Alan Ng

There are many flaws in Animal Farm, but its message is what I’m recommending the film for. Look, it will make great dinner conversation with your toddlers.

If you’re going in hoping for something the whole family can genuinely connect with on a deeper level, you’ll be disappointed. It’s a kids’ movie, plain and simple, and there’d be no way I’d see this if I didn’t have kids.

In the end, the film and its storytelling is meh.

Let’s be real: the only reason to see a Jason Statham movie is for all that juicy action. Fist fights, knife fights, gunplay, machine-gun mayhem, explosions… all in this game of cat-and-mouse.

Greenland 2: Migration is all mind-numbing action with nothing to say. If you’re a fan of Gerard Butler or Morena Baccarin, you will probably have fun with this one. Otherwise, it’s a skip.

The film has good action set pieces, but without a story that has something to say or connects with audiences beyond the surface, it’s just another standard sci-fi action film.

With this cast, the film should have been a knockout. Instead, it feels bogged down, heavy, and way too concerned with making statements instead of just being entertaining.

The biggest downfall of Relay is the ending.

Ultimately, Hurry Up Tomorrow is an example of style over substance. Its visuals try to shock and awe while leaving its narrative a confusing mess.

The film’s repetitive themes and lack of emotional payoff leave it feeling more like a beautifully acted therapy session than a fully satisfying story.

While Bong Joon Ho delivers his signature visual flair and Robert Pattinson fully commits to the existential dread of his endlessly disposable character, the film struggles to keep its high-concept ideas fresh past the first act.

Companion takes a stab (literally) at sci-fi horror with an interesting idea, but making a robot the emotional center of the film is a misfire.

Detective Chinatown 1900 tries to be a high-energy action comedy but gets tangled in a web of subplots, leaving little room for the buddy-cop fun it teases.

It features likable characters, and though it may not offend or make you laugh, it ultimately leaves you smiling. However, you can’t help but feel a sense of loss regarding the potential the film and its story had to be truly great.

While the setup is intriguing, the film quickly loses steam, becoming a muddled chase interspersed with concert footage.

A Quiet Place: Day One failed to capture what we loved about the original films and instead decided to focus too much of its time on a rollercoaster ride of an alien invasion. Fun is fun, but without proper character development, Day One is more fast food than a hardy meal.

The standout star here is Cailey Fleming as Bea.

Great villains and silly heroes make a move that ultimately falls flat.

It’s a photo-realistic computer-animated movie. The animation of Kong, Godzilla, and the other Kongs is mediocre at best. The backgrounds should look photo-realistic, but they don’t. I’d rather watch dudes in suits duke it out over a cardboard city than watch this cartoon mess again.

Saltburn just goes too far, and its startling images shocked me out of the story altogether.

In the end, The Marvel is a superhero movie clearly made and produced by people who have never read a Marvel comic book but read Archie instead. It feels like it was made for teen girls and not for actual comic book fans.

It just feels like a movie that was made because Cena and Brie agreed to star in it.

I give Killers of the Flower Moon a mild recommendation. It’s too long and predictable. The saving grace is its performance across the board.

There’s just no nuance here. Good is good. Evil is evil.

I’d recommend Retribution if the weather is too hot and you want to spend a few hours in air conditioning. Otherwise, it’s a pass.

Blue Beetle is worth seeing, but it has many missed opportunities.

The only thing wrong with Transformers: Rise of the Beast is that it’s bland and boring.

Could this version of The Little Mermaid stand alone if the original didn’t exist? Possibly. Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s songs and story structure remain intact and are its only salvation. But, again, why watch the live-action remake when the original is so much better and suited more for kids?

Knights of the Zodiac is a good production in terms of its action and cast. But when one focuses so much on the fantasy-action set-pieces, having a soulless story makes all efforts fall flat.

Renfield is a good movie that squanders its potential to be great.

Operation Fortune is an action movie. So, how are the fisticuffs and shootouts? They couldn’t be any blander. Yes, there is a lot of action, but I don’t remember anything cool until the end. It’s your standard gunplay, hand-to-hand combat, and car and motorcycle chases.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is fast-food when audiences demanded a five-course meal.

This feels like a high-budget television drama. Let’s face it, Jackman, Dern, and Kirby can elevate pedestrian dialogue, but they deserve higher quality work for their talent.

After Yang is a good-looking movie, especially for one that’s mostly talking and conversations, the acting is good — an easy feat for seasoned actor Colin Farrell and Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja is adorable as hell. But unfortunately, it misses its storytelling potential by focusing too much of our attention on the wrong story elements.

The highlight of Snake Eyes is the action.

Though I may not have connected with the final product as intended, if the idea of a psychological thriller about pregnancy appeals to you, then the movie might be your cup of tea.

As a movie, I thought Jon M. Chu did an incredible job bringing In The Heights to cinematic life. There’s nothing wrong with the actual production or cast. It’s all great, but my issue is with the source material, specifically the songs.

