Kate Erbland

As is often the case with such violence, it eventually becomes numbing. By its midpoint, once the novelty of a superhero movie showing super levels of violence wears off, the thinness and lack of spark in the fight scenes becomes more readily apparent. By the film's end, they are hard to distinguish from any other superhero fare. Similarly, lack of imagination keep the film's prodigious swearing and occasional nudity from feeling like anything original.

While the film’s star and subject is never less than dazzling, even her most inspiring moments can’t obscure a paper-thin exploration of a remarkable life in transition.

Though Decker pumped up the salaciousness for the ultimately icky Mild, its connections run shallow, and most of its action—particularly in the over-the-top third act—feels spectacularly unearned.

Like so many franchise-starting first films, “Deadpool” had to push through some necessary evils to get to the good stuff, fortunately, all that subversive goodness is on wild display in Deadpool 2, which delivers on the promise of the first film (and more).

Puzzle toes a tough line, managing to stay relentlessly good-hearted and deeply humane, even as Agnes herself plunges into deeper, more dramatic waters. It’s the kind of mid-life crisis story that so rarely centers on a woman and Macdonald shines in the role, riveting even in the quietest of moments.

Twists abound, and while they don’t always pay off, at least “I Care a Lot” cares enough to deliver a full, bloody meal of a film for anyone intrigued by the allure of anti-heroes.

Baena takes a well-tread road, leaving behind the guts of his promising story and never capitalizing on the charms of either romance or his leading lady.

Bolstered by real events and true emotion, A United Kingdom opts for genuine, hard-won feeling, and the film studiously backs off from cheesy moments or over-the-top revelations.

“Ouija” is genuinely frightening and smart, the rare horror prequel able to stand on its own merits and deliver a full-bodied story that succeeds without any previous knowledge or trappings. However, in outfitting this particular haunted house with monsters to spare, Flanagan loses the thread of what’s really scary: Everything we can’t see.

Moner’s charisma keeps things pushing forward, and so does the film’s appealing spirit. If only every big screen adaptation of a beloved existing property could feel this funny and fresh, there’d be less to fear about an industry besieged by recycled material that never takes a risk.

While many of the film’s beats are familiar, director Gary Alazraki’s version of this classic family comedy often misses one essential ingredient: real humor.

Jones and Allain’s vision of how we might reinterpret this sort of story for the big screen — including assembling a cast of people who are charming to watch, full stop — is both vital and delightful, and if it has some kinks to it, perhaps that’s just the price of trying something new.

Alas, it’s not veracity that rules in stories like The Housemaid, but the often mealy delights of Feig’s latest film are routinely thrown into sharp relief by Seyfried’s crisp performance. Motivations, emotions, and machinations might be the building blocks of this sort of housebound thriller, but a genuinely good performance? That’s what can really wipe the floor.

True stories about brave, everyday people fighting evil powers never go out of fashion, and “A Call to Spy” joins their ranks with ease.

Unexpected doesn't take such a rosy approach to its conclusion, however, preferring to leave things more up in the air, a narrative choice that is more contemporary in its telling and more genuine in its feel.

Carousel feels ripped from the fabric of a million lives. Don’t let the seemingly small nature of the film fool you; there is career-best work here, especially from Pine, who was always made for a romantic drama. This one was worth the wait.

Things grow slacker and a touch sillier by its middle act, which both does away with big problems and introduces entire new ones in their place. Still, Condor remains such a genuinely adorable leading lady and Lara Jean such a special character that fans will undoubtedly embrace the messy ride.

Although the film appears to be aiming for pitch-black humor, it’s all so mirthless that the result is genuinely ugly.

Execution is more of the issue, as the film’s 112-minute running time feels both packed to the gills and unable to fully tackle everything James’ script throws at the wall. Yet a strong visual sense and excellent performances, especially from Midori Francis, are tough to beat.

Documentaries should inherently spark questions and debate, but Nuisance Bear too often throws out a buzzword or heady topic and abandons it.

It’s a nifty fit for the Danish filmmaker behind similarly cold-blooded dramas like “A War” and “A Highjacking,” who establishes a sense of unease from the film’s opening moments and never quite relents.

What Majors does here, how raw and vulnerable and brave he is not just with his craft, but his very body, is something to behold. This is true artistry, absolute commitment.

Few contemporary horror films start this strong to end so poorly, and with such a lack of ease. Molly deserves answers, but “Knocking” forgets what the questions were in the first place.

Grainger and Shawkat are wonderful together, conveying the depth of a 10-year relationship with affection and honesty.

