Josh Spiegel

Though this film is well-intentioned, fleetly paced, and boasts a unique blend of animation, it's a desperate and sweaty attempt to revive the past glories of the studio.

This movie isn't even worth glancing at when you scroll through your Netflix profile.

There is such a thing as a propulsive, intelligently crafted, no-holds-barred, violent action masterpiece centered around a seemingly unkillable man whose mastery of weapons is endless. That, of course, is the "John Wick" series. This cannot hope to compete.

On paper, Chris Evans and Ana de Armas would seem like a perfect romantic-comedy couple, but their chemistry in this film is nonexistent.

What a baffling, misguided film.

By studiously spelling out each emotion, Zemeckis and Weitz remove any potential for enigmatic complexity. And while the computer technology bringing Pinocchio to life is nowhere near as creepy as anything in Zemeckis’ Polar Express, that’s mitigated by how obviously fake he is anytime there’s a shot with a human actor “touching” or “holding” the little wooden boy.

Cheaper by the Dozen, every time it tries to walk down a thornier path, seems to be guided away by executive fiat to ensure that nothing gets too dicey. There was potential here, but it goes unrealized.

It's hard to know whether the challenges of making a rough-and-tumble action movie with Liam Neeson at the helm now stem from age or from making a movie like this during the pandemic. Whatever the explanation is, the result is that Blacklight is a bland way to pass 100 minutes.

An aggressively misguided, strangely dour affair that starts off bad and only gets worse.

A better director would have improved its flaws, or maybe pushed Sorkin to go through some of the elements and refashion them. "Being the Ricardos" needed a different voice; the one here profoundly, obstinately refuses to grasp the inner workings of the comic mind.

The Addams Family 2 makes exceedingly few right moves, feeling tossed-off right to the very end.

Dear Evan Hansen, for all the plaudits it received on stage, is a hollow attempt at broad-based sincerity that felt hollow even before it became a big-screen adaptation.

Vacation Friends" probably wouldn't work that well in a movie theater, but at least there, you'd have the potential of infectious laughter. At home, Vacation Friends falls totally flat.

Space Jam: A New Legacy, both in its cravenly cynical development and release, is not a surprising film. The marketing didn’t lie. This movie is exactly what it looks like. And it’s a grim glimpse at a potential future of mainstream filmmaking. No thanks

DreamWorks Animation can make solid family entertainment. But they haven’t this time.

Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard – a title, by the way, that is mostly misleading outside of a single scene where Michael serves as Sonia’s bodyguard – has a few brief moments of joy or wit. But most of those moments rely on the audience’s recognition of the all-too-famous cast (such as being delighted at seeing Banderas and Hayek share the screen once more, even with Banderas playing the bad guy). This film, even more than its surprisingly successful predecessor, is exhausting and obnoxious. A few good lines don’t save a slapdash, snarky mess.

Tom & Jerry is, in many ways, aiming to be a live-action cartoon. But it fails in so many basic ways of cinematic storytelling. The story is dull, the characters are single-dimensionally bland, and the performances are stiff.

Irresistible is one of the dullest, most toothless comedies in recent memory.

The Banker is like a shell of a movie, with a desperate lack of personality. The ingredients are there, down to the inevitable moment in the end credits when photos of the real people are placed alongside the actors playing them. Yet just as Apple TV+’s original series are lacking the element of dramatic excitement, so too is The Banker.