Matt Fowler

Psycho Killer may "have a Hulk," but it's also a parade of missteps and missed opportunities.

A House of Dynamite has the acting and directing goods, but its weak resolve arrives late in the game.

The Astronaut has a game lead in Kate Mara and the decent stagings of a monster mystery, but it winds up being a humdrum offering in a genre usually teeming with imagination and innovation.

The love story between Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry works, or at least meagerly satisfies, on only surface levels, as does most of the movie.

A muddled mix of '90s teen flicks, curated for a new generation (with a Hitchcock premise swirled in), Do Revenge is a lukewarm high school vengeance tale that never settles on a tone and is barren when it comes to laughs.

Me Time has bursts of energy and vibrancy, mostly involving its two leads and their snappy chemistry, but it's also a hodgepodge of predictable buddy comedy beats that doesn't do much to separate itself from what's come before.

Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank curiously exists as a Mel Brooks movie remake, though that's also its most redeeming feature.

Don't Make Me Go features excellent performances from John Cho and Mia Isaac, but it stumbles big at the finish line.

Despite solid performances from Zac Efron and Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Firestarter feels stifled in story and presentation.

The Cellar has a cool and creepy set up but then fizzles once the answers start arriving.

Metal Lords is earnest with metal but sloppy with character and story. It delivers a rousing finale but the journey there is uninspired and half-formed.

Zach Braff and Gabrielle Union are great pillars here, though the film itself isn't consistent enough with its tone, snapping back and forth between sweet sentiment and cheap gags.

Black Crab has all the ingredients to grab you and take you on a thrill ride -- and at times it achieves this -- but it suffers partial collapse by the end because of its need to land a little loftier than necessary.

Bruised is a good outing for Halle Berry as a director, though a better reminder of her as a star. Aside from that, however, the story progression is light on impact.

Zeros and Ones uses the spy genre as a thin mask for a fever dream that evokes nightmarish uncertainty.

Despite the inherent ugliness of watching a rich kid diabolically dig into a mom and dad who are just trying to save their home for the sake of their own children, Home Sweet Home Alone has some decent wit and heart to it. Archie Yates is good as the new precocious protector of his lair, but it's Rob Delaney and Ellie Kemper who anchor the film and give it something resembling a soul.

Kate Siegel does her best to elevate a simplistic thriller that follows all the same beats you're accustomed to.

Night Teeth's winning lead trio and its glossy, electronic buzz save this Collateral clone from sinking into full nonsense. The film's usually interesting, though it never truly strikes with malice or meaning the way it wants to

Escape the Undertaker is a benign but effective use of Netflix's interactive abilities. Pairing the most macabre WWE Superstar with the company's most positive players makes for a fun showdown, one that you might wish had made it to official WWE TV -- not in this form, of course, but as a noble "turn to the dark side" storyline.

It's a bizarre and overly rambunctious ride that forsakes cleverness for Billboard acts and dizzying set pieces.

The Starling contains themes of grief and guilt that are worth exploration, but finds itself unable to delve deep into these elements, instead relying on bad bird effects and a needlessly quirky and eccentric tone to gloss over most of the uncomfortable elements.

Copshop is meaningfully and enjoyably derivative as a patchwork homage to '70s shoot-em-up cinema (even Spaghetti Westerns), but it never quite reaches its potential.

Cry Macho has spare moments of charm and tranquility, but mostly it's a dry and unfinished story that fails to hit even the most basic of Story 101 beats.

Krysten Ritter, along with Winslow Fegley and Lidya Jewett, provide enough pizazz to keep Nightbooks afloat, creating an engaging supernatural hostage scenario.

Paw Patrol: The Movie is a precious and peppy offering for the pre-preteen set that utilizes gentle character drama and buzzy action to stand out as a big-screen adventure. It won't be any parent's first choice, from an animation standpoint, but the standards of storytelling hold firm, making for an overall calm and comforting watch.

The Last Mercenary has bounding energy and a fun take on star Jean-Claude Van Damme's past exploits as an action star, but the humor is way more miss than hit and the actual nuts-and-bolts spy plot is a trudge.

Gunpowder Milkshake does its formidable cast dirty with a bland script, recycled story, and an empty comic book style that does little but shine up a stale outing.

The Boss Baby: Family Business delivers middle-road mirth, full of action and quasi-clever jokes, and featuring the fun voice additions of James Marsden, Jeff Goldblum, and Amy Sedaris.

