Jesse Hassenger

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.

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

Actual kids will probably enjoy The Secret Life Of Pets 2, just as they probably enjoy whatever mini-movies Illumination churns out to supplement its hyper-successful home-entertainment releases. But they might also start to sense just how mini this sequel feels, and start fidgeting after 15 or 20 minutes.

Wilde’s film gets a lot of comic mileage from its lead actors’ ability to create a funny, believable relationship. Feldstein and Dever are both terrific in it.

Throwing in some gnarly gore—and Brightburn indulges a couple of truly gruesome flinches—doesn’t change the plodding inevitability with which Brandon goes super-evil.

As tedious as Rocketman is when it’s going through the biographical motions, it’s equally delightful when it launches into something most rock movies pointedly avoid: full-on musical numbers.

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.

The real model here, of course, is "Shakespeare In Love," but that movie was also a comedy, while Tolkien is as reverent and moist-eyed as a Peter Jackson goodbye scene.

It ends up a whole lot of cute, branded nothing — watchable junk for young adults of tomorrow to look back on with inordinate fondness.

Adults in charge might want to take a cue from the movie’s penny-pinching, and save some money on movie tickets.

Good intentions or not, it’s a little bit chilling, this fantasy world where “thoughts and prayers” really, truly are the best anyone can offer.

Little moves quickly and can feel a little scattered, with subplots about Jordan befriending a group of middle-school misfits, April’s idea for a new app, and multiple love interests. But the film is grounded by its actors, the key to any body-swapping material.

The world, the movie seems to be saying, expends a lot of energy on blithely incoherent messages to women, based on half-baked ideas rather than their actual experiences. As it turns out, Unicorn Store does the same thing.

It operates on its own little wavelength, rather than broadcasting itself loudly.

After noble and varied entries like "Jack Reacher," "Hell Or High Water," and "The Old Man & The Gun," The Highwaymen is a crucial reminder that good Dad Movies aren’t as easy to make as they look.

Lorain’s film ultimately doesn’t go especially deep in detailing its romantic relationships, its friendships, or any overarching storyline. But Slut In A Good Way is more than the sum of its entanglements; the actors and the camera work so well together that it feels, at times, like a musical.

Wonder Park has the unmistakable air of a promising movie no one has taken full responsibility for polishing into a good one.

It’s a watchably low-key family adventure, but that’s a low bar to clear for Nancy Drew, so well-suited to function as a gateway text—to Sherlock Holmes, Veronica Mars, Philip Marlowe, Brick, House, Encyclopedia Brown fanfic... almost anything involving advanced noticing.

Happy Death Day 2U pulls off a trick that isn’t especially easy for original movies, let alone direct sequels: it makes all the laborious world-building and storytelling effort feel like fun.

The filmmakers figure out how to make a creepy kid chilling again, then stop short, closing the case too early. In other words, they’ve got an underachiever on their hands.

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.

It’s somehow both less explicit and more blandly lascivious than its nastier counterpart, equally skittish about exploitation and saying anything meaningful about its subject.

Underneath the expressive voice work, songs, in-jokes, and nonsense cameos, there is some thematic resonance to Lego Movie 2, not fully tapped.

The utter stupidity of Replicas sometimes makes it feel almost daring. It goes to some dark, counterintuitive places out of a seeming obliviousness to both what science fiction audiences might want to see, and how actual people might behave.

It’s both a calculated attempt to recapture some of the emotional magic of his successes, and a clinical analysis of how exactly humanistic but effects-driven filmmaking is supposed to work. These qualities make it fascinating, but ineffectual as a narrative — or even as a demo reel. Zemeckis seems to think he’s showing heart. Instead, he’s messily dissecting it.

Thematic muddles would matter less if Bumblebee delivered more as an action movie, but despite some neat car-chase complications, this series remains stubbornly averse to shaping its action barrages into satisfying set pieces.

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.

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

It’s exorcism’s greatest hits, if exorcism were a band playing 300 casinos and state fairs a year.

The filmmaking itself is often witty, finding gags in whip-crack editing and shifts in perspective.

The heroes are noble but believable, the villains appropriately loathsome, and the violent clashes, particularly a turning-point castle infiltration, are exciting without indulging in a Gibson-style wallow in torture and gore. But the moments of offbeat personality that animate Mackenzie’s best work are fewer and farther between.

Ultimately, Creed II feels a little muffled by its workmanlike touches, especially when it gets in the ring. Just as Rocky was too low-key and charming to spawn a fully worthy successor for several decades, Creed so elevates its franchise roots that even a pretty good sequel can’t land with the same impact. Then again, a 2018 movie called Creed II expanding on Rocky IV to become one of the better Rocky movies may be another minor miracle on its own.

Twice now Reilly and Silverman have helped to give a cartoon’s happy ending real emotional depth. And twice now, they’ve made their characters so endearing that some fans may feel oddly conflicted about the prospect of undoing those endings just to see them again.

