Matt Singer

The final act pickles Jay Kelly’s tragicomic vibe into something more overtly and excessively sentimental.

Sabotage’s mystery component is mostly dead on arrival, and poor Olivia Williams has the thankless job of carrying it as the no-nonsense detective searching for the killer. But as Ayer proved with his previous film, End Of Watch, he has a natural eye and ear for the ecosystem of law enforcement.

A lot of Love and Thunder’s individual parts are sharp, and the film is full of likable performers like Hemsworth, Portman, and Thompson. It’s not a terrible time at the theater. If you enjoyed the last Thor movie, you’ll probably enjoy this one. Just not as much.

Hobbs & Shaw is the movie version of a replacement-level player. It is adequate, but not exceptional. It’s the baseline version of what one of these movies should be, now that they’re not about undercover cops chasing thieves anymore.

The bad news is the studio’s most innovative visuals are wedded to one of its most formulaic origin stories. In some scenes, Doctor Strange is Marvel’s most exciting movie yet. In others, it might be its most boring movie since Iron Man 2.

Like Saturday Night Live itself, there are too many great comedians involved for it not to be at least occasionally funny. But it’s surely not among Neville’s most insightful films. Michaels guards his secrets like someone in the Witness Protection Program.

Warts and all, the new Ghostbusters is still one of the best tentpoles of the summer (admittedly, that’s not saying much). It doesn’t tarnish the legacy of the original movie, and its own legacy might have been even stronger if it hadn’t worried about paying homage to the old Ghostbusters quite so intensely.

Weird won’t make anyone forget Walk Hard, but it might make some folks go and break out their old Weird Al records for the first time in a while. I recommend Dare to Be Stupid.

Bad Boys was written off for good after Bad Boys II, and yet here we are more than 20 years later, with two solid sequels in four years. Somehow, these guys really have become Bad Boys for life. And perhaps even beyond that.

The writing as well as the sprightly character animation captures the spirit of these creatures at their absolute best and hilarious worst in a way every dog owner can recognize and relate to. When the film sticks to that, it works.

Bay is a dynamic visual storyteller, but he’s much better at the visual component than the actual storytelling.

Favreau’s Jungle Book is at its best in moments of visual splendor; when his camera pulls back to admire the sweep of the CGI foliage or yet another dazzling computer creation wanders into frame. Those images have a clarity that the rest of the movie often lacks.

Is it a fun movie overall? Yes, although not quite as much fun as I had hoped. On paper, Shakman cast the four lead roles perfectly. In execution, I’m not sure any of his stars really found their groove as these characters yet. Or maybe the script flattened the Fantastic Four to the point where it left them no groove to find. Let’s put it this way: It’s a decent first step. There’s still room for improvement.

The world-building is engrossing. The premise is refreshingly peculiar. The action grabs your attention. As long as the movie keeps a lid on what precisely is going on, it works.

Frankly, the original Mortal Kombat arcade game had a better sense of narrative momentum; at least there the fights progressed toward a final showdown with the big bosses. Without spoiling this Mortal Kombat, it mostly feels like a giant prologue to something else. Still, for sheer visual panache, intricate fight scenes, and the fact that it’s not an out-and-out embarrassment, Mortal Kombat rates very highly on the list of video game movies.

Lucy earns points for its unpredictable treatment of its vaguely superhero-ish premise and an appealing silliness, but it struggles to match wits with the genius at its center.

Before that, though, Knock at the Cabin is about as well-acted and intense as a movie of this kind gets. For a long time, Shyalaman had a reputation as a guy obsessed with twists. While he does still occasionally veer into that sort of territory, his movies these days are less about structural gimmicks than insistent messages. In Knock at the Cabin’s case, it is a poignant tale about faith and sacrifice — and, above all, avoiding family vacations at all costs.

The’re not a lot of momentum to Hotel Transylvania 3; this is a children’s film after all. But the character and location designs are inventive and appealing, and there are several memorable set pieces, including a wordless scuba diving sequence that draws heavy inspiration from classic Warner Bros. cartoons.

If you want to see a lot of strange CGI visuals and the you’re interested in the groundwork of the next phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you’ll likely walk out satisfied (if maybe a little confused about the specifics of Kang’s larger plan). If you want to see an Ant-Man movie like the previous two Ant-Man movies — with wry humor, simple stories, and inventive uses of Ant-Man’s shrinking powers — you’re as out of luck as Scott Lang after Kang drags him to the Quantum Realm.

This isn’t quite solid-gold filmmaking. But it might be gold-plated.

Frankly, the whole movie industry could use more original ideas and fewer looks back to the past. But this one is entertaining enough that I’ll give it a pass. By a small margin, it’s probably the best I Know What You Did Last Summer ever.

It is a beautiful film, as all Fincher films are, and it contains several compelling performances. But if all that artifice and powerhouse acting add up to something particularly profound, I did not find it during my initial viewings of the movie.

