David Fear

There’s a sense of sniggering that lurks behind all of the provocation, which thankfully never crosses the line into full 4chan territory. But the fact that so much hinges on the poking of a wound doesn’t automatically make it audacious in a way that’s taboo-breaking. It’s the sort of too-edgy-for-the-mainstream movie that’s not nearly as edgy as it thinks it is.

It’s just that the delivery system designed to get you from one showstopping mano a mano to the next begins to feel so derivative that not even the pulp pleasures of Beetz kicking mondo ass can keep this from feeling like a reheated fast-food binge.

This film isn’t for everyone’s tastes. Then again, neither was Sorry to Bother You‘s mix of critical commentary and absurdist comedy; and, like that film, I Love Boosters takes a wilder, big-picture swerve in its third act. Still, you have to admire the fact that Riley is weaponizing his humor and using it to brusquely jostle your brain by any means necessary.

If nothing else, How to Make a Killing is an abject lesson in how to hire the right person to salvage your movie.

There are better adaptations of Wuthering Heights, and there are far, far worse adaptations of Wuthering Heights. Yet you will certainly not find a hornier version of this material than Fennell’s fast-and-loose spin on the torrid tale of Heathcliff and Catherine, childhood pals turned paramours who can never truly be together and genuinely can’t keep their hands off each other. It may in fact be the horniest literary adaptation ever made.

You may feel, with its immersive 3D set pieces and screensaver imagery blown up to IMAX proportions, that you’re entering a bold new world. But transportive is not the same as transcendent. The piles of ash here looks and sounds phenomenal. What you would not give to feel some actual fire burning behind all of this.

Hard to ding something for wanting to be a cult rom-com so badly, especially when it’s so well-acted.

There are a few decent numbers left. Erivo still makes you feel like she owns this role. But for better or worse, For Good mostly feels like a mere reprise of the first film’s candy-colored cacophony, only with the volume slightly turned down.

You spend a good deal of Keeper forming theories about what’s going on, keenly sifting through clues in the hopes of possible answers. Once everything is revealed, however, you wish you’d gone back that previous ignorance that now seems like a state of bliss. To say that Tatiana Maslany is a saving grace here is obvious, given that she’s rescued a few projects from utter disaster.

While it has its share of highlights...there’s a lot of celebrity malaise and hot air masquerading as insight here.

The question posed by this impressive, if somewhat overheated take on a theater-canon staple is not, in the end, “What curse is it that makes everything I touch turn ludicrous and mean?” It’s more like: Why kill when you can overkill?

Even before an ending designed to avoid resolution and cause moviegoers to stifle screams of “Wait, seriously?” this well-intentioned look at how close we are to the brink of extinction is the cinematic equivalent of an unexploded ordnance. For something so blessed with timeliness and talent, it leaves you feeling like you’re buried in a hovel of disappointment.

Portraits of great men given the movie-star treatment usually accentuate the positive. Linklater finds it more interesting to look at a self-sabotaging artist’s greatest misses. It’s a tribute that’s really a cautionary tale.

Ballad of a Small Player truly puts all of it chips on its lead, and while that faith doesn’t make up for a lot of the ridiculous twists and overplayed hands leading up to a climactic streak, it’s still a smart bet.

Look, it’s not like Tron: Ares, the third entry in this film series that now spans four decades, doesn’t have a few things going for it.

As [Murphy] proved in Oppenheimer, his silences can speak volumes, and some of Steve‘s best moments simply involve you watching him think.

The less enamored of Eleanor the Great you become, however, the more and more thankful you are for the presence of June the Magnificent. There’s a lot of joie de vivre she injects into even the most morose moments, and Squibb knows exactly how to use spoonfuls of sugar to help the regret, the side-eye snark, and the heartache go down. The film’s just good enough. She’s great.

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues is the sequel that many of us have waited for, if not exactly the sequel we wanted. It’s amusing rather than hilarious, gently ribbing rather than gutbusting.

Despite the mix of succession-focused handwringing and a lot people busily running around, extremely little actually happens in Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale — certainly not enough to justify a third feature.

Christy is a decent movie, and a way better proof-of-concept regarding Sweeney’s willingness to go the distance for a project.

Caught Stealing is a decent wild ride through the past, filled with enough memory-bank fodder and hairpin turns to keep anyone engaged.

The way that Qualley brings her star presence and her chops to Honey O’Donoghue, however, feels unique. You’re used to seeing people in neo-noirs do their variations on Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall’s line readings; no one has managed to fuse those icons’ respective personae into one role and make it feel completely their own. It’s truly a great sync-up of performer and part.

No one would consider Oh, Hi! a failure. But you’ll be tempted to say byyyyyeeeeee more than once before this couple’s final bow.

