Jesse Hassenger

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.

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

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.

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.

Apart from some stray moments of youthful exuberance, the film version of 13 has been scrubbed as clean as any high school musical, so that it resembles any number of sitcomy streaming programming—erasing the very novelty that made it sing on stage.

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.

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.

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.

Antebi sets his own tone and masters it. The movie has the rush and the desperation of a fresh start.

Alpha is more of a horror-inflected drama than an outright genre piece, which allowed plenty of critics to fixate, not unfairly, on its failings as an AIDS metaphor. Yet the movie has resonance beyond simply recalling the years of its creator’s youth.

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.

Ironweed asks a lot with its 140-plus minutes of low-key suffering. It feels long, in part because not a lot happens from a plot perspective. Still, its strongest moments linger.

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 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.

The rest of Race has other moments of engagement in a slickly produced and watchable package. But ultimately, it offers history told as a series of passing anecdotes.

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

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.

This is a lot of plot for a movie that endeavors primarily to entertain children, though the excess is more likely to give adults a headache.

Though their conflicts eventually lead to horror-movie violence, the cruelest fate, the movie implies, may be a professional life consigned to malls, overpriced novelty coffee drinks, and other commercial/cultural remnants of a millennial youth.

While The Man From U.N.C.L.E. probably isn’t any less of a caricature of its period than "Sherlock Holmes," it carries its fakeness with more snap in its step. The imaginary intrigue it generates is fleeting, but often beautiful.

Minions has idiosyncratic roots, but it’s a franchise play all the way. Finally, even 5-year-olds have their own movie that mechanically cashes in on something they loved when they were younger.

Early on, Steadman talks about his humor needing to have a “slightly maniacal” edge. For No Good Reason has no such thing; it’s gently informative and amusing the whole way through.

In a trim 88 minutes, it manages to make Poots and Shannon an intriguing duo, then lets them revert to odd mismatch. It may be worth watching, though, for anyone who’s ever wanted to see Shannon attempt to burn holes in Justin Long with his eyes.

What this one offers in abundance is facts about golf in its early days. How the movie escaped a Father’s Day release in the U.S. is a mystery.

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.

If Senior Year had been willing to further develop its affectionate social satire, it might have been a surprise 2020s classic of the teen-movie genre. Instead, it’s dead set on proving it has heart, too, and in the process becomes as thirsty for likes as any teenager’s Insta.

At times, the movie feels like it’s having fun in spite of itself. So it’s perfect, in a way, that Edgar Allan Poe keeps turning up to jolt his own story back to life.

[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.