Jesse Hassenger

Even when the movie focuses on its imagery rather than its plot mechanics, it seems intent on covering its bases rather than committing to a particular look or mood.

PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie feels more like a legitimate feature film than its predecessor, but it’s still well within the realm of distractor cinema rather than something parents would want to watch with their kids.

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.

As ruthless as some of the deaths can be, and tongue-in-cheek as the movie’s heightened reality becomes, Y2K remains affectionate toward its characters; it has a surprising amount of warmth and sweetness for what’s essentially a comedy about teens trying to get laid that pivots to a comedy about teens getting hacked to death by robots.

Words And Pictures is supposed to be divided, as equally as its title, between these two characters. But Owen’s performance as a man who values his own faux-sophistication even as he goes to seed overpowers Binoche, leaving the movie lopsided.

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.

Though it’s nominally liberated from its TV backstory, Spirit Untamed could still have benefited from a little more freedom.

The film calms down a bit in its second half, leaving more room for Bondarchuk’s striking wartime tableaux, making occasional use of its native 3-D cinematography. (The movie, a massive success in Russia last year, will screen primarily in IMAX 3D venues in the U.S.)

Look Both Ways has nothing meaningful to say about any of the subjects it’s supposedly addressing. Even when the filmmakers get little details right (Natalie’s animation references are spot-on and very convincing), the movie is playing the supportive friend to its audience, patting viewers on the back and talking about how everything happens for a reason, and it’ll all turn out great.

It’s a faster, wilder ride—and a choppier one, even as it moves primarily in circles.

Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain has way more laughs than the standard direct-to-streaming comedy, with some gloriously silly running gags and hilarious non sequiturs. But it lacks any real point of view behind that silliness.

Gold is fitfully entertaining, but for a movie that gives itself license to go bigger and weirder than real life, its imagination for excess runs out whenever it isn’t focused intently on its star.

Greenland 2: Migration takes itself seriously in all the wrong ways; it wants to maintain a safe distance from the real world, while urging the audience to shed a tear over some imagined nobility.

The smoothness of the movie’s individual sequences bumps up against narrative raggedness, as Affleck labors to compress a sprawling, novel-ready narrative.

None of the players here were in Ben Affleck’s The Town, but this feels like a companion piece to that one, too, in both its entertainment value and occasional overplayed hangdog Damon-Affleck pathos.

After 30 or 40 minutes, it becomes clear that, despite a few more callbacks, this is a more-of-the-same sequel, not a next-level sequel.

Hunt’s writing isn’t exactly knocking off Woody Allen (her characters do send text messages, after all), but it shares with Allen a peculiar, stylized imitation of how New Yorkers supposedly sound.

Beyond considerable physical presence, Q brings touches of subtlety to a stock character; by the time she makes her eventual, inevitable reference to wanting to get out of the game, there’s a genuine weariness that feels earned enough to bypass the cliché.

The result is a pretty dumb movie with beautiful visual effects, cleanly shot action, and a kickass soundtrack. Wouldn’t it be great if the future of blockbusters was only this bleak?

Despite its rueful musings on the time that passes whether or not you’re properly occupying yourself, and despite the clear passion Rabe and Linklater exhibit for this material, Downtown Owl persists in a kind of circular ramble. It’s so transfixed by the process of muddling through that the movie itself becomes an indistinct muddle of its own.

For the most part, the movie’s ideas about Barnum are incredibly stupid and, at times, kind of sweet in their daftness.

Not enough happens in Song One for the movie to really qualify as unpredictable, but it deserves credit for a steadfast avoidance of melodrama in a story that practically begs for it.

As the movie pulls over to look at museum fabrics in vain search of a groove, it turns the audience into its impatient child, threatening to start kicking the back of the car seat any minute now.

There’s liveliness in the conception of Rumble, knocked around and out by the demands of formulas no one has bothered to figure out.

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.

Rather than containing relatable multitudes in a compact story ready-made for online sharing, a bigger-screen Cat Person turns paper-thin.

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.

Its strongest evocation of poignant, imperfect memory has to do with its leading man, and the glimpse it provides of a fuller career that never was.

Rather than inspiring some kind of connection between disparate eras, Leap! uses pop music as a quick fix for kids who might be bored by ballet or orphans.

The director, Luke Scott (son of Ridley), doesn’t exactly elevate this material, but he does see it through. The voice of Brian Cox goads the action into Bourne territory to counter its "Ex Machina" overtones, but the movie works best when it riffs away from its antecedents into even more pitiless territory.

The movie’s thread about parental neglect and/or sacrifice is wispy. As a carnival geek show, though, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy delivers the goods, and at greater volume than its unofficial predecessors. It isn’t as personal a movie as the possessive title implies, but the marketing is largely correct: For the first time in ages, a mummy presides over a real horror show.

There’s a kind of equality at work here: No one is well-served.

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.

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.

The most retro thing about the remake is its specific, outdated utility: If anyone still patronizes video stores with hard copies, and if those stores don’t happen to have the original Poltergeist (or Insidious) in stock on a Friday night, this version might do the trick.

Guzmán has been a delightful presence in countless movies over the years, and it’s neat to see him take on an unambiguously leading role, especially one focusing on two Puerto Rican characters. But the movie’s Luis is a surprisingly dull Ugly American.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 has just enough laughs to make its shopworn lessons about the value of friendship and (brace yourself) teamwork feel like part of a harmlessly amusing kids’ movie, rather than an insidious way of training kids to expect and even demand franchise bloat.

