Jesse Hassenger

Though its actual storytelling is pretty arbitrary, The Black Phone has the emotional simplicity of a children’s film, wearing its grit like makeup.

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.

For a lot of Marvel fans, it will be more than enough. For the more superhero skeptical, it offers a helpful example of how simply skipping the origin stuff on the fourth try doesn’t automatically confer a sense of dramatic urgency or comic-book wonder.

Leo looks like the kind of standard big-studio animation Netflix has been regularly knocking off, but it’s far funnier, and more unexpectedly sweet, than the average kid-targeted cartoon. In fact, Robert Smigel, Adam Sandler, and their collaborators have made one of the funniest movies of the year that doubles as a love letter to the complexities of teaching kids, in or out of the classroom.

Plus One isn’t much more than consistently amusing and sweetly romantic, but in the right hands, those qualities can still feel like a lot.

What’s consistent about Photograph is the way it maintains the delicacy of a particularly fine short story, complete with some ghostly supporting characters and plenty of ellipses where more conventional movies would amp up the exclamation points.

Despite a top-shelf cast and strong subject matter, Suffragette feels like the product of limitations.

The small miracle of Leslye Headland’s second film as writer-director is not that it sidesteps its influences or shuns its genre. It’s that it somehow makes the lusty undercurrents of its male/female friendship unironically romantic and, at times, unapologetically sexy.

Mottola and Hamm don’t seem like they’re trying to rewrite Hamm in Fletch’s image, or vice versa. They look more like they’re making exactly the half silly, half sly movie they personally want to see.

Like a lot of sequels, it feels the need to go bigger and brasher even as it repeats much of its predecessor. And so despite a streaky-canvas animation style that fuels the characters’ momentum, it eventually feels like a whole lot of pirouettes and flips around a security system that isn’t really there.

Apart from some compelling procedural elements, the movie is mostly style, and that style is a generic mess of tics: pseudo-documentary quick zooms, exchanges of fraught glances, and handheld camera work.

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.

This kitschy, weirdo movie has such a bizarre clarity of vision about what it wants to do that a few biffed jokes are almost part of its charm, like its sketch-comedy accents and intentional defiance of logic.

In Infinitely Polar Bear, Ruffalo attempts to put a recognizable, charismatic, slightly worn face on manic depression. Somehow, though, he comes up with a vaguely theatrical, and vaguely wearying, performance.

The main problem is a dialogue-heavy script by first-time screenwriter Jonathan Perera that mistakes quantity of verbiage for quality.

Cold Storage makes horror-comedy look as easy and appealing as it’s supposed to be.

St. Vincent goes down easier than it probably should. It helps that Lieberher, though saddled with some cutesy movie-kid dialogue, makes a sweet and empathetic sidekick for Murray (he calls him “sir” constantly, like Marcie in old Peanuts strips), and that McCarthy, like so many gifted comedians, proves capable of playing it straight as needed.

Low Tide is mostly a genre exercise. But it’s a disciplined, rigorously entertaining one.

As a result, this well-meaning puff piece sometimes appears to double as an extended video-dating profile: Generous sexagenarian seeks stable younger woman for procreation.

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

This sentimentalization plagues so many nostalgia pieces aimed at ex-kids, though at least a movie that ultimately pushes its luck and stalls out befits the high-rolling teenagers at its center. Most of Snack Shack is a winning scheme.

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.

Late Night is admirably eager to address the messy problems of the comedy world, but it ultimately can’t stop cleaning up after itself.

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.

Even when The Bad Guys resembles other movies, it’s stealing from them gracefully, with its own sensibility and energy.

Dora And The Lost City Of Gold, like that Nancy Drew movie, isn’t really for teenagers, any more than High School Musical is; it’s for tweenage-and-younger kids who look toward the high-school horizon with a combination of aspirational awe and chilling fear.

For a designated last great hope of original sci-fi, this is a surprisingly programmatic picture.

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.

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.

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.

Intentionally or not, Denial is perfectly timed to a season of insane conspiracy theories and feelings-based readings of facts.

