Matt Singer

Let’s face it: The LEGO Movies were always better than they had any right to be. At their core, even with their clever writing, colorful visuals, and memorable voice casts, they were still feature-length toy commercials. The LEGO Ninjago Movie is just the first installment in the series that actually feels like one.

There are good things in American Pickle, like two convincing (and occasionally moving) performances from Rogen. But they’re the equivalent of a couple cucumber scraps in a giant vat of salt water.

It’s the very definition of a film with its heart in the right place. And also a prime example of how good intentions don’t automatically make great movies.

There are some highlights — mostly the lead performances.

Beyond a few flashes of visual ingenuity, though, there really isn’t much to recommend about this movie.

Why make a Venom movie (much less three of them) if the character will never get to meet Spider-Man? Beyond the fact that it is sort of fun to see Tom Hardy act like a weirdo, I don’t think Sony ever came up with a satisfying answer to that question.

The BFG’s sluggish pacing will test even older viewers’ attention spans. The visuals are potent, but the story is never urgent. The crux of the movie, inspiring people to dream, is a noble, beautiful thing. But not when you put them to sleep in the process.

As a focused spoof of exploitation tropes, Machete Kills is, frankly, terrible. But as a surreal stream of subconsciousness from a filmmaker who’s spent a lifetime watching bad movies, it’s an occasionally entertaining diversion.

Here Today is too peculiar and heartfelt to be truly bad, and it does make an interesting companion piece to Mr. Saturday Night, with Crystal working through same issues from an older perspective. Together, they feel like the work of an artist baring their soul in a sometimes unpleasant way.

If you are going to Venom for cool superhero action — or for compelling characters, pulpy science-fiction, impressive special effects, a parable about corporations run amok, or a single significant connection to Spider-Man — you will be sorely disappointed. If you can look past all of that (and the dreadful first hour), your reward is Hardy, delivering one of the all-time great unhinged performances.

This is a very confused movie, designed for an audience that doesn’t exist.

Quan remains an extremely likable actor, as well as an impressive martial artist. (Even before Everything Everywhere All at Once, he had worked on several Hollywood productions as a fight choreographer.) It’s great to see him back on the screen, but he’s let down by his material here. When he’s not kicking butt, Love Hurts is downright painful.

The Last Knight is not, in any conventional sense, entertaining or good, although parts of it are spectacular.

Blair Witch does deliver the requisite shocks demanded of a horror movie for a multiplex audience, but maybe it’s time for filmmakers to stay out of these woods for a while — at least until there’s a new technology for the Blair Witch to mess with.

With little drama or humor, it mostly amounts to watching a guy complain about his fairly decent life for 100 minutes.

A superficial sequel that lacks the first movie’s unique quirks and soul.

The nicest thing I can say about 2019’s Aladdin is in its best moments it reminded me of a movie I liked a lot as a kid.

At pretty much every step Folie à Deux feels like one big middle finger to fans of the original movie. I just wish it was less of a middle finger to the rest of us at the same time.

It’s not just that Michael’s portrait of its title character is incomplete. He’s depicted as so pure that he becomes uninteresting; a moonwalking and talking human jukebox with little in the way of a compelling story. The only thing this basic rags-to-riches narrative has going for it is its non-stop parade of Michael Jackson and Jackson 5 hits, music so good it will surely turn Michael into a major box-office hit.

Although Malek looks the part, and has Freddie’s dance moves down, his performance is all stiff British accent and overbite (Mercury was born with four extra teeth). Singer never gets beyond the superficial to tell us anything profound or meaningful about Queen or Freddie Mercury or the perils of rock stardom.

Fifty Shades Darker is a very faithful sequel; a milquetoast continuation of a bland romance between two boring people.

The movie around him is a mess at the best of times and a disaster at the worst, but Aykroyd always looks like he’s having fun, even if no one else is.

True, Out of the Shadows is an improvement over the last Ninja Turtles movie, but only in the way that a mild cold is an improvement over the flu. It’s not good, but at least it’s not so terrible that it makes you want to lie in bed for a few days.

Rebel Moon is the kind of movie that seems overwrought and underbaked all at once. So much care has been given to the style and the design of every little element of the sets, the costumes, and the props; yet so little concern has been given to populating all those background elements with fleshed-out human beings with lives that feel like they exist beyond the edges of Snyder’s immaculately composed frames.

The first half of the film setting up the characters’ meager backstories and conflicts is boring. The second half is livelier but dumber, with the kaiju rising yet again from the depths of the Pacific to rampage through some extremely computer-generated cityscapes. There isn’t a single second where anything involving the jaegers or the kaiju looks real.

McGrath and screenwriter Michael McCullers are too preoccupied piling on chase and action scenes to exploit their title’s potential to its fullest.

Clooney and Roberts are both good fits for their roles, and they do what they can with the material they’re provided. It’s just that the material they’re provided is so crummy.

When all is said and done, The Alto Knights imparts very little about these two men that couldn’t be gleaned by reading their respective Wikipedia pages, and it does it at a sluggish pace and with little visual flair. Some of the biggest and best names to ever work in gangster movies contributed to this film; De Niro and Pileggi, obviously, but also producer Irwin Winkler and director Barry Levinson. Despite their many contributions to this genre in the past, they’ve got nothing new to say here. And they provide zero evidence that casting De Niro in both lead roles is anything more than a gimmick.