Jacob Oller

Despite a furiously alpha-male James McAvoy raging through the movie—nearly making this new take into an enjoyable, scareless, hoot-and-holler romp—Blumhouse’s hollowed-out remake undermines its nasty source material with its Americanized sheen.

The wreck of Wonka stings because of the clarity with which we see King’s eye for visual comedy and lavish setpiece staging, squandered on a movie where branding was always going to eclipse beauty.

Jolt’s generic results are so far removed from its high-concept electrical premise that you have to wonder: Watt the hell happened?

Corbin’s film is brutal and sad, thanks to its brutal and sad origins and the abilities of Boyega, but its wandering eye is just the latest to gloss over Brian Easley.

Diallo undoubtedly strikes at potent topics with skill and sets her collaborators up for success...but its storylines and characters don’t convincingly coalesce.

The Public Image is Rotten’s soundtrack is, of course, great, and the candidness from former bandmates regarding their backstabbing and youthful mistakes is certainly refreshing, but it’s all wrapped in a package wearing dad jeans: too safe, too simple, too given to a happy ending.

Though Steve is a capable conduit for the myriad familiar dramas of juvenile delinquent storytelling, there’s just not enough time in the day (or the film’s wishy-washy 24-hours-in-hell structure) to give anything the attention it deserves.

Where the Crawdads Sing is shallow, predictable and just broad enough that you can understand why it sold so well as a half-lurid paperback. Newman’s work adapting it makes its derivative elements as obvious as a bad accent, but its chart-topping, tone-deaf mediocrity is faithfully replicated.

The look of Dragon Ball is changing, and Super Hero represents its growing pains. But it also represents a willingness to look its longevity in the face and, like all long-running serials, see what passing the torch once again really means.

The moments where these reluctant clients open up about their wholesome desires, their dreams of spending their lives with someone they can grow old appreciating, invigorate the unfocused film. The rest of the time is spent whirling around all the fascinating subtopics Feng brushes.

At times, the throwback goofiness of Ron’s Gone Wrong can be amusingly quaint, but more often the film is humorless, sentimental tripe that couldn’t find its point if it had a dozen B-bots giving GPS directions.

Strange World’s embrace and rejection of both tradition and modernity can be confounding, despite the undeniable beauty it finds along the way.

Not just an incredible waste of a spectacular performance, but a film more caught up in ogling tragedy than dealing with it.

The feverish Knocking puts together a fittingly upsetting portrait of lonely instability through its simple premise, visually inventive first-time director and physically invested star.

The melancholy absurdity—dragged out over two-and-a-half hours—doesn’t revel in its ironic condemnation. It’s a long sigh, an off-key parody song performed before humanity’s curtain call.

Safdie splits the difference, striving to replicate the gritty, in-the-moment documentary feel of the source movie he clearly admires, and coat it in the triple-A Hollywood sheen befitting this kind of serious star vehicle.

If the idea of killer jeans makes you crack a grin, and even if you’ve been disappointed by horror movies with similarly silly central conceits, it’s worth your time to try on Slaxx. You might be surprised how enjoyable this bootcut bloodbath feels.

Robert Budreau‘s Born To Be Blue turns Baker’s darkest professional and personal period into a sepia weepy.

Even in its over-the-top finale, Nobody never quite reaches the bloody ballet of Wick, nor the depth that franchise’s odd underground world offered, which dulls the tip of its action.

Mäkelä can capture something real about queer nightlife, shooting evocative moments at a drag king show, but that ability only makes you wish he’d abandon his main character—or at least let him mature a bit before subjecting us to him.

Familiar pieces playing a familiar game to familiar ends won’t make Martyrs Lane anyone’s favorite horror movie, but it’s put together well enough to offer comfort and intrigue in small doses.

Throughout, Lears is all over the place. When To the End focuses on climate change deniers, it can be cathartically searing.

Where Chicken Run once played off of the specific aesthetics of WWII POW films with dark humor, Dawn of the Nugget loses its identity in favor of a harmless playfulness interchangeable with a Madagascar or Ice Age sequel.

True to its inspirations, Ash offers up a formal mix between traditional sci-fi filmmaking and frequent first-person segments (either through pseudo-body cam footage or more explicitly video game-like bouts of point-of-view panic) that gives the familiarity a bit more energy than your average knock-off.

