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.

The early and largely easy fun begins to curdle into inanity that simply drags (there is, oddly enough, way too much actual golf in this movie), before devolving into an overextended fever dream of celebrity cameos.

To help us buy in, the film mostly relies on the polish of this retro universe and its premium cast (who turn in uneven performances, save for Moss-Bachrach), along with one’s faint familiarity with the iconography of the heroes, to do the legwork. But those pieces sometimes are sufficient to keep this a smooth-enough ride that can even be periodically thrilling.

For all of his genre-bending on display, Kurosawa is interested in something more real and more dark about humanity’s capacity for greed and bitterness, and the quiet ways that the internet can further mutate those diseases in us.

Sovereign is most intriguing for its subtle, if incomplete observations of the more complicated realities of both sides of the law that inform and ripple from Jerry’s paranoid world.

The film, directed by Victoria Mahoney, is a sure-footed romp that tightens the screws, most immediately by flexing a bigger cast and broadening the lore of the original comic book series.

The action sequences are fluid and immersive, the art is frequently striking and the music (catchy, if formulaic earworms) is a properly wielded and dynamic storytelling tool.

To be sure, this new iteration is entertaining, bears a sense of heart and brings a tight script of fantasy and friendship to life.

There is at once a roughshod, zippy energy coupled with a sedateness here that results from the simple fact that the film never quite knows how to square the pure awkwardness of two teachers — two stars from different eras of a franchise — instructing a karate kid at once.

There’s just enough to make for a moderately fun, mostly serviceable and often adorable revamp that will probably satisfy fans of the original.

Underneath the blinding lights, the Weeknd has always told us, is a hollow core. In that regard, the movie has mirrored the music.

There’s something almost refreshingly bold in the full-tilt inanity here — in taking a blockbuster budget and embracing idiocy, as if to knowingly say, “I mean, it’s a Minecraft movie.”

The violent comedy works most of all through Quaid, who is natural and nimble in embodying the funny paradox of a nebbishy hero who just won’t go down.

The writing is stiff and the ensemble is mostly charmless, while the visuals are slapdash.

Booth and Pill make for a pair worth rooting for, but it’s Booth in particular, just barely but believably not of this world, who lends the film its winning sensibility.

It’s Coon’s charming performance of the eccentric victim-to-be that brings the film, written and directed by Jeffrey Reiner, into fuller focus as a crime comedy.

Grounded by Harden’s natural and loosely charming performance, Khalid treats his nightmare scenario with an alternating sense of anxiety and buoyant, joshing can-do attitude.

It’s all a particularly egregious piece of commercial slop — just a little too expensive and passable to qualify for being so bad it’s sort of fun.

In recent years Netflix has become a factory for B-rate Christmas movies, with the occasional cheap comfort to be found in its manufactured holiday romances. This bizarre concoction, not so much.

For a road-trip buddy comedy, a greater crime than being unfunny is perhaps, amid all of the shenanigans, being dull. That is partly the feeling one is left with in the R-rated movie Brothers, which, even with an A-list cast, seems to move on autopilot through all of its pit stops.

Despite the film’s aims at spiky commentary, the class rebellion mostly serves as the thin wrapping to, at best, a middling heist movie that loses some of the punchy tension of the original’s getaway sequences. At its worst, it’s no more than a teenage soap opera.

The twists and pedestrian dramatics are a stiff slog to get to, and Gordon-Levitt’s once innate charisma has vanished altogether here.

Most palpable in its frames are the heart and genuine love for this universe, and when the bots start colliding, with action sequences toward the end that are thrillingly punchy, it’s easy to surrender to the lore.

The paranoia sets in all too quickly in this awkwardly paced thriller, and it’s among a handful of defects in a film whose creative process seemed to begin and end with its final twist in mind, haphazardly and unconvincingly working backward to construct what’s necessary to build up to i

Ultimately what this version, directed by Rupert Sanders, is spiritually derived from is neither the film nor the comic, but rather the flattened popular image that the film produced — a Hot Topic-style version of alternative consciousness.

By the end, a part of the experience makes one wonder what sharper point Kravitz is trying to make beyond the obvious ones — and it’s clear she wants to say something — while another part simply wants to lean into the audacious experiment she’s crafted. One where the film’s tart bite is remarkably thrilling, even if there’s some hollowness to its center.

In Álvarez’s final flourish, the film finally forges its own identity, pushing the franchise into a territory that it has yet to go in before. It might not stick the landing — and in some ways it feels altogether silly — but the twist plays so well into the gloriously indulgent mashup play that the film runs on that, by then, you’re just happy to be on the rollercoaster ride.

The movie falters periodically under the weight of its own dream logic, which can be hard to follow or flimsily constructed as the story gains momentum. But it’s mostly easy to move past those flaws in a work of such rich magical realism and heart.

There’s still occasional fun to be had and a budget that’s clearly put to use, but we’re mostly here, it seems, to keep the Minion cash cow chugging along.

Tremblay’s film is not always graceful — the dialogue and acting can be stilted, and one hopes for a little more formal rigor — but it’s a strong debut undergirded by a palpably real emotional core and an un-showy sense of the reality of reservation life.

It’s a Garfield movie that strangely doesn’t feel as if Garfield as we know him is really there at all.

As warm and wise as it is simple and languid.

Half-sketched and sometimes hard to follow, the stories glimpsed here ultimately fail to produce a fully legible or consistently engaging arc of what must be a roiling inner world.

The film revels in mashing up familiar genres: the monster movie, body horror and the Gothic church thriller. But it injects a revitalizing juice into the franchise — smartly edited and well paced, with a good cinematic eye.

