Mark Kennedy

How these two 20-somethings actually hook up is the subject of this sweet, down-to-earth, funny and thoughtful rom-com that shows two strangers moving though London and visibly falling in love over a matter of hours.

The fourth installment is more stylish, more elegant and more bonkers — kind of like Paris itself.

Despite the change of scenery, Scream VI is less a sequel and more a stutter-step, a half-movie with some very satisfying stabbings but no real progress or even movement. It’s like treading water in gore. And to fully enjoy this “sequel to the requel,” you need to have watched most of the others.

The filmmakers are also clearly trying their hand at satire, but ham-fistedly. Set during the Reagan-era “Just Say No” period, “Cocaine Bear” hopes to remark on the demonization of drugs and it also seems to have something to say about how humans misunderstand the balance of nature. Neither work.

The film allows Witherspoon and Kutcher to show off their naturally funny sides, especially when they’re fishes out of water. But many of the scenes drag on and sometimes the exposition is chalky.

Director Kyle Marvin fails to build any real tension as he frighteningly shifts from farce to cringe to melancholy, but real footage of the big game is nicely knitted into the second half.

Hill and “black-ish” creator Kenya Barris have written a rom-com with teeth, a film not afraid to air long-simmering cultural grievances.

Missing, building off the related film “Searching” from 2018, manages to make a film about small screens feel electric on a big one.

The film has a few odd jumps and seemingly comes to a fiery conclusion — finally some warmth, good God — but it’s a false ending. A much better one awaits, one that’s unexpected and very, very satisfying. Stay to the end — as long as you’re bundled up.

Ackie’s performance is something to be cheered, reaching for the the kind of authenticity that Andra Day channeled when she also tackled a doomed musical icon in “The United States vs. Billie Holiday.” But so much clumsiness, scenes featuring unnaturally heightened drama with little insight and the compromised authenticity of the performances drag I Wanna Dance With Somebody down — ultimately, it’s not right but it’s just OK.

This is a film that stays with you and changes you. It is heavy, indeed.

It’s easy to initially dismiss it as an “SNL” digital short that got high on its own tinsel but there is a sort of perverse glee to seeing Santa suck on the tip of a candy cane until it is a sharp shard and then plunge it into a bad guy’s neck.

Writer-director Florian Zeller’s second installment in his trilogy examining mental health is an emotional wrecking ball almost exquisite in its destructive power.

The script by Jake Crane and Jonathan A. H. Stewart is a slow-burning affair that will have audiences tugging at the leash.

The focus sometimes gets a bit blurry, to be honest and the whole thing often doesn’t add up to much.

Causeway, directed by Lila Neugebauer with a straightforward honesty, sounds more manipulative and manufactured than it is. At its best, it’s a quietly affective portrait of unlikely friends hoping they can help each other make it to the shore.

Beneath it all is the story of a child’s love and guilt — and an education and judicial system letting her down — which propels her to bring her parents back from the dead, but that gets a little lost in the gross-out humor, Addams Family-level weirdness and shock-for-shock’s sake visual gags like a demonic teddy bear. For all the lovingly crafted spectacle, Selick’s agonizing, shot-by-shot film, is as overstuffed as that bear.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra and the design team do a great job in every department but are let down by a derivative and baggy screenplay by Adam Sztykiel, Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani that goes from one violent scene to another like a video game in order to paper over a plot both undercooked and overcooked.

Amsterdam reaches for something contemporary to say about race relations, concentration of wealth, veterans and fascism but ends up with a plodding, mannerist noise.

It’s not a perfect film — the first half sags a little, the jump in Bobby’s career is jarring and some soliloquies land with a thud — but name us a perfect rom-com. This one has what the best have: heart, good faith and good old fashioned love. Welcome, “Bros,” to the canon.

It glows with respect for a man who earned it.

The filmmakers employ all kinds of ways to try to keep viewers interested, like split screens, some farce and a surreal dream sequence, but there’s not enough humor or grit or anything other than actors swanning around in period clothing.

Barbarian is firmly of it’s time — online house rental bookings, smart-phone flashlights and real estate square footage listings — and yet timeless, like an arm ripped off and used as a club. It was predictable and yet was impossible to predict.

