Jacob Oller

Though the simplest pleasures of Favor remain—catty chemistry between Kendrick and Lively, loopy twists, bravura statement outfits—the heat powering the concept has cooled to the extent that, despite the increased body count, the sequel feels as perfunctory as its title. It’s just Another one.

The Conjuring: Last Rites solidifies The Conjuring franchise as the Fast & Furious of horror movies: A conservative, Christian, family-oriented, spin-off and sequel-laden series of adventures that lose the plot and reinvest in the audience’s affection for its familiar beats and cornball leads.

Miguel Wants to Fight is a flyweight comedy with the misfortune of coming out the same year as the similarly style-forward, action-spoofing teen reckoning Polite Society.

While its larger ideas never fully find their feet, The Queen of Black Magic lights a fire beneath the soles thanks to its continuous flow of gags—eventually developing into an almost Hellraiser-esque carnival of punishment.

Good on Paper wasn’t that good as a stand-up segment; as a movie, it should be permanently erased from the memories of anyone unlucky enough to have seen it.

If repetition is the only goal, Lilo & Stitch paints by the numbers. But the Disney Channel Original aesthetic and a handful of wrongheaded decisions make this film just the latest in a string of soulless, cut-rate copies.

Stuffed with motormouths and throwaway gags, the chunky animation can be a little off-putting, but its momentary ugliness feeds into its delightfully dark villains, its underdog heroes and the strange story tying them all together.

The problem isn’t that the film is as shallow as its subject, but that its efforts to find substance beyond the style are handicapped by its broad format.

The Devil Made Me Do It proves that, with The Conjuring franchise at least, the devil you know is far, far better than the one you don’t. Chaves doesn’t quite manage to close the Warren files, but his efforts in the universe are now two of the weakest.

In its lovingly observed, casually bold and uneasily tense coming-of-age drama exists familiar dynamics we’d rather not recognize.

Over Your Dead Body is a gleeful, bloody romp masquerading as a dark marriage comedy, though unsurprisingly the two sides of its genre dynamic have a dysfunctional relationship.

This boneheaded movie’s got a dull point, but at least a lot of rich jerks get murderized by fanged, stab-happy unicorns.

Wolf Man rarely bares its teeth, opting instead for tail-tucked melancholy. Relatively absent of jumpy gotchas or relieving humor—though there is a slightly tongue-in-cheek moment involving a doggy door—the film relies on injecting its Gothic origins with a dose of modern dread. Dangers lurk outside the home, but could just as easily infiltrate it. The march of death could hasten its pace for anyone at any time, rendering those around them impotent.

Directed by Jacqueline Castel in her feature debut, My Animal’s moody dreams are in a territorial brawl with its small-town realism, which in turn barks and snaps at its soapy plot. Its fable eventually hunts down more than a trite analogy for perceived deviance, but its blend of visual and narrative tones favors the laconic over the lycanthropic.

This fable’s push to meet, then fix, your heroes can still sound as saccharine as a solo acoustic set, but it’s smart enough to undercut itself early and often.

While most of the film is simply mediocre-to-bad melodrama with a questionably conservative bent to its messaging, some elements stand out for how downright terrible they are.

But as that film approaches 90 years old, Disney made a remake that looks 100 times worse—and, necessarily, has been updated in an attempt to tell a more human tale. Aside from coating the story in a sickly “live-action remake” sheen, like dipping a juicy red apple in a vat of poison, Snow White also pads out its plot so that the character at the center actually has a character, that her love interest is more than a randy stranger in the woods, and that her foe’s villainy is more political than mythic. But the extra half-hour is just as muddled as the misguided classic elements, all of which forge a tarnished tiara to which Rachel Zegler is the single crown jewel.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra and his fully crewed vessel of writers never sink all the way to the bottom, but the very best they accomplish is keeping their heads above water.

The pulp and action are sold by Statham with the resigned competence of a factory worker clocking in for a shift, and Breathnach’s over-eager performance is balanced out by her expressive face. They’re a decent team to watch go through the motions, running through underworld contacts and old pals who owe one last favor.

It Lives Inside shows that a generic, uncertain script isn’t improved with a single coat of paint, especially if the ugly original is bleeding through the patchy, translucent renovation.

None of The Gray Man’s still-Bourne thrills are executed with the precise elegance of John Wick, the winking doggery of James Bond or the joyful craftsmanship of Mission: Impossible. Rather, its chaotic Grand Theft Auto filmmaking skates by with the sloppy sufficiency of its own protagonist.

At the center of it all is Powell, making the same face for an hour and 45 minutes, too unflappable to root for, too smug to magnetize as an inhuman American Psycho. And How To Make A Killing needed to pick a side, either of clownish class comedy or of bitter sociopathic satire.

Even when it’s not selling its past self, Good Burger 2 is selling something. It’s what makes it a hard movie to root for, even when it lucks into saying the right things: It tosses one money-grubbing trend in the trash while ordering all the others directly off the menu.

The film’s highlight is the swaggering Sorvino. More charming with age, like wine or scoundrels, he manages to enrapture without pandering, entertain without sacrifice or compromise.

The Twits is exactly what one might imagine a Netflix Dahl adaptation to be: Diluted, simplistic animation, as cloying and feckless and smoothed over as anything from the last decade of Illumination films.

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

As Rowling continues submerging her magical world into the same hellish and disreputable bog as her personal legacy, I wish she’d kept The Secrets of Dumbledore to herself.

Salem’s Lot isn’t a disaster (far worse horror films have made plenty of money at the box office), but a bloodless and frail version of the story drained of its vitality.