Jesse Hassenger

Dark Fate serves as a case study for the difficulty of crafting a satisfying follow-up to a pair of certified classics, a process that seems to involve constant toggling between hopelessness and insisting that all is not lost. As such, it’s hard to blame Cameron for keeping his old series at arm’s length. It’s also hard to stay interested in a franchise that looks, with each inessential sequel, more and more like a doomsday prepper rephrasing the same old prophecy.

At times, Double Tap does recapture the original film’s tossed-off delights. It’s been revived with so many of the original actors and filmmakers for that express purpose. But this particular sequel suggests that in another 10 years, there won’t be much left to reanimate.

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.

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.

It’s hard to feel energized by a historical epic finding a couple of ways to look cool for a few minutes at a time. Most of The King is just unadorned semi-prestige, with a few gruesome severed heads rolling around for cred.

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.

Low Tide is mostly a genre exercise. But it’s a disciplined, rigorously entertaining one.

In many ways, this is an Old Man movie — a slower late-period work by a filmmaker ruminating on his advancing age, and on the beloved classics he made as a younger guy. But it’s Scorsese’s version: pulsing with more life than most younger filmmakers, before giving way to stark, chilling regret.

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.

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

Plenty of crime capers end ruefully, but few feel this potently bittersweet.

The charitable reading is that Ready Or Not understands how moneyed entitlement knows no gender — that the only way to break the arbitrary yet destructive grasp of the super-rich is to chop it off, or possibly light it on fire. So no, not a subtle movie. But a fairly satisfying one.

To his credit, it probably would have been easy to turn this particular book into a quasi-satirical parade of withering takedowns. Turning it into a flavorless, center-less journey of self-discovery was likely a lot more work. That doesn’t make it any easier to watch.

This is a movie that seems utterly convinced that it’s saying something profound, but proves difficult to actually parse.

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.

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.

Hit-and-miss horror auteur Alexandre Aja knows how to deliver lean, mean horror action. Crawl is far less tongue-in-cheek than his Piranha remake, but it doesn’t build to a fever pitch or deliver dynamite setpieces.

In a movie that often observes male dysfunction with some ironic distance, Eisenberg brings the satire closer to the bone.

In another self-reflexive move, Far From Home transfers the real dilemma back to the filmmakers: The character comedy is great fun, and the action spectacle often feels like their responsible burden.

Yesterday, Boyle’s new Beatles-centric dramedy, comes closer than he’s ever dared before — which makes this likable, hummable movie particularly disappointing when it fails to ignite the pop fireworks of his best work.

Plus One isn’t much more than consistently amusing and sweetly romantic, but in the right hands, those qualities can still feel like a lot.

Late Night is admirably eager to address the messy problems of the comedy world, but it ultimately can’t stop cleaning up after itself.

Actual kids will probably enjoy The Secret Life Of Pets 2, just as they probably enjoy whatever mini-movies Illumination churns out to supplement its hyper-successful home-entertainment releases. But they might also start to sense just how mini this sequel feels, and start fidgeting after 15 or 20 minutes.

Wilde’s film gets a lot of comic mileage from its lead actors’ ability to create a funny, believable relationship. Feldstein and Dever are both terrific in it.

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.

As tedious as Rocketman is when it’s going through the biographical motions, it’s equally delightful when it launches into something most rock movies pointedly avoid: full-on musical numbers.

What’s consistent about Photograph is the way it maintains the delicacy of a particularly fine short story, complete with some ghostly supporting characters and plenty of ellipses where more conventional movies would amp up the exclamation points.

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.