As for the documentary about the man of the hour, do as the title suggests: Run away.

Virtually no one associated with this film should be congratulated in any way, having ruptured any bridges between Hollywood and senior citizens or for the shocking misuse of Diane Keaton’s considerable skills.

Neither the divers nor kids, government officials nor families and volunteers really come into focus, staying as murky as the miles of submerged cave.

As a viewer, you may leave the theater with more answers than when you arrived — and that’s refreshing. Walker-Silverman has no interest in putting pretty bows on things, loads of past histories or sentimentality. This is what love looks like with wrinkles and sorrow but also sunshine and joy — it pushes through the harshness of life and blooms with possibility.

Paramount’s limp, animated remake actually triggers new stereotypes in the service of trying to expose racism for a pre-teen audience. The studio seems to have reached for legitimacy by bringing the venerated Brooks along for the bumpy ride, darkening both legacies. What emerged sits uneasily at the corner of tribute, parody, theft and laziness.

What to make of this glorious, intergalactic mess? There is no better answer than to swipe one of our hero’s catchphrases: “What a classic Thor adventure, Hurrah!”

What makes The Black Phone stand out is how it perfectly captures what growing up was like in the often raw ’70s and an utter respect for the world of kids. Every adult is either dismissive and distant — or downright murderous.

Lessin and Pildes do a masterful job of putting the Janes in historical context, seeing how their desire to offer safe abortions grew out of the revolutionary ’60s and yet how women’s issues were often deemed secondary to male-led efforts.

The problem with Men isn’t with the acting. It’s with a script that could be described as attempting at something like arty horror and can’t stick the landing. Often it is tedious, slow to build and pretentious.

The film handles Maverick’s personal stuff — wooing the barmaid, repairing his relationship with Goose’s kid — while also fulfilling its promise as an action movie. There are jets pulling 10Gs, the metal sound of cockpit sticks pulled in gear, epic dogfights and the whine of machinery balking at the demands put on it. The action even takes a few unexpected and thrilling turns.

Bourgeois-Tacquet, making her feature debut, struggles to find ways to tell the audience what’s going on her heroine’s head.

There’s always something a little off about Father Stu, a sense that the filmmakers have taken a lot of liberties with a real life to make it extra saintly.

The filmmakers — director Daniel Espinosa, hobbled by a meandering script from Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless — simply do not know what to do with this creature once they’ve given us his backstory.

Deep Water, despite an all-star team behind it, barely makes a splash. Although it is being billed as an erotic thriller, it’s tedious and clunky. Trips to the supermarket are more exciting.

Lucy and Desi traces the rise, union and collapse of this larger-than-life couple who made a fortune thanks to “I Love Lucy” and remade TV along the way. There’s a lot to chew on and the film lacks a certain sharpness, exploring one fascinating framing device after another only to eventually abandon each one.

As an acting exercise, it’s intriguing — barely any scene partners and all unfolding in real time. As a film, not so much: After a plodding, placid start, it goes from first gear into fifth and never relents as the woes pile on.

After a bit of a slow start, “Moonfall” gets absolutely trippy in the last third as it details a mind-blowing alternative history to mankind that spans millennia and distant planets and backs it all up with gorgeous, massive special effects. Logic is abandoned altogether but few will care.

Visually and storytelling-wise it’s not a cut above much of what kids can watch on TV these days. This is a franchise that looks like it’s slowly going the way of the dinos, while we drool.

January is often where bad films are stashed, but “The King’s Daughter” isn’t just bad, it’s a cloying, cliched mess that’s not worth even the slightest risk of contacting COVID-19 to see in theaters.

Washington earns his audience’s tears with an unrushed, unshowy style, letting an adult and very human relationship evolve on camera, skipping back and forth through years as it goes from love, birth, death and acceptance.

The Tender Bar is a gentle, oddly crafted but loving look at men, fueled by a soundtrack of classics like Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” and Steely Dan’s “Do It Again.” It’s a valentine to guys who step up.

Red Rocket could have soared in a traditional Hollywood feel-good way but instead stays small and down to the ground, sticking with you uncomfortably and brilliantly.

