Jesse Hassenger

If the movie’s adult characters are conveniences, its evocation of teenage yearning-slash-horniness (and the ways those can get mixed up) feels pretty real, even in the more outlandish moments.

Halyna Hutchins is the movie’s saving grace. Without her work, it wouldn’t be worth a look at all.

Thunderbolts* is the first Marvel movie in a couple of years to make a good-faith effort to live in its characters’ heads, rather than just their Wiki pages.

Can 20 minutes or so of brutally inventive action really prop up a whole movie? In this case, yes. Havoc doesn’t reach the mayhem-as-characterization heights of John Wick or the Asian films that clearly inspire Evans, but it does turn its gnarly spectacle into a kind of absurd redemption for the flatness of its characters.

For maybe half its 103-minute running time, maybe even a little more, Until Dawn gets by on its spookhouse variety and surprising humor.

That’s the true power of Affleck and Bernthal’s collective charm offensive: They can make a junky story about a computer-brained savior of human-trafficking victims resemble a whimsical hangout session.

Sinners, which the filmmaker himself has been touting as his first wholly original feature (Fruitvale Station, his debut, was based on a real-life tragedy), is both Coogler’s most fantastical and most closely rooted in the history of American racism. It’s pulp from the heart and the gut.

The soul of the movie isn’t particularly in the human/creature relationship at its center, but in the stunning craftsmanship that surrounds (and in the creature’s case, creates) them.

Tran and Gladstone keep the movie watchable, mixing prickliness and warmth in a situation that’s more common than movies often acknowledge: a partnership where one person is far more invested in parenthood than another.

Drop is ultimately a nice movie about an abuse survivor being terrorized by seemingly omniscient forces, loaded with moments that don’t really hold up to scrutiny and well-sold by Fahy’s performance.

It’s not that The Amateur explores moral gray areas; it just swirls generic and weirdly apolitical spy-movie elements around until all that’s left is a watery blur, accidentally paying faithful tribute to studio mediocrities past.

If Hell of a Summer is supposed to spoof the horror movies it resembles, it never settles on a satirical point of view from which to approach them. If it’s supposed to actually imitate them, well, even worse; the original Friday the 13th is no classic, but it’s got a damn sight more atmosphere than this.

That the movie is “only” a silly romp makes it all the more charming to watch Boden and Fleck find a less mechanical, less programmatic way to have fun.

For a big-studio adaptation of a massively popular video-game, A Minecraft Movie lets a surprising amount of its director’s personality shine through. Napoleon Dynamite’s Jared Hess manages to fit some laugh-out-loud silliness into his Overworld saga before surrendering to the obligations of CG-driven fantasy adventure. Thematically, A Minecraft Movie offers a pat world-is-what-you-make-it lesson, but Jack Black and Jason Momoa in particular sell it with a lot of comic enthusiasm.

On its terms, and especially with an ending I read as ambiguous, The Woman in the Yard is also unflinching enough to maybe count as daring, and maybe Sollet-Cerra’s most viscerally moving film. It’s also among his least playful, least comforting. Your anxieties can’t follow you around if you can barely make it out of bed.

Some of the movie’s cartoon mayhem is fun enough. The rest feels like, well, work.

Ash could be a rumination on the nature of identity, or the destructive colonial spirit of Americans, or the indescribable horrors of a world beyond our own ruined one, but despite all of its cranked-up imagery and sometimes-confusing storytelling, it’s tidier and less thought-provoking than any of that – a genre exercise, capably extended.

Snow White is really one of the better Disney remakes.

This one’s The Irishman for anyone in dire need of new glasses.

Novocaine starts with a premise that is Crank-like in its absurdity, deepens it with feeling, and then rams full speed ahead through a litany of stupidities.

Much of it consists of Plankton talking to his frenemies about his marriage. As such, it often feels more like a three-episodes-and-change filibuster than a real movie.