There’s undoubtedly better adventures on the way for the Four in future endeavors, and this should truly be viewed as a first step to making them a major deal in the MCU. But to say their introduction is fantastic would be pushing it.

It’s a new chapter in a saga, yet like its characters who’ve been practicing the art of war since Sun Tzu coined the term, the sequel somehow feels ancient and a little creaky.

So why the hell does this feel so generic, so by-the-numbers, so instantly forgettable? The whole thing resembles the blockbuster version of a readymade, assembled from various, recognizable spare parts and elevated only by virtue of its name.

On the surface, this may sound like a nice, trashy little diversion. We can confirm the “trashy” part, and you know that any time you give Moore the chance to either weep, become enraged or, in a best case scenario, do both at once, it’s going to reap some sort of dividends.

Debate all you want about whether this movie actually teaches you how to train a dragon. What this movie is actually trying to accomplish, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is how to train their audiences to keep buying the same thing over, and over, and over again.

Hiddleston’s soft shoe gives you a glimpse of how the ordinary can become extraordinary. The movie surrounding it, however, seems determined to make the extraordinary seem as bumper-sticker simple and banal as humanly possible.

At its best, this tale of a young female assassin seeking vengeance and wreaking havoc is one more chance to see expertly choreographed mayhem. At its worst, it plays like a Wick-ipedia sub-entry ambitiously pumped up to main-event status. Let’s just say the balance tilts toward the latter more than you’d like.

Hardcore fans may get their kicks from seeing Macchio and Chan together. Everyone else will just feel like tempted to sweep the legs of everyone trying to cash in on a recently revived franchise and wring it dry.

Mission: Impossible — Final Reckoning feels like a conclusion to 30 years worth of proving that yes, you still can conjure up a certain vintage strain of Hollywood magic. It also feels like the end of an era.

The whole of Friendship isn’t as attractive as the sum of its disparate parts, and you wonder if a more concise, focused version of this look at the self-consciousness of dudes trying desperately to bond wouldn’t have hit better.

There’s a true-crime aura that hangs over every scene like a shroud — an unshakable sense that you’re not watching a Western so much as a ghost story.

Only a hair overlong at two hours, this is the kind of disposable airport spy thriller that Hollywood rarely makes anymore, and which generally plays fine, maybe best, on cable over a lazy Saturday afternoon.

It has homicidal fantasy critters, lots of sharp and pointy horns, and absolutely no teeth.

It still feels like you’ve wandered into a Mob-themed animatronic presentation at some amusement park — the Disney Hall of Famous Mafia Bosses — and dutifully watch as landmark moments in crime history are checked off and re-enacted. Take away the De Niro Con: The Movie bona fides, and you’ve got nothing but a fancy Discovery special.

Bong is a consummate cinematic craftsman, virtually incapable of creating a dull frame. What’s happening within those impeccable compositions, however, feels like its suffering from an overabundance of business and undernourished storytelling.

The dramatized version simply floats, roils and plods forward as if being tugged dutifully along, ticking off checkpoints along the way. That IRL ending still reads as miraculous. Yet the whole thing feels still feels starved for creative oxygen.

It’s content to be just one long, sick joke without a punchline, designed to occasionally punctuate a stylishly nihilistic P.O.V. with a lot of OMG moments. You may love it or hate it.

An extended rom-com meet-cute that just happens to have monsters lurking about, The Gorge works best when its just the two leads staring at each through binoculars, bantering via sketch-pad scrawlings and letting their flirtations organically morph something more intimate.

It’s as if someone had gently ladled a teaspoon of artificial political-thriller flavor over a substandard Marvel movie, being oh-so-careful as to not upset corporate overlords or the status quo. A better title might have been Captain America: Business as Usual.

Parthenope wants to be a feminine epic. It’s really just an update of those Bardot arthouse skin flicks, Italian style. But it can take solace in easily being an early contender for the horniest movie of the year.

It’s decent if often frustrating debut, buoyed by a star that’s shouldering a lot of the needlessly complicated narrative burden. We can’t wait to see what Tøndel’s fourth film looks like.

Unfortunately, Malkovich thrusting in a metallic space suit may indeed be the sole takeaway of this attempt at a social thriller.

What you’re ultimately left with is the typical catch-and-release horror template that occasionally sags under the weight of its own ambitions, as well as one that, having exhausted the idea’s potential early on, simply limps to the finish line.

This sequel tries to expand into tonier genre horizons and gin up a sort of Den-iverse mythology, yet simply ends up playing tourist in smaller, more previously colonized territory.

For a movie that continually asks its main character to recognize where dreams end and delusions begin, you wish it knew when to heed its own lessons.

