Alonso Duralde

The first movie, for all its fluff, gave Miranda that eminently quotable “cerulean sweater” monologue, but this follow-up has nothing as interesting to say about fashion, or journalism, or life as anyone leads it. It’s sending nostalgia down the runway and expecting us to wear it, when the perfectly comfortable original already fits just right.

Movies about artists, ideally, celebrate the art while also providing a glimpse into the blood, sweat, and tears behind its creation, but any exciting moments here can be found in their original, natural state on YouTube. Michael has no ambitions beyond being its own commemorative souvenir booklet.

While sitting through its interminable 133 minutes, I found myself parsing the difference between the unsettling and the merely unpleasant, and between the grotesque and the icky. In both cases, the former requires some engagement with human experience and consciousness while the latter — where this film permanently resides — merely relies upon witless bad taste and simple-minded gross-outs.

You, Me & Tuscany has all the heft of a squash blossom, and it’s similarly tasty without being filling. But sometimes, you just want one anyway.

Let’s give The Super Mario Galaxy Movie this: for a piece of intellectual-property exploitation, it’s created with far more craft and care than it had to be, with dazzlingly colorful backgrounds and action that’s constantly moving forward. At the same time, it never stops to explain the rules of the characters and their interactions for those of us not steeped in four decades of gameplay.

It’s a meaty premise, one that its talented cast digs into heartily, and the film succeeds at generating tensely uncomfortable comedy for most of its running time.

The film’s best moments are an outlandish pleasure, far outshining the highlights of the similarly-plotted and mostly by-the-numbers sequel Ready or Not 2: Here I Come. But the latter at least maintains a consistent level of energy from start to finish. The initial dynamism on display in They Will Kill You contracts and collapses. Death be not dull.

Tear-jerkers are valuable to cinema; they can provide emotional catharsis as satisfying as any other kind of popcorn entertainment. It’s hard to get misty-eyed, however, over a film that never stops reassuring you that everyone’s going to get a happy ending. Let the audience feel bad for a while, so they can feel good after; failing that leaves everyone feeling nothing.

Ultimately, the film’s breezy attitude and calculated audience-pleasing wins out. Project Hail Mary offers plenty of laughs alongside of a dollop of sentiment, and it centers science in a tale where the apocalypse isn’t necessarily inevitable; it celebrates both humanity’s ability to save itself, and the idea that humanity might be worth saving.

Veers off in so many exhausting directions that it ultimately amounts to little more than sound and fury. She’s alive, alive, but she can’t maintain this pace.

Hoppers tells an effective story with wit and ingenuity, not to mention distinctive character design for every corner of the animal kingdom, from a kind-hearted shark (Vanessa Bayer) to a bratty caterpillar (Dave Franco).

The Scream series has become a horror version of That’s Entertainment!, where 21st century fans of a 1990s movie that paid homage to 1980s horror can get the kind of squishy, splattery, shocking homicides that A24 just isn’t going to deliver.

I Can Only Imagine 2 is a Marvel movie for Evangelicals, but not in a good way: it rehashes the emotional beats of its predecessor to sell audiences an exercise in diminished results. With its reliance on familiar tropes and story clichés, it’s a movie that, even if you haven’t seen it yet, you can probably imagine.

There’s a lot more sex in this Wuthering Heights, but the characters are flatter, the story is duller, and by the film’s climax, any dramatic momentum has been swept away by the winds on the moors.

Obvious jokes, facile insights, and emotional Band-Aids are all that’s on the menu.

Send Help becomes its own unique, mischievous, horrifying creation, thanks to director Sam Raimi and his singular gift for eliciting laughter that turns into screaming (and vice versa).

While Pratt has become the most stultifying of screen presences — he was a lot more fun to watch back when Bekmambetov cast him in a small role in 2008’s Wanted — Ferguson and Reis are both as electrifying as the material allows them to be.

Juggling big ideas and white-knuckle scares has always been the currency of the 28 Days Later saga, and Nia DaCosta does right by the franchise’s legacy.

What’s surprising is that Waugh and his team shine in the quieter moments.

For sheer horror pleasure and monster-movie squirms, this silly monkey movie delivers the goods.

Is Song Sung Blue shamelessly manipulative in its assault on audiences’ tear ducts and heart strings? Absolutely. Will those qualities make it a whipping boy for contemporary reviews like this one while also turning it into a beloved classic in years to come? It’s entirely possible. Like those Neil Diamond songs, this movie might have a moment where it’s considered a joke or an embarrassment, but eventually, people will come clean about how much they love it.

Search for SquarePants comes down vigorously on the side of exuberance.

The entertaining and occasionally over-the-top The Housemaid returns Feig to A Simple Favor territory, serving up aspirational, glossy wealth-porn with one hand and the dark underbelly of the glamorous life with the other.

Director and co-writer James Cameron has a lot to say about colonization and guns and the environment and, while that messaging is noble and right-minded, it’s delivered with blunt force. The 3D here is stunning, but the metaphors come at your face with the same propulsion as the images.

Ultimately, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 makes no effort to expand its appeal beyond its built-in audience of gamers.

Wherever it winds up going, the Judy-Nick friendship emerges as one of the more complex and satisfying bits of character interplay in contemporary Disney animation.

Any evolution should be appreciated, perhaps, as the story chugs its way to the finish line. Wicked fans can delight in one final visit to Oz, while those of us less enamored can hope that the yellow brick road ends here. For good.

For all the targets that director and co-writer Edgar Wright hits with the story’s political and media satire, he allows the pacing to go slack, turning what should feel like an escalating set of stakes into an episodic series of vignettes.