Without slackening its tension, Black Bag sometimes resembles a bitter comedy of manners, which are apparently also kept in the black bag for certain stretches. These are people who like to tell each other what they find irretrievably boring, especially if it’s each other, whether or not they’re even telling the truth about their disdain.

What sometimes resembles a goof on Stephen King becomes a form of tribute to the author’s ability to mine terror from the mere facts of living.

Well into his late period, Campbell still knows his way around a crisp cut, but sometimes that’s most noticeable in Cleaner when he’s not directing action at all – which is a surprising amount of the time.

Despite or maybe because of its unusual, constant-reset rhythms, large swaths of the movie actually work. It helps that Derrickson has two genuine stars on his side in the form of Teller and Taylor-Joy who both, lacking an infrastructure for proper romantic comedies, channel that energy into an unusually convincing version of a romance that would normally be obligatory at best.

Brave New World doesn’t even seem sure about what it’s selling—just that it has to get a movie-shaped something-or-other to market.

Fans of the series will likely bask in the warm feelings, particularly a handful of scenes following a one-year time jump toward the end, like Tolkien devotees reveling in final stretch of Return of the King; agnostics may regard this same section as if it’s, well, the final stretch of Return of the King, playing to the similarly unconverted.

Heart Eyes can’t help but swoon at the rich tradition of slashers serving as first-date fodder. It’s not especially scary, but it’s a thrill all the same.

Apart from some slapstick abuse of her fake baby bump (sometimes funny) and the Mrs. Doubtfire-style hustle and bustle of needing to don or repair a pregnancy get-up (less funny), the actual story of Kinda Pregnant winds up feeling like a holding pattern, right down to the predictable punctuation of R-rated raunch talk and gags that gesture toward satire (gender reveal parties! So ridiculous!) without actually scoring any real points.

The ongoing sight of a blood-soaked Thatcher finding herself through violent confrontations, essentially figuring out on the fly whether she’s a Terminator or a Final Doll, is diverting enough. Her melancholic presence hints at the trippier, more genuinely unsettling horror movie this could have pivoted into. It’s also a reminder of how facile the rest of the movie really is.

Most of the movie is colorfully antic; another fearsome villain is a dead fish voiced by Ricky Gervais (too easy), and at one point a bunch of buildings come to life and rampage like meta-kaiju. There is, however, surprisingly psychological depth afforded to Petey’s clone, Li’l Petey (Lucas Hopkins).

Flight Risk feels like a free-floating outlet for a little bit of rage and a little bit of shtick, both Mad Mel standbys that he seems unwilling to really examine, within these confines or elsewhere.

Presence has the story, limited scope, and 85-minute runtime of a 1940s B-picture, infused—as those pictures often were, and as his crime movies usually are—with a disciplined style and contemporary electricity. It’s budget Gothic that’s worth every penny and then some.

Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx do their jobs in Back in Action, assuring that it remains mostly watchable. But it’s ultimately a bummer to watch two well-established stars and versatile actors returning to big-budget filmmaking just to make another spies-versus-real-life action-comedy.

Mostly, though, the movie’s cartoonishness feels pitched just right, a heightened silliness that the characters’ circumstances keep bringing back to earth.

If Gudegast is indeed aiming for Michael Mann, as some contemplative shots and a synth-y score suggest, he’s arguably missed the mark wider than ever. If he’s hoping to chart his own territory, well, Pantera spends a lot of time in the wilderness – before teasing another sequel, of course, where surprise will be even harder to come by.

The result is a movie that seems more interested in instruction and reassurance than pushing at or playing with sexual kinks. In other words, it’s ultimately about as sexy and unpredictable as a corporate performance review.

The series may actually be subject to a bizarre formula: The looser and more disparate the parts of a Sonic movie are, the better the whole somehow holds together. At least that would explain why Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is, improbably, the best of the lot so far.

Jenkins brings a little more color and variety to the proceedings, and even a smidgen of royal-family bitchiness in the early dynamics of Mufasa’s adopted family – though the lion who would be Scar, through no fault of Harrison’s, doesn’t exactly give us access to the fullness of his emotional journey.

