Jesse Hassenger

Is This Thing On? might come to its healing from an appropriately modest place, but there’s still a bit of actorly grandiosity under its skin.

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

Gradually, Midnight Sky becomes a nailbiter—not over the fate of the Earth or the astronauts so much as whether its two storylines will coalesce into something more meaningful. Somewhat surprisingly, they do (though others’ mileage may vary even more than usual).

Dora And The Lost City Of Gold, like that Nancy Drew movie, isn’t really for teenagers, any more than High School Musical is; it’s for tweenage-and-younger kids who look toward the high-school horizon with a combination of aspirational awe and chilling fear.

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

Hedda is DaCosta’s most direct and purposeful adaptation yet, but like her other films, it’s missing some ineffable push past its beginnings into more expressive territory. The process of adaptation feels more confident than the conclusion.

The runty little brother of "The Hunger Games" has gotten surprisingly proficient in that area of well-produced sci-fi junk where a lot of the dialogue consists of variations on, “Go, go, go!”

The movie is gentle enough for younger kids, but doesn’t feel obligated to play straight to a 5-year-old’s sensibility. For the first time in a while, DreamWorks seems to be trusting its filmmakers with a semi-original idea, rather than racing breathlessly to the finish line.

Without having seen the two-film version, it’s unclear whether the gender-segregated points of view would enhance that emotional intensity or create more redundancy in an already thin narrative. In this form, The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby tows the line between just enough and a bit too much.

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.

In Trolls and the new Trolls World Tour, celebrity voices, high energy levels, nonsensical catchphrases, cross-promotional branding, cover-heavy soundtracks, and overuse of voice-over narration are all jacked up to 11, creating what are essentially marathon-length dance party endings. Yet somehow, this shamelessness gives the whole enterprise a kind of deranged honor.

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.

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?

Ambulance tightens the story’s frequent ridiculousness into genuine tension; it’s just retro enough to feel like an old-fashioned thriller done up with some newfangled tech that doesn’t choke the images with overly obvious CG.

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.

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.

Galluppi’s premise has ingenious simplicity.

There’s something liberating about a comedy where all four central characters f--k up with such youthful bravado.

For better and worse, The Inspection seems like the movie Bratton had to make, a story so personal that some of its biggest emotional confrontations start to resemble a therapeutic exercise.

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.

Alpha has been sold, to some degree, as a family-friendly film, and while it’s too violent and perhaps too heavily subtitled for young kids (or, for that matter, some adults, who may notice how superfluous much of the dialogue is), it’s easy to picture some 10-year-olds taking to its exciting, cornball charms.

The Dark Horse may not entirely work as a film, but it has an unexpected amount of gritty idiosyncrasy on its side.

The cast is uniformly strong, and willing to go wherever Guadagnino takes them, in however little clothing he deems necessary; the ensemble-wide equal-opportunity nudity is almost frequent enough to qualify as confrontational.

The actual sports stuff feels a little sweatier, with too much clamor for each animal teammate to really pop. But Goat still leaps over the worst pitfalls of big-studio kid-centric animation. Where it counts, the movie knows just enough ball.

Violent Night isn’t a great action movie, or even a very good one, but George Costanza’s old assessment of Home Alone rings true: “The old man got to me!”

Bad Boys: Ride Or Die has clearly glommed onto a more Fast & Furious sensibility in its middle age, albeit with hard-R violence and swears. It’s equally calculated and sweet (well, maybe somewhat more calculated) that Smith and Lawrence no longer assume they can get away with Bad Boys II-level nastiness.

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.