Alonso Duralde

The third and final film in the Maze Runner series, subtitled “The Death Cure,” gets it half right as an action movie. The stunts, the explosions and the chases are all exciting and elaborately mounted; there’s just not much of a movie to go with them.

Red Notice plays like a parody of itself — a star-studded, globe-trotting heist caper replete with MacGuffins, twists, and double-crosses. And for much of its overstuffed two-hour runtime, it gets away with it.

Jurassic World: Rebirth doesn’t go anywhere particularly unexpected — besides being a big-budget, corporate-backed franchise film advocating that medical advancements should go public rather than be patented by drug companies — but the cliffhangers are choice.

The MCU train is back up and running, but this latest entry sees it jerking in fits and starts as it leaves the station.

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.

Since the genre of video games-turned-into-feature films has inflicted some real doozies on audiences, Tomb Raider towers above most of its peers by being merely OK. By any other measure, this is a saga of fits and starts, and we can only hope for smoother sailing if the film inspires the sequels it clearly hopes to engender.

While the movie ends in a way that’s clearly designed to prompt further sequels, we don’t get that prequel X factor that makes us interested in a character arc whose outcome we already know. “Better Call Saul” knows how to do this; “Solo” doesn’t.

Dowd and Burstyn’s performances will endure even as the rest of it fades into the memory hole of unnecessary sequels.

It delivers the kind of sentimental sledgehammering I found myself willing to forgive — the presence of Helen Mirren goes a long way in that regard — but once the story goes off on a pointless tangent, the whole soufflé collapses.

For its first half or so, The Maze Runner tells a captivating tale of survival and weaves a potentially interesting mystery. Once its path become clear, however, you realize this is a puzzle you've worked out before.

It proves that this mechanized world and its inhabitants are better suited to cartoon form than the headache-inducing Michael Bay movies, but it’s ultimately another piece of elaborate fan service that will bore the uninitiated.

That face-off between two comics legends becomes but one in a series of big things bashing into other big things, which is what Snyder and writers Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer mistake for storytelling. The trio do manage to cough up an acceptable number of ooh-that’s-cool moments, and fans who will be satisfied with those will be satisfied with those, but any other ideas and characters the movie might offer get lost in the rubble.

Audiences in the mood to be scared will certainly send their popcorn flying during a few tense moments of The Meg. But they’ll also wish the movie had bothered to find an equivalent to Robert Shaw’s USS Indianapolis speech in “Jaws.” When the human characters are reduced to chum, it’s hard to care about them getting eaten.

It’s great to have an animated female lead that does for science what Belle in “Beauty and the Beast” did for reading, but ultimately, Over the Moon wanes more than it waxes.

The goals of Fatman exceed its grasp; it wants to be funny but also grim but also realistic but also about Santa Claus. Had the film moved a few degrees in either direction, upping the dark humor or concentrating more on minimalist despair and brutal action, the Nelms brothers might have been onto something.

The pleasurable jolt of a silent scare has given way to predictability.

There are quick cuts and CG imagery and bro-ing out in nearly equal proportions; I found some of this excess to be heady and exciting, but by the end of the film’s running time, it all became a bit tiresome, to say nothing of tiring.

Rather than take the time to let us really get to know and understand its complicated title character, the movie instead goes for cheap, gotcha plotting that undermines the entire project.

Viewers interested in martial-arts action are bound to find the combat-with-a-C to be lackluster in that way that hand-to-hand fighting tends to be when it gets drowned out by digital effects. More likely to have fun with this latest Mortal Kombat are Sam Raimi enthusiasts who can appreciate the comedy in over-the-top geysers of fake blood, which the film unleashes with increasing regularity as the fights get more serious.

Smallfoot provides more complex food for thought than most mainstream animation, but the overall results are still disappointingly bland.

Everyone’s so damn happy and grateful to have been meddled with that it undercuts both the comedy and the drama in this film from writer-director Lorene Scafaria.

Perhaps the biggest issue for The Mauritanian is that the screenplay by M.B Traven and Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani tries to accommodate too many protagonists.

There are few surprises or misdirects or red herrings involved with this all-too-solvable mystery, let alone subtext or commentary. With Marlowe, a very talented cast of actors and a legendary filmmaker have assembled to make a Philip Marlowe movie you can fold laundry to.

Anyone who sees this new movie without having watched the original will certainly enjoy the lead performances, but they’ll be getting the frozen-watered-down version of the story.

While the film’s vertiginous set pieces are appropriately heart-clenching, it’s not nearly as successful at little details like plot and character.

The broadness of Phoenix’s work allows the rest of the ensemble — particularly Conroy, Zazie Beetz as a single-mom neighbor, and MVP character actors like Bill Camp, Shea Whigham and Brian Tyree Henry — to dial it down and give effectively human-size performances.

This feels less like a movie and more like one of those reunion specials where the cast of a beloved old TV show returns to play their characters again, recreating their pratfalls and repeating their catchphrases.

As a spawner of merchandise, Cars 3 fires on all pistons but, as a movie, it’s a harmless but never stimulating 109 minutes.