There’s never a true early-check-out moment of the sort that arrives with such numbing frequency in so many bigger-scale blockbusters; the movie locks in and moves.

Kraven The Hunter gets closer than any of its predecessors to understanding the silly, entertaining freedom of shedding continuity. Then again, maybe it’s best that this misbegotten series quits while it’s just-barely ahead.

Nightbitch has an ample supply of sharp observations, but it retracts its claws too soon and too easily.

It’s the kind of movie that could be charitably described as “educational”, though probably not as much as the magazine article that serves as its source material. At least we know Perry is true to history in one major way: today, as was the case back then, these women deserve better.

As ruthless as some of the deaths can be, and tongue-in-cheek as the movie’s heightened reality becomes, Y2K remains affectionate toward its characters; it has a surprising amount of warmth and sweetness for what’s essentially a comedy about teens trying to get laid that pivots to a comedy about teens getting hacked to death by robots.

Nosferatu is a hell of a picture. If Eggers often appears to be reaching as far back as possible for his cinematic influences, riffing on a silent movie allows him – forces him, even – to reveal his more modern sensibilities, where men are repped by the contorted, strangled scream face of Hoult and the ineffectual Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), whose wife Anna (Emma Corrin) is this story’s version of Lucy from Dracula. In a plague-ridden town, it’s Ellen’s visionary, full-tilt fever that allows her to more closely commune with the evil around her, maybe even finding a hint of sick ecstasy. Nosferatu, in its enveloping-shadow way, finds more than a hint.

Jack Black will be enough to lure both kids and parents to the holiday comedy Dear Santa. But Black can’t carry the whole thing himself, and he’s eventually subdued by some deeply questionable story choices.

Wicked makes the old Wizard Of Oz look even more like a vivid original, while the newer movie unfolding in front of us looks like a faded memory.

The aggressively secular and gift-based systems of Red One are almost enough to prompt a moist-eyed holiday wish for more piously churchy seasonal entertainment.

Enjoyable as it is, Scott’s movie is adrift in a closed system, a massive warship floating around a coliseum.

Despite the amateurish lack of comic or dramatic timing, Christmas Pageant does have some old-fashioned charm.

There’s something rattling around, somewhere in Heretic, dealing with the power and limitations of belief, a movie that aspires to the deviousness of something like Barbarian, to which its setting bears the mildest of superficial resemblance. At some point, it escapes into the night without much trace.

Eastwood, still so earnestly attuned to the mechanics of personal guilt and faltering systems, finds timelessness in that growing unease.

Like its predecessors, Venom: The Last Dance has a little fun in the meantime. But in the end, it’s just a writhing symbiote waiting for a host that never shows up.

[Keaton] has the kind of presence that makes you sit up and pay a little more attention to whatever he’s saying, and his restless, punchy manner is unsentimental enough to sell sappy material, even as he appears to sidestep it. Goodrich ultimately requires more sidestepping than one man can handle.

The quirkiest thing about it is how much of that time it spends accidentally calling attention to its own overwritten, under-thought weaknesses.

Smile 2 ultimately seems struck dumb by its own possibilities, and gets stuck franchising hopelessness.

Blitz often feels like a pitched battle between the conventions of big-canvas war recreation and McQueen’s attempt to evoke the stranger, less obviously narrative-driven chaos that happens when the battlefield descends on a major urban center from the sky.

For a touch-and-go exercise in hoping the audience will fill in not just the narrative blanks but the emotional ones, there’s We Live in Time.

Rather than blazing a new trail for Lego cartoons, this may be the first one to feel like it’s adhering too closely to its instruction booklet.

Though Nickel Boys is at least in part about Black oppression and the suffering that comes along with it, Ross uses the movie’s point of view to avoid making a movie that turns that suffering into a marquee attraction or an endurance test.

