David Sims

Love and Thunder offers the usual lightning-streaked action and tossed-off gags, but this time, there’s not enough heft behind the flashiness.

There is no sense of real danger, because the mission has to continue, if only to keep this impressive long shot going. Any time there’s a larger, more cataclysmic set piece, our heroes look like tiny chess pieces on a much bigger board, bystanders who move around exploding mortars and whizzing bullets to produce the most stunning tableaux possible.

A depressingly routine affair that fails to replicate the joys of its source material.

All in all, the weaknesses and strengths of this remake boil down to the unavoidable fact that Force Majeure, a film I’ve seen multiple times and consider one of the best of its decade, isn’t a work that can be improved upon.

Pearson’s epiphany, and his subsequent battles with the church, were confusing for both parties, and Marston seeks to underscore that with nuance. Unfortunately, he ends up losing grasp of the compelling drama lying at the heart of that conflict.

While the film tries to be a shocking window into another world, it plays more like an agog piece of tourism.

Puzzle is often too prosaic for its own good.

Fiala and Franz can’t find a compelling purpose for the uncanny yarn they’ve spun. When all its ominous frights flame out in narrative chaos, The Lodge becomes a bore, more invested in the ghoulishness of its final reveal than in examining its unpleasant moral implications.

As a studio comedy, Tag is just about diverting enough to avoid total disaster, but it lacks the self-awareness and depth that might’ve turned it into a genre classic.

Although Elemental has moments of imaginative joy—watching a living cloud talk to an aquatic being, for one—the viewer is mostly subjected to a very mundane, clichéd domestic dramedy, not the kind of tale that can truly transport younger audiences.

This is a biopic so fearful that audiences won’t get the connections it’s drawing that it depicts a CGI dragon stalking the battlefields of the Somme. The result doesn’t rise above the insight of a Wikipedia page.

This project does not skimp on its main attraction, but it does seem unsure of what to put around it, throwing a variety of hapless characters in the mix and arming them mostly with indifferent comedy in the face of some truly gnarly violence.

It’s a garish, special-effects-laden extravaganza that still manages to feel tossed-off and half-hearted. The film is entirely devoted to the property it’s adapting, but its mimicry underlines just how pale an imitation it is.

If the rest of Sonic the Hedgehog were pitched at Carrey’s energy level, it could at least be distracting. But for such a short movie (it runs 99 minutes with extensive credits), and especially for one about a super-speedy fellow, it never builds momentum.

The script, by Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse, conveys little beyond the fact that Stephen and Rachael are both sad, nice to each other, and very attractive.

Perhaps his curious gambit of casting real-life figures would never have gelled, but Stone, Skarlatos, and Sadler are not unsympathetic, just untrained in front of the camera. With more time and effort The 15:17 to Paris might have worked; as it is, it’s little more than a failed experiment.

All of Downsizing’s story elements are so audacious that I was rooting for Payne to make some narrative sense of them. But in two hours and 15 minutes, the only insight the movie offers is that stagnation is part of existence, and that while we probably can’t stop the world from ending with unbelievable scientific breakthroughs, all that matters is that humans are there for each other.

I, Tonya too often feels glib and glancing, holding the public responsible for many of the easy assumptions and narrative shortcuts the film itself indulges in while telling Harding’s story.

A Futile and Stupid Gesture feels like a quick tour of a man’s greatest hits that relies on his accomplishments, rather than any storytelling artistry, to impress the audience. Yes, Kenney was part of a turning point in American satire, but that alone doesn’t make for an interesting film.

Not only is it not very good as a standalone story, but it’s also been bizarrely shoehorned in to J.J. Abrams’s nebulous Cloverfield franchise (which now consists of three films made in the last 10 years) with next to no narrative justification.

Justice League feels like a pilot episode—it’s half-formed, overstuffed, and narratively a chore—but at least its gotten all those annoying introductions out of the way. And it only took five movies to get there.

This is a film with genuinely compelling leads, each of whom could support a solo movie, and yet they all seem on autopilot here, dispensing swift kicks and crude bon mots with bored efficiency.

Johnson once excelled at playing anti-heroes you could root for and boo cheerfully all in one breath, but now he’s just another silent grump who’s never allowed to lose a fight.

This movie is little more than a vibrant-looking tableau, a two-dimensional take on an intricate piece of history. It’s a tale that’s been told better before, and Willimon’s modern updates are less enlightened than they initially seem.

For all its energy and vulgarity, The Gentlemen is a slog, a tedious and unnecessarily unpleasant tour of ground that Ritchie’s already covered.

The effort it must have taken to create this movie is apparent in every frame, but that doesn’t mean it’s watchable.

Although Momoa does his best to inject some brash personality, it collides with Black’s more authentic brand of chaos; if either of them is on-screen at any time, rest assured that most of the dialogue is getting yelled. The visuals are similarly obnoxious.

Bayona, the Spanish director who first emerged with his terrific horror film The Orphanage, does his best to inject some more intimate action into a series that usually operates on an epic scale, but he’s working with too absurd a plot for his craft to really matter.