Dana Schwartz

Isn’t It Romantic pulls off a sweet sleight-of-hand trick as a rom-com-within-a-rom-com, mocking all of the classic rom-com tropes while still letting us indulge in them. The movie is having its gourmet cupcake and eating it too.

A brilliant supporting cast, which includes Hugh Laurie, Steve Coogan, Ralph Fiennes, Lauren Lapkus, Rebecca Hall, and Kelly MacDonald, is utterly wasted on this lame and forgettable outing. The only real mystery is why they wanted to be apart of this project at all.

There is a beautiful, surprising, and entirely engrossing film within this movie; it’s just almost impossible to find among the establishing shots of ponds and endless subplots of real-life characters introduced for seemingly no other reason than to help make this movie perfect for sophomore year high school classes.

What kind of Grinch would I be to berate a new cheesy holiday movie about two siblings going on a Christmas-related adventure in which, I repeat, Kurt Russell plays a hot Santa? Make some cocoa for the family, and spike yours if you have to, but remember what the holiday is about: watching mediocre, predictable movies with the people you love.

Unlike so many recent horror movies, The Clovehitch Killer is patient with its thrills, almost excruciatingly so.

Ambitious, beautifully animated, and clever to a fault, Ralph Breaks the Internet breaks free of the pitfalls of most sequels by never forgoing heart for the sake of bigger franchise pyrotechnics.

But for most of the film, Parker’s Vivienne is bland and forgettable. A scene where she sleeps with the drummer in her backup band is supposed to be titillating but instead feels perfunctory.

Every gag in this movie has already been done before, and better, presumably by one or both of the earlier Johnny English films. I promise that I will never force myself to find out.

The real magic of the movie comes in its echoes of the first — namely, Black’s performance as the Goosebumps mastermind.

All About Nina works best as a showcase for Winstead, even if she’s performing material we’ve already heard before.

Excellent performers are wasted, especially the criminally underutilized Mandy Patinkin and Annette Bening, both of whom appear in just bit parts. With far too much confidence but nothing to say, Life Itself lives up to the college-freshman affectedness of its own title.

All of us, but especially Jennifer Garner, deserve better.

When it leans into its camp, (I.e. when the French-Canadian “Frenchie” is on screen), The Nun comes closest to its ideal form of go-to midnight-movie, the fun younger cousin of the Conjuring movies with less build-up but more of the money shots you’ll come to a theater to see.

Even if you’ve seen it all before, Sierra Burgess will still satisfy your end-of-summer sweet tooth.

There is no resolution for any of the story lines haphazardly dangling like electrical wires. No villain is defeated, no secrets are explained. When the credits roll, there has been no catharsis for the 90 minutes of movie preceding it, which makes it all feel like a protracted introductory sequence for a sequel that, god willing, will never come.

The meta jokes flow like Mountain Dew — this is a rollicking, goofy superhero send-up that never overstays its welcome.

Far from a perfect film — the morals are clunky, the pacing awkward at points — Damsel still manages to achieve the rare distinction of being both ambitious and just so much goddam fun.

One imagines the real John Callahan, who died in 2010, would have appreciated a film that wasn’t afraid to call him an a—hole

Where the Purge movies could have been about the slow — and then terrifyingly rapid — dismissal of morality and social norms, like "High-Rise," it chooses instead to skate through those haunted house scares and clunky symbolism.

The true strength of the film lies in Zoey Deutch’s magnetic performance. It’s impossible to watch this film and not come to the conclusion that the actress (Vampire Academy) is a soon-to-be major star, as soon as she hits on a major project that makes use of her effortless humor and charisma.

It is not a thriller nor even, really, a mystery. Instead, much like a play, it forces you to pay attention to the nuances of each of the actors’ (very well-done) performances, to sit with the characters quietly as if in a sitting room too formal to do much else.

As a movie, it’s the cinematic equivalent of paint-by-numbers: competent, attractive even, but take a single step closer and the lines peek through. There’s no need to pay money to go see Upgrade: If you select it on a plane and sleep through 60% of it, you’ve seen it in its entirety.

The Seagull is lush and dreamlike, leaving the drawing room for lake, field, and forest. Though we lose some of Chekhov’s claustrophobic talkiness, the dense poetry of his language, Mayer fully captures Chekhov’s sharp humor.

Krystal feels like the result of an elaborate blunder wherein three different scripts were accidentally shuffled together and then — presumably through a series of hijinks — the director accidentally shot it all straight through.