Jude Dry

The genius of the first movie was its ability to disguise a searing critique of capitalism inside a hilarious package, an idea that is genuinely funny itself. The sequel, with its recycled jokes and re-mixed songs, is merely a reminder of how original the original actually was.

Freeland is clearly having fun behind the camera, but broad and superficial performances mean the fun doesn’t always translate.

It’s an ambitious piece, but in the dance between experimental ideas and grounded storytelling, Aviva should have listened to her body.

With its bisexual lighting and hyper-designed oddball aesthetic, Please Baby Please looks a lot more polished than its messier camp influences. Aesthetically, the film cobbles together its many cinematic influences with admirable swagger. But film isn’t solely a visual medium — it’s a storytelling one as well.

Though the original novels were written in the ’70s and ’80s, at times Confess, Fletch feels like a ’50s farce, with good old-fashioned misdirection and mistaken identities doing the leg work. Unlike James Bond, Fletch doesn’t need gadgets or fast cars to untangle this mystery, just a few Negronis and heaps of charisma. The formula works.

The film’s main triumph is in crafting a convincing narrative with a clear point of view.

With a thinly sketched premise and a Hail Mary pass at emotional depth arriving late in the final act, the film feels like a series of vignettes draped around Stalter’s charms. Unfortunately, charisma alone doesn’t make an interesting narrative.

Like its heroine, Official Secrets is shouting into an echo chamber.

The film is visually breathtaking, and anchored by two strong performances. But the loyalties in My Cousin Rachel seesaw too dramatically for tension to build satisfyingly; the film runs hot and cold when it really wants to simmer.

McMurray fixates too much on the brutality of his subject, foregoing any meaningful character development. The result is a film about punishment that is quite punishing to watch.

Unfortunately, in its valiant effort to avoid cliches, the story falls flat. By focusing on what not to do, there’s just not a lot there.

With a more streamlined script, or even fewer characters and more developed relationships, Abe could have made a real impact. As it stands, there are too many cooks in the kitchen.

If the deliciously grainy archival footage were the only thing That Summer had to offer, it would be enough. But by including Beard and Radziwill’s introspective voiceovers, Swedish director Göran Hugo Olsson (“The Black Power Mixtape”) creates a nostalgic meditation that touches on both cultural and historical memory.

With its “Glee”-colored dance numbers and drag-lite drag scenes, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie just isn’t serving.

Funny Boy is a luminous coming-of-age tale seen through the eyes of a relatable yet entirely unique experience.

Landing somewhere between “Love, Simon” and “Superbad,” Alex Strangelove is a strange delight indeed.

As seen through the eyes of her former lovers (merely a few of many), Highsmith’s life is brought sharply into focus, revealing as much about her humanity as her work.

There’s Something in the Water doesn’t break any molds in terms of documentary form, and it’s less impressive as cinema than activism. But it’s easily digestible and well researched, with the aid of Waldron’s book.

Gigi is an invaluable role model to young trans people in her ferocious courage and undeniable fabulousness, but the film is little more than a celebration of that.

With a PG-rated humor that parents can enjoy too, Secret Headquarters feels like the movie equivalent of the fun uncle who speaks to you like an adult, but also drives a mean Mario Kart.

Lingua Franca illustrates the woefully untapped potential of marginalized storytellers.

Hart guides the actions with a sensitive and joyous hand, luxuriating in the palette of Arizona’s arid desert and gaping badlands.

It’s perfectly entertaining, using Barker’s inventive tropes to tell a solidly gory nightmare, but it’s a pale vanilla shadow of the original.

Quincy is refreshingly devoid of talking-head interviews, relying instead on the measured ruminations of the man himself and the extensive archives Jones and Hicks had the difficult job of paring down. The result is a jaunty stroll through the last half-century of music history, and a fitting tribute to a living legend.

See How They Run packs a lot of characters into a thin story that leaves little room for the considerable talent to stand out. It may be inspired by the greatest mystery writer of all time, but it’s an uninspired copy at best.