You might know where this is all going, but damn if you won’t enjoy the wild ride there.

At just 81 minutes, the film’s sagging middle soon gives way to a zippy and very funny final act, which ties up big plot points while still hinting at more adventures to come for its charming trio.

Russell and Karpovsky are a winning pair, and if they ever want to hit the road for more big jokes and even bigger revelations, any director would do well to let them take the wheel.

Every beat of the film might be obvious, but that doesn’t detract from the enjoyability of watching an indelible young heroine like Lara Jean figure out her own life and just maybe fall in love in the process.

No sequel is essential, but Frozen 2 makes the argument that, even in the fairy tale land of Disney, they can still be important.

The film reunites most of the principal cast and crew of director Harry Bradbeer’s 2020 Netflix feature, “Enola Holmes,” and while that franchise-starter was frisky and fun, its followup rehashes the original’s charms (with wishy-washy results), while expanding elements that required no additional attention.

Chew-Bose’s directorial debut is a sharp offering that adds to the mystique of the original material and makes a strong case for its own existence.

Khan’s film pulls liberally from the genre playbook — stars and co-writers Ali Wong and Randall Park haven’t been shy about the film’s early inspirations, especially classics like “When Harry Met Sally” — but it also offers its own charms, thanks to Wong and Park, who delight both on-screen and on the page.

The larger-scale drama is unquestionably effective — what Greengrass and his team of craftsmen and visual artists have been able to do with wind is a miracle, and that’s to say nothing of the fire itself — and so evocative and terrifying that words fail to do it justice.

It seems odd to deem any film an instant cult classic, but “Barb and Star” is such a giddy outlier, a dense, flawed assemblage of zany humor that people will happily tear into for years to come.

By its final act ... “The Lost King” picks up enough steam ... yet even this last 40 or so minutes highlights how plodding the rest of the film is, how dull this story about literal grave-digging feels, when nothing less than elemental truth and a singular mission in life are reduced to, well, just a story, and not even an altogether real one at that.

As good as Ruffalo and Saldana are, the best parts of the film are the lovely, unpretentious performances by Imogene Wolodarsky (Forbes’ daughter) and Ashley Aufderheide as Cam and Maggie’s daughters.

Throughout the film, Noxon refuses to offer up easy answers and feel-good conclusions to Ellen’s journey, even when it ratchets up into a literally overheated final discovery.

Scene by scene, Marks’ film plays like a traditional high school-set rom-com, but things take a turn as Aza’s illness becomes more obvious.

And, really, it does something wild, something increasingly rare along the way: it makes you feel, as messy and strange and unexpected as that might be. Now that’s a super story.

It’s a coming-of-age tale for the stunted set, and one that deftly navigates conventions at every turn. Although Tracktown lacks edge, it’s just so relentlessly sweet and Pappas is so effervescent on screen that those missteps in tone are easy to forgive.

A rousing documentary that’s equal parts inspiring, entertaining, and educational.

Haley’s tender approach may not sting, but it does leave a mark. Yes, it has a happy ending, but the film also makes it clear that such conclusions are only the start.

That sense of a story rendered incomplete, of answers we may never fully know, is at the heart of the Kowalskis’ story, but Roosevelt’s film is unable to square that with the constraints and demands of a feature film.

Late Night smartly sends up not just the cloistered world of late night television, but a current cultural climate struggling to evolve in a changing world.

While Mantzoukas and Revolori charm – consider them your new, unexpected go-to buddy comedy duo – The Long Dumb Road soon runs out of gas, chugging through a series of increasingly unbelievable contrivances.

Buffaloed wants to package searing insights into the crooked world of debt collecting into a cutesy comedy, leaning hard on Deutch’s skills and far less on a script that’s unwilling to get nasty with its subject matter.

If you’ve seen Moller’s The Guilty, well, you’ve basically seen Fuqua’s, but Gyllenhaal’s performance adds a go-for-broke turn that capitalizes on the actor’s deep emotional reserves.

It’s only in the film’s final moments that Diana realizes the power of the team, but “Nyad” would have felt just that much deeper if the film itself recognized it earlier. There’s more to “Nyad” than Diana, and there’s more to this story than swimming.

Featuring stars Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown doing predictably divine work (do these two performers know any other way?), “Honk for Jesus” is equal parts hilarious and painful, an incisive upbraiding of the sorts of people who should have long ago realized no one — especially nattily attired pastors — is above God.