Like its muddy multi-movie gamble, the ideas are there for Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. But like its characters, it’s happy to follow the path of least resistance.

Despite remaking much of that film (Taisei Iwasaki and Yuma Yamaguchi’s tense score being one of the most successful throwbacks), Bullet Train Explosion abandons the complicating human factors that gave the original its soul. It makes the same mistake as so many modern blockbusters: confusing bigger, louder, and simpler with better.

If you’re not immediately tickled by Normal‘s premise, which cements into the traditions of narrative conflict—man versus nature, man versus man, man versus self—the very literal concept of “man versus entire town,” this is the least of the Odenkickass movies. And if that idea makes you smile, Normal might be even more disappointing for how mechanically it goes through motions that used to be novel.

It’s a straightforward slasher with a tech-savvy twist, ironically not outlandish enough to stand out from the formerly forbidden footage filling our feeds every single day.

It’s a pointedly strange experience, sometimes annoyingly so and sometimes unexpectedly crushing, but all enjoyably kooky depending on your tolerance for this kind of thing.

It doesn’t always work, and it’s a little messy in its attempt, but the ambition to manipulate a cash-grab into something evolutionary—something many legacyquels wish for but almost never attempt so brazenly—makes this Matrix the rare resurrection resulting in more than a sad IP zombie.

If you’re blessed with matching taste, where you’ll put up with a bunch of over-literal, stiff-backed oddballs dealing with a clone crisis, you’ll find a rewarding and gut-busting film that’s lingering ideas are nearly as strong as its humorous, thoughtful construction.

It ends up like every other three-person romantic dramedy ends up, but at least Love, Brooklyn boasts competent players going through its motions.

While a little dark and a little unsteady—and boxed in a bit by the limitations of its genre—Flora & Ulysses still hits most of the right beats and manages to find some resonant, intelligent things to say about some pretty grown-up topics.

While not compelling enough to be one of the two options—either a destructive or awakening force for our own personal simulations—winkingly proffered in the doc itself, A Glitch in the Matrix still has genuinely gripping segments.

What’s delivered is a flat drama with some admittedly striking nature photography, though the biggest survival struggle becomes that of your own attention span.

In Your Dreams has all the excitement of a low-anxiety, day-in-the-life nightmare stirred up by a case of the Sunday scaries. And, like those mundane nightmares, as soon as the film is over, you’re left momentarily wondering if it actually happened in the first place.

The abusive push-pull between America and Mexico, the conflict between the exotic fantasy of a Latin lover and its xenophobic underbelly, crashes into two people too ill-defined to function as anything more than symbols.

While there is a literal amount of truth running through the semi-autobiographical Suncoast, its glossy, uncertain cutesiness is as fake as Ron DeSantis’ height.

The voiceover-heavy storytelling is exhausting and weightless, despite Keshavarz’s clear affection for and closeness to these women.

Prickly characters and a knack for mortifying situations strain to break free from When You Finish Saving the World’s limited and dispassionate plotting.

A small cadre of performers and a play-like production—split into three contained acts that leap decades and single-location settings—keep the indie charmingly subdued, but the movie is so literal when drawing attention to its own underdeveloped themes that it boldly challenges you to be ignorant of the genre’s most basic philosophical bullet points.

Schmaltz-heavy and wishlist-thin, That Christmas offers very little and doesn’t even have the self-awareness to include the receipt.

It’s a star vehicle intent on dulling its leads’ shine, a slick blockbuster relying on narrative and visual restrictions, a cynical movie about the power of friendship. And yet, even as Wolfs undermines itself, it’s a charmingly prickly (or charming, despite its prickliness) mess.

While Chase, Taylor and Konner figure out a way to give us a half-assed rundown of the gangster rise-and-fall we saw again and again in the series, they couldn’t figure out how to make that into any kind of satisfying film—let alone one worth its references to the gangster canon and let alone one that has anything at all to say about the race relations in Newark during its setting.

The film never quite achieves the level of fevered hurry for which it aims—sometimes due to its often trite, on-the-nose dialogue and sometimes to the stilted delivery of said dialogue.

