a critic’s feelings about it a champagne problem.

There are pieces of Luckiest Girl Alive that seem interested in a life splintered by trauma, in the relief of unburdening, the hunger for certainty over what happened, the thrill of playing on cultural expectations for women. But the story it ultimately tells is an empty, self-serving fantasy.

Kinda Pregnant finds its groove in the more grounded and honest. The tiptoeing around big changes in one’s best friendship, the tension between joy and dread, the role of a friend when another is going through something irrevocable all get mentions that hint at something sharper and stickier. But what texture exists gets steamrolled by the loud and extreme.

As a cinema experience, The Official Release Party of a Showgirl at least mirrors the album it celebrates – rote, tinnily light, with the lazy execution and first-draft quality of someone up against a deadline. Further evidence of what critic Spencer Kornhaber has termed Swift’s burnout era.

Written by Colby Day, In the Blink of an Eye attempts no less than the sweep of life from big bang to unknown verdant planets, with the emotional depth of a tide pool and the complexity of a cave painting.

The initially alluring casualness of Ohs’s project fades quickly into a mildly irksome shallowness – lots of unearned and unconvincing staring, docile conversations, should-be evocative images that do not evoke.

It struggles to feel at all like a genuine story.

In making the worst stereotypes of America’s political poles as extreme as possible, and America’s divide as literal and violent as possible, The Hunt feigns a viewpoint rather than actually having one. It takes aim at everyone, redeeming no one. Which feels circular, and queasy, and right back where we started: some empty talk about a divided nation, and a film thats probably not worth this much conversation.

McConaughey may be a capable driver, but this is an unwieldy vehicle – oversized, overlong and altogether way too many parts to run smoothly.

For all the grand gestures of musical theater, there’s an odd flatness to Theater Camp, a half-hearted and lackluster comedy from a group of Hollywood friends set at a summer performing arts community.

Love Again, by ceding some space to the Queen of Feelings, has moments that play. I can’t say it was good, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it.

There’s bits of misplaced humor, a firm sense of place and promising performances, but frustratingly little magic to be found here.

There are moments in Along for the Ride . . . where the magic that cements a teen film seems within reach. For a few seconds here or there, you can feel it. The rest of it just passes by like the tide.

The 99-minute film is long on yelling and guffaws, short on punchlines.

Nothing is really offensive or incompetent, but it never rises to the level of funny or interesting, either.

Love in the Villa is feel-good, not try-hard. Nothing ever rises to the level of unwatchable, but nothing has any distinctive staying power, either – you may catch the whiff of romance here and there, like passing by a bakery storefront, which constitute the most alluring shots of the movie.

The younger Day-Lewis shows promise as a film-maker – Anemone certainly looks serious, the correct scowls and swirling skies and wordless, eerie montages to suggest weighty themes, big emotions and ominous suspense. The tools to back up that style with emotional punches that land like the real ones of the brothers – best believe they tussle it out, because of course – are not yet refined, but in this father-son duo, at least, I have faith.

Ella McCay is, first and foremost, a mess – a clunky collection of incoherent characters and confounding plot that seem to defy basic story logic at every turn, and not in a surprising or intriguing way.

Issa Rae and Lakeith Stanfield can’t save this dreary Valentine’s drama that lacks fizzle and emotional stakes.

As hard as Cuoco and Davidson try at chemistry – and Cuoco, at least, seems to be really trying – this umpteenth spin on the Groundhog Day time loop is more irksome than endearing, cutesy than actually cute, a downward spiral of uncomfortably performed neuroticism that devolves into a borderline indefensible ending.

Those seeking a feelgood romcom should keep looking.

Little Wing is overall an odd, unaffecting mess, other than, again, the pigeons, who look majestic on camera.

There are a few laughs but, at nearly two hours, Ricky Stanicky far outstays its welcome.

Where the Crawdads Sing never really had an interest in complications, or hardship, or racism as anything beyond wallpaper for its central nature girl fantasy of self-reliance. It would rather stay above the fray, gliding prettily along the marsh without actually getting dirty.

Where Godmothered should coast, it stumbles – swerving between unwieldy earnestness to something edgier and settling on something duller than it should be.

Dosunmu, an established music video director, assembles beautiful shots of longing, pain, yearning, closeness and jealousy between Beauty and girlfriend Jazz (Aleyse Shannon). But strung together by Waithe’s too-spare script, they feel isolated and go nowhere.

A Different Man is a slog, made worse by the fact that it seems to mistake darkness for insight.

It’s a visually verdant but emotionally flat film whose confusing friction between two miscast leads frustrates rather than engrosses.

Despite the action-comedy bona fides of director Paul Feig, helmer of the far more entertaining Bridesmaids and Spy, and the comedic chops of Awkwafina and John Cena, Jackpot! is an unsteady balance of dark and light, a tinny and discordant mishmash of stunts, ridiculous characters, ludicrous stakes and attempts at zeitgeist.

Though the two leads are capably charming – or, in the case of Tiffin, baseline attractive as a nice hometown guy not given much to do – the movie still has the imprint of a tech company’s content assembly line: cheaply made, over-lit, bumpily paced, ludicrously dialed-up characters without much comic payoff.

Chasing Summer at least outruns the charge of being boring, though at what cost.

This awkward, misjudged, occasionally sexy film has seeds of a radical, fresh story and flashes of directorial brilliance but is hobbled throughout by the confounding decision to write her 26-year-old main character as either insensitively neuro-divergent or more sheltered child than adult.

The central romance here is, on paper, a love for the ages, a story of all-consuming passion. It’s not quite so in practice.

The Chernins are savvy enough to not wrap the whole thing in a neat “just be yourself” bow in the end, but Incoming could have worn a little more of its heart on its sleeve.

The two leads do their best here, but even they cannot scrounge enough feeling out of this desolate sci-fi.

The low stakes of the camp drama and the soundtrack’s indistinguishably familiar pop (adaptations of contemporary Christian hits, plus four original songs) aim for easy, catchy, comfortable fun – a breezy intention which casts some of the script’s insensitive moments in even harsher light.

What sweetness and charm Prom Dates does muster is thanks to Lester alone, whose comic timing is sharp and whose performance of a girl growing comfortable in her sexuality over one crazy night actually conjures the sense of a real person.

It’s a weird facsimile of a movie – plot with no momentum, plenty of character facts without substance, a pastiche of better movie moments and classic romcom notes. Even for lowered expectations or couch-day fluff, this is a skip.

Another film might have mined Steinem’s remarkable life for its complications and contradictions, but The Glorias settles for slapdash iconography.

Though it supposedly argues against human beings turned into synthetic quasi-droids, Uglies feels like just another throwaway product.