Jim Vorel

Sweeney may have taken this role with Oscar statuette dreams and “legitimate actress” intent, but thanks to its sketchy screenplay and languid boxing bonafides, the result tends to be as dull and thudding as gloves striking a heavy bag.

On one hand, we have a fantastic central performance, supported by solid direction, decent visuals and sound design, a creepy atmosphere and an effective relationship metaphor. But at the same time, the film is simultaneously being hamstrung by a screenplay that fails to render believable character relationships, falling back on painfully clunky exposition, wooden supporting performances and infuriating character behavior.

It’s a hagiography more than anything, one that does benefit from access to an intriguing library of behind-the-scenes footage, interviews and outtakes, but rarely does I Like Me know how to connect this material to any kind of deeper insight into John Candy’s psyche, with a few notable exceptions that ultimately aren’t enough.

With a plot that likewise falls apart under the lightest bit of scrutiny, what we really needed was more judgement of our protagonist, and not less.

For far too much of its bloated runtime, it becomes an incomprehensible slideshow of trauma and weakly executed horror imagery, only occasionally revealing the far more effective, character-driven psychological thriller it’s clearly yearning to be.

The film needed to be either a dark, moody story about criminals seeking a way to break out of the ruinous track of their exploited lives, for the sake of a baby … or a winking, snarky heist comedy with a charismatic lead character. It instead tries to do both simultaneously, and the clash between those elements is distinctly awkward.

If only Jennifer Jason Leigh had been available for a few more days of shooting, perhaps Night Always Comes could have put some flesh on the bones of its family drama, enlivening what is otherwise an overly familiar crime caper, but like an absent parent, the supporting elements of the film just can’t be counted on when you need them.

A queer ghost story with devastating emotional power and transgressive themes of domination, selfishness and abandonment, it is all too often hamstrung by plodding stylistic choices and a thin script that stretches many of its interactions until they’re so thin, threadbare and ethereal that they end up just as spectral.

Where The Pickup could have most easily have ideologically separated itself would have been on the comedic side, by leaning into the talents of its marquee names, but it instead represses the delivery of jokes more and more as it goes, becoming merely another tepid crime caper without a more distinct identity.

Occasionally funny in spite of itself, particularly when relying on tried and true slapstick zaniness and the admittedly irresistible performance of Christopher McDonald as Shooter McGavin, it steadily becomes a punishing endurance run that belabors the same handful of gags to the point of nausea.

Leave it to a new version of I Know What You Did Last Summer to highlight that there was never anything particularly interesting about I Know What You Did Last Summer in the first place.

With an incredibly deep and frankly excessive wealth of archival footage at its disposal, Perry examines filmic versions of the video store experience, drawing conclusions about what they meant to us, how filmmakers used them, and how we processed the end of the video store era.

A confused mashup of psychological imprisonment thrillers, dystopian social satire and even something adjacent to zombie horror, it’s bereft of actual ideas despite its cement mixer of a premise, struggling to pad out its runtime with 10 minutes of limping credits at its conclusion, leaving 83 minutes as a remainder that feels like a short film or anthology entry dragged kicking and screaming to feature length.

Unfortunately, Fear Street: Prom Queen simultaneously goes out of its way to steal directly from all its major influences, demonstrating little if any original thought.

It benefits from a strong central protagonist’s performance, but is simultaneously let down by a screenplay that collapses under the slightest bit of scrutiny. Clown in a Cornfield simply isn’t as smart as it needs to be in order to prove that it’s more than its title.

Ultimately, The Trouble with Jessica runs out of gas and limps in the direction of a contrived conclusion, lacking the mercurial spark that all its characters attribute to Jessica at one point or another. If only the experience of watching the film could be as engaging as the implied experience of knowing her.

Its performers make the most of their meager resources–they get a lot of mileage out of that baby doll–but in a genre powered by questions of ideology and ethics, Daddy is too milquetoast to memorably deliver its opinion.

Psycho Therapy’s screenplay derails it in its closing minutes with genuinely whiplash-inducing abruptness, running out of gas when it’s still seemingly far from its natural finish line.

All in all, The Parenting is just a notably scattershot affair, from its poorly defined character relationships, to its questionable pacing (and eventual abrupt ending), to CGI that sometimes looks fine and other times is suddenly and shockingly inept, like what I’d expect to see in a feature from The Asylum or Troma.

