Luke Y. Thompson

Hundreds Of Beavers is one of the most distinctive movies you’ll see all year, and one made for midnight viewings if ever anything was.

In the wrestling ring, Cena used to wear a shirt which read “Rise Above Hate,” and indeed, he does so here. It would be better if he found a project where he didn’t have to.

If you can get through a rough first act, you’ll see both absurd military superheroics and the greatest grocery run ever.

Yes, there are kills, but they’re often as comical as they are scary, and deliberately so. It’s a fun gateway horror movie for kids—and the easily scared who want to test their limits lightly.

The movie at times feels like an eternal cycle of the nine-minute ride, which loses its luster after 123 of those minutes. It offers you this chilling challenge—find a way out! Better yet, refrain from being the mortal foolish enough to enter in the first place.

Hamill, however, is the MVP, continuing to deliver some of his best work as an older man. When he leaves the action for a spell, the energy leaves the movie.

It’s impossible to take any of this remotely seriously, or find it particularly frightening. But it is its own sort of fun, at least for a while.

It’s a set-up too contrived to feel real, yet not quite over-the-top enough to be hilarious.

To say that Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood And Honey delivers everything a slasher movie should is higher praise than it used to be. Marketing alone would have guaranteed this movie a certain percentage of curious eyeballs, but Frake-Waterfield made sure that what genre fans see is everything they expected.

For the first half-hour, Netflix has a high-concept hit on its hands. Pause it there, and imagine the rest—you won’t do any worse than Barris and Hill’s script at conceiving an ending.

The Drop isn’t really about dropping a baby. But it’s not about much else, either.

To its credit, and this isn’t damning with faint praise, the new House Party is frequently very funny. (The R-rated language and creative insults are a great asset, even if they might restrict the potential teen audience.) What it has in humor, though, it lacks in pace.

Momoa’s clearly abetting a passion project here, but unfortunately, Camargo hasn’t managed to capture a similar passion from his main cast.

When the entire theme is about misdirection, then yes, assessing how enjoyable the swerves and bluffs are, both narratively and conceptually, feels entirely appropriate. And they all too often feel like letdowns.

It’s silly, sitcom-y, and impossible to call “good,” but Falling For Christmas is the kind of bad that feels almost appealing.

The “mystery” elements simply aren’t mysterious. Yet without them, the sparse moments of gore and icky bugs aren’t quite enough to pad things out.

The unquestionably well-intentioned and obviously deeply personal Luckiest Girl Alive would benefit from more mature guidance.

The goal of a movie like Dig ought to be simple: keep ratcheting up the tension to the point that when our main character(s) finally turn the tables, it’s hugely cathartic. Unfortunately, the “ratcheting” part is where Dig fails to hit paydirt.

Far be it from us to actively reveal what scuttles Zemeckis’ film, but let’s just say that it seems like the people who made its biggest creative choices have more wood for brains than the character they brought to life.

For a solid portion of its running time, Gigi & Nate at least delivers what it promises: a young man and his monkey—to be more specific, a young, newly quadriplegic man and his service monkey.

It’s not just that more timely humor would do better; it’s that most comedy fans would probably rather be watching MacGruber again. Instead of sitting down for Me Time, do that, and hope that Hart and Wahlberg figure out a proper story next time that gives their chemistry somewhere to go.

James does a decent job with what he’s been given, but it’s never clear exactly what the movie hopes to do with his character. Is this just another crime and punishment retread? Or is it meant to serve as a metaphor for dealing with grief while disabled? It’s too broad to work as the latter, and too unhurried for the former.

As intriguing as the combination of Binoche and Grillo might sound, it would be much more impactful if they shared the screen for more than a handful of scenes. As such, the movie begins with a bang, but it ends with a whimper.

Though the recipe of a feudal setting with fantasy and myth-making elements ought to be strong, the mixture is off, like a handsomely plated sandwich where the ingredients are more bland than anticipated.

The only benefit the soul is likely to get from watching this is the comforting knowledge that you, the viewer, are not any of the people onscreen. Which doesn’t mean you can’t have fun watching them be bad, of course. But it’s a detached kind of fun.

Generally speaking, the best kinds of story surprises illuminate the material; the worst simply laugh at you for falling for red herrings. Much of what happens in The Twin bounces back and forth between those ends of the spectrum.

It’d be nice to think that the forgettable nature of Memory was a deliberate irony. Then we could grant it bonus points for cleverness, rather than an average grade for just being bland.

From the cast to its odd, intriguing locations, Sigal was successful in assembling many of the right ingredients. Unfortunately, they lack a chef who knows how to properly combine them, whether that’s to create a meaningful sense of cohesion or to truly create the kind of beautiful chaos that makes Lynch such a mesmerizing source of inspiration.