Keith Phipps

Without spoiling Normal’s central twist, suffice it to say that it leads to a lot of gunplay that allows Wheatley to off one character after another in violent, sometimes explosive fashion. It’s more wearying than shocking, but not fatally so thanks to a brisk pace, a willingness to shift gears with little warning, and, again, Odenkirk’s humane performance.

It’s not badly executed, but there’s nothing scary or clever enough to set it apart from similar films beyond the Faces of Death connection, a throwback meta cloak wrapped around a merely good-enough modern horror movie.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is, like its predecessor, solidly put together and even elicits a chuckle here and there (most of them, as before, courtesy of Black). But it’s also pretty much as impenetrable as Finnegan’s Wake for those not locked into its hermetic, mushroom-and-brick-filled world.

Drunk on its own ambitions and the permission to go as big as possible, The Bride! is seldom cohesive (and occasionally incoherent) but it’s also rarely boring, the sort of noble failure that’s more compelling to watch and discuss than a lesser success.

In the tradition of the opening scene, let’s bring it all full circle with the question that kicked off this series: Do you like scary movies? If so, there are plenty of other ones you could watch.

As satire, it’s toothless. (The rich are awful. We know.) That might be forgivable if the film was at all funny or could decide if Becket was a victim or a psychopath, a problem not aided by Powell’s noncommittal performance. He’s doing too little.

“Wuthering Heights” looks great and it’s fun to wander around in it for a while, but it’s hard to shake the thought that Fennell’s film has been thrown together without much consideration for how all the rooms might fit together. It’s the cinematic equivalent of The House on the Rock.

What begins as an attempt to send up pop star self-indulgence finds its way to self-indulgence by another route.

Roberts skillfully stages some memorable kills but, despite the unusual antagonist, Primate too often feels like a by-the-numbers slasher that expects the novelty of a bloodthirsty chimp will carry it.

Played by Foster with flinty persistence, Lillian is part of the long, great tradition of memorably screwed-up sleuths and A Private Life makes it easy to wish we’d see her again in a sequel in which she pursues a case that’s worth her time and ours.

It evens out to an engaging-enough biopic, but if Song Sung Blue had found a way to interpret their bittersweet love story with a Lightning & Thunder-like intensity, it could have been even more.

For long stretches, Is This Thing On? works better on a scene-by-scene basis than as a cohesive film. Arnett and Dern believably summon the off-kilter chemistry of a couple going through a rough patch in their scenes together and the lost-at-sea fogginess of the newly separated in their scenes apart.

It’s as if everyone seemed to think that all the film needed was to assemble the right pieces and the rest would take care of itself. And with pros like these, they almost do.

Ella McCay has some fine moments but getting to those little gold nuggets requires a lot of tedious sifting through the sand.

It doesn’t feel as fresh as the winning original, but it also never plays like a desperate cash-in, which immediately makes it better than a lot of Disney’s recent output. But is it worth seeing? Sure. Why not?

Sweeney’s transformation is more than just physical. She’s convincing as both the scrappy kid no one expected to go anywhere and the swaggering superstar who began throwing verbal blows at opponents.

One of the film’s greatest strengths is its refusal to oversimplify the matter and a script that allows Turner, Teller, and Olsen to make their characters more than mere type

Through it all, Reznor and Ross keep the music pulsing in time to the action and for some thrilling, surprisingly long stretches, that’s all the movie needs.

While Luna and Tonatiuh play characters transported by movies, the film in which they appear never quite summons the same power.

It’s the work of someone who didn’t take the time to realize he had nothing to say, then decided to say something anyway.

As a love story, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey doesn’t really work. And given that much of the movie—scripted by Seth Reiss (The Menu) and directed by Kogonada (Columbus, After Yang)—is concerned with telling a love story, that's a pretty big problem.

Adhering to Kerr’s real-life story allows Safdie to skirt clichés, but it’s really only Johnson’s memorable characterization that suggests Kerr’s story had to be told.

Goldstein and Poots play off each other well, creating the sense of a years-deep connection that’s suddenly threatened by what’s changed between them, but also by what’s remained the same. They’re convincing as two people who don’t know what to do. Unfortunately, they’re stuck in a movie that also doesn’t really know what to do.

In retelling a story whose political implications could still start a screaming match decades later, it takes a mushy approach seemingly determined to offend no one, or at least offend no one all that much or for very long.

Though it doesn’t come close to touching the original, it’s not the years-late embarrassment it might have been.

Whatever he’s done in the past, Eastwood here seems most interested in paying tribute to some men who deserve the commendation — nothing more, and nothing less.

The setpieces, in addition to mostly rehashing better scenes from earlier films, feel thrown together to serve the effects, and the effects look far less astonishing than anything in Cameron’s first two films.

It’s fun to watch the decades go by and the fashions change, but though Fresh Dressed takes its subject seriously, it ends up feeling superficial.