Like a lot of memes, Ralph Breaks The Internet appears proud both of its clear place within a system and its ability to stand outside and poke fun at that system.

If anything, this is a more meager, timid iteration of Seuss’ story, starting with the characterization of its famous antihero.

When his zany cast of characters (many but not all played by Perry himself) takes leave of his material, as in Nobody’s Fool, his movie’s faults start to look more congruent with less auteur-driven studio comedies.

In the best scenes, the filmmakers make the case that Queen’s musical decisions grew out of the musicians’ restless inability to fit in with either pop conventional wisdom or, sometimes, each other. The rest of the movie fits in all too well.

Johnny English Strikes Again might actually come closer to success than its predecessors, if only by default. At very least, it proceeds unencumbered by excess story machinations.

What Hill hasn’t yet mastered, despite considerable skill as a first-time filmmaker, is how to impose a narrative more quietly, especially in finding the right ending. He also doesn’t seem to fully trust his sense of humor.

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.

The best moments toy with a kind of superhero body horror, but the movie never fully commits to that angle, maybe to appease a ratings board and perceived audience of 13-year-olds (isn’t that who Venom was designed to please?), or maybe because director Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland) is more interested in the comic possibilities than the horrific ones.

It’s still mostly just a time-passer for younger kids — and, absent a strong point of view, as much of a hedged bet as its narration-and-song opening.

The emotional impact is ultimately surprisingly muted; she dies too soon, and the movie ends. Then again, it’s hard to blame anyone for assuming that consistent access to Radner’s voice, in moments both public and candid, would be enough. She radiates such joy, all these years later, that it nearly is.

It’s a simple idea, to take this working-class family and introduce what amounts to a high-tech ray gun, but the hook is so effective that it buys Kin a fair amount of time before the story turns from scrappy to stupid.

As a thriller, Searching is both ruthlessly absorbing in the moment and relatively disposable as soon as it ends, sliding itself gracefully into the desktop recycling bin.

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.

In a movie this flat-out dull, even a tasteful lack of direct exploitation feels like a failure of nerve.

If Dog Days were a little weirder, it would just be a smug anti-comedy takedown of a late-period Garry Marshall picture, like "They Came Together" with its biggest laughs edited out.

Perversely, it’s only after Like Father is in the clear from its potentially ridiculous set-up that it really starts to trade in phony sitcom-movie bullshit.

It’s telling that the filmmaker captures one of Gallagher’s best moments in a long and relatively uneventful take situated at a breakfast table; this movie may wander, but Akhavan’s attention to perfect little moments is unwavering.

It’s hard to fault Puzzle for going in a more rigorous, serious-minded direction... until it trudges in that direction with such repetition. Turtletaub and his screenwriters lay the borderline-anachronistic details of their heroine’s oppressive life on so thick that the movie starts to sag.

Diggs, Casal, and Estrada are all walking on a high wire here, requiring a balance so delicate that it may not be visible to some of the audience until they have to decide for themselves whether Blindspotting’s leap-of-faith climax works.

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.

Sorry To Bother You is often wildly funny, and if its broad arc is familiar stuff about a down-on-his-luck everyman experiencing success but at what cost, at least the plot specifics are unpredictable by dint of Riley’s imagination.

It’s supposed to be evocative, but in many scenes the characters just look dim and overly backlit, to the point of obscuring the actors’ expressiveness. There might be another metaphor in there somewhere.

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

Although its resolution is admirably non-fantastical, Action Point is ultimately more interested in telling a story about a pretty nice dad who becomes a somewhat nicer dad.

Given the sweetly dull-witted relationship at its center, Adrift threatens to bog itself down with the endless intercutting back and forth in time. But the movie has a little more up its sleeves, narratively speaking, than first appears, and Kormákur converges the two timelines effectively.

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.

The movie portrays Deanna’s rediscovery of a pre-mom life, and how she squares that freedom with her identity as a loving mother, with a lot of warmth, and its refusal to gin up tired conflicts or mawkish lessons is admirable. That does, however, leave Life Of The Party without much comic momentum.

Though Davis makes Tully convincing both as a human being and as a mysterious godsend, it’s Theron whose work is absolutely vital to Tully’s success.

Smigel may not want to take up permanent residence in the Happy Madison offices, but he raises his old friend’s game considerably.

Trying to figure it out makes Traffik weirdly compelling, but nowhere near good.

Though little about the technical skill of Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero brings to mind Spielberg, it’s hard not to think of "War Horse."

It is not unusual for an underdog sports picture to be predictable. But The Miracle Season seems downright preordained, and not just in its arc. The movie is constitutionally incapable of surprise even on a moment-to-moment level.

The comedy Blockers, which is not written, produced, or directed by Apatow but feels descended from some of his work, sets for itself a more ambitious challenge, daring itself to give each member of its ensemble a coming-of-age arc, and to pull off two different high-concept comedies at once in the process.

As visually appealing as much of Gemini is, it wouldn’t work nearly so well without Lola Kirke playing Jill.