Scream makes so many references to its predecessors, along with plenty of other horror flicks both lowbrow and high, it’s impossible to forget you’re watching a fictional film. It may be exciting to let the audience in on the joke, but it’s hard to get lost in this world.

Once more for the people in the back, treating anyone’s identity like a costume is offensive and dangerous to an already-marginalized group. If the filmmakers wanted the movie to have a real impact, they should have cast a transgender actress. Instead, Anything is just a yellow lily-livered mess.

Smallfoot really flounders with its obligatory message-mongering: a hodgepodge of didacticism about the importance of celebrating differences, asking questions, never fearing the unknown, or judging someone because they look different. Plenty of sound lessons in there, to be sure, but without a singular focus, they all blend into one.

The austere minimalism of Rust Creek works to the movie’s advantage.

See for Me wastes no frame in its brisk 92 minute running time, it’s a tightly-wound thriller propelled by enough turns that you won’t want to miss a beat.

While there are moments of committed physical comedy and a few good line deliveries, the circumstances are neither believable nor outrageous enough to add up.

Jones clearly has valuable insights about being a Black woman in entertainment and has the chops to tell a captivating story. What any of that has to do with the sex industry is a total mystery.

Objects become subjects in Kristy Guevara-Flanagan’s sweeping yet focused analysis that exposes the truth about the power of images to shape the world’s views of women.

The moral is clear as day to any kid, though plenty of adults could use the reminder: Never judge any creature by the way they look. And, for animation devotees, the lesson is the same: Never judge a cute animated offering by its platform.

Theater lovers will enjoy seeing these actors take on such iconic roles, but they’ll find themselves wishing they were seeing the same great talent on the stage.

A kaleidoscopic fantasy warped through the lens of a 1970s sci-fi Western, After Blue is a synthetic siren song for the freaks of the future and the past.

Crush is, for better or worse, just like every other teen rom-com, extraordinary in its ordinariness. It succeeds at what it sets out to do: Give queer kids a totally enjoyable, and often quite funny, mainstream love story with a happy ending.

The fun continues with a totally satisfactory sequel that brings the Sanderson sisters back to life one more time. OK, so the plot is basically the same and the jokes mere updates to the original. Why mess with a good thing when you can simply recreate it?

The action delivers, but the film’s third act suffers from an excess of set-ups, cameos, and minor deaths played up as major losses. After all, they have two more to go.

It’s a wild romp with all the campy noir you might expect in a film by the father of queercore.

It’s refreshing to see two stars who could have easily phoned it in for the rest of their careers push themselves to try new things. Even more thrilling, they really can sing!

With a star-studded cast, dazzling design, and thrilling dance numbers, The Prom is the best of what Murphy can offer Hollywood — a taste of the past with its eyes on the future.

The sequel remains charming, beautifully animated, and often incredibly funny, but there’s a sense that writer Brian Lynch realized Max’s story needed a lot more padding this time around.

Consequences thrums with a vibrant current — propelled by a dizzying churn of cigarettes, cocaine, fistfights, and shirtless young men — until arriving at its predictably explosive conclusion. The film’s perspective may be austere, but its heart is defiantly exuberant.

As the tension builds to its harrowing conclusion, and Alex begins to bare his teeth, Mathews pulls enough tricks from his sleeve to make Discreet a worthy digression.

Like a grand opera, Bel Canto weaves many stories into one sweeping epic.

The fast-paced dialogue and mature-but-wholesome humor creates a general aura of clever high school rapport, aided by a lively supporting performance from comedian Ayo Edebiri (“Big Mouth”). But in trying to be everything in between, the movie ends up being not much of anything.

The blatantly ridiculous appeal of “Cocaine Bear” is proof enough that the project isn’t lacking in self-awareness, but to what end? It’s not unhinged enough to qualify as full-blown parody, and not smart enough to be called satire. Banks seems uninterested in directly referencing exploitation movies of the past, or in burying winking cultural critiques within the outlandish action. Maybe that’s too much to ask from a movie called “Cocaine Bear.” Like its title, what you see is what you get.

