Lovia Gyarkye

This bloated finale (running almost 2 hours long) perfunctorily ties up the narrative loose ends with little finesse or energy — a shame because the earlier two entries, chock full of pop culture references and subversive thematic underpinnings, had immense potential.

Momoa loosens up here, leaning into Arthur’s humor and teasing with something approaching depth by dialing up the cockiness. He plays well alongside Wilson’s severity and Abdul-Mateen makes a striking villain. But the film never surprises us by taking any serious risks. We always know its next move.

Luckiest Girl Alive struggles to balance its dual aspirations: delivering an emotionally wrought tale about survival and wrapping its gravity in the cheeky breeziness of publishing comedies like Freeform’s The Bold Type.

The film pushes against the expectation of queer narratives to follow the same dolorous beats by prioritizing fun and crass humor. But there’s just not enough substance to get us to care about reaching the finish line.

Without understanding more of Lily’s broader community or getting a stronger sense of how she navigates the relationship with Ryle, the film can feel too light and wispy to support the weight of its themes.

The problems with The Rivals of Amziah King emerge in the stitching, when Patterson (working with editor Patrick J. Smith) must turn a series of fine vignettes and memorable musical interludes into a coherent narrative.

Vigalondo’s film has a compelling premise, but the story (he also wrote the screenplay) gets away from him, resulting in a film that never quite hits its stride.

The Actor can be fun to think about, but hard to stay connected to. Johnson’s film works on an intellectual level — batting around questions about how identity is constructed — but the director struggles to translate the stakes of those questions.

Mooney eagerly mines the trove of Y2K cultural references to shape a narrative fine-tuned to a particular millennial sensibility, but struggles to meet the very low demands of its internal logic.

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever never quite lands its most poignant moments because Imogen and her siblings remain stubbornly at a distance.

Honey Don’t! is a better movie than Drive-Away Dolls thanks to an engaging whodunit plot, but it ultimately suffers from the same issues as its predecessor: The film feels like a series of gags with nowhere to go.

Bradley Rust Gray’s blood is a beautifully observed film that never arrives at its desired emotional destination.

There’s no doubt, from the way Reptile creeps in the first half, that Singer is a skilled director. But there’s something to be said for restraint, which the helmer, who wrote his screenplay with Benjamin Brewer and the film’s star Benicio Del Toro, doesn’t exercise enough of here. In an effort to prove its cleverness, Reptile clanks, rattles and stumbles in its second half.

It’s a sweet but oddly circumspect film, ruled by a friction between warring demands: the allure of wistful memories and the rigor of complex appraisal.

Derrickson offers a handful of memorable shots and genuine jump scares, but the director’s attempts to build dread in these moments come too late to have their intended impact. With so much of the film dedicated to establishing Levi and Drasa’s backstory and their romance, The Gorge is slow to get going on the action.

Immaculate works best when it abandons its attempts to be a kind of surrealist portrait of Catholic terror and leans into the campy horror of B movies.

Blood Brothers struggles under the weight of its subjects.

The drama feels flimsy when it strays from the swamps, rendering the politics of the time as almost secondary to the visual spectacle of a harrowing escape.

A sense of admiration and responsibility courses through the doc, an orientation that eventually curdles the narrative.

The film begins to sag the deeper we get into Sam’s story, which requires more digging than Peretti can give us. The jokes are rarely the same, but they hit similar notes; the problems with the characters feel repetitive; and the movie circles the same ideas until plot points need to be tidied.

There are instances where you can see the director experimenting and attempting to disturb Disney’s imposing order, deploying close-ups, almost ground-level pans and strategically sweeping views to find warmth and tactility within a cold technique.

Lift doesn’t seem to trust viewers enough to withhold details. It’s too insecure, too eager, too anxious to be mysterious. Its tricks are not so much revealed as word-vomited through clunky exposition.

Fresnadillo’s film puts on fewer airs of disruption than other versions of this story, so the narrative comes off as less self-satisfied. Still, it struggles to sustain an inspirational tenor.

With many strong elements, it’s frustrating when The Astronaut fumbles in the final stretch.

Enola Holmes 2‘s shortcomings don’t wreck the film — it’s a serviceable sequel — but the tension between the topics the film tackles and the soft-pedaled approach is one that hopefully won’t haunt future projects.

A chilling story told in a disjointed manner.

Disenchanted lacks the charisma and curiosity of its predecessor.

The film is a concert movie for Shyamalan’s daughter, the musician Saleka, wrapped in a middling thriller kept afloat by a compelling performance from Josh Hartnett.

What Jolt lacks in originality and subtlety it at least somewhat makes up for in verve.

Spirit Untamed is beautiful to look at and occasionally genuinely funny. The stunning and detailed animations saturate Lucky’s world with an impressive array of colors, from the crimson apples she feeds Spirit to the pistachio and emerald-green leaves on the swaying trees.

The film is competently made and absorbing at times, but there’s a workaday quality that slows its momentum. It’s a handsomely made project, but a story about such a complicated set of characters should make us feel more strongly, and Rust struggles to accomplish that.

