Clint Worthington

The unbridled mess that is Aline is just off-kilter enough to warrant a look, no matter how well you know Céline Dion.

Once Upon a Deadpool doesn’t offer nearly enough new gags to justify its cheeky family-cut re-release. Sure, the bits they add are great – Fred Savage’s hostage situation with Deadpool should have been a cool third of the film – but in the end, it’s a retread as limp as one of Wade Wilson’s re-growing limbs.

While the focus occasionally gets lost in the filmmaker’s personal inquisition, it remains a thought-provoking, challenging cap to Greenfield’s life-long body of work.

It’s a shallow exercise in gimmicky scares, but that might be its greatest virtue: it’s a horror film of modest aspirations, avoiding the convoluted mythology of the rest of the series by planting a bunch of scary stuff in a room and setting it off. It all amounts to empty calories, but it satisfies in the moment.

On top of trying to be a Big, Important Film, Jones is also meant to be a showcase for McConaughey’s post-Oscar relevance as a dramatic actor, and he turns in a solid but unmemorable lead performance.

Honestly, points go to Chaves and crew for trying something different with The Devil Made Me Do It: perhaps recognizing the formula was getting stale, they decided to try balancing it with some new procedural tricks. But all it ends up doing is scattering the film’s sense of identity even further; we still get the scares, but they don’t work as well, mostly because they deal with people we don’t care about.

At the end of the day, “Atropia” feels like Gates gesturing vaguely at a few really interesting notions about the military-entertainment complex, and how it can bleed through into the people waging the actual war.

It’s frustrating, then, to see such high-concept potential, some decent production design, and a couple of game leads fall victim to a mystery that unfolds with thudding obviousness.

Extremely Wicked is let down by a shaky mixture of tones, and a fairly hokey presentation of its time period.

While Plummer tries his damnedest to anchor Remember in the high drama to which it aspires, Egoyan’s latest is best forgotten.

Windfall has all the ingredients for an unusual crackerjack thriller: a game trio of actors putting in solid work (and, in Segel’s case, tapping into previously unseen layers of menace), some stylish direction, and a cheeky noir aesthetic from the credits to Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans’ brass-heavy score. But the whole thing never quite builds on its mercurial concept the way it ought to; the characters are meant to be mysterious, but instead come across as mere ciphers.

Just don’t expect it to rewrite the genre playbook.

Admittedly, big stretches of Demeter are a bit overwritten and unnecessary; there’s no real need for a film like this to exist, especially considering we know how it’ll all turn out. But as long as it’s here, it might as well be celebrated for what it is: lean, effective nautical horror of a type we don’t often get anymore. Seaside scares are a rare thing these days, especially when Øvredal packs this much atmosphere and characterization into such a wafer-thin premise.

The Christmas Chronicles is a passable enough lark, and may well be on the upper end of the spectrum when it comes to modern cinematic Christmas fare.

Roper, who came up directing music videos, shapes a post-heist getaway between four unscrupulous criminals, all strangers until they get to know each other far too well, with surprising style and panache. It’s a shame, then, that all that table-setting (and a quartet of riveting performances) gives way to agonizingly cheap turns by the end.

Houston’s magic as a performer was in her unpredictability; her voluminous range, the trailing vocal journey her famous runs took us on from note to note, measure to measure. When she (and Ackie) come alive on stage, Lemmons’ biopic soars with vibrating energy. It’s all the moments in between that grow ever more frustrating — the thin characterization, the flattening of her story into Behind the Music story beats, rushing from milestone to milestone without taking a breath.

Project Power is a hard-R action flick with a neat premise, inventively handled, and a winsome cast to coast us through the creakier bits of the screenplay. More crucially, it’s also got a sense of humor about itself.

Not quite a domestic mystery, not quite a fascinating character study of a frustrated creative, Bernadette feels half-hearted in just about every respect.

Operation Fortune is a spy “comedy” insofar as it generally shrugs in the direction of parody: its characters presume the air of cheeky sendup without actually committing to it, whether it’s Statham’s grumpy skull-cracker or Plaza’s confused deadpan.

It’s hard not to think of The Christmas Chronicles series as a series of wasted opportunities. Kurt Russell as Santa Claus, with Goldie Hawn his doting wife, is such an inspired casting choice that it’s a real bummer to see them do so little with it.

In something as herky-jerky and convoluted as The Gentlemen, the viewer has enough to worry about keeping the whole story straight without dreading the next tone-deaf thing to come out of an esteemed character actor’s mouth.

It’s a frustrating experience; a lot of the individual gags work quite well, but they never build to anything cohesive.

However handsomely and efficiently staged, the actual action in this action movie feels immaterial. It’s a foregone conclusion that Mills is going to get his daughter back, no matter what obstacles are thrown in his way.

Fire Saga manages glimmers of fun through its laborious two-hour runtime when it sits the hell down and plays some fun Eurovision-y songs, but there are too many false notes in between to justify trucking through the tedium to find them. Just hit up the soundtrack when it comes out and bop along to some goofy songs.

Behind Meet Cute‘s smart performances and effortless humor lies a bittersweet tale about the agony of choosing to live another day, of making decisions not knowing whether they’re the right ones.

The experience of watching Ticket to Paradise is pleasant enough; it goes down easy, like a smooth sugary mai tai. And for a while, it’s nice to just luxuriate in the confident hands of Clooney and Roberts, two movie stars who can coast through any old crap and make it fun. But after the sugar high of the honest-to-goodness blooper reel in the opening credits wears off, the rest of it is liable to give you a hangover.

Blonde is a maddening watch, a frustrating fumbling of the delicate tonal balance required to say what Dominik’s angling to say about his subject. It both condemns the conditions Marilyn suffered under while elevating it to the status of beautiful sacrifice. It’s demonstrably not a biopic, and yet its usage of a real-life figure, and the miseries she experienced, feels too cavalier to completely separate the two.

The biggest problem with McKay’s stuff is that he thinks he’s the next Paddy Chayefsky, bringing down untold wisdom from on high and proclaiming disdain at the blinkered, media-soaked vagaries of our world. Unfortunately, he’s bought too deeply into his hype as a vivid truth-teller of society’s ills, and that smugness has infected too much of his films’ fabric.