Alex Harrison

Given some time to think on it later, viewers might have trouble pinning down what it actually had to say about all those thorny subjects it seemed to be about.

The heart of the problem is The Monkey King makes its central character, whose story has been told and retold for hundreds of years, uninteresting. Without that spine to hold it together, everything collapses.

Wicked: For Good does stumble at various points. The much-touted new songs by returning songwriter Stephen Schwartz are superfluous, and there's a laughably regrettable decision near the end involving Jeff Goldblum that only avoids disaster by being very brief. But all the same magic that powered the first film is still at work in this one.

There is a modest feeling to There There, and the emotional impact of its actual content might display the limits of this extreme methodology, but its (smartly brisk) runtime is hardly too steep a price to see a small movie explore such big questions with such clarity.

While The Gorge is (ironically) fairly shallow, it offers some strikingly designed genre thrills and is powered by two charismatic stars.

It's a lighthearted, empathetic film that multiple generations of family can see together and all find something worth taking with them.

With nothing of substance to chew on, the only thing a (committed) viewer can do is strap in for the 90-minute runtime and wait to hear a tune they like - and hope that, once it's over, they emerge earworm-free.

Edgar Wright and Glen Powell are consummate entertainers, and they made this dystopian Stephen King movie as fun and guilt-free as they could.

It would be unfair to assign blame to any one performance, or even to Winslet's direction, when the script is the obvious culprit. Story or character hurdles are thrown up and surmounted with the same neatness, sapping them of their impact. The movie becomes so certain of its footing that the two-hour runtime starts to feel like a chore.

It's a strong, engaging story that showcases some striking animation, and if I am to return to the wider world of Peter Jackson's Middle-earth, this seems to me an ideal way to go about it.

It doesn't quite have the courage to be the best version of itself. Still, it works. War Machine is an action movie you feel in your body, and it mixes in the right dose of sci-fi VFX without losing sight of the character that keeps you caring.

Sympathy for the Devil is a missed opportunity with a collection of engaging moments, none sustained enough to really satisfy.

Silent Night winks at us as often as it tries for genuine drama, and whichever tone you choose to accept will likely determine whether you have as much fun with it as I did.

Landon's latest will be best remembered for its multiple laugh-out-loud set pieces, and with the craftsmanship and performances on display, viewers will likely be willing to forgive its less-impactful stretches.

Fixed is fun while it lasts, more so than you might expect going in. Its most lasting effect on me might be a longing for more traditional, hand-drawn, 2D animation from our major studios, and anyone who might feel similarly shouldn't let this movie pass them by.

Garner's performance is the heart of this, and if the movie were told entirely through her eyes, I think you'd have the compelling layer of doubt that the film sometimes seems to want.

It sits somewhere at the intersection of Quentin Tarantino and Sam Raimi, though without the former's control of form and the latter's splatstick comedic timing, it can't quite live up to the potential of that mashup. Still, it's plenty of fun. Zazie Beetz is the ideal badass heroine to carry this movie, and there are more than enough moments of stylish violence (and violent style) to get the whole theater cackling.

Rosario stretches the material of a really good short film into an underwhelming feature.

Its absurdity is enough to appeal to the right group of adventurous friends, perhaps, but even those with the stomach for its grossest impulses might find themselves wondering what it was all for.

Being halfway between film and TV gives it the weaknesses of both and strengths of neither; trying to straddle the real with the mythic gives us characters that mostly feel too representative to connect with as individuals, and too individual to make compelling representatives.

Manodrome lacks depth as either social commentary or character study, in large part because of how it positions us in relation to its protagonist's perspective.

Writer-director Lee Cronin holds onto the essential mythology while bringing in elements from a host of other influences, including the Evil Dead series, The Exorcist, and Hereditary, to try and shake up what mummies can be on screen. Discovering the true nature of this film's mummy, and what it's capable of, is part of the fun. The result isn't quite a 28 Days Later moment – one way to understand the film's full title is that this feels like one filmmaker's interpretation of a classic monster, rather than a new template for others to follow – but it's definitely the scariest a mummy movie has been in years.

As a vampire movie, Salem's Lot is refreshingly old-school.

What enjoyment there is to draw from the action, which has its ups and downs, is tainted by the skepticism of this whole endeavor that's baked into the filmmaking. Even knowing better which direction they should go in, McQuoid & Co. remain frustratingly unwilling to commit to it. What they've made is tellingly at its best when making fun of itself.

Already working with a shakily thin script, Jákl weighs his movie down with an overly self-serious aesthetic, to the point that even the target audience might find the two-hour runtime a tough sit.

Lord of Misrule feels like it was made with a lack of understanding of what actually works about its premise, and the result is a constant ebb-and-flow of being drawn in by the imagery and pushed back out by the storytelling.

Joker: Folie à Deux is not always fully thought through. This is why the original was often misread in the first place. This film is full of quality craftwork, performances, and images. There's much here to appreciate, especially visually, and I enjoyed my time with it. But I'd recommend not asking much more of it than that.

While it has its weak spots, A Family Affair holds together well enough to entertain.