K. Austin Collins

The Lion King, ultimately, is simply a copy—not a true remake. It’s exactly the movie Disney wanted to make, which is good news for them—but a shame for us.

Spiderhead was adapted from a short story by George Saunders, but halfheartedly and with decidedly less wit.

For Joe Bell to largely be a tale of one man’s inner journey rather than a dive into the unknowns of his son’s inner life and eventual tragedy is not out of turn. It is a worthwhile story to tell. The flaw is not in assigning gravity to Joe’s journey.

It’s the product of a satirical ambition that lacks the wit to land any heady blows; the horror mastery to be even glancingly scary; the intellect to make those thrills invigoratingly existential; and the sense of humor to make it entertaining. What it is, is limp, dull, half-cocked — with a few good performances from good enough actors that hints at how a smarter movie might have worked.

It’s funny to think of this new chapter, with all its mean twists and its tense character convolution, as a prelude to the story we already know. Orphan is the longer movie, but compared to First Kill, it’s a psychologically slim, unmessy affair in comparison.

There are movies that were never going to be good, no matter the effort, and then there are movies that decide upfront to be bad and have a much easier time asking us to go with it. Cocaine Bear is the latter. It gives us what we’re asking for. Turns out, that isn’t much.

The Little Things settles sleekly into its place as a movie of the week. That’s a satisfying enough ambition — even as the actors onscreen give performances that point to a richer, wilder movie.

What starts as one of those rare, unplaceable, maybe-satire, maybe-camp, high-wire pop confections morphs into a fairly straightforward biopic about a beloved superstar that seems overly wary of pissing off a living idol.

The pleasure and terror of Dark Web is, as it turns out, its unpredictability.

Smith is the lifeboat leading us to a more pleasurable film, one where it doesn’t so much matter that the sets look cheap, to say nothing of the CGI keeping Smith’s head plastered on a floating blue body.

Emancipation is not better off for laying any claim to the actual man that it purports to be about. It is a historically dubious, morally incurious piece of genre fare that satisfies as entertainment and not much else. Pure Hollywood heroism.

What makes Dunham’s art worth watching is what makes so much of it feel like a gamble. It invites projection.

The movie was directed by Michael Chaves (The Curse of La Llorona) who, in the case of The Devil Made Me Do It, reveals a finer hand with the melodrama of possession — the utter internal chaos of it, the feverish disorientation — than with jump scares. The jumps: not so jumpy. More or less predictable.

Coming 2 America is a good time — even more, it’s evidence that this actor-director pair are on the verge of something great.

Eternals is good at telling us where to look, at impressing us with its manufactured sense of grandeur. What it lacks is any credible sense of what’s actually worth seeing.

It’s not a remake so much as a juicy, larger-than-life update—a movie whose aim is to bring the Super Fly myth up to speed.

Tame is what Magic Mike’s Last Dance is — what it apparently wants to be, what it becomes in exchange for its new, cardboard-simple, ostensible pro-woman worldview. The movie’s pleasures mute themselves beneath its good intentions. It wants to be about what women want. But it feels like it never asked.

McKinnon is all excess, all the time, and The Spy Who Dumped Me—a solid comedy, overall—gives us another chance to bask in that.

The premise is ripe; the thrills are rich; the payoff doesn’t come together quite as easily as the rest.

Washington...absolutely has a keen sense of his character. It’s there in every skeptical cock of his head, every sly, knowing grimace. But The Equalizer 2 is too much of a dull slog for any of that to pop with Washington’s usual ace charisma. The movie is a bog; Washington’s merely wading through it.

Blonde is no truer or more intelligent than a more openly sleazy rendition of this story. It leaves too little room (despite its two hour and 40 minute runtime) to reconcile the fuller reality of this woman.

Cut out the extra layers of nothingness piling up in the margins and you’ve got the kind of surreal tension that only romantic comedies, that dying but not dead genre, can offer: a case being made for romantic love, even when it doesn’t exist.

Bohemian Rhapsody’s problems aren’t specific to this movie. They are the bane of biopics broadly speaking, especially those tackling artists. I want to leave this kind of movie with a sense of the artist’s art, not just of the headlined subsections of a Wikipedia summary.

Carnage is for the most part, in ways that count, another dirtbag delight. It’s a lesser movie than Venom, but one that scratches many of the same itches and then some.

As a pure dilemma-fest, the movie basically works, resetting the clock scene by scene, making the joy of survival deliberately short-lived. The suspense works. Watching these people figure things out, just in the nick of time — except in the cases of the people who run out of time — doesn’t really get old, even if the movie somehow gets a little old.

Halloween Ends is a curious and mostly effective mix of slasher antics and dramatically straight-faced themes. It’s a good enough slasher to provoke laughter in some of its grimmer moments, because the deaths are that ridiculous and the targets are sometimes, unfortunately, a little deserving.

Its preference is for plucking the lowest hanging fruit and, more urgently, letting its own audience off the hook. Though Irresistible occasionally lands a point—a soul surfaces briefly, thanks to Cooper—the movie ultimately doesn’t have the guts to be the movie it needs to be.

The film is moving. It’s also a bit reductive. The flaw is in the way that one enables the other.