I’m not sure The Gray Man fully qualifies as a “good” movie, but I will admit I wasn’t bored by it. It has a knowing sense of its own absurdity and a really fun Chris Evans performance. As long as the action remains at a smaller scale, it’s satisfying.

The stuff about this couple in decline is lacerating and painful in the best and most hilarious ways possible. The stuff about the solstice is standard horror fare made unfurled, with exceptional craft, at a snail’s pace. And the longer Midsommar goes, the further it gets from the pain and the loss that fueled its emotional core, until it has lost touch with the things that made it special.

It’s not boring and there are a few decent laughs. But it also does feel like exactly the movie you would expect a big Hollywood studio to make from this material.

Like director Jon Turteltaub’s underrated National Treasure movies, The Meg has an innate understanding of its own absurdity, and is at its best when it embraces and amplifies that impulse.

The screenplay, written by director Peter Landesman and based on books by Felt and John D. O’Connor, does a fine job of condensing a sprawling conspiracy into a digestible feature, although it sometimes favors clarity over nuance and winds up enunciating important plot points in glaringly unnatural dialogue.

On paper, The Little Hours sounds like a combative anti-religious tract, but Baena’s less interested in mocking the church than in basking in the gulf between humanity’s lofty aspirations and its baser instincts.

This is a creature feature, plain and simple — and, at least on a visceral level, a satisfying one.

The old masters of early movie stunts who Cruise and McQuarrie so obviously admire knew that sometimes simpler was better.

This movie has a lot on its mind — and perhaps too many characters.

How to Be Single isn’t particularly hilarious, but it’s not particularly unpleasant either. The characters are likable. Their lives are fun to wander through for 100 minutes. Their small, daily battles are relatable, even to a 35-year-old dude.

Kill The Messenger isn’t a great movie, but it’s a great vehicle for Renner, and a showcase for the kind of work he should be doing more regularly.

While most of 2022’s holiday toys are destined to be dumped in storage bins or even the garbage in a matter of weeks, I have feeling M3GAN is going to stick around a lot longer than that.

Life jolts audiences with relentless ferocity, but it’s not interesting.

I appreciate the sheer logistical achievement of Infinity War (and the chutzpah of its ending). I laughed a bunch of times, and some of the scenes are definitely exciting. But I would be lying if I pretended this movie ever grabbed me the way the best MCU movies did.

Reitman clearly made this film from a place of love and admiration for the institution of SNL and the people, then and now, who produce it. He might get the facts wrong at times; what he gets right is the feeling that every fan who grows up watching SNL imagines the show is like behind the scenes — giddy and chaotic and brimming with passionate creativity.

The results are mostly pleasing and occasionally very funny (particularly whenever Manganiello pops up and Pee-wee tries to pronounce his name). But they also feel very familiar, something that flies in the face of the movie’s key theme about reinvention.

Rampage won’t set the world on fire (our world, at least; it sets plenty of its world on fire when George and his two giant pals arrive in Chicago), but it does exactly what it says on the tin: It’s a big, goofy romp about creatures who lay waste to a major American city while the Rock cracks jokes in a light brown shirt.

Alita barely considers any of the existential questions about humanity that are typically central to this kind of sci-fi film. It’s just a slick action film. That is one way, at least, it does feel like a Robert Rodriguez movie.

Combine some of the Italian master’s whimsy with even more of Disney’s The Little Mermaid, along with plenty of Pixar’s now-standard bittersweet lessons about growing up and you get Luca, an affectionate portrait of friendship that never quite rises to the level of the beloved animation studio’s best efforts. Maybe it’s just a little too simple, both in construction and stakes.

At times, Napoleon is a costume drama. For long stretches, it is a bloody war film. And occasionally — in its best moments — it becomes a sordid and twisted love story about the unbreakable bond between two people: Napoleon Bonaparte, played by Joaquin Phoenix, and his wife Joséphine, played by Vanessa Kirby.

The many similarities between Raya and Mulan and Moana suggest that Disney’s honed in on a new formula for their fairy tales, one that emphasizes (to borrow a phrase from a television series that anticipated the appetite for these kinds of stories) warrior princesses. In this case, at least, the formula works.

Captain Marvel itself has none of that rebellious spirit. It takes very few risks in the way that something like Thor: Ragnarok did, beyond the fact that it is the studio’s first blockbuster with a female hero in the lead. Personally, I like my movies about rule breakers to actually break some rules.

Sure, yes, technically speaking Zootopia 2 is intended for your children. This is a colorful, energetic, and extremely busy animated film about talking animals. But while these critters’ adventures keep the kids occupied, a lot of the movie’s humor, tucked into its corners and backgrounds of the frame, is aimed squarely at their parents and guardians, at least those who love a groan-inducing play on words.

There are some legitimate criticisms you can level against Aquaman. You could never say, however, that this movie doesn’t go for it. It goes for everything — maybe too much, when all is said and done.

