Chase Hutchinson

It is a film you won’t fall head over heels for, but one you can’t help loving many parts of. You’ll just have to do your best to fondly recall the good parts, namely Quan and Lynch, while hopefully forgetting all the rest.

There are moments where it feels like it could have become a more gleefully mean-spirited horror ride by really sinking its teeth into the story and actually biting down, but it remains hamstrung by the rating as well as a lack of creativity.

All the emotional beats from start to finish are just completely unearned — it's as if every foundational aspect of a good horror story has been washed away, too.

The occasional moment of machine gun motorcycle jousting aside, it is a largely dull and dreary experience that never feels like it is ever anything more than a hollow mimicry of far better action works of the past.

There is a cacophony of sound and color which provides some spark to it all. It just is burdened by unshakably tiresome plotting that is made all the more meaningless when it decides to walk back much of what already felt far too small in its creative and emotional scope.

Me Time just goes through the motions of a wacky comedy without any of the actually funny components.

While the humorous heights of both the situation and the people within them can be exaggerated for comedic effect, the conclusion we arrive at is anything but. When we see these people for who they are and the frightening whole they have come, it will leave you shaken to the core because you can recognize just how familiar this all is.

While The Leech starts out sturdy yet simple, feeling more like a psychological thriller than anything, when it takes a leap into the full-fledged spectacle of horror, it is worth getting lost in along with the characters.

With This Place Rules, Callaghan has captured who America actually is on a larger canvas, and while the manner in which he paints lessens its impact, who we are underneath it all is where it finds slices of grim truth all the same.

It is in its willingness to peer directly through the looking glass that most other science fiction works would blink in the face of where Animalia taps into something that remains as spectacular as it is elusive.

Even as Butterfield continues to try to bring something resembling gravitas towards the end of the film, it all just peters out. No matter how many quick cuts and bursts of sound it throws at you, everything it goes for falls flat on its back.

It is the worst thing an action film can possibly be: forgettable.

It is a film that sets out to sink its teeth into something a bit deeper and more inventive only to merely serve up an experience with little to actually chew on.

For a film about a supposedly historic and harrowing journey to the moon, it never manages to charter any new territory of its own.

For all the classic horror stories it gestures at, Killer Book Club never is able to tell a memorable one of its own. No matter how many empty escalations and confrontations with the killer it makes its way through, the real clown show is the film itself.

While it is not going to be among the very best of 2023 when it comes to its story, the craft that went into its presentation is unlike anything you’ll see this year or any other. It manages to burst through the surface of its frequently stormy narrative waters and grab hold of your heart just as it does your eyes.

It is the vibrancy to the presentation that remains the standout though the performances are also good fun.

Much like the scene from which it gets its name, where a photo from an old album is flipped to reveal those four words, turning things over and holding them up to the light is the necessary starting point to finding the truth.

Breathe is empty bluster and nothing more. It’s like a vacuum of where a movie should be, sucking all the air out of the room until nothing is left.

[Bartholomew] gives us insights into her character more naturally than some of the occasionally forced dialogue, showing us glimpses of her increasingly fractured mind through an embodied performance. Even when the film doesn’t fully capture the spirit, the spell she casts gets awfully close.

Where the original remains a work of art that is as entertaining as it is well-made, this remake proves to be nothing more than an empty and thunderously stupid approximation of an action film. Neither thrilling nor tense, it's simply dead on arrival.

Bionic is another sci-fi dud for Netflix, bringing nothing new to the genre and not much more to its action sequences.

Jackie Chan has some fun playing himself in Panda Plan, but this family action movie falls flat.

It’s a movie about the forces that consume anything and everything to make them into something that is a part of a collective. The more it expands on this, the better it gets, sweeping you up in stunning visuals that swallow you whole.

It’s a simple yet effectively haunting work that’s well-shot, written, and acted across the board, especially for a first feature that takes on as much as this does.

Better Go Mad in the Wild is transcendent not because of big speeches or underlined ideas, but because of how it lets us sit back and watch two people, both flawed, funny and deeply human, struggle through another day.

The writing is frequently darkly playful, the direction measured and the performances all completely committed, ensuring the portrait of a family in crisis holds together just as they may all split apart.

Yet for all the sadness at the core of its story, “Clarissa” is captivating in how honestly and openly it confronts that emotion.

Playing like an extended fever dream defined by shallow snapshots of memories, incessant narration by Travolta himself, a gallery of cartoonish, one-note characters, and a poisonous, perfunctory sense of nostalgia, it’s a disaster that leaves no survivors.