It all threatens to resemble a hat on a hat, possibly worn by a snake eating its own tail. Yet Perry isn’t really going for a trippy hall-of-mirrors approach, even when he cuts together multiple performances of songs so that Pavements past, present, and fake-ass trade verses on their catalog of ’90s non-hits.

With his careful attention to the controlled emoting from both Swinton and Moore, so free of showy tearjerking or breakdowns, Almodóvar humanely and pointedly avoids turning The Room Next Door into an issue movie dedicated to assisted suicide. Then the movie backs into feeling like one anyway.

The promise of more music keeps the movie on life support when its drama threatens to flatline. When these sequences gradually recede from the movie, it feels as if someone should call an ambulance, but it’s also too late. What’s left are shadows of what might have been Saldaña and Gomez’s best on-screen performances, or Gascón’s breakthrough.

The grindhouse thought experiments can be engaging, and a sign that the movie is more interested in speculative fiction than in preaching toward a single specific theme. But the movie rampages too quickly and carelessly to really dig into any of its characters.

It isn’t just Harley Quinn fans who will be annoyed and possibly insulted by the filmmaker’s sour whims. The degree to which Phillips undermines fan expectations would be admirable if Joker: Folie À Deux wasn’t also something of a slog—and if its every creative decision didn’t feel strangely affectionless.

Baker obviously loves most of his characters, and while Anora doesn’t necessarily give off warmth, spending so much of time in the visceral chill of a Coney Island winter, it regards the entire situation with nonjudgmental good humor and a touch of melancholy.

At times, The Wild Robot feels almost elegiac – or is that just what happens when DreamWorks drops their worst habits and dedicates themselves to serving as a genuine creative competitor to their old rivals at Disney.

It’s more akin to speed-reading from the SNL memoir library than experiencing the thrilling unevenness—the captivating try-whatever stupidity—of the actual live show. It’s inconsequential in all the wrong places.

Look, as far as toy ads go, Transformers One is tolerable. It’s a little more fully imagined and rounded out than the jankier weirdness of its 1986 spiritual predecessor. The difference is that in 2024, a Transformers cartoon isn’t just selling toys to kids; it’s selling its own sketchy credibility to fans of all ages.

The movie’s lack of a clearly defined villain might alienate some genre fans; so might the lack of an easily trackable metaphor. Others will find it a relief. Never Let Go is a horror movie more interested in what it can evoke than what it can state or even imply.

Even as Plaza’s character and presence nudges the movie out of its comfort zone, the youthful, romantic recklessness it tries to celebrate feels theoretical – a lesson, not a life.

Rebel Ridge isn’t a lecture on civil asset forfeiture; it’s as elementally satisfying as a great Western. That’s really the genre Saulnier lands on here, complete with a moral clarity about its violence.

Even the movie’s best moments – and much of Blink Twice is entertaining through those moments – have the uncomfortable feeling of satire designed from a moneyed remove.

Like his Shell remake, the Sanders Crow makes something oddly compelling out of a bad idea.

It humbly presents the optional but delightful spectacle of watching John Woo have fun again.

The movie seems to pre-suppose that in our desperation to spend time with Wahlberg and Berry, any empty stupid simulacra will suffice as an excuse.

At his heart, Feig isn’t really a satirist – or an action director, despite his repeated efforts. He still makes a convincing underdog, though, fighting his way through misbegotten genre that shouldn’t work here nearly as well as it does.

None of the players here were in Ben Affleck’s The Town, but this feels like a companion piece to that one, too, in both its entertainment value and occasional overplayed hangdog Damon-Affleck pathos.

On one level, Shyamalan feels more comfortable than ever; Trap may cook more purely and entertainingly than anything in his last decade of self-styled pop hits. But it also suggests that there are discordant notes that he can’t, and probably shouldn’t, ever get out of his system.

The result is lingering and unsatisfying uncertainty over whether this is a standalone novelty, a multiversal course correction, or a genuine send-off. Even its satire feels micromanaged. Wade Wilson can still bounce back with ease, but even in its diminished state, superhero bullshit remains a formidable foe.