Cobweb, directed by Kim Jee-woon, mines the comically absurd reality that is filmmaking, at times with bouncy cinematic verve, at others somewhat aimlessly and a little too indulgently.

Disco Boy is a lean but sweepingly ambitious film crafted with formal rigor.

The kids in the film are simply too young to make an impact, and Snoop, who is fine enough as an actor, ultimately doesn’t possess the charisma necessary to elevate a lazy script.

The animation is strong, if too candy-coated, and the film is clever and funny from time to time. And parents might even find their own inner boy band fever ignited alongside their kids.

Quiz Lady, a mostly winning comedy directed by Jessica Yu, is elevated most of all on the shoulders of Oh’s delightful and nuanced performance.

The doc mostly amounts to a sweet nostalgia trip about a niche group of obsessive young people. It’s also an ode to young adulthood itself: For most of the group, latching on to cinema was simply a means of finding a community, and themselves.

It’s a mostly well-crafted film with decent visual scope. The film’s greatest flaws are in Cage’s shakily written character.

The film lacks any well-executed surprises to help it push past one-dimensional satire, and Howery is not strong enough of a dramatic actor to keep a single-setting, single-character film like this consistently engaging.

The fun premise can make for a passively enjoyable watch during a Halloween binge, but the film mostly feels like it’s just going through the motions.

It’s a tightly controlled vision that, like many parables, induces a sense of the suddenly, viscerally new — in the look of a figure against the ocean, or the words of a mother telling her child to run — in what we’ve seen before and have always known.

It’s a promising debut from Dutta, who offers a fresh premise that proves a natural fit for the genre.

Outlaw Johnny Black struggles to establish a consistent comedic rhythm.

Elements that could have made for a somewhat intriguing documentary get lost in what amounts to a tedious piece of agitprop that ultimately regurgitates the dutifully respectful picture of Elizabeth we’ve seen time and time again.

Even if the movie is about one small win, there’s a sedate pleasure in seeing it play out, especially knowing a version of it happened in real life.

It’s both a shame and a wonder that the film managed to assemble such a beefed-up roster of talent — Snipes, Haddish, J.B. Smoove, Faizon Love and, in a cameo, Kevin Hart — for what amounts to a stilted, factory-line comedy.

While its heady themes yield commentary that is ultimately just a tad thin, Barthes’s satire is best enjoyed the way it’s made — without taking itself too seriously.

The ultimately sparse dramatic elements here feel more suited to a short film; in a feature-length production, they become too thin to support the big feelings and weighty themes the movie wants to leave us with.

It’s not an easy task to make a movie out of a kids’ show from a bygone era, but the film does a relatively smooth job of dipping into — but not overdoing — the nostalgia and retaining the lighthearted, wacky tone that was the show’s signature.

As the team unearths evidence, the documentary offers a ripe window into the process of scientific discovery.

Exceptionally well-crafted and anchored by moving performances from Koma and Mensah-Offei, the film is, in one sense, a great work about that basic human desire to long for something better, and the heartbreak that often comes with it.

Hong’s greatest strength is restraint. At every moment in which she could turn the film into an easier, feel-good story about a woman being taught how to wake up to life, she pulls back.

The documentary, directed by Jack Youngelson, is about the slow, difficult work of reaching out, opening up and eventually finding a glimmer of hope, day by day.

For what it sets out to do, detailing the bond of young boys under surreal circumstances, Shooting Stars is a relatively sturdy retelling.

Harder has made good and entertaining use of a premise that could have become a simple gimmick, and Naud and Saper prove strong leads as their characters try to read each other between the likes.

The power of Alegría’s feature debut is found not in dialogue or explication, but in the lyrical, magical realist qualities of folklore: disappointed mothers and fathers, sacred animals and cursed rivers, love and forgiveness.

Most of all, the film is surprisingly nimble at incorporating an emotional core that makes its story more interesting than the adventure itself.

Even while it’s hampered by these rough edges, the movie is terrifically scored and beautifully shot.

The film’s aversion to formal or rhetorical bombast as it discusses scientists’ hopes for a better future is its own balm. We’re staring down catastrophe, Stone explains matter-of-factly, but our greatest tool is already in our grasp.

The film is so graceless and bizarre in its attempts at tugging at the viewer’s emotions that it often feels like a work of parody.

It’s dumb fun that is at times entertaining, at times flat.

Basic storytelling components are also ignored, as if entire scenes are missing, so that One True Loves, directed by Andy Fickman, stumbles even as a piece of Hallmark sappiness.

The film reads like a faux-hip youth pastor in movie form, only instead of an acoustic guitar, it’s an 808 drum machine luring the kids toward God.

As they have in past team-ups, Sandler and Aniston maintain a charming midcareer looseness, and have a palpable affability as a duo — one can sense the fun they had making such silliness, even if the result isn’t gold.

Braff is going for something broader than indie naturalism, so perhaps the film calls for less subtle brushstrokes. But the result is something that rings with far less thoughtfulness than he’s clearly capable of (particularly in light of the opioid crisis that the film mentions), despite Pugh’s remarkable attempts to ground the story.

At times, particularly in its overwrought closing act, the film feels as if it’s going to collapse under the weight of its relentless, convoluted twists. But the lighthearted tone poking through keeps it afloat, and suspends the viewer in mostly carefree entertainment for its two-and-a-half-hour running time.

Watching its sequences, you can feel both the immediacy of each moment and the nostalgia that’s already seeping in — each snippet of life becoming, by the minute, just a flicker in the teenagers’ minds, like the flashes in the film’s montages, immortalizing their youth before it’s lost to time’s grasp.

The silly premise is one that a better Ritchie film could, with some charm, style and wit, have turned into a workable romp. But everything here is stuck on autopilot.