Caroline Siede

It’s an intriguing idea that results in a painfully by-the-books biopic. That being said, a gusty, heartbreaking turn from Renée Zellweger makes the exercise worth sitting through.

As with so many great onscreen romances, it’s not that All Of You is doing something that’s never been done before, just that it’s doing it really well, with a great pair of actors at its center.

Though it doesn’t entirely recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle magic of the original, To All The Boys: Always And Forever is a worthy sendoff for this well-loved series.

A thoroughly wacky 1945 screwball comedy that also doubles as a fascinatingly subversive commentary on conventional gender roles. It’s a bit of a hidden gem in the Christmas canon.

A debauched but heartfelt coming-of-age story about impressionable teenage boys and the imperfect male role models who influence them. Davidson’s most important skill is his ability to share the spotlight and create real chemistry with his co-stars.

The big-screen version of Downton Abbey is still engaging, well-dressed comfort food. It just doesn’t quite feel like a full meal.

To make a great romantic comedy, you need a few key components. Stylish direction. Winning lead actors. Likable, lived-in characters. And some kind of unique angle on the well-trod genre at hand. Someone Great offers all of that and more, but it also proves that one of the most important and least appreciated aspects of a successful rom-com is a great script.

The film delivers a central philosophy about love (you like people because of their good qualities, but you love them despite their flaws) and features plenty of earnest self-actualizing, but it’s first and foremost here to provide a funny, breezy update on a familiar rom-com formula. Unlike its lost twenty-something leads, Set It Up knows just what it wants to be

Across just a handful of scenes, [Rob] Morgan emerges as the soul of the film. It’s a testament to how much the right actor can do with even the briefest screentime—and a call to give Morgan a starring role worthy of him.

Its characters are thinly written, its antagonist is one-note, and its clumsy third-act action climax is wholly perfunctory. Yet despite all that, Dumbo still manages to offer the sweeping old-fashioned magic of an earnest family blockbuster.

Indeed, The Bluff is a rollicking good time despite the fact (or maybe because of the fact) that the line between thrilling and ridiculous has never felt more razor thin than it does here.

If The Thursday Murder Club has a central flaw, it’s that it’s more affable than laugh-out-loud funny or especially clever. In that way, it winds up feeling more like an appetizer than a full meal. In fact, with such an appealing heroine and such an engaging yet underexplored world, you could easily imagine The Thursday Murder Club as a supersized pilot to an ongoing series where the gang solve a new crime each week.

It’s an impressive journey unimpressively retold, relying on overly familiar biopic tropes about the difficulty of being a woman in the man’s world of the 1950s.

Apex mistakes going bigger for going better when what it really needs is a little more cleverness, either in how Ben operates or how Sasha tries to survive her impossible scenario. For a movie with some pretty ridiculous plot swerves, everything winds up feeling oddly straightforward, which makes the survival genre’s requisite catharsis and comeuppance land anticlimactically.

The trouble is, Roommates‘ emotional realism is so compelling that by the time it decides to swing around to being a full-on black comedy, it’s hard not to feel disappointed by the ending. To be fair, that is the setup promised by the framing device, so the film doesn’t exactly pull a fast one, and the cast is equally committed to the more heightened comedy when it arrives.

For a film about heartbreak, The Broken Hearts Gallery is a bit too glossy for its own good.

In a film seemingly aimed more at teens than adults, Minghella effectively updates that familiar star-is-born template for an arthouse-minded Instagram generation.

Instant Family balances its sitcom tone with some real, unexpected heart.

A pleasant distraction without a lot of payoff. It doesn’t tarnish the original, but it never quite rises to its heights either.

Forget the gritty realism and quippy one-liners that so often define the modern action genre, War Machine is proudly, almost guilelessly old-fashioned.

Instead of translating a real-life experience into something enjoyably madcap, Good On Paper more often than not feels like a friend recounting every detail of a story that’s less interesting than they think it is.

Aladdin could wind up working well for young audiences yet again. For everyone else, however, it’s a bland copy of a lush original. It has the same themes and characters, but without the heart or nuance, despite being 38 minutes longer.

Though Life Itself is neither good nor “so bad it’s good,” it’s also such a bizarre, inexplicable film that it’s almost worth seeking out just to experience it for yourself. For those who want to watch a worthwhile family melodrama, however, just stick with This Is Us.

Unfortunately, welcome insight into the physical and emotional experience of living with cystic fibrosis eventually gives way to increasingly improbable romantic and dramatic scenarios...By its third act, the film almost starts to feel like a parody of the most maudlin conventions of the “sick teen romance” genre.

Like Father is confidently shot and showcases some lovely Caribbean scenery, but Rogen’s biggest strength as a writer/director is her masterful understanding of tone. She’s crafted a genuinely moving father/daughter dramedy in what feels like a heightened studio comedy.

Although the big-screen adaptation of Nicola Yoon’s best-selling young adult novel finds welcome specificity in its world and character building, it never rises above the most generic of platitudes in its central teen love story.

Unfortunately, The Spy Who Dumped Me struggles to tell a story as compelling as its two leads.

While The Grinch never rises to the level of a modern Christmas classic, it’s an enjoyable enough holiday diversion with a core message that’s as lovely today as it was when Dr. Seuss first wrote it.