Alonso Duralde

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.

Sometimes silly but always propulsive, this franchise entry dares to give us an empathy-generating Predator, even if Elle Fanning’s robot steals the show.

It’s always applause-worthy when a biopic focuses on a few key years rather than try to tackle the span of a notable life, but Cooper never fully captures the mental anguish or the artistic glory tied up in Nebraska’s creation. It’s as spare as the album it chronicles, but never as subtle or satisfying.

Hawke remains delightfully disturbing, however, and some fans of the original may find the character’s return worthwhile, even if Black Phone 2 twists itself into narrative knots to make it happen.

TRON: Ares throws in a few half-baked ideas about ethics in the tech world, but its main agenda is to be big, loud, fast, and eye-popping, and on that level — and only that level — it’s a complete success.

It’s entirely possible that Benny Safdie was out to craft a different kind of underdog sports movie, one where the audience isn’t manipulated into raising a triumphant fist at the end. But surely the writer-director-editor hoped for more than a disinterested shrug.

Farce and tragedy, the personal and the political, revolutionaries and the establishment, the intimate and the epic, character study and zeitgeist metaphor — opposing forces clash thematically, aesthetically, and brilliantly in Paul Thomas Anderson’s ambitious and audacious One Battle After Another.

Spending its entire running time between quotation marks, this tedious exercise represents one of the most egregious wastes of talent in recent memory, from a talented cast (led by Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell) to legendary composer Joe Hisaishi to director Kogonada, whose previous films After Yang and Columbus conveyed emotional truths that exist beyond the understanding of this cutesy waste of energy.

This is gut-punch, feel-bad studio filmmaking, all the more notable for how rarely it happens.

This Finale is basically one giant victory lap that takes the Crawley family and their employees into 1930 and beyond — as Cole Porter once wrote, “it’s fun/it’s fresh/it’s post-/depresh.”

With The Conjuring: Last Rites, this venerable franchise finally (one hopes) gives up the ghost, not with a bang, but a whimper.

For most crime capers, shooting is funny but killing isn’t; the always-divisive Aronofsky obliterates the line between comedy and realism, and the result is a farce that’s both literally and figuratively explosive

The “be your true self” storyline has been a staple of animated features for decades, but it’s delivered with a real kick here.

Stripped of the twists and surprises that made the first one such a sleeper hit, this sequel nonetheless delivers breezy, bone-crushing entertainment for undemanding late-summer audiences.

Between Lohan’s impressive return to the movies and Curtis’ defiance of the Best Supporting Oscar curse, Freakier Friday represents an all-too-rare opportunity for talented women on both sides of the camera to demonstrate their chops at big-screen comedy. Long may they freak.

The Naked Gun comes in at a lean 85 minutes, but stay seated for the whole thing, as even the closing credits become a vehicle for jokes on top of jokes.

There’s a lot to like about the world of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, from the mid-century kitsch to the progressive social ethos to its generally upbeat demeanor, but the movie itself lacks the nerve to carve out a memorable personality. Bespoke costumes and vintage Lucky Charms boxes are the empty props of a timid movie.

Every few scenes, there’s a chuckle-worthy bon mot or sight gag, or the animation style will alter radically for some plot-driven reason, but there’s far too much downtime between Smurfs’ sporadic delights.

The miracle of Superman is that, in 2025, it’s a superhero movie that inspires genuine delight.

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.

While this sassy cyborg with the deadpan baby voice remains a brilliant comic creation, the movie’s messaging is muddled. For all of the laughs and thrills, we’re left with a satire about technology that still wants to play nice with AI.

F1 doggedly follows the expected ups and downs of most sports-movie narratives, and it’s clearly more interested in recreating the experience of racing than telling a story or crafting a character piece.

As these two modern masters of genre subversion have matured, they've also figured out a way to check off the boxes of thrills and gore and suspense while also finding something real to say about perseverance, hope, and love.

While the adventure is suitably wild and the sidekicks are at least visually appealing, Elio never quite clicks in the way that viewers have come to expect from the people behind Toy Story 3 and Finding Nemo.