Ultimately, The End is a cult movie that, until it eventually finds its cult, will be more admired than loved. It isn’t the last word on the pending apocalypse. It simply has the fortitude to go out singing.

No one wants to rock the camakau too much here, and the overall sentiment seems to be something like Sequel 101: You loved the first movie, so here’s a second movie that’s a lot like the first movie. This is the good news if that’s what you’re after. If not, well: It’s one hour and 40 minutes.

Yes, The Piano Lesson hits a few bum notes. Its melody nonetheless remains intact.

As for whether this is the last film Eastwood gets the opportunity to make, the jury is still out on that. But you can’t accuse him of resting on his laurels. Artists half his age couldn’t come up with a cinéma du airport read this intriguing.

Why does this Last Dance feel so impersonal, so rote, so step-by-step predictable?

What this sequel really seems to be suggesting is that there is nothing scarier than an unstable pop star in 2024, poised on the edge of a public meltdown captured by a million cellphones and consumed by scandal-hungry social-media addicts. When it comes to possessing your soul, a supernatural demon can’t hold a candle to show business.

Sometimes all of these little plastic avatars are a needless distraction from what is a compelling origin story by any measure. Other times, the LEGO-ification of it all provides a welcome distraction from some fairly cut-and-dried Music Documentary 101 business, with Piece by Piece putting a formally unique spin on a very familiar, if slightly incomplete arc.

Ronan can’t save The Outrun from its limitations as a drama, or from its worst stack-the-deck instincts. But she does lift this film up and infuse the storytelling with a genuine sense of what it means to try living one day at a time for the rest of one’s life.

What do you get when you cross a discordant riff on a fan favorite with a failed prestige project? Twice as much deux-deux.

Maybe our expectations were too high. Maybe we should have said his name — Burton Burton Burton — three times, and the filmmaker who did that beloved original would reappear, grinning maniacally and giving us something a bit less undead and a bit more alive.

Does it tick off the boxes of what we’ve come to expect from this series? Yes. Does it add up to more than The Chris Farley Show of Alien movies? Well … let’s just say no one may be able to hear you scream in space, but they will assuredly hear your resigned sighs in a theater.

Look at it through the lens of a dual star vehicle that isn’t afraid to sacrifice coherence in the name of cheap thrills, and this bird only slightly sings off-key.

Trap is… well, you wouldn’t say it’s good...It is undeniably camp, however, and we look forward to attending one of those midnight reclamation-revival screenings à la Showgirls, where everyone screams the dialogue and dresses like Hartnett’s normcore Norman Bates, a decade from now.

In a genre that runs the gamut from A Hard Day’s Night to Can’t Stop the Music, filmmaker Rich Peppiatt’s gonzo take on the band’s story — titled, simply, Kneecap — falls somewhere between those two markers of quality; the group may be groundbreaking, but this recounting of their struggle to achieve fame, glory, and inhuman levels of intoxication sticks to an extremely familiar template.

The Deadpool movies were once a much-needed counterpoint to all those dead-serious MCU sagas. They still act like the foul-mouthed class clown in the back row, but now it’s just more white noise dressed in red, yellow and black.

Unlike most revisits of previous box-office hits, it doesn’t rely on nostalgia for the original. It does, however, display a serious soft spot for a bygone era of moviegoing, when two photogenic stars, a simple high-concept premise and the promise of digitally rendered chaos was enough to put millions of asses in seats.

Given the talent involved, Fly Me to the Moon should be the stratospheric answer to our summer-movie prayers. Instead, it can barely get off the ground.

This is a movie that doesn’t just heart the Eighties. It actually wishes it still were the Eighties, casting a fond glance to a simpler, more star-driven blockbuster era. Two hours later, however, and the thrill of getting this particular banana in your tailpipe feels like the most distant of memories.

You can’t say it’s unambitious, any more than you could call it coherent, and the result is less Dances With Wolves Redux and more Palms on Faces.

It’s tough to shake the feeling that you are watching human mouthpieces lob rhetorical talking points in the name of achieving some sort of profound insight and, more often than not, failing to hit their targets.

If you know the book, you know the answers regarding the who, what, where and why behind its secrets. If not, know that all will be revealed and, past an investment in Fanning’s character (and an admiration for how she does more with less in terms of a low-key acting style within high-voltage scenes), little will hold your interest.

Like the other Bad Boys movies, this is the cinematic equivalent of exquisitely prepared fast food, empty-calorie entertainment that people love to eat because it tastes good going down.

The result is both exhilarating and exasperating, swinging so wildly all over the map that you may want to pre-emptively wear a neckbrace before viewing.

There will be fresh heroes to cheer, fresh villains to hiss at, fresh metaphors about power and corruption and history repeating itself to scratch your chin over. Yet a curious sense of staleness starts to set in even before the first act of director Wes Ball’s entry pits ape against ape.