Ultimately, Vanquish falls into the cliché of typical action films, where the focus is on the action, and the story is a way to string the action together

I’m Not In Love is competently made. Despite the screenwriting-as-therapy formula, it’s entertaining and engaging to watch.

The only reason to see this film is if you’re a fan of any of the actors. Everyone is good, but ultimately, the story will let you down.

There’s nothing new and nothing we haven’t seen, which means every single moment and plot twist is familiar and predictable.

In the end, my question is whether Never Rarely Sometimes Always is meant to be just a story or offer something political to say in the great abortion debate. I’m certain the film exists to highlight the stories of young women forced to travel across state lines for abortions. Either way, there’s not enough of either to make it a compelling movie in the end.

I’m being overly harsh with Climate of the Hunter because it was frustrating to watch. I had to work hard to follow the story and figure out what was really happening between the characters and I find myself replaying various scenes to see what I missed.

While the film boasts an all Chinese cast, the story, culturally, is pretty tame.

Artemis Fowl is not a horrible film, but it had the potential to succeed, yet falls flat in the end.

In any biography/drama, the key is to make audiences believe this is the real person from history. Capone just never gets there. That could be Al Capone, but nothing in the film makes me believe it’s him, nor emotionally connect with him. Capone wastes a lot of good talent, and it’s a shame.

The messaging in Greed does nothing but preach to the choir and keeps us firmly divided in a time where reaching across the aisle would do a helluva lotta good.

There were many aspects from a filmmaking and storytelling process that I found admirable, but I just can’t see myself recommending it. I know all too well that my criticisms have everything to do with the very core of J.M. Barrie’s original story and Pan mythology itself.

As unoriginal and awkward as Like a Boss is, Byrne and Haddish do everything in their power to elevate the mundane script to something worth viewing.

Inherit The Viper had the potential to be an exciting thriller with dramatic family elements. Instead, its characters fall flat as if the actors were not allowed or unwilling to flesh out their characters more.

Aside from Hank’s brilliant performance as Fred Rogers, I also liked the style of storytelling. The movie from start to finish feels like an actual Mr. Rogers episode with its simple three-man jazz piano score and its slow, deliberate pace. The overall story is good, sweet, but predictable.

There’s a lot of silliness that will warm the hearts of Rom-Com fans. The silliness at least is high brow with Paul Feig at the helm and Emma Thompson part of the writing team.

Key, Leguizamo, Greer, and Haysbert actually look like their having a good time and investing their acting talent in this silly story without flinching. No one’s phoning it in. John Cena is just a little too cartoony in his straight-laced character and somehow manages to make “normal” feel over-the-top.

The real problem with the film is tone and pace.

The story is unique, and the end revelations are clever but fall short of mind-blowing (which is the bar). Lathrop Walker carries the film from beginning to end. He’s exciting and likable. He excels at his stunt work and provides the empathy we need for his character to carry us to the finish line.

The Outsider puts a spin on the western drama but quickly falls back into the conventional tropes of the genre. It best to approach The Outsider knowing that its primary focus is on the story and not action.

Overall, Cold Blood just falls flat. Secrets should be shocking, unpredictable, and strongly impact the story. Here they’re predictable and lacks cleverness in discovering everyone’s true identities and motives.

UglyDolls is good for the kids and a great way to occupy their attention for almost 90 minutes. For the adults, it’s just another uninspired children’s film to hold us over until the next one comes along.

While having all the key elements of a mystery, director Stacie Passon’s film is more a character study focusing on themes of the safety of sisterhood and self-imposed alienation.

In these divided times, films centering on political issues either make an earnest attempt to persuade the other side to consider its point of view or play to its political allies and demonize its enemies. The Public does the latter, and the result is to further widen the divide of political discourse with self-righteous finger-pointing.

Performances alone cannot save an uninspired script. The story is not bad per se, but it’s not original or inspired and therefore Making Babies wallows in mediocrity, when it needed to make a choice between going for real laughs or have something profound to say about having children to make the journey worth taking.

The problem with Stray is that it doesn’t ever connect with the audience, with the exception of Murphy’s back story. The mystery just unfolds, and we as the audience never engage in the mental exercise of piecing clues together and finding an answer.

This film barely gets a recommendation only because it finally gets interesting at the end.

I found myself just not engaging with the lead characters and storyline as much as I like. In the end, I was just observing people dealing with a problem, while never able to be in the story as it played out.

The reason to see The Last Movie Star is its performances from both Burt Reynolds and Ariel Winter. It’s a sweet, solid film and a suitable bookend to Reynolds’ career as a leading actor.

It is Foy’s performance and presence that makes you want to stay to the end. She is the girl thrust into leadership with the vulnerabilities of her young age and with youthful curiosity. She’s not a child pretending to be an adult, but a child forced to act like one.

Strip out the thriller moments and you have an interesting film, instead, we’re left with a mediocre thriller that phones in the final act.

Rockwell and Schwartz are basically doing their version of a Hope-and-Crosby road film. They play characters very familiar to an American audience and that is played against a British comedic landscape. The result it interesting to watch, but I think more for the Brits than its American counterparts.

Lester takes all the wrong approaches.