David Ehrlich

Admirable as it is that Deep Water tries to play things straight, Harlin’s film would have benefited enormously from a neurologically enhanced super Jaws in the third act.

I couldn’t help but try to read a bit deeper into how these characters rhyme with each other, especially since Egerton is so game to go nuts, and Theron — ever the reliable action star, radiating strength through a clenched vulnerability — is as human as he is cartoonish.

The movie’s endless middle is so dull and uneventful that Desert Warrior can’t help but belie its true purpose at every turn, as whatever momentum its hyper-fictionalized story was able to conjure at the start begins to sour into the stuff of a glorified commercial.

A lot of jokes have been made at the director’s expense because of it, but if Lee Cronin’s “The Mummy” hadn’t been released as “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy,” it would be extremely difficult to tell who made it. Maybe the wet gore would give it away? The word “slop” doesn’t come to mind for once (bland as it is, Cronin’s film is far too effortful for that), but goop is its only defining touch.

Erratic, petulant, and shot with a humor-killing hyper-saturation that smothers its Apatowian improv scenes under the sickly patina of a Gaspar Noé drug trip (the film was lensed by “Climax” and “Enter the Void” DP Benoît Debie), Outcome is nominally about a repentant soul trying to make amends with the people he’s wronged, but it seems more interested in focusing on the people who’ve wronged its hero in return.

The movie’s narrow focus on the pre-existing conditions that fed into the cable car crisis does more to flatten the people involved than it does to bring new dimension to their ordeal.

The result is a dated mishmash that makes a credible but halfhearted bid for relevance by triple-underlining the common theme of the much better movies that inspired it: White male bitterness is the most blithely destructive force on Earth.

A smattering of individual moments achieve the kind of madcap insanity that a movie like this needs for momentum, but “The Shitheads” is plagued by stop-and-start plotting that does more to stifle its energy than build to it.

For their part, the Garrity family is asked to carry more weight with less substance, and their non-characters struggle to support the emotional burden of an intimate life-or-death journey, the destination of which is a lot sillier than it was the last time around.

If the emotions in Goodbye June are as transparently manufactured as the fake snow that falls outside of the hospital windows, they’re all bundled up in a warm blanket of truth — the truth of how loss has a gravity that can bring a family closer together if they let it.

Anaconda constricts its premise a little tighter as it moves along (if only because the absurdity ratchets up in a way that forces the film to adopt a clearer sense of itself), and there are some undeniably amusing bits of stupidity along the way.

The trouble here has less to do with verisimilitude than engagement; this story about the power and pratfalls of emotional projection simply doesn’t inspire enough feeling for us to see much of anything on either of its two blank screens.

The only people for whom this situation isn’t terrifying are us, the audience, who feel nothing but the purgatorial torpor of sitting through a movie that’s too afraid of its own concept to do anything truly provocative with it.

While the moral comes through loud and clear, that’s largely because the film’s bland depiction of slumberland isn’t a fraction as well-realized — or even as fun! — as its portrayal of the middle-class disillusionment that sends its young heroes scrambling into their subconscious’ every night.

Powell is an exceptionally promising filmmaker, but by the time he arranges all of his ducks in a row for the finale, he’s lost track as to whether Lucas is continuing the cycle of vengeance that has poisoned so much of his family, or if he’s breaking it.

Taut and well-acted as this queasy little thriller can be, its unflinching tale of corporate authoritarianism is much too streamlined to reflect the emotional truth of watching totalitarianism in motion. The result is a hollow synecdoche of today’s America that seems timely and ridiculous in equal measure.

The Hand That Rocks the Cradle is easily at its best whenever it digs into the art of repression — repressed feelings, repressed desires, repressed pain.

See Fuck My Son! not because it’s good, but rather because it refuses to pretend that it isn’t bad. If only that argument were enough to convince me that it shouldn’t have been better.

The director is so eager to make a spectacle out of this scenario that Good News begins to feel as self-insistent as its characters.

Leto’s performance works because he’s so utterly believable as a soulless ghoul that it’s easy to buy into the happy-to-be-here warmth of his emergent humanity.

Most of the shorts here try to use holiday goofiness as a gateway to serious terror, but unsurprisingly struggle to make it across that hell-mouth intact; meanwhile, the sole episode that keeps a straight face and taps into some of the real fears that accompany trick-or-treating manages to become the franchise’s most genuinely upsetting short in years.

Him asks its characters ad nauseam how far they would go to be great, but this dreadfully compromised movie never even risks enough to be good.

Eternity does what it can to leverage its heady concept into a heart-stirring tale of love and longing, but the world-building — or lack thereof — invariably gets in the way of the emotion that Freyne is hoping to generate from it.

Despite promising a welcome throwback to the sort of down-and-out milieu that authors like Graham Greene once put on the map, this Lawrence Osborne adaptation winds up feeling like nothing so much as a quintessential Netflix movie: Easy to watch and impossible to care about.

Style has always been the vehicle for his substance, and while it’s easy to imagine why an overdone misstep like “Parthenope” might inspire Sorrentino to rein things in a bit for his next feature, it’s funny that said feature turned out to be the story of a man who threatens to unravel from self-doubt at the height of his power.

For all the texture of the film, which was shot in and around a New York City vibrantly retrofitted to the story’s 1998-set specifications (costumes, music, locations, the whole kit), the hammy way important beats and plot points are served up feels out of step. It doesn’t pop, at least until the film’s final act, which finally brings together Aronofsky’s disparate parts and shows an inkling of what the filmmaker was attempting to capture.

As “First Steps” limps to its total nothing of a conclusion, it feels less like a victory than it does a total surrender. You have to walk before you can run, but at this point the MCU is back to crawling on its knees, and at this point it seems like it might be too afraid to ever stand back up again.

For a movie that’s meant to represent the birth of a brand-new cinematic universe (the DCU), James Gunn’s slight and slaphappy take on Superman doesn’t feel much like the start of anything.