Jesse Hassenger

This breezy approach has its limits; Marshall isn’t so different from a well-made TV movie. But it plays well on the big screen anyway, and there’s some relevance in the way it depicts competing forms of bigotry—racism alongside anti-Semitism and expectations about female sexuality.

It’s at once an encore, a postscript, and a fresh start.

In another self-reflexive move, Far From Home transfers the real dilemma back to the filmmakers: The character comedy is great fun, and the action spectacle often feels like their responsible burden.

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.

It takes a surprising amount of time to adjust to the film’s shticky conception of its main character, Hope Ann Greggory (Melissa Rauch).

But if Their Finest is a little stodgy and tasteful, it also possesses Scherfig’s trademark wistfulness.

The Phenom is merely well-acted and well-made, rather than heart-stopping. There are worse fates for a sports movie, to be sure.

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.

Those who already admire the director may not find a stunning level of insight, and the curious but unindoctrinated would be better served by starting with one his actual films rather than a rundown of them. But there’s a certain satisfaction in a rundown of a career as rich and varied as Linklater’s, not unlike the pleasure of watching a well-edited Oscar tribute reel.

Like so many expensive fantasies, Alita: Battle Angel feels burdened by dreams of a franchise that may never materialize. But if a series does come to pass, Rodriguez should stick around. However briefly, big-budget filmmaking has synced up with his playground aesthetic.

Writer-director Thomas Bezucha, adapting a novel by Larry Watson, shows remarkable patience in developing this low-key rescue mission — or maybe he just assumes that he’s courting an older audience who won’t need much prompting to side with Diane Lane and Kevin Costner, but will enjoy extra time with them all the same.

Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins doesn’t reach the giddy, earnest heights of something like Aquaman or a Wachowski project. It methodically sets up sequels—to be recast and released around 2030, judging by the Joes’ cinematic track record so far. But the dubiousness of its present-day achievement, the sheer ludicrousness of making the best G.I. Joe movie in 2021, is part of the dumbfounding fun.

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.

This is a fast-paced, likable, and silly romp arriving at a time where a horror movie’s memorability tends to correlate with its evocative doominess. Even when Freaky doesn’t live up to its full potential, there’s still something oddly satisfying about unmasking a slasher movie to reveal the ’80s comedy lurking underneath.

Wrath is also fun, after a fashion, only with the grim undercurrent of a movie more interested in generating violence than truly motivating it. This is especially true in the second half, when Ritchie offers solutions to a mystery that never really had any viable suspects.

The charitable reading is that Ready Or Not understands how moneyed entitlement knows no gender — that the only way to break the arbitrary yet destructive grasp of the super-rich is to chop it off, or possibly light it on fire. So no, not a subtle movie. But a fairly satisfying one.

In The Oath, his first feature as a writer-director, comic actor Ike Barinholtz zeroes in on an approach somewhere between caustic stage comedy and "The Purge." The movie isn’t always up to the delicacy of that ambitious balancing act, but even the attempt is engaging.

Ultimately, Appropriate Behavior works almost in spite of itself; so efficiently does the film explain why Shirin and Maxine split up that eventually it lags behind its own premise.

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is frequently funny and occasionally pointed, more than enough to recommend it as a comedy. It’s also another instance where doing things as they’ve always been done no longer feels like quite enough. The prejudices Baron Cohen exposes have become too fond of exposing themselves.

Redford and Streisand are the whole show, so scenes with various supporting characters drag. But Pollack’s film still manages to function as a glossy rebuke to the Hollywood standard of the unlikely romance.

The sequel is another indication that Sandler is still undertaking his longtime mission of making silly comfort-food comedies with the stealth seriousness of older age.

In some ways, The Mule represents a late-period version of classic Eastwood, in that it’s even pokier and more workmanlike than his best work, and sometimes downright strange.

This is a well-crafted, exciting movie, sometimes more impressive for maintaining those qualities in the face of an utterly unsurprising story.

Though this series is built on comic looseness, it’s that sincerity that carries through its minor comedic missteps, like underusing Hall and leaning too heavily on Cedric’s wacky-old-man shtick.

It’s minor, clever, and essential in the specialized field of Gemma Arterton studies.

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.

It’s pleasantly baffling to discover that not only is Hotel Transylvania 3 easily the best film of the series, but it also feels more at home thematically on a cruise ship than its predecessors did at a haunted Transylvanian castle.

As a children’s movie, it’s uncommonly sensitive and complicated, rooted in relationships rather than dazzling action. But adults may notice its simple poetry turning, after a while, to suds.

That’s always been a part of Ferrell’s work — his understanding of American mediocrity, and his delight in poking at its oblivious limitations. Eurovision both softens and expands his worldview, allowing him to indulge some small-town-dreamer pathos without getting into hokey Americana. If he’s playing the hits, he’s starting to interpret them with style.