The whole movie falls between stylization, which it mostly lacks, and realism, which it can’t quite claim with its non-teenage teenager spouting non-swearing swears.

This one’s The Irishman for anyone in dire need of new glasses.

For maybe half its 103-minute running time, maybe even a little more, Until Dawn gets by on its spookhouse variety and surprising humor.

There are a lot of bad things this movie doesn’t do, which is not quite the same as doing anything particularly well.

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.

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.

The action material in My Spy undermines its would-be cuteness, while remaining questionable on a level of cheap thrills.

Really, this is a diverting kiddie movie that struggles most visibly when attempting to graft some kind of moral sensibility onto a story that – spoiler alert? – gets resolved by the good guys hitting the bad guys really hard.

As with "Catfish," Joseph is there with his soulful handheld camera-bobbing, trying to convey the pensive thoughtfulness of a person who may not be thinking all that much. And as with "Catfish," the audience catches on long before anyone on screen.

In its broadest outlines, Book Club: The Next Chapter is a harmless, mildly farcical travelogue for fans of the central actresses, as well as those casually interested in briefly recognizing Andy Garcia, Don Johnson and Craig T. Nelson.

Like a lot of Coen movies, it’s not exactly an outright spoof, but it takes place in its own little stylized pocket universe. Unlike a lot of Coen movies, Honey Don’t! doesn’t quite come together as a mystery.

The increasingly ornate violence (much of it taking place in a newer if no less creaky location) fuels an effective thrill machine, and if that machine can’t match the unexpected sweetness of the T-800’s relationship with John Connor, well, maybe that’s for the best.

Horns fumbles with its own powers, too. If its moments of Aja-ian archness blended better with the macabre sincerity that presumably comes from the source material, it might have provided a real autumnal chill. Instead, it’s more ambitious and complex than the horror movies that dutifully clock in to haunt multiplexes around Halloween—without actually being better.

It isn’t just Harley Quinn fans who will be annoyed and possibly insulted by the filmmaker’s sour whims. The degree to which Phillips undermines fan expectations would be admirable if Joker: Folie À Deux wasn’t also something of a slog—and if its every creative decision didn’t feel strangely affectionless.

Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx do their jobs in Back in Action, assuring that it remains mostly watchable. But it’s ultimately a bummer to watch two well-established stars and versatile actors returning to big-budget filmmaking just to make another spies-versus-real-life action-comedy.

The movie gets so wrapped up in sorting through the whimsical bureaucracy of discarded IFs that it forgets to create an actual world to hide it under.

It’s heartening to see a big-ticket cartoon franchise end with the animation as its true star.

In addition to the latent sexism, unmitigated by Sorvino’s nothing of a mom role, there’s something insidious about the movie’s incompetence, and the accompanying belief that it’s good enough to entertain audiences of any age. It aspires to harmlessness, and fails.

There’s room in the horror space for a movie like this – a daft campfire tale best told in the damp morning after, part creature feature and part noodling about the nature of humanity. The Watchers may even find an enthusiastic sleepover audience, with its endearing PG-13 spookiness. But unlike other Shyamalan forays into the uncanny, it’s more functional than fully formed.

Paul and Julia can rescue each other, but they need more help pulling Stung out of "Tremors" and "Party Down"’s combined shadow.

Halyna Hutchins is the movie’s saving grace. Without her work, it wouldn’t be worth a look at all.

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.

The movie is so poorly staged that it manages to conceal the supposedly important hero/kid bonding elements, while telegraphing early on where the rest of the story is going.

Tracers, then, is unavoidably a movie about Taylor Lautner joining a parkour gang, and often exactly as silly as that sounds. But it’s also a major improvement over Lautner’s last action-thriller, "Abduction," which had little action, few thrills, and zero abductions.

The movie accumulates much from its betters before it starts to rot from the inside. Eventually, it becomes a distended corpse of a big-ticket blockbuster, washed up on streaming.

Uncharted spends a lot of time scraping up meager points for what it isn’t, rather than what it is. It isn’t a superhero movie, despite the budget. It isn’t CG’d within an inch of its life; there appears to be some location shooting in the mix.

The grindhouse thought experiments can be engaging, and a sign that the movie is more interested in speculative fiction than in preaching toward a single specific theme. But the movie rampages too quickly and carelessly to really dig into any of its characters.

Five Nights In Maine’s grieving has a short-story quality, and many movies would do well to follow that model.

For a big-studio adaptation of a massively popular video-game, A Minecraft Movie lets a surprising amount of its director’s personality shine through. Napoleon Dynamite’s Jared Hess manages to fit some laugh-out-loud silliness into his Overworld saga before surrendering to the obligations of CG-driven fantasy adventure. Thematically, A Minecraft Movie offers a pat world-is-what-you-make-it lesson, but Jack Black and Jason Momoa in particular sell it with a lot of comic enthusiasm.

With his English-language debut, Blood Ties, Canet takes on material of even less interest to today’s big studios, constructing something much more ambitious than a straight thriller — a sprawling familial crime drama, heavier on relationships than chases or shoot-outs.

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

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.

The movie feels bloodless, and not just because the gore is muted and computerized to stay within the boundaries of a PG-13 rating.

The satire of self-satisfied, opportunistic Brooklynites is cutting, but it lacks the humanity afforded the upstate characters, and quickly repeats itself, seemingly by design.

Afterlife wants desperately to summon the spirit of watching the first movie back in 1984. It winds up ghoulish in the wrong way.

Sleeping Dogs winds up playing like a low-rent Saw sequel without the elaborate traps or gore. It’s all bad cops and worse twists, turning the fragility of human memory into a cheap trick.