Ritchie’s film is less infatuated with displays of All-American bodily sacrifice than movies like Lone Survivor and 13 Hours, but it still keys into a kind of performative, manly anguish.

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

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.

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 real Noble accomplished a lot, but the movie insists on giving her achievements a mystical and mythical dimension...without the imagination to carry it off.

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.

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.

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.

Alpha has been sold, to some degree, as a family-friendly film, and while it’s too violent and perhaps too heavily subtitled for young kids (or, for that matter, some adults, who may notice how superfluous much of the dialogue is), it’s easy to picture some 10-year-olds taking to its exciting, cornball charms.

It’s both a canny contemporary riff on the material and a well-made but only moderately scary slasher.

Even when it’s slowing down, Fight shows beguiling confidence in both its filmmaking and its characters—enough to make its smallest romantic moments feel significant.

It’s remarkable, then, how well Caught Stealing holds together as entertainment; as much as Aronofsky seems incapable of the modulation needed to make a crime caper, he’s also a big part of why this particular variation works anyway.

The opening of the movie has some perfectly timed visually-delivered laughs, like an early car scene involving an accidental failure to reverse, and the bottle-episode staginess of later scenes limits the visual invention. Still, by this point you’ve boarded the ride, and Oh, Hi! keeps you captive in a way that Iris only dreams of: by sheer force of Gordon’s personality.

Perhaps because Lando was less explored than Han in the original films, Glover manages the tricky task of both paying homage to role originator Billy Dee Williams while adding his own spin to the character. Like Ehrenreich, his version goes comic without tipping into outright spoofery.

Amulet attempts to yoke together serious drama with over-the-top genre satisfaction. Instead, it winds up tying itself in unsatisfying knots.

Roar Uthaug is not a director who seems destined for greater, grander epics, and that’s one of his best qualities. He makes polished B-movies without the delusions of A-list grandeur.

[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.

Whenever the movie seems prepared to dig a little deeper, it throws another self-actualization party in its own honor.

So many feature cartoons of this era operate under formula constraints; the animation of Cats Don’t Dance often feels exuberantly free.

The film’s other performances aren’t as engaging as Seydoux and young Martins, which means One Fine Morning itself sometimes feels like it’s muddling through with Sandra’s same weariness, too faithfully reproducing the repetitions of real life.

In between missteps, Goodbye To All That carves out some of its brief running time for the kind of quiet, low-key dramedy that complements the recessive charm of its leading man.

Perhaps the most endearing aspect of Sly is how it re-emphasizes that the real Stallone is, in fact, a pretty chatty, even loquacious guy. Even his references to his own limitations name-drop enough artists to undermine that lunkheaded image.

By laying off the action-movie gas pedal, Plane makes Butler, performing in his native Scottish accent, more warmly likable than he’s been in years.

While it is something of a comedy, Joshy is also serious, and its comic actors follow suit.

It’s hard to feel energized by a historical epic finding a couple of ways to look cool for a few minutes at a time. Most of The King is just unadorned semi-prestige, with a few gruesome severed heads rolling around for cred.

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.

Yet as personal, well-performed, and sometimes lyrical as this material is, Dalio also has a peculiar way of making it all play like a public service announcement—like a feature commissioned for a mental-wellness convention.

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.

Most of the time, though, How to Train Your Dragon’s live-action craft fails to match the equivalent in its animated counterpart, even with original filmmaker Dean DeBlois on hand for his live-action feature debut.

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 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.

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

Fire And Ash is terrific entertainment that occasionally gives the impression of well-appointed vamping; it’s almost enough to wonder if all the meticulous writer’s-room blueprinting of two-to-four Avatar sequels might have done as much harm as good. Viewers who just long for more time in Pandora are in luck: Cameron may not see a way out himself.

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.

As a whole, Dog is credible as a small-scale drama with some moments of light, puppyish comedy, from the man and the mutt. Like Clooney before him, Tatum hasn’t quite made his own Soderbergh movie. He has, however, made a surprisingly good one.

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.

By zeroing in on the eldest Addams child, the new Addams Family 2 exposes just how clunky and wrongheaded its take on Wednesday is — and what the animated movies get wrong about the family in general.

