Brandon Yu

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

The movie doesn’t have enough of a narrative engine to compensate for its lack of world building.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Losing all of the glee of its predecessor, the movie instead offers nearly three hours of convoluted story lines, undercooked themes and a tangle of confused, glaringly state-approved political subtext.

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

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.

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.