Katie Rife

Wonder Woman 1984 is lively and bright and entertaining enough that it only occasionally feels like it’s going to go on forever. But it’s hard to get past what seems like a lack of consideration—or perhaps concern— for what motivates Diana Prince, or what fans like about her.

It’s way too much and a bunch of nothing at the same time, and even agents of chaos who take wicked delight in witnessing this type of pandemonium may find themselves worn out before the film’s predictably hyperbolic conclusion.

When it comes to shock and delight, Seance doesn’t quite live up to Barrett’s work with other directors. It’s tough being a legacy.

Despite the sensitivity of its storytelling, and Chastain’s career-defining passion for playing headstrong, independent women like Mrs. Weldon, it also never really comes to life.

The escape-room scenes themselves (a.k.a. the good stuff) are imaginatively conceived and deftly executed enough to justify a late-night cable viewing.

When The Bough Breaks resembles nothing more than a cheap fast-food burger served on fine china: Tasty, sure, and quite enjoyable in the moment. But once the credits roll and the primal centers of the brain stimulated by guilty pleasures like this one return to normal, all you’ll remember is that it looked prettier than usual.

It’s not a waste of a concept, exactly, but it’s not the reinvention that the franchise needs, either. Rock’s involvement brings some new blood to Spiral, but after a promising start it ends up becoming a pretty okay Saw movie with some bigger names than usual.

The latest film from The Ritual’s David Bruckner seems to have forgotten that it’s supposed to be a horror movie first and a metaphor second.

Not exactly a thinking man’s action movie, and not a gleefully dopey thrill ride either, Honest Thief is as grudging as its main character when it comes to doling out thrills.

The film is so full of jump scare fake-outs and shout-at-the-screen moments, it neglects to build sustained suspense — a far worse sin than its lack of logic, which can actually be kind of fun.

The acting is hammy, but intentionally so, as is the crude, greasepaint-and-baby powder makeup on the ghosts. Clearly, Vesely has pushed the stylization of the piece as far as it can go in order to compensate for Slice’s low budget.

Ridley Scott's melodrama about the Italian fashion family has its moments, but not enough of them.

It’s not a great film by any means, but it is the epitome of a “Fantastic Fest movie,” meaning enjoyed best with friends and a few drinks.

Putting Kristen Stewart and Chloë Sevigny on screen together was a wonderful choice—one that doesn’t deserve to be drowned in a torrent of confusing, implausible, and just downright dull ones.

Basically, this movie is exceedingly clever until it isn’t, finding creative ways to explain outrageous plot points until it gets tired and starts bombarding its young target audience with chase sequences instead.

A movie that jumps on buzzwords like “canceled” like a hungry dog on a juicy steak, but never coalesces into a coherent statement about, well, anything.

Family Business feels like trying to eat lunch in a room full of screaming toddlers who keep slapping the sandwich out of your hands.

There are worse fates than dorky earnestness, of course. But Moxie just isn’t all that funny either.

Levi has a smirking quality to him that sometimes reads as if he can’t believe he’s starring in this crap. He is credible as a clean-cut, all-American boy, however, and he and Paquin work as an onscreen couple. In fact, some of their banter is kind of cute. The supporting cast has its charms as well.

Although its many complications quickly devolve into absurdity, Wrong Turn does deserve some credit for the boldness with which it deviates from its franchise inspiration. This is no paint-by-numbers remake. And although it’s just got way too much going on, the gore is gnarly, the paranoia is palpable, and the characters, while sometimes annoying, have motivations and arcs that make sense.

Even when its characters do get earnest, Heart Eyes has its tongue so far in its cheek that these moments of vulnerability are also viewed from an ironic distance. Instead of feeling for these characters, we’re waiting for the bloody punchline—which will come, and will be funny in a deliciously morbid kind of way. There’s nothing to hold on to, and certainly nothing to be afraid of.

Jolie and Pitt are both, without a doubt, very good actors, and in the film’s rare moments of vulnerability, their fights and reconciliations contain a seed of devastating emotional truth that speaks to the pair’s talent and real-life bond. But those moments are suffocated under long, dreadfully dull sequences where everyone poses artfully and says very little.

It’s a serviceable period ghost story that’s slight in story and not exactly subtle in themes, but contains a few genuinely striking images and atmosphere to spare.

