Brianna Zigler

There are worse and more mind-numbing portrayals of domestic abuse out there, but is it helpful to offer up a pipe dream, double-acting as a trauma fantasy for eager voyeurs?

Inside‘s concept holds creative possibility, yes, but without much, if any, applied, it’s just a guy stuck in an apartment for 105 minutes, going through various stages of disbelief, acceptance, mania, determination and setback as days, weeks and months go by, and desperation becomes more of a necessity than a last resort.

It’s not willing to be goofy and gonzo enough for the inanity of its concept, not cool enough for the slick fight scenes it wants to impress you with, and not worthy enough of Cage as Dracula (the real star of this show).

Trap is a sturdy and fun little thriller despite its third act stumbles; a lean, simple story that taps into what one could glean is Shyamalan’s fear of being a bad father to his own daughters.

Despite Sweeney’s uneasy performance, there is something present between Sweeney and Powell, and in the text of the film, that feels fresh—or, at the very least, like a homecoming.

The beats become terribly repetitive even when the fight choreography is at times satisfying, and the R-rating at least allows for some CGI blood spurts. But in spite of the dreary tedium, there are moments of genuine levity that shine through the gloom, be they intentional or not.

Marmalade is the kind of just okay, middle-of-the-road, nearly inventive but still mostly derivative indie that at least has the decency to be only 90 minutes.

You’re Cordially Invited is a rigorously unoriginal and uncreative film, in compliance with the flat mundanity of content that the streaming giants want their audiences to bask in.

None of the actors do much with the uninspired material, but perhaps Baccarin is the most enjoyable to watch as she grumbles in monotone about how she wants to kill herself and handily espouses monster factoids from her diligent research as a former Caltech professor.

As is, Don’t Look Up is an exhausting and meandering “What if? But also, what now?” If the world really is going to end in my lifetime, these were 145 minutes that I’m never getting back.

A discarded made-for-TV sequel to Rosemary’s Baby in the ‘70s is now just what most mainstream American filmmaking is, summed by prequel Apartment 7A: something stupid, easy and familiar to watch in the comfort of one’s home, confined to the medium that had once threatened to overtake cinema and is now doing so again all these years later.

Y2K should mark the beginning of Kyle Mooney’s film auteurism, but his funnier instincts and command of human vulnerability have been replaced by weak jokes, weak characters, and a weak storyline.

Eenie Meanie largely coasts on clichés, every brief high point deflated by its worldview.

Overlong and overstimulating, the entire film is like a giant, immersive eyesore.

Compounded with dull plotting and a truly uninspired protagonist arc, Dogman is a curiosity of a comeback film that only makes you consider the virtues of director jail.

Paint is interested in the meme of the man. As the old proverb goes: A funny meme does not a feature film make.

The King’s Man is an off-putting installment in a series that should have already ended.

It’s not a great film by any means (I’m mixed-positive on Farrelly comedies, generally), but Ricky Stanicky does succeed in fashioning a fairly consistent number of gags that got a rise out of me even if the narrative, especially as it careens into the third act, feels like a one-note joke that’s getting stretched a little too far.

Clean is irrefutably, deliciously bad. But there is something unironically beautiful about movies that are just plain awful, movies that dare to provoke your senses at all instead of simply sating them with something pleasant and “competent enough.”

It’s as if Neeson is attempting to maintain the same schtick from Taken, with the children remaining the same age despite his own age ever trudging onward (there’s a twisted Dazed & Confused joke someone could make here). It is a workaround refutation of his mortality without the use of de-aging CGI.

If Opus has anything to say about celebrity, fandom, and the state of arts criticism, it’s both not much and not new, so vague and so unrealized that it’s difficult to even parse exactly what it is.

Beck and Woods seem to have an entirely misguided conception of what people love about B-movies in the first place and, like A Quiet Place, 65 flounders in this middle ground because it won’t commit to being a genre film.

Beyond the tepid cultural commentary, the film has few other redeeming qualities.

There is nothing in The Family Plan that you haven’t seen before, to the point that there’s somehow even less.

It is obnoxious, overlong, annoying and, above all, deeply unfunny.

Surely a short film interview would have been more interesting, and engaging, than He Went That Way. It’s the kind of story that’s undeniably fascinating, but so bare-bones as a screenplay that it needs a little something more if it’s going to work, padded out either in the director’s style or in the writer’s script.

He’s All That is, yes, a nightmarish, joyless commentary on influencer-beholden adolescence told through the crutch of nostalgia and starring a charisma-less TikTok star, but it’s hard to know if one is merely an example of “Old Man Yells at Cloud” or if the teenagers of today are truly living in a Hell on Earth

The story isn’t necessarily awful, but it’s mostly boring, stretching itself out to an unwieldy 115 minutes.