Lopez indulges a different form of movie-star vanity than simply making herself over as an unstoppable woman of action. The movie pretends to conceal her mothering sensitivity, but it’s actually flaunting the same maudlin old-man sentimentality that drives so many Liam Neeson vehicles, minus the genuine anguish Neeson can usually summon on cue.

Miracles From Heaven is too dramatically inert to oblige Garner with a great character, but it does offer plenty of tearful monologues and mini-monologues.

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 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 movie seems to pre-suppose that in our desperation to spend time with Wahlberg and Berry, any empty stupid simulacra will suffice as an excuse.

It’s nice that The Legend Of Tarzan isn’t a nakedly mercenary franchise play that presumes dozens of sequels to come. (It’s also not a low-rent Casper Van Dien vehicle.) But it sure could use some money-grubbing set pieces to tie the genial silliness together.

Eventually, though, The Brothers Grimsby runs out of room to fully work as a hit-or-miss comedy — and perhaps most disappointing, doesn’t reserve any of its hits for co-stars Isla Fisher, Rebel Wilson, Gabourey Sidibe, and Penelope Cruz; it’s a great, diverse female cast assembled to do not very much.

The problem is, Hotel Transylvania 2 focuses so intently on parental neuroses—Dracula needs Mavis to remain his little girl and needs his new grandson to conform to his vampire lineage—that the movie itself feels smothering (especially on the heels of the similarly themed original).

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.

The story is never fully passed along to the younger character; this really is Fiennes’ movie all the way, and probably more interesting for it.

Though The Old Guard 2 is only the second installment in this movie series, it’s already far weaker than its predecessor. It does just about everything worse.

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.

It takes a surprising amount of time to adjust to the film’s shticky conception of its main character, Hope Ann Greggory (Melissa Rauch).

The movie looks a little like a lost Tony Scott project, but not quite enough — the style isn’t as tactile. Most of its ridiculous conviction comes from Diesel. He’s given plenty of better performances, but here he’s especially convincing in the role of a guy who legitimately believes he has nothing better to do.

What makes The Princess so surprisingly fun is its commitment to a hooky premise.

The problem is that Army Of One doesn’t add up to much. It’s not quite a satire nor quite a full character study.

Uncharacteristically true to his word, Peter does less insufferable blathering this time around, but the subtitle The Runaway still threatens the audience with a better time.

Most of the movie is lazily retrofitted for a variety of marketing opportunities. Some kids will probably like it anyway. But some kids also like toy commercials and singing chipmunks. It doesn’t mean they should actually watch them.

Equals brings Stewart’s charisma back to a genre framework — though its form of low-key science fiction is no longer the kind of genre material that actually gets wide exposure.

It’s hard to say what’s odder about Maleficent 2: that Jolie disappears for long stretches of it, or that her elegant, imperious darkness isn’t much missed when she does.

Lively has become an expert at creating the impression that at some point, the movie behind her will come together. All I See Is You comes closer than "Adaline," but its adult intentions don’t go far enough.

Younger horror fans who haven’t caught up with the earlier films may well receive this one as a perfectly creepy little genre exercise, and there are moments where it plays that way even to a more experienced audience.

Is A Big Bold Beautiful Journey a piece of wannabe creativity with a yawning hollowness at its center, or an A-list romance with some welcome aesthetic sensitivity? Like the outcome of a first date, it will ultimately be determined by chemistry.

The outline of a snappy relationship comedy is here, and Bell is talented enough to make one. Maybe next time she’ll commit to it.

Whaley aims high for this sort of material, but his film, sweet as it is, gets a little too precocious.

Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins doesn’t reach the giddy, earnest heights of something like Aquaman or a Wachowski project. It methodically sets up sequels—to be recast and released around 2030, judging by the Joes’ cinematic track record so far. But the dubiousness of its present-day achievement, the sheer ludicrousness of making the best G.I. Joe movie in 2021, is part of the dumbfounding fun.

It’s hard to make a film that’s critical of digital technology without sounding like a square. It’s this uphill battle that The Circle fights for a little while, then loses about halfway through.

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

Rudd and Black make the new Anaconda easy enough to accept as a comedy with a dash of clunky effects-based creature action, rather than a full-blown horror-comedy.

The movie is brisk, good-natured, and amusing, but these aren’t qualities that demand the resurrection of a low-rent cartoon empire. The charm of Scooby-Doo and his friends doesn’t have anything to do with the world of bizarre Hanna-Barbera TV curiosities they helped spawn. It comes from their mysterious ability to survive well past their seeming expiration date.

Steeliness comes naturally to, say, Jennifer Lawrence, but when Woodley unleashes the occasional voice-cracking battle cry, it generates tension between her desire for revolution and her utter believability as a teenager with more earnest ideals than ruthless training.

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.

If you’re looking for two hours of not-quite-escape, the solipsism of Locked Down has real charm and entertainment value, not least in its willingness to be a movie about adults — and for adults. If the specter of a global pandemic haunts the material more than it enriches, well, it’s not alone, is it?

For an uncertainly paced and fabricated historical side quest, much of Robert The Bruce is painlessly watchable.

Even in Kristin’s quietest, most contemplative moments, Collette can’t stop bugging her eyes or yanking down her mouth – which, to be fair, is a natural reaction to being repeatedly poisoned over the course of 101 endless minutes.

Revived and pumped up for the sequel, Wan’s synthy semi-psychedelia still makes for a delightful trip, but maybe Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom could have used a little fresh air; for all of the eye-popping colors, creatures and action flourishes he engineers in and around the sea, there isn’t a single sequence as front-to-back satisfying as the surface-world rooftop chase in Italy that popped off the screen in the first movie.

