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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Uncharted has fun moments . . . but its overreliance on unfunny quips and uninspired retreads of the action-adventure genre makes it another disappointing non-MCU outing for Holland, and another spiritless adaptation of a beloved video game.

Marry Me feels like a satirical movie that missed the joke. It doesn't have a plot as much as a collection of rom-com tropes — Fake marriage! Reverse "Notting Hill"! Evil exes! School mathalons? — and is strung together by the whisper of a narrative structure. But while "Marry Me" is silly, poorly made, and inarguably a bad movie, I had dumb fun.

Sing 2 feels like a relic from another era. And oddly, a relic that really wants to sell you on U2 songs.

As charismatic as its stars are, and as refreshing as its period setting is, the wildly inconsistent tone and overstuffed runtime loses whatever was left of the shine of the first "Kingsman."

Though you can see its twists coming from a mile away, Caine and Plaza's oddball dynamic and Roessler's visually stimulating direction makes "Best Sellers" a movie that's diverting enough to cozy up with.

Free Guy is the equivalent of a pop earworm – something a little tinny and artificial that nevertheless worms its way into your brain, whether you want it or not. Which makes it rather fitting that the big emotional crux of the movie is actually based around a pop song. And that the film’s star is epitome of pop likability: smooth, digestible, inoffensive — yes, even with all the curses that roll off his tongue.

The worst sin a martial arts movie can commit is not properly showing its action. The second sin is casting martial arts superstars and not letting them fight. On both counts, the extraordinarily limp G.I. Joe reboot Snake Eyes is guilty.

Black Widow is at its best when it’s a wacky family drama between Natasha, Yelena, Alexei, and Melina, with dashes of a spy thriller. But Marvel films can’t content themselves with staying small, and Black Widow falls victim to the big bombast characteristic of the studio. The result is a disappointing solo movie that ends up burying Natasha Romanoff once again.

There’s something here, beneath the glassy-eyed performances and the Instagram aesthetics, about class and privilege and the evils of men — and you could even make a case for False Positive being yet another effective display of gaslighting as horror — but any actual messages are too vague to parse.

After the empty soullessness of Fate of the Furious and the ribald nonsense of Hobbs and Shaw, F9 feels like Lin is pulling the franchise back on track. Whether that track is properly placed or not, or whether it’s actually a track that takes you off the deep end…well, your mileage may vary.

Other than a few inventive sequences around the film’s central conceit of “the Noise,” Chaos Walking is a grim retread of the YA dystopian story that offers nothing else but a misguided attempt to elevate the genre through a darker, more “adult” tone. It ends up being little more than a joyless exercise with bad wigs.

Earwig and the Witch feels like a film going through the motions, but not understanding the emotion behind the big narrative beats it’s trying to pull off. It’s a film matched by its flat animation style: incomplete and uninspired.

It’s pop art made into a feature film, which is a swell idea — if there’s an emotional core that can carry the audience through the staid surrealism. But Audley and the rest of the cast choose to play their characters like stoic ciphers, barely formed archetypes who glide through the film as if in some kind of permanent dream state themselves, making Strawberry Mansion feel even less anchored to reality.

What Mulan does suffer from is the absence of the levity that the musical elements would have brought. Mulan is serious verging on dour, so bent on presenting itself as a serious war drama that its rare moments of comedy feel almost awkwardly slotted in.

The problem is that Eurovision Song Contest can’t dream of capturing the real-life weirdness of Eurovision. And while there’s some chuckles that can be drawn out of McAdams and Ferrell lip syncing a surprisingly catchy song while running through a hamster wheel, there’s only so much fun that can be made of a televised singing contest where weirder things have happened.

The saving grace of the film is the performances.

CRSHD has some promising ideas and visually inventive ways of presenting them, but it still feels like a rough draft of a film. The humor lands, and the character dynamics offer a charming backbone for CRSHD, but this coming-of-age comedy could do with some workshopping.

Heroes Rising is an impressive piece of fan-service with beautiful character work and some of the most inventive and dazzling fight sequences that the series has ever seen. But a recycled plot and villain threaten to doom the film to the lower echelons of forgettable anime movies.

Most attempts to adapt the works of Jack London to the big screen have, more often than not, resulted in a neutered final product. Chris Sanders‘ live-action/computer-animated adaptation of The Call of the Wild falls firmly in this category.

Everything about Dolittle seems hastily put together — from the whiplash-inducing tonal shifts, to the potty humor, to the poor use of a star-studded cast.

The problem with Like a Boss is that it spends so much time being a pale imitation of other female-led comedies that it overlooks what makes the film work: Haddish and Byrne. If you just let them riff, let them live together and let the cameras roll, you would get an infinitely better movie than the middling workplace comedy that Like a Boss turns out to be.