Jesse Hassenger

The grotesquerie crowds out the movie’s fleeting cuteness.

Ultimately, though, the character animation and sprightly vocal performances can’t quite wriggle out of whatever formulas and secondhand story wreckage Ruby Gillman grabs to assemble its stop-and-go plotting.

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.

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.

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.

Anchored by the filmmaker’s coming out as a trans man about a third of the way through the film, Chasing Chasing Amy has an undeniably sweet and well-intentioned story to tell about its maker, but Rodgers comes across as a little self-fascinated in a familiarly youthful way, like he’s taking an extended selfie at a fan convention.

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.

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.

The dead air in the movie’s opening section is intentional, yet there are moments where Final Cut, the movie you’re actually watching, feels off – not through outright incompetence, but the eerie, imitative quality of a too-soon-too-little remake. Call it undead air.

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.

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

You can feel The Flash wishing it could steal a glimpse into the audience and revise itself on the fly accordingly; no wonder early screenings apparently hedged on an ending until the last possible minute.

Kandahar gets the straight face right, but seems woefully convinced that it’s a serious drama, right down to the wailing-woman soundtrack that so many Hollywood and Hollywood-adjacent movies about the Middle East bust out to show they’re down with the anguish.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

There are plenty of little chuckles throughout, but the movie doesn’t incorporate seemingly throwaway gags into its narrative like an expertly timed Harold-style improv. More often, it feels like the Broken Lizard boys are trying to salvage what works and re-use as much of it as possible.

Ritchie’s film is less infatuated with displays of All-American bodily sacrifice than movies like Lone Survivor and 13 Hours, but it still keys into a kind of performative, manly anguish.

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.

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.

A Good Person winds up with the ambition of a novel, but little of the richness.

As they often do, Tomlin and Fonda make their material look sharper than it really is.

Where 2022’s Scream showed how the series could keep adapting and changing to fit new cinematic trends, this one hints at how unsustainable franchise maintenance can feel over the long term, even for a series that’s enjoying its deserved resurgence in creativity and popularity.

Even when Creed III treads familiar ground, this series feels like the ideal outlet for the on-screen persona Jordan is building: a resilient man who needs to better understand the power he’s fought so hard for.