Brave New World doesn’t even seem sure about what it’s selling—just that it has to get a movie-shaped something-or-other to market.

Its unusual structure makes it both novel and ungainly.

Overconfidence in the face of mediocrity is something Ferrell usually satirizes. This time, he’s more of a participant.

Intentionally or not, Farrant and her screenwriters leave a hole at the center of their film.

The stars work hard, and the movie goes slack. It seems like that old adage is true: Behind every Bad Moms is a couple of dudes without any discipline.

This makes The Final Girls an odd concoction: a semi-crude and not especially scary horror-comedy with some real emotional depth.

It’s not especially fair to criticize the movie that could have been made, rather than the one that was actually made. But even on its chosen terms of a family dramedy, People feels lopsided.

Redundancy is about all it offers, despite an entirely new set of characters and a story set 40 years after the early 20th-century original.

Between the movie’s subtext and its new-digital-world distributor, Bay seems to be communicating the frustration of constraint, but why? What has he been barred from doing?

At his heart, Feig isn’t really a satirist – or an action director, despite his repeated efforts. He still makes a convincing underdog, though, fighting his way through misbegotten genre that shouldn’t work here nearly as well as it does.

The consistent failure of imagination is all that keeps the film’s scenes from feeling like a random selection.

Portman acquits herself charmingly, as she usually does in her occasional slumming blockbuster role; maybe she and Krasinski should have swapped parts. The erstwhile Jim Halpert isn’t even all that terrible here; at least he makes his character’s smarmy-doofus quality work for his non-relationship with Esme. The real star, though, is Ritchie’s unflagging spirit, as if chasing after bigger blockbusters in the 2010s led him to his own rejuvenating fountain.

Like its predecessors, Venom: The Last Dance has a little fun in the meantime. But in the end, it’s just a writhing symbiote waiting for a host that never shows up.

The movie’s attempts at ruthless pulp manipulation don’t land; cruelly offing a character whose entire personality is “pregnant” is a cheap bid for John Wick stakes.

Plenty of romantic comedies lack any demonstrable knowledge of actual human behavior. The Perfect Match lacks any demonstrable knowledge of movie behavior, too.

Padre Pio’s two halves stubbornly, constantly butt heads with each other, stories in catastrophic disharmony.

The whole story hinges on a twist that’s superficially clever on paper but wildly farfetched in practice. Once that hinge has swung, Stone ratchets up the supposed tension with attempted murders, scuffles, chases, and confrontations. Yet as these attempts at excitement emerge, the movie itself flattens out.

Monster Trucks, in all its stupid, misguided, laughable anti-glory, is difficult to hate. Its stupidity is, at times, vaguely likable, and if not redeemed by strong craft, not harmed by technical deficiencies.

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.

The film isn’t especially scary, but it has a creepy, pervasive grimness, well-acted by the impressive ensemble.

Frustratingly, the movie is plenty likable when it’s not trying to show off its wistfulness.

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

Theoretically, it’s a solid generator of comic tension, with a clear timeline taking the production through rehearsals, tech, dress, opening night, and beyond. But Peretti dices these segments into so many blackout sketches that the whole thing feels as weirdly protracted and repetitive as the frequent slow-mo shots Peretti inserts for reasons beyond my understanding.

The Boss, without quite reaching the heights of McCarthy’s work with Paul Feig, establishes its star as sort of a comic auteur — which is not the same as repeating herself.

The laughs don't linger, even within individual scenes. What remains, reinforced by a set of end-credit outtakes, is the sense that Sudeikis, Day, Bateman, and Pine had a really good time making a sort of okay movie.

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.

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.

The uncomfortable yet not unwelcome spectacle of De Niro attempting zingers makes this movie an essential subject for future study of the actor’s comic side. Unfortunately, it is essential in no other way.

The techniques of the movie, then, are sound. Wan still moves his camera and composes his shots with a patience that belies his dank Saw origins. But the cinematography isn’t as virtuosic this time around.

While it’s not necessarily a good thing to aim this kind of weaponized marketing at kids, it’s also silly and colorful enough to nearly work as a live-action cartoon. It might rot brains, but perhaps not while regarding them with utter contempt.

It’s half-assed in every way but cast retention; almost all the major female characters return.

Maybe it’s a question of drastically lowered expectations finally working to Sandler’s advantage, but Sandy Wexler is disarming in its charms.

If playwright Theresa Rebeck, who receives co-writing and story credit, brought a fresher perspective to this material at some point, it has been slathered in screenwriterly varnish and a sense of take-charge female empowerment best described as EuropaCorpesque.

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.

Jigsaw isn’t a series low point. It’s less aggressively unpleasant than some of the others.

Hamburg springs some surprises, albeit secondhand ones. More often, he calls his shots from a mile away.

It would be easier to buy Jexi’s more intentional absurdities if its reality wasn’t so elastic, stretching to accommodate poorly staged large-scale slapstick.

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.

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

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.

Here is the problem with making four movies about a middle-schooler who only ages a little and learns sitcom-ready lessons: After a while, it all starts to feel as repetitive and uninspired as any number of more ambitious franchises. The Long Haul has a chance to reimagine the series and only comes up with Vacation Junior.

There’s no revenge, no murder, and no kidnapping. It’s a low-budget New Orleans Cage movie with some dignity. It would be a pleasure to report that The Runner is also good, but this slim if mildly compelling film lands somewhere between character sketch and morality tale.

It’s not scary, and not goofy enough to be funny.