Eremita (Anthologies) offers bursts of such inspired and inhibited strangeness in an uneven assessment of life, documenting this specific period around the world through a diverse spread that’s very imperfection is relatable to anyone that’s tried to get anything done under quarantine.

Lightyear is a beautiful starship with precious genre cargo, functional and direct in its simple mission to carry on.

When The Power is on, it’ll have you white-knuckling a flashlight all night. When it starts flickering, well, even its least nuanced moments or most telegraphed turns still have a level of craft that make certain Faith will be able to keep the lights on as a filmmaker for a long time to come.

Prolific TV director Benjamin Caron‘s self-serious movie keeps digging itself into a hole, first with its narrative, then with its heroine’s increasingly lurid backstory, until, like that heroine, it can’t claw its way out.

While China’s propaganda department made sure the film was imbued with a definitive moral, there’s a subtle pleasure in a spy story otherwise intoxicated with its own smokescreen.

Together, from director Stephen Daldry and writer Dennis Kelly, succeeds by candidly approaching the subject head-on—literally, as its two-handed drama starring a couple played by James McAvoy and Sharon Horgan is a moving, sharp and charmingly black-humored film of direct address.

Though the punches maintain their force in Nobody 2, the sole punchline they support has become a grating dad joke, one that you’ve heard so many times that it’s lost all meaning.

If ever there was a case made that being on the right side of history, in the right place and with the right story isn’t enough to make satisfying non-fiction, Kim’s Video is it.

The film’s rock-solid survival story is enhanced by its charming ensemble and striking, elegant environment.

Caught between these conflicting expectations, it’s hard to appreciate Cruella as a whole. It’s overlong, with endless endings, and invites more conversations about it as a curious corporate product than as a cohesive movie. But it can also be perversely enjoyable with its flashy playlist-while-playing-dress-up aesthetic and brash, heightened central actresses.

Unfortunately, even though Moonshot aims high, its misfire falls all the way back down to humble terra firma.

The sequel sticks Affleck and Jon Bernthal in a sitcom episode surrounded by a Sound Of Freedom-style macho fantasy—call it Gun Sheldon. It’s a terrible combination that buries the rapport of its leads in chaotic action, troubling worldviews, and increasingly generic plotting.

It’s not a great standalone entry into the Fast canon, but as the franchise speeds towards its finish line, it’s still satisfying to know that it’s in the hands of someone well-versed in the series’ strengths and still willing to imagine new ways to crash its toys into each other.

In telling a story that’s only being put to film in the first place because of how much schadenfreude online lookie-loos gained from it when it was happening live, the doc doesn’t say anything beyond the obvious.

Eastwood’s been riding off into the sunset for decades now, and Cry Macho’s creaky, lackadaisical hat-wave is a feature-length parody of a golden oldie.

Though it’s still thrilling to hear actors fire out Mamet’s heated arguments, when the dust clears from the film’s dense conversations, what remains is hollow.

It makes less sense for this story, haphazard and lost, to follow one of Disney’s better films of the last 20 years. There’s almost an affecting message, where teamwork on a small scale results in greater togetherness on a large scale.

A forgettable sci-fi with standout elements—making the most of what he’s got left, even if it’s not enough.

The film is better at punching the clock than punching the bad guys. To that end, it’s an honest day’s work from Ritchie and Statham, but not an especially entertaining one.

The weary and plodding story putters along the redemption arc’s curve, losing faith even in itself along the way.

Half high-concept enlightenment satire, half exhausting family dramedy, Bad Behaviour is as tedious as its leads’ search for inner peace.

If you don’t worry about the story and just immerse yourself in the gags, Alloway’s film is a must-watch for the Venn diagram overlap between Shudder subscribers and the slumber party crowd.

Rather than embracing its premise’s unique potential, Boss Level mires it in tropes and convention.

Even if it wasn’t hot on the tail of Pixar’s Hoppers, Swapped would still be an overly familiar adventure towards empathy, one light on comedy and insight despite plenty of visual imagination in its world of flora-fauna hybrids.

Held and George’s film twists and turns, but charting their narrative swamp is a simple and unrewarding exercise.

Those unfortunate enough to populate Mr. Harrigan’s Phone must be as dumb as the movie thinks we are. This low opinion of its audience is apparent in every step of its narrative and in some of its stranger creative choices.