The Electric State is one hell of an artistically neutered, sanitized boondoggle, awe-inspiring in its deployment of expensive visuals but largely bereft of any kind of genuine wit, humor, warmth or adaptational deftness.

As writer, Woody Bess seems to want to drag more weighty pathos into a format that doesn’t inherently support it very well, and it ends up hurting both the film’s dramatic and comic deliveries at the same time, rendering its performances confused, with the exception of veterans like Keith David and Richard Kind.

Old Guy is a rather careless take on the fusion of comedy and action genres, the kind of film that will throw around an acronym like “PSNI” in the middle of conversation and just assume an American sitting at home on their couch will deduce this stands for “Police Service of Northern Ireland.”

In Rounding, you can see the basic outline of a worthy psychological drama, but its screenplay fails to turn that vague shape into a fleshed-out story, instead relying on the viewer to fill in the gaps, while the horror elements merely detract from the material that might have worked otherwise.

Despite an incredibly talented cast of top-tier comedy talent, the film fails to establish a cohesive comedic tone, becoming only more unmoored when it reaches for unearned emotional profundity later on.

For Zodiac Killer Project to work, it would have to be coming from a filmmaker who is fully ready to admit their own culpability in continuing to fuel the worst aspects of the genre they intended to exploit. That kind of brutal self-admission would have taken a great deal of courage, but Shackleton can’t quite get there, even if he comes close at times.

Back in Action functions modestly well as a welcome back to the screen for Cameron Diaz, who is still capable of being as charming today as she ever may have been. It even functions decently well as an action movie for the specific, too-narrow frames of time where Diaz and Foxx are thrashing wave after wave of nameless mooks–whoever the choreographer and stunt coordinators are here, they’ve done the heaviest lifting of anyone on the project. But the film feels absolutely threadbare in all other dimensions.

Jharrel Jerome gives his all, but without a screenplay to stand on, balance is impossible.

Carry-On is good for a chuckle in fits and starts, primarily when dealing with the easily imagined workday horrors of dealing with irrational holiday travelers in a packed American airport, or the behind-the-scenes camaraderie of the TSA with their bingo cards for items such as confiscated drugs, weapons or embarrassing sex toys. There’s also a few well-executed action sequences.

At the end of the day, Sweethearts just feels wan and inconsequential as a result of its lack of focus.

It’s directed and edited in totally competent fashion. But none of that justifies taking the time to watch an often tedious reworking of a story you’ve already seen so many times before.

Credited to being “based on an original idea” from star Daisy Ridley, Magpie works in fits and starts as a portrait of an unbelievably, almost comically toxic marriage, but never aspires to really plumb the psyches of its characters or present them with anything but the most obvious and unchallenged choices.

Like an unstable particle of antimatter–which beyond all reason becomes a major plot point, if you can believe that–Time Cut begins to rapidly deteriorate in legibility in its third act, before spinning totally out of control.

In the end, The Apprentice is a story whose central character wouldn’t really justify the telling of said story in normal circumstances, except for the fact that he eventually became a ruinous president of the United States.

Rarely does it ever genuinely feel like a horror movie at all, in fact. Instead, it’s more like a halfhearted feminist kitchen drama, with the occasional “scary” beat inserted under protest, a horror film via technicality of labeling and marketing rather than any particular intent. It wants to be just about anything but.

The feeling is one of depletion, as V/H/S/99 begins robbing past hits in a grim effort to keep itself mobile and vital.

In truth, the entirety of Halloween Ends is suffused in some kind of magic or witchcraft, a gauzy layer of unreality that prevents a single character in the film from behaving like an actual human being.

Any time Goodnight Mommy tiptoes toward the brink, there’s a hand waiting to yank it back toward mundanity.

Unfortunately, There’s Someone Inside Your House is a considerably more rote endeavor in mass-market horror filmmaking—competently shot and staged, but decidedly familiar, it displays none of the emotional nuance or attention to character detail we’ve associated with Brice in the past.

Snyder is trying to do so much here that the whole thing practically collapses under its own weight, a victim of its own attempt at bombast and visual iconoclasm.

Director Yeon Sang-ho, who staged genuinely tense sequences in the first film, just seems suddenly out of his element here when expected to produce a grander action spectacle.