The Pickup is entertaining on that most basic of slack-jawed levels: It has likable stars doing movie stuff (car chases, elaborate deceptions) that the movie seems to bank on blurring into memories of other, better capers.

Statham and Gansel don’t recreate the Transporter magic; those were lovingly ridiculous action movies, while Mechanic: Resurrection is more hastily ridiculous. But after a season of sagas, revivals, and franchise hubris, the flatness of a Statham sequel inspires its own kind of trash nostalgia.

Too frequently, the movie also treats its female characters as props to be shuffled in and out of danger as the screenplay requires — a nasty tendency that undermines its ongoing (and murkily argued) debate about whether a successful agent can maintain his humanity.

Flight Risk feels like a free-floating outlet for a little bit of rage and a little bit of shtick, both Mad Mel standbys that he seems unwilling to really examine, within these confines or elsewhere.

In classic unpredictable Liman fashion, this jumbled and seemingly truncated adaptation of the first book in a YA trilogy is nonetheless likable, entertaining science fiction.

Apart from some slapstick abuse of her fake baby bump (sometimes funny) and the Mrs. Doubtfire-style hustle and bustle of needing to don or repair a pregnancy get-up (less funny), the actual story of Kinda Pregnant winds up feeling like a holding pattern, right down to the predictable punctuation of R-rated raunch talk and gags that gesture toward satire (gender reveal parties! So ridiculous!) without actually scoring any real points.

Chalamet and Fanning do okay in Rainy Day, but Selena Gomez is the one who shows surprising facility with tart-tongued romance.

Role Play wants to be a star-driven caper merging complicated relationship dynamics with exciting espionage action. But despite a few brief signs of life, both sides of the film are woefully unconvincing, as are its stars. Kaley Cuoco goes way too broad, David Oyelowo looks pained, and the whole thing strains to imitate better movies.

If we have to wade through some silly, pandering nostalgia to get to this pleasingly vast dinosaur playground, so be it.

The filmmakers might claim the sexy superficiality as their whole point; if so, it’s a thin one. Chadwick and Stoppard seem to be making a movie about the impulsivity of desire, but they never dig into those feelings beyond depicting them.

Without any actual classicism to accompany Craig’s outdated notions of outrageousness, the movie quickly turns fustier than its edgy posturing lets on. Craig simply watches a bunch of selfish people behave badly in predictable ways, and occasionally has them lunge at each other in anger. How perfectly droll!

A small, unflashy, borderline incompetent movie like Mr. Church is certainly another sign that Murphy does what he wants. Maybe this guarded performance in a lousy movie is a sign of him wanting to do something better.

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

Maybe Vardalos should revisit this material when she’s ready to write "My Big Fat Greek Funeral."

AI may not be advanced enough to make a movie even as crappy as Atlas, but in the meantime, it seems like autocomplete is having a go at it.

Past Winterbottom films have turned “real life” into both comedy and tragedy. The Face Of An Angel turns it into a directionless skulk.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie doesn’t really have the patience for character-based conflict, or plotting more complicated (or motivated) than groups of characters showing up to different planets on cue.

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

The grotesquerie crowds out the movie’s fleeting cuteness.

My Spy: The Eternal City is tailor-made for an awkward family movie night: too violent and suggestive for elementary schoolers, too dumb for teenagers, and too confusingly joke-free for adults expecting a comedy.

Most of the movie’s star power has been harnessed without much obvious reason, right down to the movie’s seeming origins as a delivery system for the Elton John catalog.

The movie is at least interestingly confusing until about the halfway mark, when monotony sets in for good.

Like so many movies designed for believers first and ordinary sinners second, if at all, Gavin Stone has trouble approximating the sensibility of actual entertainment and is particularly deadly as a comedy. Even David Spade movies tend to have more laughs.

There’s certainly an audience for these thrillers, but imagine how big that audience might be for one that really works.

Surly and Andie’s second adventure...is less ambitious than the original.... But it’s also more propulsive, which is to say antic.

The movie isn’t as off-the-charts shameless as Sparks, but it lacks the Russian roulette death-guessing game to occupy viewers who get bored.

The movie focuses so intently on technical craft that it sometimes zones right out. Hawley is still stretching boundaries, often literally, while disregarding the human experiences they’re supposed to contain.

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.

Much of Walter’s behavior resembles, at very least, a movie version of mental illness, only to have the story reclassify it as a coping mechanism. This unwittingly makes the character seem as affected as any Sundance stereotype—and the movie disturbing for all the wrong reasons.

Tarot seems perpetually uncertain about whether it should play its thinly conceived premise for laughs, or actually pursue real scares. It winds up with neither, stumbling around in the dark and turning its small ensemble into a crude means of timekeeping for its surprisingly sluggish 90-minute runtime.

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.

Bad plotting would be relegated to the realm of incidental if Coffee & Kareem were funnier—isn’t that always the way? Unfortunately, the movie spends a lot of time handing Helms underlined jokes, which he proceeds to underline again with his why-did-I-just-say-that delivery.

This live-action co-production between Sony and a Japanese animation studio begins with the colorful bounce of Paul W.S. Anderson directing a cosmic X-Men knockoff, and quickly runs out of gas in a way that resembles the worst of Sony’s Screen Gems genre arm.

It’s all pretty silly, but it compensates for a lack of emotional weight with star power.

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.

Matthew Vaughn’s latest directorial effort doesn’t traffic in the same edgelord button-pushing as his Kingsman series, but as that relief fades, it becomes clear how much Argylle is recycling ideas and imagery from those (and other, better) movies. Bryce Dallas Howard and Sam Rockwell make an endearing pair, but they’re committed to an occasionally loony adventure that lacks the grace necessary to match its stars.

