Jacob Oller

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.