Jordan Raup

Despite the contrived drama surrounding it, this is a refreshingly uncynical portrait of familial strife.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance has an ample dose of humor, heart, and chiseled abs, but one wishes the trilogy capper felt more than perfunctory.

While it fails to deliver convincing action and its comedy feels watered down, Central Intelligence does get the “buddy” aspect correct. Doing their best with a script (also by Ike Barinholtz and David Stasser) that feels all-too-safe, Johnson and Hart manage to prove that a movie can glide by just enough on sheer charisma alone.

Like an amusement ride on its last legs, there is no wonder in this world anymore; just the repetition of cheap, worn-out jolts. The park is gone, and with it, so is any semblance of humanity.

While Lucia Aniello (one of many from Broad City involved here) brings a certain energy in her directorial debut and the cast do comedically click, Rough Night too often feels watered-down with a blatant disregard for basic logic, resulting in a comedy that’s ultimately more exasperating than clever.

One imagines how over-the-top zany this could have been made, had the adaptation been overtly faithful, yet Linklater is able to extract the heart of the story while injecting some of his own characteristic themes.

It’s the kind of escapist action film and politically-tinged revenge tale that could actually spark a discussion rather than the reaction one has after walking out of The Hunt: stunned silence at how filmmakers could so severely botch a satire in a moment when there is plenty of material to mine from. If nothing else, at least it is mercifully short.

Despite [Harrelson's] commitment to a lack of civility, there’s a darker film lying in the cynical heart of Wilson, one that gets squandered by its mawkish aesthetic and lack of interest in exploring these characters beyond their crudeness.

Every so often the semblance of a promising adaptation peeks beyond the surface, but ultimately it all gets swallowed in a reductive muck of misguided choices that over-explains what the short story left up for discussion.

This tedious film’s biggest issues don’t lie with its simplification of politics or often taking the feel-good easy route, but rather how flat the comedy lands. This in part due to how weakly formed its characters are across the board, as well as the peculiar tonal approach that is taken.

With a grand score by Alan Silvestri that kicks up at every possible turn and extravagantly over-the-top Hathaway performance, this update on The Witches is a family-friendly Halloween treat that still boasts Zemeckis’ brand of the bizarre and a clear-eyed vision that seems all the more rare in today’s Hollywood.

Despite actors who are clearly committed to the material, The Free World is an unfortunate misfire of banality.

With The Meg, Turtletaub flounders about, failing to wring out a basic amount of tension in most scenes, leaving us to swim around in circles with only spare, Statham-infused signs of life.

While a murky, laborious affair, Pinocchio never feels wholly inept with the consummate craftsman at the helm, yet it’s certainly the director’s laziest time behind the camera.

Not containing the wit to be smart, thrilling sci-fi nor the chutzpah to embrace a fun, B-movie shlock vibe, it unfortunately feels like an uninspired TV pilot that any other network would’ve permanently locked in a vault.

Assassin’s Creed bears a jumbled narrative and self-serious approach that ends up feeling far too assaultive on the senses without any genuine pay-off.

The tell-all exposé on why exactly The Last Thing He Wanted is a failure on almost every level is likely many years away, but it’s been some time since such a promising concoction of talented ingredients has resulted in something so impossibly dull, gratingly lethargic, and utterly incoherent.

Bits and pieces work—an underused Maria Bakalova, in one of her first post-Borat roles, stands out as she contends with Dieter’s advances; there are a few laughs seeing Carol dealing with a crumbling relationship at home with no way to intervene; Dustin placing more importance over this franchise than his newly adopted son––but The Bubble‘s vast majority plays as Day for Night for dummies. Comedy can certainly be extracted from the strange new world we find ourselves in, but Apatow’s project is a meta experiment in search of a purpose beyond delivering a few scant chuckles.

H. simply doesn’t feel fully formed, keeping us at a narrative distance from its otherwise relatable characters.

After the perpetual dormancy of our lives this past year, humanity is on the verge of reawakening, and Awaken is a worthy testament to just how much there is to explore.