Brandon Yu

This Netflix thriller is a fun-enough time that is elevated by the performances of predator and prey.

Although Charli and Góra can’t quite translate enough layers between them to make this film really bruise, this is a pleasantly slight work that doesn’t overstay its welcome.

A slapdash satire of modern celebrity culture that is awkward where it wants to be acerbic and clumsily maudlin where it wants to be meaningful.

This is, in short, as polished as you would expect of a work about a pop behemoth, a companion piece to their new album that’s less a revelatory look at the meaning of their time away than a sentimental welcome back for the group and its fans. For the BTS Army, that’s likely more than enough.

It is no fun for a viewer to scoff at a film that purports to speak to pain that is real for many. But “Slanted” doesn’t actually have any interest in contending with those experiences seriously, instead using its palely observed traumas as a launchpad for a pastiche of other punchier genre films.

It has its momentary charms, mostly when it’s just .Paak and Rasheed riffing off each other, with the buoyant chemistry of a real father and son, or, when we see .Paak be less BJ under K-pop’s bright lights and more himself, just the artist with a mic and a set of drums.

The knight might represent the contagion of human evil, and Anne’s story a journey of proto-feminism, but for all its big themes, the most resonant is the film’s title.

It’s a story with few surprises and mostly rudimentary emotional concepts, but is enlivened by artwork with colorful texture and a dynamic animation style.

Even as it periodically languishes, the film comes back around, with some moving flourishes, to stamp its idea: To witness these vicissitudes over a lifetime, is to see the beauty, bloodshed and loneliness of true artistic greatness.

Damon is the only one keeping his head above water, mostly because he’s the only one given the space to make decisions and navigate different dynamics. Everyone else is trapped in a kiddie game of cops and robbers.

Like any decent soap, The Mother and the Bear is powered by human dramas that are contrived, silly and ultimately a little weird. But what actually happens belie what is in execution a relatively sedate story about the spoken frictions and unspoken secrets between mother and daughter, father and son.

All of its head-spinning action has a stultifying effect. At all times, the film seems afraid that it’ll lose its audience’s attention, barraging us with the mindlessly zany to hold our engagement.

There’s just enough style and slyness to momentarily whisk one away.

If Zootopia introduced us to an original animal world, this one believes in building out a universe. It can be thrilling, even if it gets lost in its own creation.

It’s gloriously, audaciously silly, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a good time.

To graft the story of Jesus onto the template of a genre film is, if blasphemous to the faithful, and mainly just silly to everyone else.

The movie is an imperfect gem — some of its ambitions toward grand emotional sweep are not without seams and it can at times feel like an overextended animated short. But it’s hard not to be charmed by its warm existentialism (in a children’s film, no less) and its belief that the greatest wisdoms can be found in the way a child sees and learns.

It’s all meant to be viewed through the lens of camp, that increasingly diluted and all-too-broad category that here feels more like an excuse for the film’s flat construction than an aesthetic approach. Though you’ll get a few laughs out of its cast.

Derrickson has crafted a sequel that is remarkably different from the original — up in the frosty mountains, this is more of an ax-murderer ghost chase than a trip to a serial killer’s horrific basement — and with that comes a ratcheting up of grisly theatrics.

Spanning many years and a lot of relationship tumult, All of You is a weepy, sweeping love story that knows full well that it’s trying to be one. But it never succumbs to cheap execution, and all of that comes down to Goldstein and Poots. They make for a terrific pair.

You can simply surrender yourself to the bland moral lessons of the movie, but even then, it’s hard not to feel like this was best left as a quirky human interest segment on a slow news day.

Instead of an auteur upgrading his sensibilities with a studio paycheck, “Beautiful Journey” mostly reads as a for-hire job doomed with jumbled writing.

Rabbit Trap, the horror folk tale from Bryn Chainey, is that unfortunate kind of creation: a work that so clearly possesses the tools that might make a good, captivating film, but instead ends up lost in the workshop, too busy admiring its own handiwork.

The outrageous violence, a core allure of the original, remains, but the gross-out is situated in a more colorfully pulpy universe and has a more smartly self-conscious touch to its comedy.

Rather than being its own entry into the genre, Pools instead is a green director’s hodgepodge emulation of ideas and tricks we’ve seen elsewhere.

The film can’t quite fill in much beyond its initial wacky conceit, lacking the extra narrative and comedic pieces to match, for better or worse, a counterpart like “Sausage Party,” Seth Rogen’s own bawdy animation entry.

Most artist documentaries attempt but rarely get to a true and palpable essence of their subjects, but it’s this sense of his earnestly tender nature, pieced together from loved ones and old archive interviews of Buckley, that leaves an impression.

Their relationship plays out mostly to set up the film’s second half, but even when things get juicier, Mylchreest and Carson can’t seem to find much chemistry through the flat writing and direction.