Jarrod Jones

Despite the story bloat, Carnahan spins a tight web for the first two-thirds of his movie.

Dan Trachtenberg's latest Predator movie is a safe, frictionless, lore-centric franchise expansion.

By denying us the terror thrills of this no-win situation, leaning into shock and eschewing awe, Bigelow leaves us trundling out of the theater with only the dull ache of impending doom to keep us company. I could have listened to NPR for that.

It’s the playful entries in V/H/S/Halloween that hit like a sugar rush. This edition is hardly nightmare-inducing, but it’s still as broadly enjoyable as a crisp October night.

Tipping approaches this dilemma but is too intellectually distracted to focus on the raw complexities that would otherwise give it shape or resonance. He opts for spectacle, which wears thin fast.

The Toxic Avenger is an imperfect but no less vital lifeblood transfusion for the cheapo horror-comedy: a cartoon-carnage splash-a-thon, and an eco-conscious call to clean out the profiteers poisoning us and our planet.

In many ways, Weapons is a topical ensemble drama; thrillingly, it has darker, more genre-driven ambitions beyond that. Cregger mixes all this despair, cynicism, and brutality into an impressively wicked and heady brew—and a ferociously entertaining horror movie, besides.

More than a solid MCU entry, First Steps is among the most vivid, peculiar, and emotionally present superhero films of the past decade.

Osiris is an Aliens retread that brings the firepower and little else.

As a thriller, Cloud is half of a fascinating, disquieting, grimly amusing satire of online chicanery. As an action movie, it’s chaotic and vague, grasping to voice a critique of our digitally warped capitalistic age.

Gunn eventually finds his footing and Superman returns to the fray, delivering heat vision reprisals and truth and justice platitudes to Luthor’s hostile forces (he leads a sycophantic science outfit that resembles DOGE gone berserk).

It is a film attuned to decline, not just to the pain it can cause, but to how it refracts memory, presence, and touch. Above all else, it’s a film acutely aware of memory’s place in a person’s sense of identity, how it can unfairly slip through hands desperate to hold on.

It might be too busy for its own good, but Thunderbolts* still manages to zero in on something few recent Marvel entries have had the capacity to convey: the human beneath the hero.

As a blistering exercise in sustained tension, Warfare works. As a depiction of the toll war takes on the body and soul, well, it’s pretty good at that, too.

A Minecraft Movie‘s fan-pleasing salvation is knowing when to Do The Thing; it understands why its audience pulled themselves away from their consoles and PCs to spend an afternoon in the theater and delivers it to them with diamond-pickaxe precision.

The Friend asks, often with a good-natured smile, what can and must be salvaged from tragedy, and how we make room for this hazmat effort in a hectic life.

Doug Cockle’s return as Geralt of Rivia is a casting coup worth celebrating. Too bad the movie he stars in is so boilerplate.

Grafted makes a patchwork of its ideas but manages to be an entertaining, mindful, gore-saturated charge through social hell.

Companion becomes a gleefully silly, crowd-pleasing techno-romp, a Turing test valentine for those still learning to better love themselves.

Too sweet to be sordid and too gross to be taken seriously, Ryan Kruger’s Street Trash makes a mess of its anti-capitalist message.

If only Red One had a bit more respect for its audience. We can all use a reaffirming message this holiday season, but this stuffs stockings with little more than hot air. I’d have preferred some coal. There’s at least a use for that.

As the final level in this game of go-along, Venom: The Last Dance is still figuring out what a Venom movie needs to be, a tricky juggling of tone and spectacle that will be amusing enough for those tuned into this series’ squishy, uncomplicated rhythms and a numbing headache for folks bewildered by the chaotic and often rudderless existence of a Venom trilogy.

ny movie with this Manic Pixie Ellen Ripley in it can’t be all bad, though Borderlands sure as shootin’ aims for it.

What this film provides is easy charms; luckily, those come plenty.

It’s too agreeable, too dutiful to building a new series, and too reluctant to disrupt this new status quo even as it detonates its many explosive setpieces.

Titley doesn’t mine for anything other than what’s already been explored elsewhere.

Through this ambitious two-part series (which reportedly has three or possibly six more installments in the offing), Snyder has labored over his influences to the degree that watching it will be a riot for the devoted and feel like work for everyone else. Either way, Snyder’s passion remains his strength.