Paul Feig has always seemed a little uncomfortable with exploitation, but he makes some progress with this thriller.

Final Destination Bloodlines does deliver. The elaborate opening set piece is one of the series’ best.

Maybe it’s a question of drastically lowered expectations finally working to Sandler’s advantage, but Sandy Wexler is disarming in its charms.

As in a lot of good sci-fi, the movie is set in a particular world, but driven by the characters that inhabit it.

Portman acquits herself charmingly, as she usually does in her occasional slumming blockbuster role; maybe she and Krasinski should have swapped parts. The erstwhile Jim Halpert isn’t even all that terrible here; at least he makes his character’s smarmy-doofus quality work for his non-relationship with Esme. The real star, though, is Ritchie’s unflagging spirit, as if chasing after bigger blockbusters in the 2010s led him to his own rejuvenating fountain.

It’s Ritchie in fun-workhorse mode, more businesslike than Operation Fortune but fleeter than Fountain Of Youth.

[Wright] continues to prove more adept at tightly weaving his thematic concerns into genre-friendly comedy. Making a muscular, fun-enough adaptation of The Running Man is at once beneath him and beyond him.

Of course, a single documentary can’t cover everything, but this one’s slim but entertaining 80 minutes suggests that Nguyen erred on the side of brevity.

It somehow manages to lack both the true moral murk of a great noir, while also eschewing the elemental drama of a great Western. It’s pretty good at both, though, and Tost seems like he knows it, without letting the movie’s solid craft go to his head.

This movie is not quite the comic event it relentlessly advertises in its opening and closing moments. But it is a reminder of the talent behind the hubris.

With its three leads all having appeared repeatedly in the small-town setting of "Parks And Recreation," My Blind Brother sometimes feels like an alternate-world appendix to that beloved show.

With eleven different characters to serve—not counting several animal sidekicks—A New Age has a lot going on in terms of plot and action, with a litany of new alliances, betrayals, and team-ups. But the sequel is not as visually sophisticated as its predecessor.

Fuze doesn’t fly off the rails at its midpoint. It keeps moving forward at a steady clip. By its final stretch, however, the effort to sustain itself becomes more visible, and less quietly confident.

It’s about halfway between "Atomic Blonde" and a Focus Features late-summer thriller, which more or less fits the Francis Lawrence aesthetic. He brings to this material what he brought to "The Hunger Games": a sense of style that feels constrained by obligations to hit a certain number of plot points.

Edgerton isn’t as electric as Hawke or Isaac, and the passion-play dramaturgy strains. But as he allows himself to drift from self-torture, Schrader finds some new, compellingly strange ways to tend this well-worn soil.

In a movie that often observes male dysfunction with some ironic distance, Eisenberg brings the satire closer to the bone.

Statham and Gansel don’t recreate the Transporter magic; those were lovingly ridiculous action movies, while Mechanic: Resurrection is more hastily ridiculous. But after a season of sagas, revivals, and franchise hubris, the flatness of a Statham sequel inspires its own kind of trash nostalgia.

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.

Despite Seydoux’s uniquely magnetic ennui – could any other contemporary actress imbue a beautifully bored model with such empathy? — and MacKay’s gameness to bring a little nuance to a real creep in the 2014 section, The Beast has an undercurrent of restlessness, maybe even listlessness.

The Boss, without quite reaching the heights of McCarthy’s work with Paul Feig, establishes its star as sort of a comic auteur — which is not the same as repeating herself.

There is visual wit in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and some invention, too.

Equals brings Stewart’s charisma back to a genre framework — though its form of low-key science fiction is no longer the kind of genre material that actually gets wide exposure.

Ultimately, though, the character animation and sprightly vocal performances can’t quite wriggle out of whatever formulas and secondhand story wreckage Ruby Gillman grabs to assemble its stop-and-go plotting.

This latest Kiss of the Spider Woman is nearly as ramshackle as its fictional namesake; it’s not the powerhouse it should be. But it comes together. And for Lopez, its artifice looks more like a form of honesty.

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.

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.

Snow White is really one of the better Disney remakes.

For much of its runtime, Good Fortune sustains a kind of witty, neo-Capra sensibility. When it comes time to bring that sensibility up to date, Ansari politely skips out.

It is a solidly sweet and corny live-action children’s film at a time when kids are mostly being sold live-action remakes of perennial streaming-service rewatch faves.

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.

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.

The Long Walk reaches for something profound and disturbing, while at the same time wary of risking a bad stretch.

As they often do, Tomlin and Fonda make their material look sharper than it really is.

