Chase Hutchinson

For every moment where it seems like it’s getting somewhere more thoughtful, it will dance away into something else, lacking focus even as it remains faithful to the rather short source material.

More a forced, one-note farce than the sharp satire it’s trying to be, Atropia is almost impressive in how it manages to allude to so many complicated subjects surrounding U.S. militarism without authentically skewering or even poking at any of them.

For all it throws at you, it’s neither consistently funny nor scary enough to leave a mark.

Each time you think you’re seeing the daylight of something potentially better to explore on the horizon, “Buddy” keeps dragging you back into the banal darkness. Like the kids, you deserve far better than whatever this lackluster production amounts to.

I see dead people in this film, but their cause of death is simply boredom.

A lot is going on all at once, but little of it coheres into anything substantive, let alone actually memorable or meaningful.

Credit where credit is due to Wicker, it’s not every day you get to see an Oscar-winning actress mount a Hollywood heartthrob made into a literal wicker man. Alas, despite the novelty of seeing icon Olivia Colman climb a towering Alexander Skarsgård like a tree, the magical fable within which this happens is not only regrettably far less fun than this description sounds, but an oddly wearisome affair.

There are plenty of silly recurring jokes and a collection of quirky characters, but it all exists to cover up just how empty the film itself is at its core.

Much like the city being built in the film, it’s all more interesting in theory than it ever is in actuality. Now that we will all have the chance to take it in for ourselves, the greatest revelation is that there just isn’t that much there to see.

There are masterful works of horror that have proven less can be more. Despite some of its promise, Baghead is not one of them.

Andra Day delivers a commendable performance as matriarch Ebony Jackson, but the entire experience is neither scary enough as a horror film nor insightful enough as a drama to leave a mark.

Though there are flashes of more chaotic comedy that get the pulse racing here and there, for the most part Chasing Summer is a surprisingly safe genre riff.

Though it assembles some of the right ingredients before laying them out before you, it never proceeds to arrange them in any particularly interesting or entertaining way.

In the Blink of an Eye is a disaster of its own making, living in the shadow of far better sci-fi films of old, and never doing anything interesting with any of the ideas it throws out.

It’s a film in search of a character whose sole saving grace may be that it leads its audience to read Sapienza’s work for themselves — because the movie doesn’t do her or her legacy justice.

It wants you to buy into the heart and the humor without earning either.

Even at just over 90 minutes, it quickly runs out of steam and can only coast along.

There is something occasionally charming about Outlaw Posse. Alas, charm can only get you so far when a film resembles more of a scattered work of cosplay than a robust cinematic work.

It takes a group that bumped up against the boundaries and instead just operates within them.

As "M3GAN 2.0" drags on, it's impossible to shake the sense that Cooper's voice was the key to the original.

It is as if Pugh is having to push her way through narrative waters that threaten to wash away her performance. No matter how she continues to rise to the challenge, the film’s cascading of contrivances drown her out.

The funniest element of what vaguely gestures toward dark comedy is how poorly written this story about writers is.

None of the action scenes have any passion to them and, even worse, they can feel downright contrived. That it then pretends to have something more to say strains credulity.

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.

There is a winning buddy comedy deep inside The Accountant 2, but it’s buried under so much tedious meandering that it never gets to fully see the light of day.

It is mostly a drag with some potentially sharper small details never coming together to outweigh the dullness at its core. For those who may come to the film wanting to understand more of who Golda was and her role in history via a well-written character study, they’ll only end up departing it with all of those questions still lingering.

Credit where credit is due, Sacrifice ultimately made me seriously consider the prospect of death while watching it. However, this mostly came from a desire for it all to end so we no longer had to keep enduring the inescapably vapid and shallow film unraveling before us.

Not only does neither part of Rebel Moon work, but The Scargiver is such a downgrade that it could prove difficult for the franchise to bounce back for more.