Unfortunately, Red Sparrow director Francis Lawrence is no Josef von Sternberg. Like most of his previous films (Constantine, I Am Legend, the final three Hunger Games), his choices are solid but rarely surprising, and despite a twisty storyline, a great cast, and two physically compatible leads, Red Sparrow never quite gets beyond being a merely okay thriller.

West does so much winking at the audience that he doesn’t leave much time to gaze into the darkness the way a truly scary horror movie does; MaXXXine’s moments of shock are surprisingly few and far between. As a result MaXXXine is rarely as disturbing or as effective as the earlier films in this series.

The fight sequences aren’t as good as director David Leitch’s previous work like Atomic Blonde and the John Wick movies, but it’s better than the standard superhero fare, with enough clever touches to keep things interesting.

Clichés usually become clichés because they resonate with audiences, and all it takes to freshen one up are a couple of new twists. Proud Mary has just enough of them to make some satisfying out of very familiar material.

Edwards is very good at crafting images that straddle the uncomfortable line between beauty and horror, and at dwarfing people with giant monsters and machines with powers beyond mortal comprehension. It’s his comprehension of mortals that sometimes feels lacking.

It’s about as unassuming as a movie about a man who can grow 65 feet tall could be, and in its relatively subdued scale, it is fairly refreshing and fun.

There are some scenes here as lively and as thoughtful as any in this great series’ history. But then that final sequence reminds viewers that this is a franchise still thinking about the way things were, and not with the way things are — or could be in the future.

The good barely outweighs the bad here, at least enough for me to give The Flash a marginal recommendation. A lot of the reviews of The Flash from early screenings called it one of the greatest DC Comics movies ever made. Maybe in another universe that’s true. In this one, I thought it stumbled across the finish line.

Parts recall the muscular intensity of Craig’s debut, Casino Royale. Others evoke painful memories (and specific story threads) from the bloated, digressive Spectre.

Patel’s desire to make something more than a straightforward action film is admirable, especially since he had to juggle responsibilities in front of and behind the camera simultaneously to do so. Monkey Man suggests he’s got potential as a filmmaker in the future. In the present, his directorial debut is the sort of genre exercise that makes you realize creating a “straightforward” action movie is not so straightforward.

In 2022, films of this ilk are so rare, that I can almost forgive the Deep Water’s faults just for reminding me that these sorts of stories can be told onscreen. Almost.

Occasionally entertaining but rarely memorable, 12-12-12 never goes beyond the level of a really good bonus feature on a special-edition concert CD.

Extraction might outdo Children of Men in some minor technical ways, but it can’t hold a candle to it as a whole. The movie comes alive around the 34-minute mark; it’s a bit of a slog until that point — one I confess I might have turned off long before its bravura centerpiece if not for professional commitments.

This sort of ultra-dark crime picture is commonly described as “hard boiled,” but that adjective feels insufficient for Triple 9, which burns away any sense of hope until only misery and suffering remain.

Chazelle seems so enamored with his simulacrum of this forgotten world that he loses sight of the people in it.

The burden of wrapping up a 40-year franchise weighs heavily on Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, an overstuffed chase film that barely lets up from its connect-the-dots MacGuffin-heavy plot for even a second or two.

The crime story, involving the hunt for the men who murdered this girl, is strictly by-the-numbers (and there are a few clue that still don’t fit together in my mind) but Sheridan proves himself a surprisingly effective director of action.

The movie cuts back and forth between the two, and their themes speak to one another in some ways, but the competing narratives barely intersect. At times, it seems as if director and co-writer George Clooney made a movie where separate but equal is not only the subtext but also the organizing principle.

Whether its unique release strategy makes it a historical footnote or an important turning point in the history of an industry will only be clear in hindsight. For now, it’s just a colorful kids movie.

Too bad no one else in Enemies Closer can match Van Damme’s oddball charisma.

This whimper of a farewell somehow feels right. It also feels like a mess — if an endearing one at times— that has been heavily reworked in the editing room.

The most disappointing part of Reverse Panic Room is how little it exploits its high-concept premise after spending so much time establishing all the particulars of this fortified lake house.

Haunted Mansion does at least represent a small measure of progress for Hollywood. People always complain that studios remake beloved movies — which do not need improvement — when it would be wiser to remake a movie that contained the kernel of a good idea but failed in the execution. Haunted Mansion is absolutely a remake of a bad movie, and it does represent a slight improvement over the previous version.

The movie around Jordan is just like Kelly himself: Cold, detached, and brutal.

If Schrader and Ellis set out to prove that movies are dying or already dead, they might have done their job too well. The Canyons doesn’t play like the cure for a moribund industry, so much as a mildly effective, highly depressing administration of the last rites.

Everything Safdie, Johnson, and Blunt do to conjure up this time and place is a technical achievement, but it never goes past that to a truly involving sports story. The Smashing Machine is sadly not a knockout. Call it a split decision instead.