Yet there’s some kind of invisible force here, hurrying things along in the hopes of a future team-up, making sure this feature film arrives more undead than alive.

In a movie as utterly lost as The Turning, everything from the performances to the production design to the music cues amount to one big pile of dirty mirrors and doll parts.

Despite its unconvincing seriousness mixing poorly with its unconvincing dark comedy, 7 Minutes proves difficult to despise outright; it’s watchably swift and somewhat engaging in the moment.

Kraven The Hunter gets closer than any of its predecessors to understanding the silly, entertaining freedom of shedding continuity. Then again, maybe it’s best that this misbegotten series quits while it’s just-barely ahead.

Maybe the most baffling thing about Scream 7 is that it’s not an off-the-rails franchise-ending disaster. It’s entertaining enough, with a few fun side performances and the easy prickliness of Sidney and Gale’s friendship. But it’s missing the giddy carnival-ride audience-movie thrills and clever meta-humor of previous entries, and the more serious material simply isn’t insightful enough to take its place (or distract from its craven origins as a corporate patch-job).

There’s a sweetness to the movie’s multiple storylines about teenagers earnestly, supportively pining for each other—and a neutered prudishness, too, about how none of these 17-year-olds seem to think about sex for even a second.

Even the occasional funny line grows wearying, because nothing in this movie happens for any real reason. The details that labor to appear random, the big slapstick plot turns, and the predetermined character arcs are all equally meaningless, unchecked byproducts of filmmakers emptying their joke files with Superbad playing on a loop in the background.

It’s a five-day toss-off that’s simultaneously an impressive feat and business as usual.

The movie seems to be conceived as a slow burn, but it's more like a faucet dripping lukewarm water.

The better moments of Color Of Time make use of the ringer cast Franco was able to assemble, however momentarily.

Ferrell and Hart are too likable and crowd-pleasing to let the movie collapse around them. But they’re also too talented for something this wan.

Ghosted is a little breezier and less blatantly synthetic than the plastic Red Notice or the smirky Gray Man, but put together these failed attempts at action-packed romance still feel like a psy-op for the superhero industrial complex: With star vehicles like these, maybe movie stars will have to stay in capes forever.

Jack Black will be enough to lure both kids and parents to the holiday comedy Dear Santa. But Black can’t carry the whole thing himself, and he’s eventually subdued by some deeply questionable story choices.

The aggressively secular and gift-based systems of Red One are almost enough to prompt a moist-eyed holiday wish for more piously churchy seasonal entertainment.

Mercy takes a more bombastic approach with more speculative technology, only to chicken out of using that bombast to do anything other than jostle the audience through a series of contrived absurdities. If this is the future of crime thrillers, everyone needs their screentime severely curtailed.

It’s briskly paced and sometimes neat to watch in reality-bending 3-D, but none of it is quite as head-spinning as it should be. The movie doesn’t dare alienate its family base with genuine trippiness; instead, it pacifies with tedious familial backstory.

After an efficient start, The Possession Of Michael King drags, weighing itself down with genre conventions the filmmakers don’t seem to understand or care about.

It’s a bizarre and pointless spectacle, but not an unamusing one. Characters like Alexanya and Atari feel very much like try-outs for Saturday Night Live characters — not surprising, given that at least four of the cast members have worked on that show.

20 years later Gans still can’t figure out how to escape the open-ended confinement of gameplay, or even give it the forward momentum of a game with a mission.

It’s just a middling cover of a pretty good old song, adrift in the present day.

Kids don’t need the Chipmunks movies to take them somewhere cheap. They deserve a comedy or a musical or a cartoon — none of which The Road Chip quite is — that’s more than a high-pitched distraction.

Because Hunter’s movie works best in its early, less crazed stretch, there aren’t any really memorable sequences here coming from the director or his distinctive star.

Maybe that call will be answered next time with enough incremental improvements to finally notch a good Divergent movie, a possibility Allegiant raises repeatedly and frustratingly. Ultimately, though, this movie isn’t just adhering to a formula; it’s carefully following a recipe designed to offset any good ingredients that get mixed in there by mistake.

Marc Webb’s new movie, in contrast, uses the song for its title, the name of an in-movie manuscript, and as a late-breaking song cue that doesn’t drop the needle so much as clunk it down with turgid inevitability.

A movie that feels like it’s been machine-learned and reverse-engineered from YouTube fanfic, rather than rooted in any kind of recognizable human experience, behavior, or psychology.

Despite undermining its own better qualities, The Longest Ride still qualifies as one of the best Sparks films by virtue of not including any love-ghosts or destructive misinformation about how Alzheimer’s works.

The implausibilities, cop-movie checkboxes, and mildly wasted talent make Ride Along 2 lazy, but not downright loathsome. If anything, it’s perhaps slightly more amusing and agreeable than the original—a sign of how little that film’s seemingly surefire premise wound up mattering.

The tension between Boyle’s restless energy and Sorkin’s tendency to run in place drives the movie.

Addicted is basically a social-issue melodrama that, minus some curse words, thrusting, and frequent side nudity, could have emerged sometime in the ’50s.

Is it better for a Stephen King franchise to burn out or fade away? Firestarter manages to do both at once.

Tom & Jerry feels freer in its moments of unbridled cartoon silliness than it ever does when it’s attending to its human plotting. It’s yet another hybrid where the overlit crumminess of live-action tries and fails to rescue animation from its own artistry.

