Jesse Hassenger

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 very much in the tradition of another Spielberg summer creature movie: Like Jaws, Beast heightens basic human fears about a sharp-toothed predator into something impossible, even ridiculous, yet weirdly plausible for most people.

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.

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.

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.

Apart from some stray moments of youthful exuberance, the film version of 13 has been scrubbed as clean as any high school musical, so that it resembles any number of sitcomy streaming programming—erasing the very novelty that made it sing on stage.

At times, Rogue Agent feels reluctant to fully engage in the kind of deception that might make it a trickier, more “fun” piece of work; it’s almost too tasteful for its own good.

Reijn and DeLappe don’t seem interested in preying on real fears so much as laughingly confirming any suspicions that yes, your friends secretly talk smack about you. Bodies Bodies Bodies is a fun ride through those well-founded anxieties, but as the end credits roll, some viewers may still be waiting for more of a punch — or a better punchline.

Honor Society never gets a handle on its comedic bona fides, but its faux-irreverent tone does allow for a satisfying con-style turn as Honor struggles to keep her new maybe-fake friends under her control.

The movie isn’t easy to dismiss. Its awkward comedy is often funny, and its shadowy mystery is compelling, because Abilene’s death does become more of an enigma to Ben as he learns more about her. Performers as eclectic as Holbrook, J. Smith-Cameron, Isabella Amara, and Ashton Kutcher all do their best to bring these potentially elusive characters to life.

Like The Prince of Egypt or Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas before it, The Sea Beast ditches talking animals and funny sidekicks, but it can’t fully shake off its Disney influences. It’s a whole lot of well-animated beasts and water, with nowhere to flow.

It’s telling that The Forgiven has the shape of a long, dark night of the soul, while actually taking place over several days.

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

Even some of its rawest emotional moments feel studiously cribbed from other movies, which is probably why not a single thing any character does throughout Don’t Make Me Go is genuinely surprising or even slightly unexpected. It’s a movie about the unpredictability and inherent dangers of a life well-lived, and you can set a watch to its screenwriting beats.

Paramount+ should have thrown this movie a theatrical run; it may more or less amount to an 86-minute pilot episode for the new series that’s coming soon, but it’s also one of the funniest movies of the year.

Though its actual storytelling is pretty arbitrary, The Black Phone has the emotional simplicity of a children’s film, wearing its grit like makeup.

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

Its creepy unease lingers, and just as in It Follows and The Guest, Monroe is the face of that unease. That’s the power of a great scream queen.

By the end of this movie, its inventive genre cross-breeding feels as worn-out as any other.

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.

The movie never turns into a full-tilt caper, even as the obligatory end-credits appendix hints at enough material to inspire one. It’s stuck, charmingly and a little wanly, in another era.

The movie gets livelier every time Stewart appears, as if on a contact high from her intoxication. Crimes of the Future needs those extra jolts of weirded-out star power. In spite of its arresting imagery, it’s sometimes more engaging to think about than to actually watch.

Men is a horror film operating largely under nightmare logic and allegorical rumbling, and in a broad sense can’t offer many true surprises.

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.

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

Even when The Bad Guys resembles other movies, it’s stealing from them gracefully, with its own sensibility and energy.

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.

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.