Jesse Hassenger

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.