Blake Goble

There are just enough goodies here for parents and well-prepared kiddies alike. The nifty VFX, performances, and modern updates are what make this remake an easy-enough treat.

Life of the Party exists in one of those unfortunate places where it’s easy to criticize, but McCarthy still makes you smile, and even laugh.

A comedy of manners and femininity gets bisected by gnarly effects, and the two-tone approach works in its way.

Grimsby’s provocative, but not stupid. It knows what kind of humor it wants to achieve, and often scores big.

Freneticism like this isn’t for everyone. But as far as martial arts epics go, MK is a high-gloss geek show that repeatedly delivers.

Army of One recounts Faulkner, through Quixotan whimsy and geo-political smart aleck humor, which amounts to a quick screwball comedy about a loveable fuckup.

The film’s a fundamental fiasco of tone and timing.

It should come as no surprise that The Angry Birds Movie is a loud and dumb children’s film, but for what it’s worth, there are plenty of cinematic commercial ventures that are louder and dumber and so on than the well-meaning and slickly sold Birds.

The movie’s merely the latest A-list comedy of this sort, is happy to live in the middle, and yet it frustratingly outwears its welcome because of a lack of creativity and sloppy structure.

Mister America aims for the acerbic pitch of a ‘70s alternative political farce like The Candidate, but the parting feeling is that it’s just an overdeveloped ramble. It’s not ha-ha funny, which is fine in the world of a muted humor like this. But like Heidecker’s campaign, it’s not entirely convincing as a satire either.

Many shots fired, all of them misses. This is a film without quality, care, or any real decency.

The Week Of is the wedding you forgot you were invited to, weren’t all that stoked to attend, then wound up loving anyway because you had such a surprisingly good time.

Another lump of coal in Gibson’s rapidly declining filmography. Fatman has no gifts to speak of. It’s kind of cheap. It’s fairly cynical and/or mean-spirited. It’s not fun. No good. Lumpy in execution. Deeply archaic in its thinking. Ho ho ho-hum.

After their muddled but well-meaning Tammy, McCarthy and her husband Ben Falcone’s follow up is a superior mix of jokes, to the point that even when the film misses its mark, McCarthy and her crew wheel and deal to the bitter end.

Crass but quick, and agreeably popcorn-y, Unhinged could have gone off in far more risible fashion. Not quite a gas, but without crashing and burning entirely, Unhinged gets where it needs to go and fast.

IO is dull, it drags, and it’ll beg the question: When will this, all of this, be over?

Marwen is too much, not enough, and yet still deeply watchable. It’s admirable for the wildly different approaches it takes. Only a stylist like Zemeckis could try something like this. Take a real man’s witty, real-life therapy-based photography and attempt to spin it into a mo-cap circus with every genre tool he can think of.

Of course, there are still product placements, and lowbrow jokes, but there’s an empathetic streak in Sandy Wexler. And that’s something we haven’t seen from Sandler in a long time.

There’s no voice, no style, and no real intrigue on hand. It’s all a slow sail to the next outsized setpiece.

A tonal miss and technical meh, Gemini Man arrives looking and feeling self-defeated.

Nominal laughs plus three reliable actresses equals the very mediocre Otherhood.

This Ben-Hur is closer to an ‘80s actioner about two men who once loved each other parting ways, only to reunite and settle their differences through vicious means.

Murder Mystery is a dud, stained with slack humor and a total unwillingness to play within its own chosen genre.

As a narrative, Point Blank’s like a screenplay slammed to the ground, shot repeatedly, and re-assembled with scotch tape and vending machine stickers (likely White Snake band logo iron-ons). It’s flashy. As far as action flicks go, Point Blank’s cool with its low IQ because it’s having fun throwing ‘bows to loud music. It knows what it is.

It’s damnable with faint praise. It’s too cheap to be thrilling, and too earnest to be all that offensive. Mired in clichés. Mostly flat. A weak Spy. Only Kevin James diehards need apply.

Like Prince’s music, perhaps this film is best taken in for its sensation and not its literal output. That, and the dialogue is just ridiculous. But Prince looks cool, owns his story’s loose ideology of churlish change, and stages some marvelously ornate shots.

Sure, it may be a little rote, and even thrifty, but it offers more than enough yuks to earn its way into your Netflix queue.

At its most basic, this is a conventional talkie, rooted in Warner Bros crime history, happy to play with cliché. At its most audacious, The Kitchen is a welcome flip on the generally male-dominated script. And at its most pleasing, this is a popcorn flick, with big moments, great pops, and three stars giving it their all, having one out in the street, making big moves for the people.

Better than My Super-Ex Girlfriend, sloppier than Hancock, it’s nothing dynamic but fun all the same. And frankly, not every superhero flick or comedy needs to be the Super-person of its domain. Likability is sometimes an underrated super-power, and Thunder Force is bursting with it.

Parents will nap, some kids will be amused, and the nerdiest viewers will have good reason to point out flaws in the movie’s not-so-intelligent designs.

There’s a laziness to The Road Chip, what with its mostly stale or needy jokes and cutesy plotting.

Jones slaves to make something of the material, and to his credit, or rather his profoundly large cast and crew’s credit, the craft is certainly visible in Warcraft. It feels rude not to compliment the hard work of the makeup, costume, production design, and visual effects teams.

It’s not that funny, and feels like a ripoff of Animal House. Either way, The Wild Life is like the contractually obligated Crowe script that time forgot, his undisciplined id, playing with cheap thrills before he got a chance to express himself like a human storyteller in 1989.

This film is all easy beats, predictive familiarities, and absolutely zero heart, soul, or silliness anywhere to be found.

The dispiriting thing is that Tom & Jerry is far from the worst family film in the world. It’s just a familiar, by-the-books, vertically integrated product to ensure continued IP visibility for the film and television arm of a corporate portfolio. Here’s the latest and laziest IP for you to become disenchanted by, should you feel so inclined.

Neil Marshall’s Hellboy is a monster mash, loud and proud. Just bring a mop.

It’s clichéd, distant, afraid to truly immerse itself in anything but long looks, but at least it looks good. And that’s that.

This is another bad Perry film, but a curiously verbose one with jokes piled atop more jokes.

Marlon Wayans is clearly getting off on the gags, but the lazy, hard humor, and elastic joke-making eventually has a numbing effect.

Adam Mason’s Songbird is about boring people getting mad that they’re stuck inside, and the government is oppressing them, and they’ll soon fly free or whatever.

At 100 minutes, with just enough digital chutzpah to keep everyone reasonably amused and never quite annoyed, Dolittle is tolerably fine.

Rio, I Love You is worth a passing look for its pot of talent.

The end result is a finished product which smacks of Universal optioning a hot Scandi novel, losing enthusiasm for it during development and production, and leaving audiences with the remaining carrots and coal.

If for one second you forget the diverging script, the weak direction, and Efron’s limitations, there’s something to be amused by with De Niro’s flagrantly foul-mouthed, horned-up grandfather figure.

Like the Hollywood it tries to lampoon, in its way, The Fanatic comes across as shallow. It is, as they say in the biz, a flop.