Jesse Hassenger

Spies In Disguise isn’t clever enough to reconcile the disingenuousness of setting off a litany of pointless explosions and battles before clarifying that this stuff is bad, actually.

Orphan: First Kill isn’t an especially scary movie, nor is its class-war commentary especially subtle or insightful. Through sheer force of personality, though, these elements are rendered immaterial. Like Esther, the movie has a keen sense of how to weaponize its own audacity.

This 73-minute speech isn’t really much of a movie, and as advocacy it’s unlikely to reach Trump-leaning voters. But as a case for Clinton aimed at third-party supporters who are convinced they couldn’t stomach casting a ballot for her, it might turn a few heads.

No matter where he goes, even when he’s working in a subgenre he helped build, Bekmambetov loses himself in the pixels.

Keaton seems to take another hitman part as an opportunity for contemplation, a decision that leaves Knox Goes Away feeling like someone hollowed out a DTV thriller in hopes of finding existential despair in the empty spaces.

Everything’s Going to Be Great just has characters and ideas waiting in the wings to rush in nonsensically.

Dark Fate serves as a case study for the difficulty of crafting a satisfying follow-up to a pair of certified classics, a process that seems to involve constant toggling between hopelessness and insisting that all is not lost. As such, it’s hard to blame Cameron for keeping his old series at arm’s length. It’s also hard to stay interested in a franchise that looks, with each inessential sequel, more and more like a doomsday prepper rephrasing the same old prophecy.

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.

Only Reid and Pine feel like they’re playing fully imagined characters, and DuVernay wrestles with how to make the overstuffed material both contemporary and timeless.

With its quasi-literary tone and over-calculated concessions to the messiness of real life, the movie settles for coming across like a clumsy amalgamation of the wonderful Amy Bloom short story “Love Is Not A Pie” and the 1998 Sarandon tearjerker "Stepmom." The hollow, unsatisfying feeling the movie leaves behind may be the most authentically funereal thing about it.

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.

Deep Water is more like the movie plenty of people probably assumed Deep Blue Sea would be like in the first place: watchable, forgettable shlock.

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.

While it doesn’t operate at its full potential, Spivet nonetheless offers a bracing risk: a kid adventure with danger alongside its whimsy and sadness alongside its reassurances.

Trolls Band Together hits its chosen notes with its trademark glitter-drunk energy and some bonkers visual invention, but its mashing up of shiny pop hits (not to mention past Trolls movies) approaches exhaustion.

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.

All told, there’s hardly a single smile in Lilo & Stitch ’25 not generated through the stolen valor of the earlier screenplay, and hardly a poignant moment that’s not more admirably raw in the G-rated version.

There could be something to say here about how comically low society’s expectations for fathers remain. The movie also briefly, incisively captures the new-parent contradiction of desperately needing help while wanting to be left alone, free of unsolicited input. But director and co-writer Paul Weitz (About A Boy) keeps making odd choices for what, in a single father’s life, requires comic or dramatic emphasis.

Ross may not be a great director, but he has written some very good screenplays, none of which sprawl out like this one.

The one performer in the ensemble capable of making this stuff sound like the good kind of bullshitting is Affleck

Blended with its 2000s plot points are the expedience, blunt dialogue and noirish venetian-blind shadows of a mid-to-lower-tier 1940s genre picture – with Affleck affecting a ragged, lummox-y dignity in the lead. If this doesn’t sound actually good, well, Hypnotic is a modest picture; that’s part of its appeal, if applicable.

The Moment doesn’t meet the gold standard of self-pitying emptiness set by The Weeknd’s Hurry Up Tomorrow, but it does share with that movie the sense that the gorgeous surface is performing a kind of vamping at the behest of a music-video-thin story.

Stewart and Erskine, on the other hand, are doing work so lived-in, so much more shaded than the nagging wife/girlfriend figures that typically orbit male immaturity narratives, that it’s hard not to wish the movie were about them instead.

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

This is an uncharacteristically unsubtle work from Lee — yet in the end, it’s not ineffective.

John Krasinski’s second feature has such a milquetoast, melancholy-indie sound that its most arresting and dynamic musical moment comes when three characters unexpectedly break into “Closer To Fine” by the Indigo Girls.

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.

There is something half-satisfying and pacifying about Hubie Halloween. In true content-blurring Netflix fashion, Sandler has essentially made a likable children’s movie to babysit undemanding adults.