There is perhaps an intriguing movie here somewhere — “Who decides what is God’s will?” is one lingering question —but to find it you have to slice away all the bawdy and ultra-violent excesses that are clearly intended to push buttons, like a 5-year-old testing her parents’ patience. Yawn.

It’s only appropriate that Encanto — fueled by eight original songs by Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda — turns into that most special thing of all: A triumph in every category: art, songs and heart.

It is more like half a movie, standing in the shadow of its parent. It is a film made to sell us more lunchboxes.

Zhao, whose film Nomadland was everything this is not — spare, naturalistic, moody — struggles with so much going on. The fight scenes are repetitive and the dialogue often stilted.

It’s a film no one really demanded and yet is loads of fun.

Ron’s Gone Wrong thinks it’s being subversive when its really being very corporate. It wastes its voice cast — including Olivia Colman, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis — and it never really connects, ending as awkwardly as a modern-day seventh-grader with a rock collection.

One problem here is time, something the film obviously plays with. The Many Saints of Newark arrives 14 years after The Sopranos ended and that may be too long for anyone but the most ardent fan to keep up. The brain strains trying to connect new faces with old ones.

The film is apparently supposed to be a meditation on masculinity, with Eastwood’s one-time rodeo star Mike Milo taming and rebuilding his young rebellious charge into an honorable young man. Instead, it’s a meditation on clumsy and predictable filmmaking.

Beneath the beauty and the violence is a story about the ties between siblings, fatherly expectations, the modern world’s demands versus traditions and our own legacies.

DaCosta can make a stroll down a well-lit, modern and clean hallway somehow creepy. This is confident, smart filmmaking. There’s a stunning scene in which the Candyman mirrors his prey’s movements and one in an elevator where blood droplets create their own horror-inside-horror.

At the film’s center is Q but there is a hollowness there. She can rappel down a staircase using a fire hose, endure waterboarding and use a dinner tray as an assault weapon, but there’s little insight in her inner life or emotions and her backstory appears too late.

The script by Tracey Scott Wilson (Fosse/Verdon) is a collection of scenes that don’t add up to much, never really building and interrupted — by necessity, of course — with overly long music sequences. This film needed someone to sharpen and clarify.

Bill is a hard part to pull off, but Damon does, creating a flawed but compassionate character, made doubly hard since he outwardly reveals little emotion.

Thanks to Kilmer’s relentless drive to document things, Val is a remarkably intimate film and a moving one, too. For a performer who has come off as chilly and difficult, this doc doesn’t counter those perceptions as much as explain them.

Here DeMonaco finds richness in flipping the script on traditional right-wing notions of the border and immigration.

With so many murky motives, there’s little to care about, no way to anticipate the next con and no sense of real peril.

If there was a stylish chic in the first film, it’s gone in the second, which sometimes seems cloying in its attempt to recreate the first.

While the franchise soldiers on unironically, the films may fail to keep up with the real world, where fears have metastasized.

Wrath of Man finds Ritchie in a moody midlife mood, his urge to be quirkily unpredictable now contained, even as his camera still swings around, going backward, ahead or soaring above. There is menace, a dull darkness and stillness, as if he’s watched “Heat” too many times.

Simon McQuoid does a decent job on his feature directorial debut, giving us a constantly staggered hits of dopamine in the form of controlled violence.

It’s a tedious mess to endure and seemed like way more fun making than watching.

Overly long, bombastic and poorly focused.

In the frustrating The United States vs. Billie Holiday, Day gives it her all as Holiday but she can’t save a film that is overstuffed and also thin. Director Lee Daniels and screenwriter Suzan-Lori Parks offer an unfocused, meandering work for much of the time, interrupted by devastating scenes that feel like a punch to the gut.

The film nicely sends up spy capers, Broadway and buddy movies and is a lot like its two leading characters: Kindly, a little silly and as sweet as a candy-colored drink at the pool bar.

The actors Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth have been friends for 20 years and that is plainly evident watching them play longtime lovers in the wrenchingly beautiful film Supernova. The award-winning duo are like a well-worn sweater onscreen, comfortable and lived-in, showing the kind of tart affection people show when ardor’s lust has given way to the slow burn of adoration.