It misses the painful performance of everyday life, or less Hallmark-friendly emotions, like anger or numbness.

A little of this debunking is cute (“I got nothing against bib overalls or straw hanging out of your mouth,” one of the subjects clarifies about the myths he wants to dispel); the rest of it feels defensive.

A once-energetic comic talent (and underrated serious actor) slows down to a pace he must feel matches his audience these days.

It offers the bittersweet spectacle of a pretty loony movie trying its best to become a more conventional one. Maybe an outright boondoggle would have been more memorable.

Who could have guessed that a simple Smurfs reboot would constitute such an unholy mess?

All told, it’s a surprisingly good time. The Garfield Movie may be as disposable as one of those numbered paperbacks that ex-kids of a certain age may fondly recall from their Scholastic book orders, but it approximates their sense of fun, too.

Though Stein assembles his early sequences with precision, laying out geography and shorthanding through set design, that sharpness is undermined by basically everything else in the movie, from micro to major.

A movie that should be punctuated like a Christmas card sign-off but instead, losing a comma, becomes an off-putting directive. How Robert De Niro didn’t make it to this set is a mystery for the ages.

Disappointments has the strange confidence of a much slicker, more decisive movie, and all of its sort-ofs don’t add up to much.

Corporate Animals, a dark comedy with horrific undertones that should draw upon many of their previous experiences, never feels especially relatable.

Like his Shell remake, the Sanders Crow makes something oddly compelling out of a bad idea.

Director Kriv Stenders seems to think he’s spun a twisty, delightfully amoral genre riff. Instead, he’s made a brightly colored smirk noir.

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!

It’s the extreme age-specificity and seeming low effort of Buck Wild that makes it more content than feature film.

The movie starts out heedless in its desire to charm, but it winds up feeling constrained by self-consciousness, and more’s the pity.

Madea remains a distinctive, weirdly compelling character. Maybe someday Perry will make a good comedy for her.

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

This is an interesting idea, executed with a reductive, tin-eared understanding of what constitutes art to go along with a faith-based movie’s reductive, tin-eared understanding of what constitutes entertainment.

None of the mounting dread is surprising, and only some of it is more effective than the average haunted-whatever picture. But Brahms himself remains an oddball delight.

The movie is 105 minutes long and would feel stretched thin even if cut down to the cutscene bookends of a music video. It is a thing you can see, technically.

No Stranger Than Love offers an accidental lesson: Attempts to write poetry ought to be preceded by attempts to read it and, preferably, understand it.

There was a time when the very presence of someone like John Cusack could enliven otherwise normal movies, and lift worthier ones onto a higher plane. But films like Drive Hard are too slapdash to even allow for coherent performances, let alone movie-saving heroics.

Agent 47 is just slightly less dull than its disavowed predecessor — or at least its dullness seems less active, because it doesn’t turn anyone as inherently interesting as Olyphant into a dour-faced killing machine.

Williams made some terrible movies, but he never phoned them in. On both counts, this one’s no exception.

For roughly the length of a TV episode, it floats above its ugly franchise architecture in a dreamlike state of divine ridiculousness.

Even on its own silly terms, Pixels is not a very good movie; it’s painted up like a Ghostbusters-style fantasy-comedy but plays like so many slapdash Happy Madison productions before it.

It’s exactly the sort of oddball trifle, like Hudson Hawk, that tends to attract the ire of baffled audiences and grumpy critics. It’s also the sort of oddball trifle that, like Hudson Hawk, will put certain aficionados of silliness in a pretty good mood.

Though it’s positioned in the early days of the summer movie reason, Shadow Force winds up as an unintentional advertisement for staying home.

It’s more like an extremely confusing and sloppily written chunk of Purge fan-fiction—a tortured use of another movie’s absurd mythology to help make muddled quasi-satirical points, while indulging the apparently fail-safe punchline of saying the word “purge” about once a minute.

Rio offers the uncomfortable spectacle of 10 different filmmakers mostly failing to produce a sense of place that can be sustained over 10 minutes, much less multiple senses of place that can be stitched into an interesting patchwork.

At times, the movie’s pleasingly jumpy visual scheme and nostalgic 2003-era cheese threaten to form an alliance and make Madame Web work in spite of itself. After all, the movie, even or especially in its worst moments, never gets dull (or weirdly smug, like its sibling Venom movies). It also never fully sheds a huckster-y addiction to pivoting, until it’s pretty far afield from what works about either a superhero movie or a loopy woo-woo thriller.

By its end, No Good Deed becomes troublingly easy to read as a parable about the untrustworthiness of black men. The filmmakers may not have intended it that way, but the movie is so bereft of anything else that its forays into moralistic paranoia stick out.

Like a lot of movies, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 has its own souvenir popcorn bucket. This may be the first one where the bucket is more entertaining than the feature.

The Misfits has moments of silliness that bear glancing resemblance to the kind of enjoyable starry, big-studio shlock Renny Harlin used to make, in between the parts that resemble the lower-rent genre efforts he churns out now.

Playmobil: The Movie isn’t as funny as some of the direct-to-video Lego-related movies, either, and that’s very much the field it competes in, theatrical release or not. As children’s entertainment goes, this is a harmless distractor, but it’s also poorly conceived at every story turn, unable to even stick to a particular generic message to make up for its extremely basic humor.

Anything legitimately affecting about the movie bleeds out, and Cage delivering a blood-soaked monologue or simulating the sound of a burned esophagus isn’t enough on its own to turn Arsenal into the gory, borderline rococo thriller it starts aiming for around the halfway mark. It’s the rare case of a bonkers Cage performance counting as too little, too late.

