Darren Franich

For anyone who loves stop-motion animation, the first 40 minutes of this bleak adventure will scratch your trippy itch and then some.

There's a secret blandness behind the frantic insider gags.

Deep Water isn't really thrilling or erotic, but it accomplishes a kind of diagonal camp sincerity, plummeting its glamorous characters into ever-tawdrier situations. I wouldn't marry it, but I wouldn't kill it. Remind me, what's the third option?

Have tissues ready, and thank Vivo for teaching the little ones a valuable lesson: Do not go into a swamp alone, or you will meet a tree-size python who sounds just like Michael Rooker.

F9 sure sounds like a lot of fun. Why is it only a little fun?

Army of the Dead grills its cheese to a crisp, but Bautista adds some healthy flavor. His headshots never miss your heart.

Nobody could play well for anyone desperate to visit a recently reopened theater, but this is a rather chilly festival of carnage, too rigid to ever really spark to life. It's wickless.

Yet even compared to the glacial Marvel-Netflix Dramas, Zack Snyder's Justice League is a chore. At the end of the rainbow, viewers are left with the promise that the actual cool things will happen next time. This cut is no worse than the theatrical edition, but it sure is longer. "So begins the end," Steppenwolf declares. When he says that, there is one hour left.

The film loses steam when the plot drifts the women apart, but Clark's fearsome performance anchors the surreal final act. Her body is a stage for Saint Maud's demonic dance.

Hillbilly Elegy is two movies, one laughably bad and one boringly bad.

There are actors who can pull off dual roles, and now we know Seth Rogen isn’t one of them.

The Hunt stuffs a satire grenade down America’s pants, hoping the shrapnel spreads from sea to shining sea. The explosion is messy, but it sure is an explosion, with a brisk hour-and-half runtime full of violent twists and cackling turns.

We need a new franchise designation for this stumbling, bloodless conglomeration of What Once Was. Rise of the Skywalker isn’t an ending, a sequel, a reboot, or a remix. It’s a zombie.

A Hidden Life’s cinematographer is Jörg Widmer, Malick’s longtime camera operator. His work is handsome and a tad too dutiful. There are so many gorgeous shots of Franz scything through farmland, and I kept wishing someone had scythed a half-hour off the running time.

A vibrantly madcap dark comedy.

Violent and sexy, balanced between hope and despair, definably too-much and unapologetically mythic. The road is bumpy, but what a trip.

This new Charlie’s Angels gets very crush-y between silly excess and striving ambition, but even the sugar is flammable.

Doctor Sleep is a mess. It’s way too long, clashing somber sobriety with loony cheap thrills. The Shining homages turn shameless and cheap. The jumpscares are more funny than scary.

At least Dark Fate is frequently bad in a funny way, without the dutiful dullness of the last couple sequels.

What’s lacking in this entertaining pulp quest, I think, is some essential surprise.

Far From Home succeeds with an unusual, troubling virtue: The best parts are the most fake.

Fairy tales edge toward strangeness, and the sanded edges of Yesterday ultimately feel more like a flashy commercial — one of those recent music documentaries commissioned by the people on screen, propaganda with feels. The music’s good, duh, and it’ll be just as good when your local high school performs Yesterday. Which lucky kid gets to play Ed Sheeran?

Annabelle Comes Home is only a little scary, and too religiously dedicated to its own ongoing cash-printing megafranchise for big laughs. But the best moments in this low-key domestic horror film have a tossed-off quality, like the whole production cycle was a fun weekend for everybody.

Toy Story 4 doesn’t hit the emotional highs of the previous films. There are good jokes that work and heist setpieces that don’t. The ending is moving, though now you distrust any finality with this saga. It does feel a bit cheap, somehow.

International is better than Men in Black II and worse than Men in Black III, and they’re all bad, so erase this sentence from your memory.

The best thing I can say is: This is a mess that makes no sense, so it’s a cure for the common overly architected superhero film.

Captain Marvel only figures itself out toward the end, when a couple twists I won’t spoil sharpen the spanning saga into a motley-crew errand of mercy.

This manga adaptation is a tired science-fiction odyssey, with bland digital effects piled onto a sappy non-story that feels like a two-hour elevator pitch for a 70-film franchise.

For a film that invites so much self-aware chortling over franchise in-jokery, you feel Spider-Verse has missed something essential from its own screen history.

The rare quiet moments in Nutcracker suggest Foy might be a real movie star. Let’s give her a real movie and find out.

Ant-Man and the Wasp is working too hard to look unconvincingly relaxed.

Day of the Soldado is our generation’s Rambo: First Blood, Part 2, a half-mad sequel transforming a traumatized political parable into a fantasy of all-American murder gods.

Bird’s made the weirdest Pixar movie ever, revolutionary and retro, an anti-authoritarian ode to good parenting.

A Wrinkle in Time hits that unfortunate un-sweet spot common to big-budget science-fiction/fantasy, where the spectacle feels more summarized than experienced.

Jim & Andy is fascinating, but it lands on a weird message: Thank goodness Andy Kaufman existed so Jim Carrey could play him in a movie.

It feels too long, and it’s only 90 minutes. Jigsaw’s lifecoach-gone-mad ruminations have never sounded less threatening: He is become mansplainer, destroyer of drama. But there are lasers. I liked the lasers.

Five Foot Two is a strange work, slippery, out of focus.

The characters come to life when they fight, and seem half-dead when they talk.

Bad dialogue, lame plot, fine. The bigger issue: How could a film with Elba and McConaughey have so little swagger?

You’d hope that a film like this could put a bold new spin on the superhero story. The reverse is true: Here we are in 2017, and even our nifty low-budget crime movies are building a cinematic universe, and saving the best stuff for the sequel.

In Salt and Fire, a bad movie but an intriguing vacation slideshow, Michael Shannon and Veronica Ferres play “characters” (unconvincing, undimensional) and speak “dialogue” (expository, flat).

Like many DreamWorks movies, The Boss Baby‘s most imaginative moments are the random asides.

Belko is an appropriately disreputable, gleefully disturbing movie.

Here’s a film that turns Michael Fassbender into a puppet, and oh, those strings hold him down.

It all works in theory. But the execution’s off.

Where Saroo goes and what he finds there left me in tears, but you feel that a complicated true story has been airbrushed into a postmodern legend.

Here’s what you didn’t expect: That The Brothers Grimsby, an upstairs-downstairs spy comedy, would be Cohen’s best work in a decade.

Full credit to director Michael Dougherty (Trick ‘r Treat) because this is great-looking movie, filled with freaky creature designs and a just-right mixture of practical effects and CGI.

Thai martial-arts maestro Tony Jaa’s newest film overloads on terrible F/X that rob the film of the actor’s usual brute-force balleticism.

Somehow, it actually looks cheaper than "Paranormal Activity." It's less funny, too.