Blake Goble

Another Evil may be a cheap thrill, but it has a unique take on the haunted house genre. Here’s a curious horror comedy that gets richer with every unexpected minute.

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.

Life is like a box of mediocrity. You more-or-less know exactly what you’re gonna get. But for what it’s worth, Daniel Espinosa’s space shocker, while totally born from the same stars as many other films, still lands about half the time.

The movie is like a second verse, sung a little louder and just a little bit worse.

A passion project from the sing-talk god David Byrne, Contemporary Color is a concert film, but a finicky one, unstable and unfocused.

A Cure for Wellness feels like a return to form for the director. It’s not hard to imagine how Verbinski might have come up with a baffling horror film about the pressures of work/health balance. His latest film is rich with invention, intrigue, and a mind-melting liveliness that’s impossible to ignore.

I Am Not Your Negro is the kind of documentary that could open ears, eyes, and hearts with its moving agony and historical empathy.

Gold is weakly written, predictable, and too placid to achieve any loftier ambitions. It’s just a soft-sold tale of a schemer’s paradise.

Patriots Day sits right on the line between exploitation and tribute. The star power is dicey, and the action relentless, but Berg means well and likes the people in his recount.

Profound and illusory, Silence shows Martin Scorsese at the confessional, in sensationally cinematic style, delivering perhaps his most intimate work to date.

The presentation and little tweaks along the way make Sing far less grating than you’d expect. There are dozens of great moments, beats, and tunes.

Misdirection, tight spots, intimacy as danger. Allied is a paperback thriller’s greatest hits compilation. But the film’s plotting is lively and sincere, gussying up the staid tropes of intrigue into immediate pleasures and perils.

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.

Hughes has seen his fair share of dramatizations on film (The Aviator, Melvin & Howard, The Hoax, even The Rocketeer), but Beatty delivers a fresh, idiosyncratic take, about the figure and the people in his orbit of oddity.

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.

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

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

Queen of Katwe shows that a film doesn’t have to give up on the tenets of genre, but has the potential to win big if it can enliven them in new ways.

Fuqua isn’t interested in pushing the genre forward so much as respecting and updating the model accordingly. The director focuses on establishing his gang of gunslingers sturdily enough that the action becomes easy to engage with, and even get excited about.

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.

The way Lowery observes Pete and Elliot’s relationship with nominal dialogue is beautiful. While it’s easy to deride the remake as commercially conceived, the film still feels as rare as the dragon it depicts, wholesome and heartfelt.

Here’s a documentary with plenty of courage in its convictions, and a teachable exercise about modern health problems.

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.

Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters is sturdy summer entertainment, at once a freaky comedy and an unexpectedly effective action film.

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.

At times amusing, at others analytical, De Palma is both an homage and a lecture.

A lot of fandom went into this, but Popstar is relentless to the point where it eventually becomes plodding.

Little Men is a summer breeze, with rich melodrama and an easygoing mood, built up around two great kids and their troubled families that says more than any after-school special. It’s an episode of actual experience, presented in lovingly natural, minimalist strokes.