Oddity is simultaneously an impressive production and a bizarre lesson in the vagaries of fear: without visibly shifting its tactics, it can be shiver-inducing in a few scenes and tedious in others.

My Spy: The Eternal City is tailor-made for an awkward family movie night: too violent and suggestive for elementary schoolers, too dumb for teenagers, and too confusingly joke-free for adults expecting a comedy.

In taking care to depict as much disappointment and frustration as heedless creative joy, the movie shunts some of Dandelion’s breakthroughs off-screen. It ends with a triumph that almost seems unaware of the degree to which Dandelion’s story hasn’t quite figured itself out.

It’s pleasant summer-evening entertainment like something out of 1995, and only occasionally gets too puffed up about what should be modest aims. That’s the advantage of pastiche: It’s hard to do it quite so self-seriously.

Within the framework of grueling training exercises that never seem quite as difficult as the movie tries to make them sound, Space Cadet has some dumb fun. It pushes its luck big time when it moves into a hasty Armageddon knockoff that this movie has neither the budget nor the gravity to pull off.

The third release from Studio Ponoc, a Japanese animation studio formed by former Studio Ghibli staffers, The Imaginary is a little twinklier and more straightforward than its Ghibli cousins, with some dreamscapes that look suspiciously Lisa Frank-y. But it has more legitimate imagination than the sweaty whimsy of IF.

Nyong’o, a prestige actress who moonlights as the world’s most expressive scream queen, does wonders with the nuances of Sam’s sorrow, the tug of war between acceptance and fighting for her life.

It’s a shame, because the idea of a serial killer approaching his work with a kind of dutiful, world-weary professionalism is funny enough – maybe only comedy-sketch funny, but then again, The Shallow Tale produces a profound longing for the number of laughs that could sustain a five-minute sketch.

The triptych of dark, minimalist fables that comprise Kindness share actors, an unnerving Twilight Zone tone, and a series of rhymes and echoes that sometimes feel like a chorus repeatedly transposed into different keys. But they most immediately, obviously share a lack of interest in being liked.

In movies like these, heartfelt relatability and comic setpieces (or even just consistently funny dialogue) form their own odd-couple symbiosis; Buffett’s movie feels more like a super-lo-fi Bridesmaids without enough of the aesthetic tradeoff that should come from ditching that movie’s generic glossiness.

Stewart and Erskine, on the other hand, are doing work so lived-in, so much more shaded than the nagging wife/girlfriend figures that typically orbit male immaturity narratives, that it’s hard not to wish the movie were about them instead.

Say Anything is an improbable, borderline fantastical love story that feels utterly true. This variation is more believable on paper, yet ultimately plays like moon-eyed fantasy.

Writer/director Nicholas Colia builds out Griffin’s world slowly, and winds up with a quietly formidable ensemble.

The French Italian is frequently clever and observant, but is it consistently funny? Like laugh-out-loud, forget-the-contrivances, hate-the-sin-love-the-sinner funny? Sadly, no. It’s a little too cluttered with dead-end oddities.

There’s room in the horror space for a movie like this – a daft campfire tale best told in the damp morning after, part creature feature and part noodling about the nature of humanity. The Watchers may even find an enthusiastic sleepover audience, with its endearing PG-13 spookiness. But unlike other Shyamalan forays into the uncanny, it’s more functional than fully formed.

Bad Boys: Ride Or Die has clearly glommed onto a more Fast & Furious sensibility in its middle age, albeit with hard-R violence and swears. It’s equally calculated and sweet (well, maybe somewhat more calculated) that Smith and Lawrence no longer assume they can get away with Bad Boys II-level nastiness.

AI may not be advanced enough to make a movie even as crappy as Atlas, but in the meantime, it seems like autocomplete is having a go at it.

All told, it’s a surprisingly good time. The Garfield Movie may be as disposable as one of those numbered paperbacks that ex-kids of a certain age may fondly recall from their Scholastic book orders, but it approximates their sense of fun, too.