There is nothing terribly new in the telling, no huge revelations or bombshells. Most of the details — including King’s infidelity and the use of Withers as an FBI informant — have been known for years. But that’s not Pollard’s interest. His canvas is large, stretching back to post-Civil War Jim Crow, exploring how notions of Black sexuality were turned into social weapons and into the way FBI agents were made mythical in popular culture.

Many of the best scenes are silent, enhanced by a wonderfully wistful score by James Newton Howard.

Marder, who wrote the screenplay with his brother, Abraham Marder, takes far too long to get to his points in a sluggish middle but has crafted a quite lyrical tale of a man trying to find his way when everything he knows is taken away.

Utterly original and utterly excellent, the modern bromance The Climb is a thrilling ride, an unconventional and idiosyncratic American film that acts like a old-school arty European one.

This very American fable has been blessed with three remarkable performances.

As it races to its cool supernatural climax — and then a coda that connects it to the first film — “The Craft: Legacy” is firing on all cylinders, looking back respectfully but also showing how the same story in different hands can soar.

The transition — from hyperreal cooked crabs that glisten in a bowl in the first 30 minutes of the film to amorphous, gooey Candyland critters 30 minutes later — is jarring. The sequences on the moon grow tiresome, despite huge toads that fly and squeaky-voiced critters.

Honest Thief, co-written and directed by Mark Williams, is a predictable and slack affair, relying on eerie music, dark sets and smoke to create tension. There is no particular set of skills here.

The last few moments contain some of the most exhilarating and moving moments ever committed to film.

Have plenty of tissues nearby when you watch the top-notch Netflix film All Together Now, a teary tale of fellowship.

Project Power nicely mixes elements of sci-fi and crime thriller to create a cool trip with a wink, set against a soundtrack that includes 2 Chainz, Nipsey Hussle and Curtis Mayfield.

Kail’s camera captures actors’ intimate faces during key moments in a way impossible for theater-goers and incorporates audience reaction to create an electric filmed version.

Objectivity is not Meeropol’s goal here but better understanding of who this slippery character is, and this film succeeds in that.

It’s not a compelling environmental film or a good drama about racers. Like many of the electric cars on the track that season, it stalls.

More concrete examples of how mushrooms or dropping acid aided life are sorely needed.

The editing is more than a little rough and the plot gets a little stretched, but just as things start to get seriously hairy, the Pierce brothers suddenly have something really interesting to say about erasure and how families can abandon their histories.

The Hunt is not great satire or even a great film. It’s an unstylish and heavy-handed horror-thriller that turns into a revenge gore-fest as it mocks everyone with a big clumsy paw.

Spenser Confidential is a bit of a mess tonally with a plot that keeps attracting new weird layers, like lint on a sweater. It wants to be funnier than it is. It hopes to be deeper than it is.

For all of the inherent drama, it becomes clear that Burden, the man at the center of a film which bears his name, is really just a cipher, a sponge upon which we put meaning.

Written and directed by Stella Meghie, the film is a gentle and attentive inter-generational tale with a first-rate cast.

The little blue alien who can sprint quicker than the speed of light has ironically benefited from slowing it down, taking a pit stop to retool and emerge this month as a total crowd-pleaser.

The first half doesn’t fit with the second half, there are too many distractions and the filmmakers think it’s clever to leave clues but they do it clumsily and at the last minute and it’s really exhausting for the viewer.

Morano is absolutely adept in keeping tension rising, her characters grounded and her audience intrigued, a half-step behind.

Gretel & Hansel is as visually arresting as it is tedious, a 90-minute movie that really should have been a 3-minute music video for Marilyn Manson or Ozzy Osbourne. It’s in the horror genre only loosely. It’s more eerie, if that’s a genre. Actually, it’s like dread for 90 minutes. It’s dreadful.

Despite its flaws, this movie reminds us all of the sacrifices made by soldiers and to be mindful of how we treat them when they come home.

“Bad Boys” only works when the bickering cops are center stage.

Director William Eubank keeps the action taut and the look of the film is realistically impressive and dark, with grimy, dirty workers donning cool dive suits that make them each look like Transformers. His camera often goes tight on the shocked faces inside the helmets. Stewart, in particular, shines with a combination of steely nerves and harrowing expressions.

Just Mercy is not always an easy film to watch, but it is necessary.