Alison Willmore

That, in chasing something vaguely progressive and YA-inspired with Snow White, Disney has turned out a film with some hilariously timely choices is a great joke, though I wouldn’t call it an intentional one.

That compulsion to reverse engineer serious stakes for a fundamentally frivolous story is Twisters’ most contemporary quality and its most irritating.

There is something magical about the simple fact that this movie exists, in all its obscene, absurd wonder, its terrible filmmaking choices and bursts of jaw-dropping talent. It doesn’t need to be timely to be an artifact of its time — a movie about nothing but song and dance and, most important of all, about cats.

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.

Watching the movie summons the distinct sensation of arriving at a party just as the guests are starting to leave.

It’s hard to think about who, exactly, is going to be moved to make changes to how they live their lives by Don’t Look Up, a climate-change allegory that acquired accidental COVID-19 relevance, but that doesn’t really end up being about much at all, beyond that humanity sucks.

Mothers’ Instinct is, indeed, pretty terrible, and not in the so-bad-it’s-good sense, and yet there’s something strangely moving about it. It’s a poignant example of how what looks like rich material to actors can turn out to be lousy material for audiences.

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.

The results are dispiritingly pleasureless, as though to fully embrace the idea of a penthouse prison would get in the way of the movie’s nebulous ideas about art.

COVID has proven a difficult subject for fiction, but In the Earth feels as though it sets up an emotional parallel that it doesn’t follow through on, abandoning the virus as a backdrop for a horror story that’s slapdash and never very creepy. It’s another instance of pandemic cinema that feels as if it could use more distance to figure out what it wants to say.

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.

What’s obvious after a few minutes of Piece by Piece is that the movie isn’t rendered the way it is because of some profound thematic ties between its subject’s life and the plastic construction set, but because the Lego is an attempt to inject something of interest into what is, even by the pre-chewed standards of authorized celeb docs, textureless pablum.

While Here Today never works, there is a confessional quality to it that makes it intermittently interesting. It’s the movie equivalent of someone telling what they think is a funny anecdote, but that instead comes out as an inadvertent glimpse into their soul.

The best part of Scoob!, a computer-animated reboot of the Scooby-Doo franchise, is the part in which the movie painstakingly recreates the opening credits of the original series.

Wild Mountain Thyme is not just charmless. It is genuinely confounding, a movie constantly working against itself to make its characters and their dilemma comprehensible.

Venom: The Last Dance isn’t a lark, but a smirk to let you know that while everyone may be aware of what it’s up to, you’re the sucker who bought the ticket.

While Urban hurls himself into the role of Johnny with the commitment of someone for whom the phrase “sequel to a reboot of a fighting-game adaptation” signals only the latest opportunity to shine, the film, which was written by Jeremy Slater and directed by a returning Simon McQuoid, offers so little to work off of that even he gives off the faintest whiff of exasperation.

Voyagers, in keeping its focus where it does, feels like a waste not just because of how predictable its beats are, but because it ends just when it feels like it’s getting interesting.

The ending may be heavily foreshadowed, but that doesn’t make the lead-up any less exasperating or what happens any less egregious.

It’s an adaptation without direction or purpose, with an unwieldy but deeply committed performance at its center. Hathaway looks to be having fun, at least. Someone should!

65 is not good, if that even needs to be said. For something that involves almost nonstop dino action, it’s impressively unengaging, like watching a video game no one’s allowed to play. But its mangled badness is kind of compelling.

Mostly, Arthur is acted upon, even when he thinks he’s seizing control — a punching bag for the world and, more importantly, for the director, who subjects the character to so many indignities that he actually stops being pitiable and starts resembling the punchline to a very long, shaggy joke. By the end of Joker: Folie à Deux, that joke feels like it’s on us.

It’s when the music stops and the movie is forced to contend with the mishmash of recycled elements it’s trying to use as a plot that it really flounders.

It’s a bold formal choice to regard the world through a fixed point in space, and, unfortunately, it’s all in service of the biggest pile of schmaltz you’ll see this year.

What makes Flamin’ Hot such a depressing offering isn’t the relative truthiness of its source material, but the qualities it holds aloft as inspiring.

The Six Triple Eight is about people who received no public recognition for their achievements at the time, but in trying to give them their belated due onscreen, this clunky excuse for a war movie ends up being more about what they endured than about what they accomplished.

It’s not the first film to try to disguise its titillation at violence, in particular against women, with blunt, larger themes. But when those themes are about the structures that enable that violence, the whole enterprise just feels repellent.

Kraven the Hunter explores the inner workings of a guy we didn’t care about to begin with, alongside underwhelming action sequences and a lot of scenery chewing.