"A New Era” doesn’t feel like a cash-grab, but a true continuation. Lush settings, well-appointed sets, and an eye-popping wardrobe only add to the magic, and good luck not happily sinking into two hours of confectionary entertainment. (The endless jokes about the film industry somehow only add to the zip of it all.)

The film shows a refreshing interest in his current existence, rather than becoming a by-the-book retread of his pre-pope life.

Messy, personal, timely, brimming with ideas, overflowing with pain, and without answers: that’s the debate, and that’s the doc.

You’ll laugh, you’ll gasp, you’ll have, yes, a very good time. You’ll also marvel at the introduction of a newly-minted filmmaker with a crystal-clear vision of both what the world is and what it could be, at least if the women were in charge.

Micheli’s film is less than artful, scattered with limited talking heads (mostly Lopez’s business partners and her mother, briefly), random flashbacks, occasional archival footage, and a series of short sequences that could frame their own films (particularly quick-cut segments about Lopez’s early years, her treatment by the press, the obsession with her body, the constant tabloid attention), but none of that is the draw: it’s Lopez.

Perfect Strangers takes too much time to get to its big game — nearly its full first act is consumed by introductions and set dressing, most of it unnecessary, considering how believable the group’s chemistry is — but once it kicks into gear, the effect is dizzying.

It’s fun enough at first, thanks to McAvoy’s energetic direction and strong turns from its young stars.

Vaughn pours himself into the role, but he also seems to understand that going big and broad for this one is a misstep. Easy isn’t a caricature, even if the people and events around him increasingly feel that way.

Like any romance, Banana Split is constrained to some familiar beats, but Kasulke, Marks, and Power have such a handle on what makes the film tick — and Marks and Liberato are so charming and fun — that even expected turns feel clever and fresh.

Lindy’s passion for and connection to the material is obvious (how could it not be?), as is her desire to twist a sad story into something fresh and often funny. Sweet, even! But an unhinged final act, plus a jaw-dropper of a finale, seems at odds with everything else she’s revealed, and this genre-spanner goes from, well, spanning to something else: not being able to hold onto any of its many spinning plates.

Although Farr layers on the creepy until the last frame of The Ones Below, the film's ultimate reveal is hardly shocking, and that the film spends a gratuitous amount time unspooling it long after it's clear what has gone down feels indulgent and unearned.

Deadpan in her delivery and facial expressions, Zadie is indeed a mess, but she’s working her way toward something better, and Meghie’s frisky comedy gives her the space to make some strides. As the weekend amusingly crumbles around her and the rest of her cohorts, Zamata tentatively approaches something like maturity (and definitely like getting the hell over Bradford), giving shape to a mostly freeform narrative.

The wit of Robinson’s series still occasionally peeks out in Someone Great, especially when her central trio are interacting, but smushed into a 92-minute running time, little of the best bits can actually breathe.

A nerve-shredding space thriller that starts strong before falling prey to blunter dramatic twists, few of which are as thrilling as the original idea that sets everything in motion.

Mostly, though, it does only that: Shock. Basic, trite, and without any hope for anything better ever happening.

Fine enough, really, but if the first film was the kind of thing that never goes out of style, “The Devil Wears Prada 2” will last a season. That’s all.

Kabbalah Me is most satisfying as a personal artifact that traces Bram’s quest, bumps and all, and it stumbles when it attempts to lay on educational aspects.

The devil is in the details, and the details? Well, they’re in the kind of patchwork-guessing and random sign-seeing that so many are forced to endure as they embark on the horrors of modern dating. Brooks just takes them in some delightfully daffy (and occasionally deeply scary) new directions.

While Rebecca Frayn and Gaby Chiappe’s script works hard to give all of its players dimension, such an overstuffed narrative tends to do the opposite, limping through sub-subplots and continually introducing new characters, leaving its main attractions to twist in the wind.

For now, he’s a lone gun, but “Solo” ably lays out how and why that might change. We may know where he ends up, but for now, we can’t wait to see where he goes next.

While Call Jane might suffer from a litany of the usual first film missteps — a tricky tone often hobbles it, as does a bent toward gliding over history in service of telling a singular story — Nagy’s affection and respect for women is a strong fit for the material. And Banks, who has stealthily proven her ability in a variety of genres, both in front of and behind the camera, turns in a career-best performance as Joy, a woman who is about to undergo a shift of her own.

It’s good enough, rousing enough, compelling enough.

It’s an impressive first feature, and while fans of zippy midnight movies might balk at its slow-burn opening act, the film eventually builds to some nutso body horror and a strong sense of mythology that announces Garai’s arrival as a filmmaker to watch, no matter the genre.

