Jesse Hassenger

With its crisply likable leads mixing it up with pleasingly chewy gangster stereotypes, it has the consistency of a good candy bar.

On a scene-by-scene basis, though, They Cloned Tyrone is well-crafted entertainment, buoyed by its three major performances.

By laying off the action-movie gas pedal, Plane makes Butler, performing in his native Scottish accent, more warmly likable than he’s been in years.

A paranoid thriller that sneaks in its character study so stealthily that it takes a while to realize who is actually being studied.

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’s both a canny contemporary riff on the material and a well-made but only moderately scary slasher.

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.

If Extraction 2 isn’t necessarily smarter than its predecessor, maybe it’s somewhat less stupid. Its self-conscious action craft puts a little bit of brain behind all that performative brawn.

The movie works in its moment. It seems to know that an obvious, crowd-pleasing helping of franchise nonsense at least needs to have some kind of meat, however synthetic it may secretly be.

True to its small, sometimes nearly microscopic, scale, The Adults draws a perfect miniature portrait of a highly specific demographic: People obsessed with doing bits, making up songs, and perpetuating their own inside jokes who nonetheless never turned to a life in the performing arts.

This film isn’t a particularly astute portrayal of war, but it does ably depict sacrifice — something ultimately missing from the movie-star restoration of Top Gun: Maverick. Comparing the two movies isn’t especially fair, but it’s still worth noting that this smaller production is doing more with less.

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.

This sentimentalization plagues so many nostalgia pieces aimed at ex-kids, though at least a movie that ultimately pushes its luck and stalls out befits the high-rolling teenagers at its center. Most of Snack Shack is a winning scheme.

If it’s no longer surprising that Sandler is a good, steady actor, it’s still fun to find out he can find new ways to play to the cheap seats.

In its loopy, beguiling, occasionally befuddling way, Three Thousand Years of Longing feels like it’s trying—and sometimes failing—to sum something up about Miller’s own history of loving strange movie magic.

It’s a piercing portrayal of culturally specific nerd rage in Tomine’s comics; on film, it’s a little talky, and could’ve used more Ghost World-style moments of caricature, like that savaging of Crazy Rich Asians at the opening. But while Shortcomings doesn’t turn Ben into a misanthropic hero or excuse his often-terrible behavior, it does stick to the ethos he espouses early in the picture: This is a movie full of people who are flawed, and real.

Saint Maud feels like a closed system, more designed than fully felt. Its moments of ecstasy are never as thrilling nor frightening as they should be.

Mostly, though, the movie’s cartoonishness feels pitched just right, a heightened silliness that the characters’ circumstances keep bringing back to earth.

There’s something rattling around, somewhere in Heretic, dealing with the power and limitations of belief, a movie that aspires to the deviousness of something like Barbarian, to which its setting bears the mildest of superficial resemblance. At some point, it escapes into the night without much trace.

For Ritchie, though, the stolidness is an experiment and, in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare at least, a reasonably effective one.

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.

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.

JUNG_E has plenty of spare parts, and occasionally janky green-screen effects. But both the robots and humans it assembles move with unexpected grace.

Campbell, Cox, and Arquette all have chances to shine, and Campbell’s rueful confidence even approaches something vaguely touching. But this is a crowded movie where the body count sometimes inspires relief rather than dread: Finally, some of these extra characters are being cleared out!

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.

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.

Writer/director Nicholas Colia builds out Griffin’s world slowly, and winds up with a quietly formidable ensemble.

Most of the movie is colorfully antic; another fearsome villain is a dead fish voiced by Ricky Gervais (too easy), and at one point a bunch of buildings come to life and rampage like meta-kaiju. There is, however, surprisingly psychological depth afforded to Petey’s clone, Li’l Petey (Lucas Hopkins).