It’s a little too pre-programmed and self-conscious to be truly witty, yet the tone it strikes and the genre space it carves out feels undeniably itself: part comedy, part sci-fi mayhem, with remnant notes of shlocky horror.

The overall structure of the movie is just race, break for argument, race, occasional montage, race some more; it gets a steady rhythm going but it’s not exactly white-knuckle suspense, either.

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.

It will entertain children, and it will inspire another sequel. Call it DreamWorks zen.

The Next Level thinks the milk-bland personalities of its central teenagers and a couple of cranky old people count as a rooting interest to ground the hijinks. Black, Hart, and Awkwafina could be a comedy dream team; instead, they’re stuck hustling around a bunch of video game battles.

For roughly the length of a TV episode, it floats above its ugly franchise architecture in a dreamlike state of divine ridiculousness.

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.

Day-Lewis, as expected, is utterly convincing inhabiting this space, with two very different showstopping monologues, one grossly comic and one filling in a defining event in his past. It’s easy to forget, given his legendary status and reluctance to play the game, how much fun it can be to watch Day-Lewis at work.

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.

It doesn’t capture the full horror potential of climate change, rising floodwaters, or even bloodthirsty sharks. But the filmmakers sure throw themselves into the fray with enthusiasm.

What Jan Komasa’s film gets right is how so much right-wing radicalization, especially in upper classes, stems from status-based grievances.

For all of its craft, 40 Acres feels fenced in.

For all of its limitations and points of departure from the previous series, though, Raccoon City maintains that lineage of B-movies made with skill.

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

The movie illustrates the gambler’s lifestyle almost too clearly; it’s a great example of how big, splashy victories can still feel like too little, too late.

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.

By the end, the movie feels less like a canny reflection of true-crime fascination than a weak imitation of it — screen life, reduced to mere pixels.

Come True has some bone-chilling passages, like an epic sleepwalking sequence that feels eerily untethered from reality. Yet some chunks of it feel informed by the sleep-study scenes that unfold by the sickly glow of monitors: too clinical for pure-horror scares while lacking in convincing science fiction specifics. True to form, this is an impressively dreamlike movie: half vivid, half inexplicable.

The lessons are sweet, the kid actors are cute, and the kid audience will probably enjoy it accordingly. Whether it sticks in their memory for 20 years or even a few months, though, is another question entirely.

Reijn and DeLappe don’t seem interested in preying on real fears so much as laughingly confirming any suspicions that yes, your friends secretly talk smack about you. Bodies Bodies Bodies is a fun ride through those well-founded anxieties, but as the end credits roll, some viewers may still be waiting for more of a punch — or a better punchline.

It’s telling that The Forgiven has the shape of a long, dark night of the soul, while actually taking place over several days.

It is remarkable that his three-hour Wandering Earth prequel is simultaneously stranger and more emotionally grounded than the earlier film. Yet even at this length, even with eye-popping moments and believable characters, some crucial humanity feels missing.

If Stallone has gone through long stretches of unrelatability in his worst movies, The Expendables 4 does bring him back him down to the common man with its flashes of dorky buddy-movie glee: Hey, I like Jason Statham too!

The movie isn’t quite evocative enough to work as effective minimalism. It averages out a stripped-down Smith and the more florid filmmaking touches to land squarely in the middle of the road.

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

If Wheatley seems a bit lost as to how to wring the maximum amount of suspense from this material, he at least maintains a location-hopping cornball sci-fi zip.

The movie never turns into a full-tilt caper, even as the obligatory end-credits appendix hints at enough material to inspire one. It’s stuck, charmingly and a little wanly, in another era.

Gyllenhaal is the whole show, and his irritable, driven, struggling character doesn’t exactly glorify his line of work. His unpleasantness gives the movie its edge, and perhaps also an unearned sense of gravitas.

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.

The movie is brisk, good-natured, and amusing, but these aren’t qualities that demand the resurrection of a low-rent cartoon empire. The charm of Scooby-Doo and his friends doesn’t have anything to do with the world of bizarre Hanna-Barbera TV curiosities they helped spawn. It comes from their mysterious ability to survive well past their seeming expiration date.

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

At times, Rogue Agent feels reluctant to fully engage in the kind of deception that might make it a trickier, more “fun” piece of work; it’s almost too tasteful for its own good.

Like The Prince of Egypt or Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas before it, The Sea Beast ditches talking animals and funny sidekicks, but it can’t fully shake off its Disney influences. It’s a whole lot of well-animated beasts and water, with nowhere to flow.

Anyone suffering from severe summer-movie withdrawal might want to seek this one out, so long as they prepare themselves for a familiar summer sensation. The film pops, then fizzes and fades: It’s a firecracker of a movie, for better and worse.

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.

Arcadian is an effective creature-feature B-movie that gets the job done in under 90 minutes.