The Woman in the Window has both flash and fizzle. Amy Adams is great in the lead role, presenting us with a shattered recluse who wages war on lucidity daily, but the rest of the cast, while noteworthy, are sort of relegated to being plot pawns. Still, if you're looking for a higher class of claustrophobic Noir, and don't care too much about the resolution, there's a playfulness on display here that might scratch an airport novel itch.

Wrath of Man has plenty of anger and action, and it's at its intriguing best when the entire story gets sorted out and all the players are on the board, but it stumbles at being a time-release mystery.

While sci-fi is generally rife with allegories, a steadier hand was needed here in Voyagers. The messaging, though noble and necessary, feels obvious to the point that it takes you out of the film. The cast is talented and the premise is promising, but the story plays out in a predictable fashion, which also works, in a way, to undercut the meaning.

Tom and Jerry hit the big screen for a hybrid live-action romp that too often feels like it's not even their movie.

Cherry is big on style and features a bouncy, pricey soundtrack but its examination of the grim reality behind the veteran/addiction cycle feels rather routine. Holland breaks down many barriers here, performance-wise, and delivers the goods as a fantastic surrogate for societal ills, but the movie is plodding and, overall, an underwhelming patchwork of previous projects.

Willy's Wonderland is a no-frills splatterfest that, while straining to fill its runtime, finds mid-level chills and thrills thanks to Nic Cage bashing the hell out of weaponized pizza parlor characters. It's a shoestring slasher that gets the job done while also not fully rounding a few of the corners it teases.

Wrong Turn delivers a handful of timely twists and coats the franchise with a new, and vastly more interesting, sheen. It stumbles at times to balance all the themes it's trying to handle with regards to societal ills, individual value, and self-determinism but the end result is still a warped ride that could set up more thrills to come.

The Marksman is perfectly watchable old man reckoning cinema, held together by good performances by Liam Neeson and young Jacob Perez, but it's ultimately not much more than an assembly line of non-surprises.

Outside the Wire is too long, too impenetrable, and not fun enough to warrant its lofty man vs. machine gimmick. It's fun to watch Anthony Mackie assume the role of a smart, cordial killbot, but the film's occasionally exciting bits of action aren't enough to breathe life into this muddled mess of a story.

George Clooney's The Midnight Sky is a gorgeous, glossy doomsday odyssey that feels like too big a winter coat on a small, fragile frame.

Grimy, "topical" pandemic adventure Songbird is pretty much D.O.A. It struggles to find life in its secluded settings while also, overall, just leaving a bad taste in your mouth. The love story never catches hold, the ensemble never gels, and the contrivances pile up beyond all repair.

Glenn Close and Amy Adams shine in Ron Howard's new, rather unfocused film about abuse, poverty, and addiction.

The Croods: A New Age is a mightily medium follow-up to the 2013 original. The voice cast is great and the jokes are the perfect type of clever, where both kids and adults can get a good laugh. The story and emotional stakes are a touch thinner this time but that's to be expected, for the most part, from this type of animated sequel.

Hubie Halloween is aggressively stupid, sure, but it's also occasionally endearing (with a guilty chuckle or two).

Greyhound has occasional bursts of violent excitement but it's overall lack of engaging characters, the unappetizing CG, and the lackluster story make for a very color-by-numbers outing from a headlining star capable of a whole lot more.

Even without the content of 2020 making the film feel even more unpalatable, Netflix's The Last Days of American Crime is a distractingly dull dystopian thriller with drab (and/or extraneous) characters and a squandered premise.

Simon Pegg and Lily Collins act the hell out of a script with a fun set-up and a lazy payoff.

The story's lifted a bit by some of the solid comedic actors, and the WWE Superstars who make a run-in, but when the story isn't sloppy, it's paint-by-numbers.

The Jesus Rolls, while a passion project for the writer/director/star -- though it's unclear what Turturro wanted to do more: remake Going Places or do a Jesus follow-up? -- comes off like a flat fever dream. The famous faces are fun and at times there's a wee bit of misfit charm, but in the end it's clumsy and churlish.

Underground is cartoonishly raucous explosion porn from mayhem maestro Michael Bay that feels like a film that was made over a decade ago and was just somehow recently unearthed by Netflix. It's a testament to star Ryan Reynolds and his seemingly effortless charisma because without him the movie would have been a snow-blind mess.