The idea of doing The Right Stuff of food stuff and treating the rise and fall of empires over a breakfast treat as U.S. History 101 is, on paper, a well-balanced meal. Onscreen, it comes off as a lot of half-baked self-satisfaction that leaves you woozy from the sugar crash.

The movie starts off as yet another Kill Bill, et al. clone. Thanks to its star, it at least goes out as something closer to Kill, Bill, Kill!

Turn away from your screens. Go for a walk. Start your own wheat-threshing collective. Anything but suffer through this.

What this feels like is a second-generation copy of a copy, and one that suffers from the typical franchise law of diminishing returns. No one expects the reinvention of the MonsterVerse wheel, but it’d be nice to have something that isn’t more of the same and less than the sum of its I.P. parts.

The film may offer a Cliff Notes history lesson and a scrapbook take on a life, but it does make you wish Shirley was still around, talking truth to power right now and offering one more aspirational example for those who might step up and disrupt.

The only thing this second-rate scarefest truly succeeds in doing, however, is giving Sweeney a hell of a showcase.

The premise is a perfect opportunity to take a cold, hard, genre-inflected look at the American experiment’s current slouching toward self-destruction — the only question is whether Garland’s wild potboiler wants to explore or exploit our state of the nation, and the jury’s still out on that.

It’s a movie that works a lot better when it sticks to its star running, jumping, dodging, ducking and, eventually, fighting back. That’s more of a comfort zone for Spanish filmmaker Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, who specializes in horror films that involve pursuit and tight spots (28 Weeks Later, Intruders).

You’re left enduring a bumpy ride on a road to nowhere, in other words, and neither the film’s wane familiarity nor its welcome, pro-smut good intentions can make the journey worthwhile.

Director Reinaldo Marcus Green (King Richard) does his duty by delivering eureka moments, a few greatest-hits sequences, some personal drama. The result is a perfectly functional look at a legend, one that will definitely make you want to put Exodus back into heavy playlist rotation. It’s still not enough.

The only time sparks fly are when that restorative tanning bed crackles and sputters.

The first-person passion is genuine. The form its being presented in feels slightly secondhand.

By the time a final showdown snaps your suspension of disbelief and suggests there are bigger hornet’s nests to kick, The Beekeeper has crept out of the realm of pulpy B-movie thrills and falls just short of being a Bee movie dabbling in deep-state paranoia-mongering.

Most of the student body quivers in Regina’s presence, and the movie seems to tremble in awe of Rapp’s ability to make you think she’s not a Queen Bee but the Queen Bee. Her limits don’t exist. You wish the rest of Mean Girls rose to meet her.

It’s essentially the Snyder Cut of every science fiction and fantasy touchstone of the past 100 years — a jam-packed, ransacked greatest-hits reel posing as a saga.

It’s all very exciting when it’s not completely exhausting. At least you can’t say Wonka is a generic legacy-property cash grab.

Starting with the French revolution and ending with Monsieur Bonaparte’s no-bang-all-whimper exit from this mortal coil, the director’s sweeping, swaggering, occasionally stumbling history lesson is nothing more than an attempt to conjure up the road-show movie magic of yesteryear.

No one’s denying that American Samoa’s brief moment of victory — it didn’t make it to Cup playoffs, yet it’s never been in last place again — is a major coup. So why does this feel like such a lost opportunity for all involved?

Seriously, this should have been either a “special episode” played out over 45 minutes or a six-hour miniseries, in which the relationships among this trinity could have been better fleshed out and the jarring tonal shifts relegated to separate chapters.

As a portrait of a friendship, one tested by decades of high times and lows, successes and failures, bad behavior and forgiveness, Nyad the movie is trawling deeper waters. As a bio-dramatization of one human’s resilience — and thus a stand-in for the triumph of the human spirit overall — it comes perilously close to merely treading them.

The movie itself ends up just hustling a stock redemption story window-dressed with issues as opposed to exploring them.

Foe knows the tale it wants to tell. But because of the often mannered, occasionally stagy way that it ends up telling it, this is a movie that has a tendency to be its own worst enemy

There is the slightly conspiratorial sense that the team behind this trip down movie-memory lane simply fed the scripts of various canonized sci-fi epics into an AI program and waited to see what sort of composite it spit out.

It Lives Inside knows you can use the cover of monsters and things that go bump in your psyche to examine the real-life horrors. But when the message starts to eclipse the medium, it’s time to get out.

You can’t accuse Dicks: The Musical of phoning in a half-assed take on material that demands you bring the big-dick energy or GTFO. But there’s a big difference between being loud and rude and being hilarious, cutting, or even clever. The movie keeps it up for a good long while. It could just use a few more inches.