Even when Ellis ramps up the suspense with crosscutting and monster mayhem in the final half-hour, The Cursed has trouble maintaining nail-biting intensity for very long

Which brings us to the fatal flaw in Unforgettable: With its formulaic story and hackneyed dialogue, all there is to do in between moments of self-aware outrageousness is admire the decor, like an Anthropologie catalog punctuated with the occasional knife wound.

A love of pure aesthetics will help anyone looking to appreciate the movie, whose sets and costumes are as indulgent as its soundtrack. As an opportunity for Emma Stone to purr and vamp in elaborate gowns, Cruella is plenty enjoyable. But the “too much is just enough” attitude that makes it visually pleasurable also makes it a slog in the storytelling department.

As with most of the Welcome To The Blumhouse movies, The Manor has flaws that could probably be attributed to scant resources and a quick turnaround time.

Every aspect of of the movie feels as if it’s been determined by algorithm, workshopped and test-marketed into a state of pleasant, fleeting dullness.

This particular film is a collection of cutesy “going in style” clichés — old lady on a motorcycle? Check. Senior-citizen oral sex joke? Check. — compiled into a road movie with shades of "About Schmidt" and "Little Miss Sunshine," and a morbid streak that comes in to cut the quirkiness just a little bit too late.

While it’s understandable that Walls might not want to linger on the more grim aspects of her childhood, Cretton’s decision to pull punches on those exact moments takes what could be a powerful tale of resilience and forgiveness and spins it into just another piece of Hollywood feel-good fluff.

Feldstein is as contagiously ebullient as always in the role, and her English accent is mostly passable, although it breaks down at times during the voiceovers that bookend the film. But her character’s actions keep chipping away at the actor’s natural charisma.

It’s a more cynical, and arguably more realistic, depiction of the unique malignancies of fame than this year’s other Oscar-baiting pop musical, "A Star Is Born." But ultimately, it’s no more insightful.

Duck Butter is clever without being all that hilarious, and personal without being all that revealing.

The film isn’t an abject failure by any means; it has some funny jokes, a couple of really good performances, impressive creature and set design, and pleasing cinematography. But when it comes down to it, It Chapter Two just isn’t all that scary.

Roofman is more of a slog than a romp, largely because of an extended 119-minute run time that still leaves many of its juiciest elements unexplored.

Their attraction seems more intellectual than physical, which keeps the film’s romantic energy at a lukewarm simmer throughout.

The Bill & Ted movies derive much of their humor from the blending of extremely low and extremely high stakes. Face The Music kind of blows it on the former: For all the preaching about the importance of togetherness and unity, the film mostly keeps its fiftysomething stars and their kids apart. Which is a shame.

Where Resurrections really disappoints is in the staging of the action. The Hong Kong-influenced long shots that made The Matrix so revolutionary are all but absent, replaced by rapid cuts that render the fight choreography less legible than in previous installments.

The Watchers isn’t terrible: Shyamalan’s direction is legible, and the whole thing makes sense on a thematic level. (Maybe a little too much sense, actually.) But it lacks the creativity and confidence to go beyond “competent” and into “inspired”—probably because this one is just for practice.

When the new SuperFly does show flashes of street-smart wit...its energy is infectious. Mostly, though, it needs to take its hero’s advice and take things up a notch.

The Angry Birds Movie 2 is the very definition of empty-calorie cinema—bright and shiny and satisfying enough for a few fleeting moments until it’s balled up and thrown in the trash. It’s also fast-paced, interesting to look at, and notably less irritating than the original, which is all you can really ask of a film like this one.

It’s paper-thin, predictable, and goofy as hell, but if you can get past the whole “pro-military propaganda” thing, it’s pretty fun in the moment.

Perhaps that’s why, despite some skillful scene-setting and committed supporting performances, Them That Follow is lifeless enough that small inconsistencies in accents, costuming, and set dressing appear more significant than they would in a more, well, thrilling thriller.

If your heart skips a beat during this movie, it’ll probably be from laughter. But if you adjust your expectations and go in expecting something loud, lurid, and frequently utterly ridiculous, it’s good for a cheap adrenaline rush all the same.

While Bening does a studied impression of Grahame’s supple body language, she uses a light touch when recreating her Betty Boop-esque voice, letting Grahame’s seductiveness ooze from her gorgeously refined pores.