Set It Up is a classic rom-com brought to life by a pair of wonderfully well-matched stars who seem to revel in the genre. This is cinematic comfort food, the kind we’ve been starving for.

For a film ostensibly about sex, Mark, Mary & Some Other People doesn’t seem to be much about actual desire; its compulsions are rooted in the pressures, expectations, and general idiocy of youth. That, at least, feels real.

Not content simply to make a finely tuned undersea action film, Macdonald reaches for something more significant and comes up short, trapping his own treasures under a tidal wave of thwarted ambition.

Schloss compellingly combines the rangy wildness of hormonal teenagehood with Sadie’s more terrifying instincts, toeing the line between pissed-off teen and possible psychopath with ease. Her Sadie is both brutally dead-eyed and weirdly charismatic; you simply can’t turn away from her, even when you really, really want to.

Come for the espionage thrills, stay for the wrenching dissection of what it means to really love someone. That’s what really cuts deep.

If only the story that surrounded it was as strong and well-crafted as the locales and people who populate it, The Photograph would be more than worthy of affection. As it stands, it just never quite develops into anything more.

The whole thing is overstuffed with enough narrative threads that it should require a feature film-sized outing to answer them all, but Entouragemerrily skips over whole chunks of vital narrative in order to give it a glossy Hollywood ending, the kind that would seem forced, well, even in the movies.

Being perpetually online sucks, but movies about it don’t have to, as Not Okay shows time and again.

There’s a deeper, more serious film at the heart of I Want You Back, but a bent toward offering up off-kilter comedic set pieces instead keeps it from hitting any harder truths.

Mostly, it’s Stallone who impresses here, as a disarmingly open and self-aware icon whose hardest lessons have left a mark on him.

We can’t all have a supeheroic squirrel to help find our own purposes in life, but Flora & Ulysses posits that we don’t need one — just a willingness to welcome their special kind of magic, in whatever shape it may take. Cynics, beware, “Flora & Ulysses” is coming for you.

Rich in its execution and careful in its approach, The Sounding resonates.

Occasionally, both Johnson and Penn — unquestionably talented performers — nearly get Daddio back on track.

On Chesil Beach offers up so many tricky tonal changes, enough that Cooke eventually gives them over to a single note: limp.

Even Besson’s most bold choices – and this is a film that goes weird, and then just keeps getting weirder – don’t seem so revolutionary when packaged in such well-tread trappings and increasingly shoddy writing.

Eager to split the difference between age-appropriate entertainment and raw honesty, Words on Bathroom Walls hedges a bit in its final act, delivering the kind of happy ending only seen in movies . . . while slyly resisting tying things up in a neat bow.

No one needs a live-action remake, but ones this faithful and sweet are not the problem.

Played by Kaitlyn Dever, this Rosaline is very mad indeed (why shouldn’t she be?), but the always-winning actress helps guide a prickly footnote into delightful territory. One part coming-of-age tale, one part literary reconsideration, and all totally fun, Rosaline proves there’s still plenty to mine from the classic canon, with lively twists.

While Wright, making her feature directorial debut with tough material, exhibits an appealing unfussiness, so much of Land is painful not for its subject matter, but because of its predictability.

When White Fang focuses on its real stars — animals, Alaska, the spread of untamed country — it’s as visionary as any animated film. Placed alongside ham-fisted humans, it loses its power.

Brie’s delicate performance nearly rescues both Sarah and “Horse Girl” from falling into the awkward traps it sets for itself, hedging on the tough stuff in favor of weirdness for its own sake, faux-arty style over anything that could offer the slightest interest in healing, for either its star or her story.

Bolstered by winning, real performances from its leads, Unpregnant will delight as much as it stings, a sterling reminder of how many stories about this very subject are still demanding to be told.

Before You Know It doesn’t balk at quirkiness, but it never uses it as a crutch or the only way to process the story.

Robertson, a deeply talented musician and songwriter who is still working today, is a fascinating subject, but the really compelling stuff is lingering just out of the frame. Without a more well-rounded selection of voices ... or a more critical-minded director to give the film perspective, Robertson is free to obscure the bigger questions and deeper meanings, opting for self-mythologizing over self-reflection.

Shana Feste’s initially grounded “Run Sweetheart Run” takes the concept of a “bad date” and runs with it to wild extremes, unfurling a white-hot, blood-soaked yowl of feminine rage in a tidy horror package that can barely contain all its biggest ideas.

While much of the information shared in “The American Dream” is stunning, tenuous threads and too-zippy pacing keep it from landing with much impact.