Alissa Wilkinson

Coming 2 America is really just a movie about how fun and great Coming to America was. It gives us another way to dance to the prior movie’s beat.

There’s enough in Eleanor the Great to still make it watchable, especially the genuinely moving intergenerational connection between two women who need each other to move past their particular grief. If only the world around them had been developed more carefully, too.

It felt a bit like the life was draining away from the movie the longer it went on — as if this was more of an imitation of a good movie than an actually good movie. (The technical name for this among critics is a “nothingburger.”)

It’s a tonally strange movie from the get-go, masquerading as a typical holiday flick about long-lost friends getting together at the holidays but ending with mass extinction. Yay!

After the Hunt seems wildly desperate to be seen as provocative about things like cancel culture and the “feminist generation gap.” But my overriding sense was that some earlier, better version of the script exists, and all the political stuff was stapled on later to make it feel more “relevant.”

It’s as much a story of love among friends as it is of any couple, and a handful of good gags and great performances keep the whole thing steaming along.

Fallen Kingdom understands the moral weight of the setup it’s been handed by the previous five movies. Even when it stumbles as a film, it has a definite point of view on what a humanity callous enough to revive a species for its own pleasure and inquiry ought to experience in return.

There is something off about You’re Cordially Invited, some sense that the whole thing never clicks into place.

Streamlined a little, it would have made for a rich text. But as it is, it’s too much to wade through.

It’s entertaining enough to be worth watching for fans of the genre or of Bullock, who turns in a strong performance as a woman who has motherhood thrust onto her in a world loaded with peril.

The big difference between this kind of video game movie and an actual video game is that you’re not playing it — you’re just passively consuming it, and you know how it will end before it gets going. So any surprise or intrigue comes from just seeing how our mighty protagonist will get himself out of this scrape. That’s just enough for a couple hours of fairly mindless entertainment.

Bernadette is a soggy misfire, with sparks of possibility peppering a weirdly plodding tale.

It’s a true story, and a simple one, but couched in Malick’s signature style, it becomes something more lyrical and pastoral.

It’s all jocular and surface-level, but it’s also not trying to be anything more than old-fashioned blockbuster entertainment — neither overly serious nor, on occasion, allergic to a bit of sentimentality.

Whatever your opinion of the book, the movie is a different animal, and a startlingly terrible one.

The fault seems to be in the chemistry, not just between the leads — it’s tough to believe that Charlotte and Adam have the connection on their night together that the movie insists upon — but between all of the characters.

There’s an interesting film dancing around the edges of The Greatest Hits, but there’s both too much sentimentality and not enough thought, and that’s too bad.

For me, the bludgeoning tends to blunt the entertainment value.

If you’re an aficionado of ’70s cinema, there’s probably not much new here. The films covered are certainly a murderer’s row of masterpieces, but they’re familiar to cinephiles. Yet despite its lack of depth, there’s value to Breakdown: 1975 as an introduction to an era, particularly for younger people or newer movie lovers who might relish learning about the films of the time and the ways they weave into history.

It’s passably spooky, sure. But all interesting prequels have something in common: They shed new light on their predecessors that expands, illuminates or complicates them in some way. Apartment 7A feels like a predictable retread.

If Bullet Train is a hit, this may be the cause; it’s pure escapism at its finest, with no message or lesson at its core.

For its faults as a movie, the story is still compelling as a bit of history, and more so in the midst of a presidential administration that at times seems to be taking all the wrong lessons from Nixon.

So if the plot of “The Instigators” kind of goes nowhere, its characters give it the feel of a hangout movie with some added shootouts and car chases and a few well-timed explosions. And that, at least, is wicked good.

Ranked against other “Tron” feature-length installments, while this one fails to capture the adolescent low-fi charm of the 1982 film, it’s appreciably more enjoyable (and, frankly, comprehensible) than “Legacy.”

The Greatest Showman is not, in any traditional sense of the phrase, a biographical motion picture about P.T. Barnum. It is a high-energy, breathless fantasy. Employing sleight of hand, some fast talking, and a lot of tall tales, it exaggerates the legend until the illusion takes on a life of its own, turning into the promised “fever dream” that, while admittedly stuffed with some truly excellent musical setpieces, has something sinister at its core.

Unfortunately, it’s not a great film. But it’s an enjoyable one, if you like fine wine, beautiful countrysides, and a little frisson of flirtation.

For all of Tomb Raider’s strengths, it would still be a stretch to call it a good movie. It’s diverting, a good way to spend a couple of hours, but it’s hamstrung by something that’s unavoidable: The whole central concept — raiding tombs — is just, well, not that interesting.

There’s a potentially funny movie in here somewhere. But it lumbers along, wasting some of its greatest assets and, in the end, overstaying its welcome.