Audrey Fox

Mercy is not a good movie, with hackneyed dialogue and stock performances that, ironically, seem like they themselves could have been generated by AI. But worse than that, it's a movie that pushes insidious views about AI, law enforcement, and privacy laws under the guise of a brains-off action thriller.

Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, and especially Stephen Graham do their level best, but they're let down by a bafflingly inept script and unimaginative filmmaking from Scott Cooper.

Black Phone 2 hits, it hits – and that's the case pretty much as soon as they make it up into the mountains. With clever set pieces that utilize Ethan Hawke to his best advantage as an even more disturbing Freddy Krueger, Black Phone 2 ups the creepiness factor.

After the Hunt is a slog that wastes the talents of its stars on unlikeable characters in befuddling situations, rarely coming near a coherent plot point with any degree of competence.

A thoughtful meditation on love and grief, Hamnet features career-best performances from Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, and is Zhao's most intimate work to date.

It's difficult not to fall in love with all of the characters in the film, and its breezy sense of humor makes Eternity a veritable crowdpleaser.

Rental Family is a clear crowdpleaser with a sense of humor and charm that will make audiences fall in love with it — if they're willing to accept its unvarnished sentimentality, that is.

Its narrative structure keeps Weapons continually engaging, while its talented cast of actors brings depth to each character, making this one of the best horror films of the year. 

I Know What You Did Last Summer is a lazy retread of an already mediocre horror film, with only brief flashes of promise peppered between kills.

The result is a cute but uneven production that doesn't live up to its impressively imaginative concepts.

It's a nice enough movie, and honestly it might just be the best possible version of a live-action adaptation of its source material. But if you're expecting anything more than an almost exact shot-for-shot remake, you may be disappointed.

With Robinson doing his thing and Paul Rudd's straight man delightfully off-kilter in his own way, Friendship is a chaotic ride from start to finish.

Final Destination Bloodlines is a tremendous amount of fun, especially if you can see it in a theater (preferably with an audience willing to match its energy). I said that Final Destination offers no surprises, and yet this iteration of the concept is a pleasant one.

Novocaine is packed full of inventive action set pieces that are alternately gruesome, goofy, and sometimes even both at once. It may not be for everyone, but it kind of feels like the gold standard for this very specific brand of action comedy.

Although it has some bright spots, even flickers of chemistry between its stars Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy, it's let down by repetitive action sequences, an uninspiring reveal, and dialogue that feels as though it was written by ChatGPT.

If at times a little belabored. With an all-in performance from Benedict Cumberbatch and a unique visual style, "The Thing With Feathers" is an inescapably compelling drama — even if its concept is perhaps a bit more interesting than its execution.

Instead of a slightly silly, character-driven series that spins off Michelle Yeoh's Emperor of the Terran Empire character, we get a hastily thrown together buddy comedy that lacks any semblance of humor or, for that matter, buddies.

The plot, like Dylan himself, seems to be meandering, and while it's an interesting parallel, the end result is a film that feels more than a little listless whenever someone's not singing.

While its nods to the '90s are all painfully accurate, it seems like Mooney was so focused on capturing the essence of Y2K that he forgot that all of this needs to be in the service of a story that's actually engaging. Sorry to all involved, but 91 minutes has never felt so long.

With Paul Mescal taking on leading man duties, Gladiator II capitalizes on all the visual delights and heroic battles that make this genre — when done well — so enjoyable to watch.

This film is a slog to get through, and by the end you almost feel as though you yourself have been trapped in the hole for weeks.

As a frenetic, chaotic glimpse at the making of a doomed-to-fail sketch comedy series that has somehow lasted for 50 years, Saturday Night is a blast.

Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield are both preternaturally likable, and it's their performances and chemistry together that helps We Live in Time stand out from the crowd. Even so, the film's gimmick and its two glittering stars aren't quite enough to elevate this into must-watch territory.

It features an excellent ensemble cast who bring tremendous heart to each of their cinematic segments, and represents Stephen King at his most sentimental and uncynical.

Although the relationship between Craig and Drew Starkey, who plays his reluctant lover, is endlessly fascinating, the film doesn't do enough to explore it, instead taking an odd third act turn into an entirely different plot and dragging out every minute of its runtime with trippy, pseudo-intellectual visuals.

George Clooney and Brad Pitt have wonderful chemistry together, as always, and they make sense as two wily, slightly over-the-hill fixers, but Wolfs itself is relatively uninspired.

The Brutalist is destined to become a classic.

Despite its faults, it showcases how much sex scenes can be used to explore character beyond their mere ability to titillate (but don't worry, there's plenty of that as well).

The film as a whole may be too sedate and ploddingly paced for some — a piano being moved back and forth, over and over again, across an elegant but lonely Parisian apartment, both literally and figuratively. But it's impossible to deny the raw emotional power of Jolie in the lead role.

There's enough here to win over audiences who loved the original film, particularly in its depiction of the endless bureaucracy of the Afterlife.

Between characters who have no depth to them, cliched dialogue, and a strange approach towards the dynamics between an abuser and their victim, it's hard to recommend "It Ends with Us" to anyone but the most diehard Colleen Hoover fans. Pour one out for Blake Lively and Jenny Slate, who both deserve so much better.

It's almost impressive that a movie all about the power of imagination could be so creatively bankrupt and incurious about the world, but this misguided kids' film manages to be all that and so much more (or less, depending on your perspective).

Although it falls apart slightly in the third act (a treat the director is unfortunately unable to shake here), a tense narrative and unsettling performance from Josh Hartnett makes Trap a delightful late summer thriller.

Shyamalan may have inherited her father's love of the twist ending, but the one she creates in "The Watchers" is as unearned and unsatisfying as they come.

It's the incomparable Strong who steals the show as Cohn, the Pygmalion who carves Trump out of spray tan and ill-fitting suits to make him into the monster he becomes.

Like many high-concept satire movies, it works best in its first act when it's still setting everything up, then it loses steam when it's not quite sure where to go with the idea. The end result is an uneven yet still entertaining satirical romp, bolstered by engaging performances from its top-notch cast.

Emilia Pérez can certainly be messy, but it's rarely a mess, and many audiences might just fall in love with its audacious, chaotic energy.

It's muddled in the extreme and few of its cast members make it out of the debacle unscathed, but its willful rejection of what audiences might want to see in favor of what Francis Ford Coppola wanted to make is so bold you almost have to admire it.