Josh Larsen

F1: The Movie is a corporate conglomerate on cinematic wheels.

It’s ugly and tuneless, with characters whose actions are so arbitrary as to render any consideration of what it means to be “good” or “wicked” meaningless.

By the movie’s merciful end, you wonder what a nice guy like Superman is doing in a mean place like this.

The result is a convoluted, overstuffed narrative that operates like two parallel movies until they converge for an extended climax.

Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning fumbles its own legacy, largely by believing it had one in the first place. With apologies to Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames, this has never been a franchise powered by our emotional connections to its characters, much less any sort of overarching, thematically resonant narrative. The Final Reckoning belatedly attempts to conjure up such qualities, while skimping on what has always mattered most in the series: scintillating stunt work.

Directed by Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, The Sisters Brothers), whose heart might be in the right place—the movie at least honors Emilia’s dysmorphia, rather than using it as a plot gimmick—but whose execution resembles something like community-theater Sicario, pulsed in an erratic blender.

Washington has the most fun, swishing about in dangling jewels and flowing robes, while Mescal—one of our best young actors—struggles to define Lucius outside of Crowe’s shadow. As for the relentless fights and battles, I found them to be increasingly tedious—even the wild ones with animals, given their reliance on CGI effects.

Hitchcock diluted by De Palma diluted by mid-tier M. Night Shyamalan leaves you with, well, bottom-tier Shyamalan.

It’s become a crutch for critics to say that this or that movie is so generic that it must have been generated by AI. I’ve resisted, but I’m finally going to play that card in regard to Wish. Thanks to a banal familiarity mixed with a dose of inhuman idiosyncrasy, the movie feels as if someone fed the opening Disney logo sequence — of fireworks bursting over a fairytale castle — to an AI program and asked it to spit out a 95-minute animated musical in the mode of the studio’s classics.

Bad in ways that are similar to 1989’s Road House—namely, an uneven handle on how seriously to take its silly premise.

To its credit, the movie gently questions Nyad’s compulsion—especially as it relates to her treatment of Bonnie—but it’s too eager to sweep all that under the rug when it comes time for the triumphant final swim.

Much of Vol. 3 feels like a combination of those exploitative ads from animal shelters and the Japanese body-horror endurance test Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Aside from that, the movie offers about 3,000 subplots and 2,000 supporting characters.

Amsterdam is one of those movies that reminds you how hard it is to make a good movie. You can have a strong idea, a talented cast, and a director with an impressive track record and still wind up with something that trips all over itself on the screen and lands in theaters with a thud.

Even while understanding that much of Belfast is supposed to be from the perspective of Buddy (Jude Hill), a young boy who witnesses the beginning of Ireland’s “Troubles” in his working-class neighborhood (and serves as something of a stand-in for writer-director Kenneth Branagh), I still felt a type of artistic naivete at work—a belief that all you need is black-and-white cinematography and a cute kid to create something of deep meaning and emotion.

The comic setups take longer than they should, then the punchlines give you a violent bear hug when they should be lightly slapping you on the cheek before quickly moving on to the next gag.

Garfield is fine, if a bit one-note in his show-must-go-on energy. The real issue is that the film is maniacally focused on Larson as the uber-struggling artist in a way that eventually feels monstrous, devouring any other character or concern that happens to cross its path.

This is a film of clashing ideas and clanging style.

Exhaustingly over-directed (Craig Gillespie zooms in from an establishing shot to a close-up in nearly every other scene), the movie is also a nonstop parade of grating, obvious needle drops.

Wow, when this thing eventually curdles, it really curdles into something rank.

When you hit a home run with Gadot, who was so thrilling in the 2017 film, you might want to make a sequel that keeps her at the center.

Not the worst of Adam Sandler’s Netflix vehicles, but not any good either.

The cultural context is at once vague and oppressive—there’s constant talk of “chi” and “ancestors”—to the point that it’s nearly rendered meaningless. With Yifei Lu in the title role, posing elegantly but not given much of a chance to project any sort of inner life.

I wouldn’t call Little a showcase for Issa Rae, who gets one of her first significant big-screen roles, but anyone who can bring this much life and intelligence to such tired material certainly deserves praise.

It Chapter Two has structural problems, character problems, and aesthetic problems.... But the movie’s main issue is an unexamined streak of cruelty.

Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson are the reason to see Men in Black: International—she has a comic precision that nicely deflates his humorous hubris—but for some reason the movie doesn’t bring them together until a third of the way in, after failing to establish any real sense of their characters.

This bloated, big-screen take on the DC comic is dumb, but not nearly dumb enough.

The original Miss Bala was a slyly feminist take on what could have easily been an exploitation flick. Guess what? This Miss Bala weirdly sexualizes things to undermine everything the original was interested in and become, yep, an exploitation flick.

The movie wields its mockery with the subtlety of a power tool.