Alison Willmore

For all its bloodshed, the movie’s not sharp enough to land a cutting blow — or even to break skin.

Ready or Not 2 moves at a decent clip and is generally entertaining, but there’s something deflatingly lazy about its slate of rich assholes, which is heavy on standard-issue entitled daughters and smug failsons who treat the staff like props.

The movie is all concept and, well, not quite no execution, but such confusing, conflicted execution that it makes the entire exercise feel like it was messed with after the fact.

Ella McCay is gas-leak cinema at its finest, which is to say that there is a naïve purity to its unhinged qualities that is almost charming.

There was something undeniably valiant about the way the first one tried, however imperfectly, to bend that long Mouse House tradition of human-acting animals into a means for an examination of racial bias. But in repeating that approach for a story about the banishing of reptiles from the city and the strategic destruction of neighborhoods, Zootopia 2 sets up parallels that strain even more at the seams.

Wright’s movie, aside from its mess of an ending, is a propulsive and generally fun affair that sends Powell careering around the Eastern Seaboard like the Tom Cruise successor he’s so determined to become, even if he’s not entirely plausible as a guy who’s volcanic with anger.

The sympathy Roofman extends toward the break room of its big-box stores and the low-ceilinged place of worship where Leigh sings in the choir every Sunday is more moving than its treatment of its protagonist, offering an appreciation that these places could be anywhere and at the same time are highly specific.

Mostly, when you watch Tron: Ares, you become aware of the degree to which this franchise has exhausted its own metaphor.

Those bookending sequences, the start and the finish, are the only ones The History of Sound fully inhabits, while in all the others it plays coy, holding back for no particular reason than that it offers the illusion of sophistication.

This Is Spinal Tap is a comedy about how the desire to be seen as a rock god collides with the humiliations of actually being human, and the visual of a group of guys in their 70s and 80s unable to move on from the styles of their youthful heyday is as effective a continuing riff on this theme as any. It’s also the only one fully realized by the new film.

To give A Big Bold Beautiful Journey credit, it is a democratically even-handed waste of talent.

Last Rites comes from Michael Chaves, the same director as that last film, but returns the series to what it does best, which is dealing with a supernaturally infested home.

Caught Stealing is an intermittently fun experience that would be a better time if Aronofsky either loosened up a little more or, conversely, maintained a tighter grip on the wheel.

Brie and Franco, in providing nuance and texture to Millie and Tim, may actually have worked against a film that would be better off allowing its characters to be in an unhealthy relationship from the beginning — a choice that would make the ending feel more unsetting rather than just a flubbed allegory.

The dissonance between that meditative quality and a premise as goofy as Happy Gilmore’s is jarring, though it’s hard to blame Sandler for taking the time to look back, no matter the context.

It’s a film about language in ways that are promising but more often exasperating.

This is Pitt’s movie, and like its star, it never opens itself up enough to truly take off.

Elio . . . plays like something that was imperfectly assembled from its component parts, as though its creative team couldn’t figure out a way to align its visions of candy-colored intergalactic diplomacy with its emotional themes of empathy and learning to think about what’s going on inside those around us.

Echo Valley feels in need of an additional twist, or one fewer — to either commit to being foremost a drama about addiction or to go harder into the suspense, rather than ending up an awkward hybrid of the two.

The film is a dead-on skewering of the high-on-their-own supply megalomania that now afflicts so many members of the techno oligarchy, who unfortunately also control the levers of the world. I found it incredibly unpleasant to watch, in a way that made me think about comedy’s limitations as a critique of power when its targets are already more awful and more ridiculous than any fictional version.

Despite the verve of the film, there’s no there there — just an exercise in quippy banter and witty violence that works well enough to remind you of better movies.

Alpha is more evidence of Ducournau’s genius for evocative imagery and striking compositions, but it also suggests she’d benefit from boundaries to push against.

It’s a movie that makes you long to be able to freeze frames in order to appreciate the loveliness and wit of its details, while at the same time giving you little reason to want to revisit the thing as a whole.

No genre really makes more sense for this moment than horror — except, maybe, for black comedy, and Aster’s bracingly nasty but centerless new film offers plenty of both.

Evans has assembled a worthy cast and has crammed his film full of what should be fun elements, and yet the final result is weirdly without joy — akin to filling your plate with all your favorite foods at a buffet, only to sit down and realize you have no appetite to eat it.

Malek keeps trying to find the emotional center and dignity of a character who’s pure pulp, and while it’s an admirable effort, it’s also jarringly unsuited to the movie.

Magazine Dreams certainly isn’t inept, and Bynum, who wrote as well as directed it, summons a devastatingly spare atmosphere that’s broken up with some arrestingly dreamlike compositions when Killian arrives at a show or competition. But it consists of the same idea, underlined over and over.

The problem with Holland is that Cave has no aptitude for tone.