Despite the conviction Crampton and Fessenden bring to their onscreen relationship, however, Jakob’s Wife is more successful as a gleeful bloodbath than it is as a character-driven horror-drama.

Your Lucky Day moves along at an engaging pace throughout, although it doesn’t reach its brutal potential as a thriller until two-thirds of the way through. Up to that point, it’s burdened by clumsy repetition of its central theme.

A lot happens in Bardo, much of it surreal. Elaborate musical numbers, dream sequences, alternate histories, and chronological hiccups all factor into this sprawling, whimsical, personal film. But once the lights go up and the spell is broken, all that striking imagery ends up feeling remarkably empty.

Firestarter 2022 is a marginal improvement on the ’84 original, if only because it has a handful of redeeming qualities rather than virtually none at all.

While efficiency and originality are both pluses in genre filmmaking, neither of them should come at the expense of creating an immersive world that sparks the imagination, or characters the audience actually cares about. With both of those qualities so woefully underdeveloped, Escape the Field feels not only like a midseason episode, but a premature series finale.

While the film boasts a refreshing premise — mob wives taking over their husbands’ territory when the men land themselves in jail — what lingers afterwards is the stale taste of its lukewarm execution.

This year’s entry into the winter animal-movie canon, A Dog’s Way Home, comes this close to just being a simple, cute animal movie, until the humans complicate things.

So what is a dog’s purpose? To provide gentle, forgettable entertainment for moviegoers who lament that “they” don’t make “nice” movies anymore, apparently. For the rest of us, it’s more like a 100-minute nap.

It’s not an unbearable film, but it’s not a particularly consequential one either, despite the boldness of its themes. In this case, a star’s big comeback comes not with a bang but a whimper.

Director Greg Mottola deserves some credit for trying to give the film a little bit of cinematic flair, something that’s lacking in many Hollywood comedies these days.

Anyone who’s still engaged by the end of the movie is probably too young to remember the original.

If you’re looking for something truly groundbreaking—or hilarious—Like A Boss isn’t it.

Director F. Gary Gray, while experienced in both action and comedy, also struggles to keep the film’s picaresque plot on track.

Like many Netflix originals, Things Heard And Seen is the cinematic equivalent of a mass-market paperback, neither good enough to haunt the viewer nor bad enough to haunt the résumés of its cast and crew.

This movie can’t decide how it wants to look or what it wants to say. You could even call the jumble of styles and tones “quirky,” were you so inclined.

Dough makes smoking pot seem about as edgy as falling asleep in front of the TV.

It’s a film that’s been thought out but doesn’t reach any new conclusions; that assembles some good elements, but doesn’t really consider how they all fit together. The truthful elements are not enough to overcome the clumsy and cliché ones, and in the end it’s a film that’s more satisfying before you know how it ends.

It’s not an attractive comparison, but The Greasy Strangler in some ways recalls "The Human Centipede III," in that it raises questions about a filmmaker’s relationship with the viewer. This is a far better and less offensive film than Tom Six’s, but it also comes custom-built to discomfit the majority of its audience.

The film is a snappy, glib tour of recent history in the Adam McKay mold, hydroplaning through the stormy real-life events that led to Ailes’ departure from Fox News with windshield wipers on high and blinders strapped to each side of its head.

Cole had a key part in one of the biggest game-changers in Black cinema this decade: a co-writing credit on Black Panther. But where that film was expansive and forward-thinking, this one feels like a throwback—and not in a good way.

The result is a choppy mix of timelines, color schemes, and differing levels of realism that’s too unfocused to really inspire.

Like a family dinner with an eccentric uncle, Holidays’ quirkiness is fitfully entertaining, but ultimately exhausting.

Overly simplistic piece of Southern poverty porn, which asks questions it’s not really prepared to answer and proceeds from a set of dubious assumptions that undermine whatever nuance it does possess.

Beyond fleeting moments of graphic violence and nudity, the knife’s edge here is actually quite dull.

This is a headache-inducing spectacle that raises more questions than it answers, and does little to inspire viewers to go find the answers themselves. But hey, at least it’s too loud to fall asleep to.

You might as well spend a couple hours with this film on in the background, but don’t expect much about it to stick with you—except for the jaw-dropping Henrietta Lacks monologue. You may need to pop a pill to forget that.

In the end, Bird Box’s most significant shortcoming is that it’s just too inert and unfocused to work as sci-fi horror.