The movie is gentle enough for younger kids, but doesn’t feel obligated to play straight to a 5-year-old’s sensibility. For the first time in a while, DreamWorks seems to be trusting its filmmakers with a semi-original idea, rather than racing breathlessly to the finish line.

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.

There may be bolder DC superhero movies, but despite that body-horrific transformation, Blue Beetle sure is the nicest one in a while.

One point in favor of Bruckner’s new Hellraiser is that it takes some time before it feels truly lost.

Where 2022’s Scream showed how the series could keep adapting and changing to fit new cinematic trends, this one hints at how unsustainable franchise maintenance can feel over the long term, even for a series that’s enjoying its deserved resurgence in creativity and popularity.

As if to counteract the bummer of watching a raucous comedy on Netflix rather than in a theatrical setting, Bad Trip comes equipped with its own crowd energy—a collective faith that there’s no idiotic stunt that can’t be pulled back from the brink of disaster.

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.

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

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.

As enjoyable as this movie is, sometimes it feels like it’s holding back; no one’s id runs wild. But the limitations of Ghostbusters make Wiig, McCarthy, McKinnon, and Jones even more valuable. They make a big franchise-starter warmer and more endearing than it needs to be.

When this nearly two-hour movie enters its intentionally laughless final stretch, Freakier Friday feels more and more like the extended encore of a reunion concert—not least because that’s essentially where it takes place.

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.

It’s an interesting approach to a fascinating story — yet it still can’t fully break free of its initial limitations.

For Kendrick in particular, it’s a sign that she could sing her way through something bigger.

By focusing on Mary (the subject of its source material), the film feels lopsided, especially without any other interesting characters apart from Elizabeth.

Campbell, Cox, and Arquette all have chances to shine, and Campbell’s rueful confidence even approaches something vaguely touching. But this is a crowded movie where the body count sometimes inspires relief rather than dread: Finally, some of these extra characters are being cleared out!

The actual sports stuff feels a little sweatier, with too much clamor for each animal teammate to really pop. But Goat still leaps over the worst pitfalls of big-studio kid-centric animation. Where it counts, the movie knows just enough ball.

As movies about a Liam Neeson character marinating in regrets before punching and shooting his way out of immediate danger go, this is a pretty good one, by which I mean at one point Neeson smokes a pipe while driving a car. It’s also Lorenz’s best as a director by a fair margin, a movie that feels inspired by Eastwood and old Westerns, but not beholden to them.

What keeps Fatale from really working as a noir pastiche (or, dare to dream, a Coens-esque ghoulish comedy of violently incompetent malfeasance) is its gentle, kid-gloved deference to the idea that Derrick is a good guy, rather than a weak-willed dope or even an affable bumbler in over his head.

This passion project also lets Norton indulge in the kind of tic-heavy acting challenge he embraced early in his career.

Hit-and-miss horror auteur Alexandre Aja knows how to deliver lean, mean horror action. Crawl is far less tongue-in-cheek than his Piranha remake, but it doesn’t build to a fever pitch or deliver dynamite setpieces.

Of course, it would be even nicer to see this story from a student athlete’s point of view. Beyond the representation issue, it might allow the movie to eliminate its dull and unevenly developed scenes.

It’s the first time McCarthy has made such prickly use of his talent for summoning audience sympathy, allowing Bill’s regrets about his parental shortcomings to resonate through his every decision.

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

In its loopy, beguiling, occasionally befuddling way, Three Thousand Years of Longing feels like it’s trying—and sometimes failing—to sum something up about Miller’s own history of loving strange movie magic.

On the Rocks is her most accessible movie so far, with less hazy atmosphere and a sturdier, more traditional center: Laura is written by Coppola and performed by Rashida Jones with a directness lacking in The Virgin Suicides or Lost in Translation.

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.

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

On the whole, The Aeronauts is a pretty good small-scale adventure movie. It’s also a pretty dull everything-else, the unceasing flashbacks providing multiple instances where telling might have been preferable to showing.

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.