Tightly written and sensitively rendered, the devastating film is propelled by masterful performances, led by a bewitching Wood in the role she was born to play.

Surprisingly funny, well-acted, and a little offbeat, Aline is as delightfully kooky as its monumental subject.

The violence, while pervasive, does not feel gratuitous. Each kill is quick and to the point, and the camera never lingers too long on the flesh-torn wreckage.

The suspense builds creepily enough, with a classic fake-out in a strong first act. But when the movie turns into full-blown horror, which it eventually sort of does, the pacing of the violence is all out of whack.

The movie’s casting montage may feel stilted and long, but it’s easy to imagine Tatum’s actual thrill at assembling the best dancers from around the world. When they stop talking and start dancing, that’s when the real magic happens.

While great direction isn’t the worst problem to have, the fact that the writing and acting couldn’t quite live up to their gorgeous surroundings hollows the experience of watching it.

It may not break the mold in many ways but one, but the impact of that one is far from trivial.

We’ve yet to see if Kate McKinnon can lead a movie, but she sure as hell can steal one. She did it in “Ghostbusters,” and she did it again in Rough Night, which is surprisingly funny despite a wild premise riddled with potential pitfalls.

Plaza steals the show with her killer instincts and comedic timing. If she can keep an operation this overstuffed afloat, there’s nothing she cannot do.

A humorless melodrama about a woman haunted by her past, Malignant sits somewhere between a slasher, a ghost story, and a possession flick, never fully embracing either. The result is a confusing melange of genre archetypes that lacks a clear point of view, even a surface-level stylistic one.

Along with a few bouncy numbers from “The Greatest Showman” duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, Bardem is the driving force behind “Lyle,” and the train loses major steam without its kooky conductor.

Before the movie came along, the show had an ardent critic in Liam Kennedy, a criminology professor who believes “PAW Patrol” “encourages complicity in a global capitalist system that produces inequalities and causes environmental harms.” While it’s doubtful the humorless dirge of a movie will make enough of an impression to mold young minds in any lasting way, the critique of “PAW Patrol” is useful as an amalgamation of certain favorite Hollywood themes that ought to be retired.

Though Pugh valiantly muscles through the melancholy beats of Braff’s melodrama, there are too many other characters and plot threads to allow her to do much besides heave the story forward.

For a movie with so much going on, (not even counting the CGI cougar Bella befriends), A Dog’s Way Home is wildly devoid of meaning or humor.

Using the hyper-gendered spaces of college Greek life as a fertile palette, Takal and her co-writer April Wolfe skewer toxic masculinity, the white male literary canon, rape culture, patriarchy, and white male rage — all wrapped up with a bow in the stylishly entertaining package of a studio-backed holiday horror.

The 1971 epic offers a stylish and scathing parable about the dangerous ways that the powerful can exploit religious zeal to stay that way.

With a little sleight of hand and a well-executed metaphor, horror can encompass both the fun and the artifice of filmmaking. Night’s End may not be perfect, but it’s perfectly flawed.

Save for a few clever twists and winning performances from O’Shea Jackson Jr. and 50 Cent (née Curtis Jackson), Den of Thieves is the kind of bloated crime thriller that could have been made in any decade — which is not to call it timeless so much as way past its time.

This gory teen comedy blends laughably outrageous carnage with a legitimately scary plot to delightful ends. Throw in a winking fetish for cinephile culture and audiences are sure to go wild for the gutsy film.

Though the title may be the cleverest thing about this cookie cutter affair, it’s refreshing to see a gay family film that doesn’t use its characters’ sexuality for dramatic conflict.

Prior and Zagorodnii are both so watchable, and their chemistry so electric, that it’s easy to get swept away in their romance. Historical accuracy be damned.

Equal parts confounding, challenging, and insanely fun, “Dashcam” is horror at its most inventive.

Though the inimitable Colman can’t help but muscle an admirable performance out of the overly sentimental material, her immense talent dwarfs the melodramatic surroundings.

Like a fine conversation, which her solid script mostly delivers, Coppola keeps the tension in the air like a lightly bouncing ball.