Strange Magic, an animated film from Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic, borrows its sensibility from another movie from the summer of 2001: "Moulin Rouge." The new film’s composer and music director, Marius De Vries, even arranged songs for Baz Luhrmann’s phantasmagorical musical.

It’s more tedious than unwatchable, and pint-size Cena fans may be curious to see him in a movie more compatible with his Kids’ Choice Awards hosting gigs than the likes of "Blockers" or "Trainwreck." Sadly, the movie never shows similar curiosity about what its young audience, and subjects, might be thinking or feeling.

In the end, The Pyramid seems designed not for horror, adventure, or action but to provide every possible answer to the question of its found-footage bona fides—yes, no, or maybe, depending on who’s asking. It spends most of its running time hedging uncertainly between trend and backlash, explanations and excuses.

The slumming stars actually make the situation worse for everyone; Life On The Line plays like an ego trip without any accompanying fun.

The movie’s B-movie flimsiness is pervasive, and paired with an overall lack of B-movie flair, though director Uli Edel makes some game yarn-spinning attempts.

The Do-Over is a de facto R-rated movie for Sandler, with the attendant bad language and sex jokes, but most of the faux-naughty stuff seems like an afterthought. The jokes that work best fill in the sad details of Charlie’s life.

Its scenes aren’t really long or improv-heavy enough to qualify as rambling, but they’re often slow enough to qualify as excruciating.

As it turns out, EDM is a mere soundtrack for what turns out to be a stalker thriller rife with the kind of details that the filmmakers might call “psychological” and that psychologists might call “insultingly stupid.”

Fantasy Island isn’t especially scary, but scares don’t usually seem like the point of a Blumhouse horror gimmick. At their best, these movies have the energy and shamelessness of a carnival ride, where the enthusiasm means more than the atmosphere. Fantasy Island knowingly steals from everywhere, and sometimes cleverly incorporates its derivativeness into the filmmaking.

There are great L.A. ensembles, like "Short Cuts" "Magnolia," or "Jackie Brown," but writer-director John Herzfeld is an expert in the bad kind, having made "2 Days In The Valley."

As broad as Williams goes in these scenes, it’s not really his fault. He’s acting out a screenplay, credited to Daniel Taplitz, that’s peppered with bad writerly flourishes.

There’s a certain perverse brilliance, however accidental, to a movie that creates a longing for a foulmouthed Aubrey Plaza/Robert De Niro romcom.

Asking for It is made with sloppy overconfidence, a stunning bluff of both style and substance.

It’s the film equivalent of a guy loudly demanding the attention of everyone in a subway car, then refusing to even issue a compellingly strange rant.

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.

Preaching aside, though, Saving Christmas is a shoddy 80-minute feature that contains approximately 50 minutes of actual moving footage. When Cameron narrates that materialism doesn’t go against Christmas because it celebrates the son of God being made material himself, it sounds like a defense of any kind of cheap, poorly made holiday crap — this movie included.

While it’s not consistently funny, and is as enamored as any other Sandler movie with making reference to its own limp running gags (including one about donkey shit), there is a certain inclusiveness that harkens back to his earlier work.

Aniston is bad here, but she’s not alone. Marshall allows everyone in the movie to either play to their worst instincts or avert their eyes while skipping through the wreckage.

In its final hour, The Last Days Of American Crime finally gets down to the business of its big heist, revealing both the propulsive entertainment value the filmmakers have been inexplicably stalling and the thinness of the whole enterprise.

If anything, Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 ups that sadness quotient, spending much of its opening proving that just because these movies are stupider than "Observe And Report" doesn’t mean they have to be less cripplingly depressing.

As if the ravings of a lunatic weren’t dull enough, Septic Man eventually becomes the ravings of an idiot too.

Most of the time, Mewes’ follows in the later-period footsteps of his friend Smith, steering a what-the-hell production that’s less entertaining than the two buddies just talking.

What’s supposed to resemble a smart, unnerving sci-fi movie looks more like a lecture about male dominance and deception that keeps foregrounding its least interesting characters.

Given how unnecessary Rise Of the Damned is, Leyden’s choice to pare down the original RIPD’s summer-movie bombast into an agreeable, swiftly paced supernatural Western qualifies as a rousing success. On the other hand, anyone working in the RIPD universe should also understand the value of just staying dead.

In Water has more of a sad-sack quality than the semi-spirited chattiness of In Our Day, yet its images of young people wandering around in search of inspiration, artistic or otherwise, also have a shivery, ghostly edge that makes the melancholy feel earned.

In its clear-eyed and naturalistic way, Smoking Tigers takes on a surprising fullness. Like other coming-of-age stories, it must leave some matters unresolved; like many of the best, what we’re left with somehow feels like enough.

Somewhere Quiet is a thriller, not just a moody exercise; it knows when to step back from the issues it raises and deliver real suspense.

The French Italian is frequently clever and observant, but is it consistently funny? Like laugh-out-loud, forget-the-contrivances, hate-the-sin-love-the-sinner funny? Sadly, no. It’s a little too cluttered with dead-end oddities.

Say Anything is an improbable, borderline fantastical love story that feels utterly true. This variation is more believable on paper, yet ultimately plays like moon-eyed fantasy.

In movies like these, heartfelt relatability and comic setpieces (or even just consistently funny dialogue) form their own odd-couple symbiosis; Buffett’s movie feels more like a super-lo-fi Bridesmaids without enough of the aesthetic tradeoff that should come from ditching that movie’s generic glossiness.