Daniel Schindel

The filmmakers behind Leap! seemingly can’t picture a children’s movie without a cavalcade of unnecessary action scenes and fart jokes—and not good fart jokes at that. The result is a movie allegedly about ballet with weirdly few scenes featuring actual dancing.

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back is harmlessly generic.

It is an odd story, mixing haute couture, small-town gossipry, romance, dark secrets, an old murder mystery, and multiple random deaths. And yet it’s also not nearly odd enough, delivering all of this with a disappointingly straight-laced sensibility.

It’s difficult to think of a biopic that so thoroughly embarrasses its subject in the process of attempting to honor them the way Churchill does.

Like an extended episode of Black Mirror but without a dark sense of humor or bleak horror, The Circle wails about how technology is affecting society with little grace or flair.

The Boss can at least be appreciated for trying to lead its main character on an honest-to-god arc, which is more than many loosey-goosey movies of its ilk can say.

The Comedian might have been salvageable if the namesake character were, you know, funny. But not only is this not the case, the film makes Jackie’s stage presence even more grating by insisting with every frame that he’s brilliant.

It’s surprisingly enjoyable even if you aren’t already in the bag for the turtles.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 commits the perennial sequel mistake of indulging the breakout characters, letting them run rampant over everything in the process. Giving everyone the spotlight only diffuses the heart.

It’s not wretched; just boring. A faintly damned improvement, but an improvement nonetheless.

Despite all this, Independence Day: Resurgence still emerges as one of the better blockbusters of this summer, and that’s only halfway damning with faint praise. It’s a mess, but I grinned a good portion of the way through.

Watching The Book of Henry feels like being gaslit.

The special effects are worse than I thought modern studio filmmaking allowed for. Actors such as Robert Forster and Melissa Leo reprise their roles from the first film with maybe half-a-dozen lines apiece. Were it not for the presence of said actors, this could easily pass for a DTV spin-off.

This film’s sense of action geography and tactics is atrocious.

I Love You Both perhaps would have been best imagined as a short, but it makes for a breezy watch.