As far as animated films go, the script for Spark: A Space Tail is clunky but inoffensive, falling far short of your average Pixar production creatively but largely sidestepping attempts at tongue-in-cheek “adult” humor in favor of groan-worthy puns à la the title.

You can’t just have two hours of kaiju slapping each other around like a gargantuan WWE highlights reel.

Åkerlund’s understanding is more like contempt, in a film that downplays the bigotry of the Norwegian black metal scene and shrugs off the severity of its actions with a “boys will be boys” approach that has no reverence for the scene, but doesn’t provide any insight into it, either.

Shepherd is more of a bandwagon-jumping exercise in arthouse horror films about grief than a truly bone-chilling example of one.

Trouble is, it’s still 2017, and although our culture keeps getting more intensely ironic all the time, we’re not quite yet to the point where this level of artifice is easily digestible.

The problem isn’t that Halloween Kills is about nothing more than brutal nihilism; that’s a perfectly acceptable thing for a horror movie to be. It’s that it tries to be about so many things on top of brutal nihilism that it loses its grip early on.

Hellseeker at least tries to work itself into the larger Hellraiser mythos by bringing back Ashley Laurence as Kirsty. But like Inferno, it falls so far short of its ambitions that only the most dedicated and generous fan could give it the benefit of the doubt.

An argument can be made for not parsing the social messaging of films like this one too deeply, as the creative team probably didn’t. But Home Sweet Home Alone does merit such criticism, if only because there’s really not much else going on.

The overall look of the film has the shiny, empty appearance of a newly rehabbed condo, and the quips about women’s love of cheese and gigantic closets have a similarly hollow sassy-greeting-card feel. But the outfits in those closets, it must be said, are fabulous.

Ava is a napping-on-the-couch movie through and through, with recognizable names and a sexy premise but no distinct personality.

The film’s dialogue and characterization are similarly undercooked: The script strains painfully hard for off-the-cuff vulgarity, but never quite achieves it, and while the pop culture references—always a punching bag for critics when dealing with nostalgia-themed entertainments—are applied sparingly, the tin-earned dialogue gives them an awkward, shoehorned-in quality.

For all its promises of an inside look into the Dalís’ lifestyle, the film never does much more than document it.

Director Gail Mancuso, a TV comedy veteran, gets the desired effect — as manipulative as it may be — out of both the funny scenes and the sad ones, leading up to a finale that can only be described as weapons-grade tearjerker material.

Unfortunately, the decade that passed between the two films was long enough for the approach to grow tiresome.

The only really surprising—and, therefore, the most disappointing—thing about Morbius is the fact that it’s an honest-to-goodness horror film. But only for a few seconds.

Didactic in its approach to the material—which, to be clear, is absolutely horrifying and very real—Madres has some good ideas, but it fails to see the structural forest for the sumptuously photographed trees.

The essential question here, of course, is how kickass those action scenes are, since no one’s watching an xXx movie for the plot. (That particular assumption may explain how loose the continuity remains throughout.) The answer is variable.

The script is so lazy and outdated in its humor, it condescends to the same audience it purports to empower.

For all these films’ paeans to grime and sleaze, they’re controlled imitations rather than the uninhibited real thing.

Dolly sets viewers up for an experience that it can’t quite deliver, mostly due to small acts of self-sabotage.

At least, maybe The Boy can lead some novices to better, more original horror movies.

Sure, the cast is full of exciting names, but all of Jarmusch’s absurdist thematic flourishes—the Romero tributes, the meta commentary, the political humor—are half-baked and inconsistently applied.

Donoso does put an effort into maintaining visual interest throughout this micro-budgeted character study, alternating between professionally shot, full-frame tableaux and intimate, grainy camcorder footage, accentuated with light touches of Brakhage-style experimental montage. However, it remains an undeniable—and inconvenient—fact that the most interesting aspects of If They Soak Me are all offscreen.

Flavorless and unexciting, thanks to an execution as formulaic as a well-worn copy of "The Joy Of Cooking."

The way the script pulls its punches is less offensive than simply toothless, giving Overboard the feel of a film written by a focus group, or maybe a script-writing robot programmed with the latest demographic trends.

As filmmakers try to figure out how to lasso the internet and tame it for the screen, Cat Person is mostly useful as a lesson in what not to do.