The movie is weighed down by too many secondary characters, which only serve to dissipate their flickering charms. No one in the film, even our heroine, gets more than a hint of backstory as the single-minded plot careens toward its predictable conclusion.

There may be fewer truly gory moments in Don’t Breathe 2 than in typical slasher fare, but they are just twisted enough to stick in the mind like a festering wound.

Aside from not being very scary, the movie is littered with missed opportunities.

Life of the Party is proof that even the funniest actors need good material, which makes it all the more disappointing that McCarthy wrote the script with director Ben Falcone, who is also her husband.

The pace picks up when the slashing finally begins in the third act, but it’s too little, too late to get the blood going.

With Vermont jokes that read like the musings of someone who’s only ever been for ski season, and the embarrassingly half-baked attempt to critique sexism by writing a kind-hearted womanizer, every stroke of Paint misses the mark. Bob Ross deserved better.

Choose or Die is a perfect entry point into genre for younger viewers, one that will also satisfy old school diehards even as it takes some pointed (perhaps deserved?) jabs at them.

Franco clearly enjoys playing the idealistic rabble rouser, and who wouldn’t want to direct a movie so they could cast themselves as a charismatic radical? Unfortunately, watching someone else play make believe is only fun if you believe it yourself.

What is the meaning of life? Are we here for a reason? Is there a point to any of this? We may never know, but knowing this movie exists may bring some viewers one step closer to giving up on the whole damn thing.

Without the star power of Mandy Moore and the relative sophistication of the single location predicament, 47 Meters Down: Uncaged is just the last gasp of a shark saga that didn’t need to come up for air.

Though the movie is clearly enamored with its own creativity, it’s not fun for anyone else. The title alone has already inspired titters online, and the movie is just as clunky and overwrought.

The only bright spot about the odd timing of South of Heaven is that it’s so obviously a relic of pre-pandemic Hollywood, one that hopefully will stop making lifeless thrillers full of hackneyed dialogue and formulaic action.

Though it’s all satisfyingly silly, Mafia Mamma never quite find its tone. Hardwicke doesn’t seem to know if she’s doing Quentin Tarantino or Mel Brooks, and the two styles are so far apart that splitting the difference lands the movie out at sea.

Even in the weak signal that is the January movie season, xXx: The Return of Xander Cage hardly registers.

It’s a fittingly ambiguous title for a directionless film, late night fare that will be enjoyed by just as many horny men as horny teenage lesbians.

Both bloody and/or creepy thrills are few and far between, but striking images and standout performances keep it cohesive.

With every note as predictable as the next, the movie just blends into a discordant mess. Even Rodriguez’s smile can’t salvage this disappointing remake, but at least it provides a welcome reminder to check out the movie that inspired it.

Rather than going out with a bang, however, the final installment in the franchise hinges its loose plot around the marital infidelities of younger, humorless characters so thinly sketched that it is impossible to care about them.

Secure in his standing as a marquis comedian, Maniscalco makes movies like a guy with nothing to prove, and his confidence buoys and brightens About My Father.

It takes truly terrible script to make such charming and accomplished comedic actors seems so wooden and lifeless.

The result is a breezy but chilling romp through a haunted rural farmhouse, seen through extremely high-resolution handheld camera work. Like most studio horror movies these days, it looks a lot better than it should, and slaps a bit less.

Baywatch won’t blow anything out of the water (except for the boat it sets on fire), but it will certainly make a splash.

The big reveal at the end of the second act is absurd enough to pump some adrenaline into the third act, but the movie drags on too long afterwards.

Led by a few strong performances, and delivering plenty of heart-clutching moments, The Bye Bye Man is sure to appeal to horror lovers of all stripes.

If this is the best Hollywood can offer these women, it’s not their fault for wanting to work. Instead, it’s on writers and studios to stop treating seniors like some sort of oddities to squeeze a few laughs out of before they croak.

There are plenty of plot devices to keep the audience on its toes, and Reynor is the epitome of a 21st century lovable antihero, so fashionable these days. He’s hard and grizzled when needed, but soft and playful as well.