Hoai-Tran Bui

Deadwyler is simply a revelation in the role, her alternately fragile, fiery, and steely performance carrying "Till" through some of its biggest lulls.

Even for those who aren't quite warm to the art style of "One Piece" (ie, yours truly), the film pummels you with so much color, so much style, so much Looney Tunes-style madness, that you can't help but be a little impressed.

The search for one's identity is never an easy one. "Return to Seoul" understands that, and allows us to live in — and finally, accept — that uncertainty.

She Said is not as economical in its filmmaking as "Spotlight" nor as robust as "Shattered Glass." Instead, as a journalism movie, it just feels rote. As a biographical drama, it feels too early. And as a Me Too movie, it feels too quiet.

The romantic comedy is painfully self-aware but rarely clever, instead falling back on rom-com tropes that were creaky back in the modern Shakespeare adaptation heyday of the '90s.

When there is no actual conflict, the film's already low stakes start to feel meaningless, and the characters' bumbling hijinks around town start to feel tiresome. Conflict is necessary to inject urgency into a film, and as a result, Hocus Pocus 2 starts to really flag halfway through, once the shine of nostalgia starts to fade and Midler, Parker, and Najimy start to run out of musical numbers to perform.

Is it exceptionally groundbreaking? No. But it's fun, and frothy, and clever enough that it makes for an easygoing hour and a half watch.

Don't Worry Darling wants to be a transhumanist "Truman Show," but ends up playing out more like a mostly okay episode of "Black Mirror." In fact, Don't Worry Darling recycles a bunch of ideas and imagery from other films, which it attempts to imbue with a fresh, new sociopolitical angle. But it can't overcome its rather simplistic story and a disappointing reveal that ultimately doesn't match up to its build-up.

Every joke in Easter Sunday lands with a thud, every emotional beat falls flat. It has the sense of humor of a bad TikTok video, and the emotional resonance of that TikTok commercial playing right now where wide-eyed people declare, "I learned it from TikTok!" Visually, it looks like a network TV reject or that one Netflix movie that you put on in the background while doing laundry.

The premise of Luck — what if good and bad luck were engineered? — is too thin to make either element feel fulfilling. Instead, the film's most imaginative qualities feel flattened, while its attempts to lend a fresh, modern edge to these old-age concepts feel unsharpened and bland.

While there are some truly jaw-droppingly beautiful visuals that speak to a greater imagination on Ando and Miyaji's part — they were animation directors for several acclaimed projects and have a keen eye for how to make things look good — the soul is missing. The Deer King can't help but feel like a paint-by-the-numbers riff on greater films before it.

The Gray Man exists "in the gray" of Hollywood action movies — not jaw-droppingly incredibly, not astoundingly bad, just there. It's a movie that's made to be half-watched on Netflix while scrolling on your phone. Its greatest disappointment is that it knows what it has — Gosling, a great cast, a lot of money — and it still ends up being less than the sum of its parts.

The film is a self-serious, but consciously aesthetically pleasing, adaptation of a, frankly, silly soap opera. It doesn't rock the boat, but it doesn't plunge into the depths of womanhood, poverty, and classism as much as it thinks it does.

The problem with "Persuasion" is it doesn't know what it wants to be. Is it a bold, revisionist take on Austen with progressive colorblind casting and cutesy contemporary slang? Or is it a sentimental period romance that wants to get its audience's hearts fluttering as they sigh over the pining glances shared between Johnson's Anne and Cosmo Jarvis' (an endearingly awkward bright spot in the film) Wentworth? The result is a half-assed attempt at both, which only makes it all the more insulting.

It's romantic escapism at its finest, a brief diversion from our grim reality that is just novel enough to make it worth our time.

Vengeance manages to balance its self-effacing and sentimental tones in a way that is extremely satisfying and entertaining to watch.

This is a glorified OVA (Original Video Animation) with an accelerated recap of the show and a few cute Kyo-Tohru scenes stuck on to justify the feature film designation — but the thing is, they only serve to make the whole thing weaker. Because buried in between that messy recap and nostalgia-baiting prologue scene is an imperfect adaptation of one of the best things Natsuki Takaya has written.

Next Exit is a moody and haunting character exercise, centering around the terrific central performances by Katie Parker and Rahul Kohli, but a little underbaked otherwise.

It's really a movie about a couple reconnecting with each other and with their kids through the power of the lottery. It's very silly, yes, but the movie at least seems to sincerely believe in this.

Don't Make Me Go is at its strongest when Cho and Isaac are onscreen together, reflecting back the kind of tense, but loving, father-daughter dynamic which is so lovingly familiar and relatable to many of us.

Lightyear may not reach the heights of the great sci-fi movies that it pays tribute to, or even the "Toy Story" movies themselves. But it's a visually impressive, escapist riff on the sci-fi epic that, at the very least, might become the favorite movie of some kid, somewhere.

Cruz is the film's MVP as Lola, kookier than she's ever been, and playing well into the character's question mark of a persona — is she a true auteur or a hack? You never really find out, but watching Lola become increasingly disillusioned with the whole project makes her the closest we get to a relatable character in this whole heightened satire.

The Bob's Burgers Movie is a little overlong. It takes a while for the plot to kick in, and by the time it does, it drags out the conflict, heightening the stakes to ludicrous degrees. And while it could've just been an episode of the show, it justifies its existence with its surplus of joyful musical songs and its surprisingly dark turns — which really only emerge in the last half hour of the movie. But mostly, it justifies itself by reaffirming why we always come back to the Belcher family. They're the sweet, emotional core of the movie, the meat of this mystery burger that we want to order over and over again.

Paired with Danny Elfman's fizzy score, Raimi elevates "Multiverse of Madness" from the bridge-building bit of IP it so transparently is. While he doesn't quite elevate it to the "madness" that the film promises, he does, for a few brief, shining moments, show the kids how those superhero movies could be done.

Marvelous and the Black Hole is a satisfying showcase from Tsang, who really draws from her animation background to show these moments of intense emotion from Sammy, but its broad strokes are a little...broad.

It's when the film meets between these two modes — the mythic and the realistic — that it's at its most thrilling.

There's a goofy sincerity to the movie even as it sends up better movies that came before it (complete with corny needle drops), and it retains that old Hollywood screwball spirit that gives it a timeless feeling. It's nothing new, and lord knows it's nothing groundbreaking, but boy, is it fun.

Despite its many twists, The Outfit is a fairly straightforward thriller, buoyed by its sharp narrative turns and a quietly subversive Rylance.