The doc circles its subject with a mix of fascination, reverence and minor disgust.

Despite bursts of intelligence, especially when it comes to conveying the fractured quality of trauma narratives, Without Blood’s vagueness ends up blunting many of its lessons.

Civil often feels more like an infomercial than a documentary.

Forster’s steady direction keeps this thread of White Bird affecting even when it conforms to predictable narrative beats.

The film yearns to capture the stages of this emotional exhumation, but a clunky screenplay makes for a less affecting watch.

The film works best when Waititi gets out of his own way and lets the characters speak for themselves instead of self-consciously extinguishing any warmth with jokes.

Wicked Little Letters swerves between comedy and tragedy without ever hitting its stride. The movie is at its best when it doesn’t strain to turn every moment into a joke, instead letting the story breathe a bit.

Where there should be intimacy, we get distance. Where one might expect steady meditation, the narrative jitters impulsively.

Wilson’s direction is similarly uneven, especially toward the middle of the film, which packs in convenient plot points to distract from narrative thinness. The result is off-kilter pacing that threatens to undo the film’s more successful parts.

Like other live-action remakes, The Little Mermaid is a neatly packaged story ribboned with representational awareness. There’s enough in it to fill an evening, but it doesn’t inspire much more than a passing sense of déjà vu.

The film struggles to maintain the verve of this opening sequence (which nails a specific anxiety of liberal middle-class Black people), subsequently becoming a series of set pieces — some more energetic than others — in search of a thesis.

There’s a lot of heart in Rare Objects, a film that tries to render with compassion the jagged aftermath of trauma.

Kinda Pregnant doesn’t deliver on charming main characters nor sustainable humor. It’s a staid affair, coasting on its zany premise and a handful of amusing moments.

When it comes to more rigorous analysis — a bit of pushback, a touch of tension or cultural context — the documentary leaves something to be desired.

Spiral delivers when it comes to gore, if that’s your thing, and appropriately dour aesthetics — but not much else. That’s a shame, because the story’s themes, from the unreformable nature of the police department to the cost of integrity in a space that values power above all else, could not be more relevant.

Riddle of Fire tries to capture the extraordinary way kids experience the world, but the results border on twee.

It’s ultimately a mixed bag, with the final moments acquiring an emotional power that should be felt sooner.

The woman at its center remains opaque, her romance is listless and her journey to self-discovery becomes an endurance test.

[Daniels] desire to wrest explicit meaning out of the mother’s experience and corral viewers toward a single conclusion unwittingly places The Deliverance in mawkish and disappointingly cartoonish territory.

When it comes to holiday movies, Candy Cane Lane isn’t at the very bottom of the pack, but it’s far from the top. . . The narrative careens through uncompelling territory before ending on a forgettable note.

This gonzo premise doesn’t have anywhere else to go, and to compensate, Twohy pads the screenplay with quirky antics that tax viewer patience and expose a narrative thinness that’s hard to ignore.

In lieu of a throughline, Beauty offers beautiful, indulgent vignettes — aesthetically pleasing and immersive episodes lacking in ideas but full of vibes.

Freaks Out seems preoccupied with looking cool and feeling offbeat without considering basic narrative requirements. With such an intense visual language and detailed costume and set design, it’s a shame that the story lacks similar heft.

The classic fairy tale and its straightforward but powerful lessons in self-confidence, perseverance and the power of imagination provide an alluring foundation for ambitious and visually stunning storytelling. It’s sad that, watching this version, you wouldn’t be able to tell.

The long-awaited third installment of J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World sub-franchise is less clogged with distracting detail than its immediate predecessor, but even a more refined plot can’t save the two-hour-plus film from feeling like an endurance test.

Throwing a woman in front of the camera and a few feminist quips into the script does not make these films any less conventional, or necessarily any more empowering.

What makes A Minecraft Movie so dispiriting is how it fails to spark the imagination, betraying a core tenet of the game on which it’s based.

The film, like the novel it’s based on, skirts the issues — of race, gender and class — that would texture its narrative and strengthen its broad thesis, resulting in a story that says more about how whiteness operates in a society allergic to interdependence than it does about how communities fail young people.

But the film is so baggy, so preoccupied with its own ambitions — re-establishing its support of women’s desires, addressing a new generation, etc. — that it deflates into flaccid fluff.

At 93 minutes, The Addams Family 2 feels longer than it actually is, and nothing, not even the new music from contemporary stars like Megan Thee Stallion and Maluma, helps it move any faster. Part of the problem is that even with a relatively well-constructed script (there is a bit of a timeline snafu near the end), the film itself is mostly boring. The one-liners are more corny than clever.

The comedy lacks the stakes to engage more than passing interest. And while there are plenty of sole-related puns, the film is so frenetic in focus that most of them don’t really land.

The movie, which bills itself as a crime-thriller-mystery, doesn’t come close to fulfilling even the lowest of expectations; it neither takes its characters seriously nor commits to its superficial attempt at topicality.