Brandon Yu

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.