Josh Spiegel

The film adaptation of Aaron Blabey's series of kid-friendly graphic novels maintains a welcome visual flair and features a game voice cast while treading extremely familiar ground.

This is a sweet, friendly, low-key affair that often feels less like a story and more like a home movie Linklater collected to share with his grandkids.

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.

Deep Water has its pleasures, some of which are of the inexplicably daffy variety . . . And when you compare Deep Water to ... well, just about every other movie available right now, either in theaters or streaming, it really does feel like a singular sensation.

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.

Jackass Forever is as bluntly, dementedly, brilliantly funny and horrific, and unforgettable as any of its predecessors or the TV series that started it all. If you are a fan of anything or anyone even tangentially related to Jackass Forever, you can rest assured that you know what you're getting.

If there is anything new to this film, it's the sense that the series is self-aware enough to understand that it's time to wrap up.

The 355 is the cinematic equivalent of Hydrox. It's a bland and generic retread of something that's well-liked, if not beloved, something that feels vaguely like the real thing.

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.

For films like Encanto to truly stand out, instead of being content with being good enough, they need to push storytelling limits as much as they push cultural ones.

Home Sweet Home Alone runs counter to whatever standard expectations any audience member would have about what to expect from a film in this franchise. To those of us who disdain the original, that actually works in its favor for the first hour. To others, this film may be alienating and perplexing. But it's a pleasant holiday surprise if you're willing to go with it.

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.

It's now hard to imagine that "Unforgiven" felt very much like Eastwood closing the book on his Western era. Cry Macho is more of a slow-paced postscript to that book, but a surprisingly well-worn and welcome postscript nonetheless.

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.

Queenpins boasts a cast of talented ringers, who elevate the muddled material far more than it deserves, without actually resulting in an all-around good movie.

Vivo is plenty colorful, with a bright pastel palette both when the film’s action takes place in Cuba and in Florida, though the backgrounds are far less detailed than would be ideal. It’s good, but not good enough. The same is true of the story, and of the songs.

Jungle Cruise is, on the whole, not quite as enjoyable as Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, and of course nowhere near as good as the Indiana Jones franchise or even The Mummy, partly because it is entirely unable to shake loose of those reference points. But it’s still a solid summer action film, or at least a solid enough entry for this specific summer

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

There’s a lot of flash and style, and all in service of an empty story with unmemorable gunplay.

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.

Spirit Untamed is inoffensive, which both makes it far more tolerable than most other DreamWorks Animation titles and also not terribly good in and of itself.

Yes, it could’ve been worse. But as daring as this film’s costumes are, and as fun as Stone and Thompson (and Hauser and Fry, to be fair) can be, it can’t help but give into its lazier instincts.

Despite the mostly younger cast, Without Remorse is a bland throwback to the late 1980s and early 1990s, hearkening to an era of such simplistic notions of good and bad that its script could have been unearthed from a time capsule. Sollima’s direction is journeyman-like, which wouldn’t be a demerit if the film he was directing didn’t feel so lifeless.

It’s an unbeatable combination of humor and heart.

Thunder Force has too good of a core idea to be left so unexplored. Melissa McCarty can’t be stopped, but she continues to be content making films that leave her talent frustratingly untapped.