Matt Singer

The characters and their relationships are strong and the dialogue is sharp, but the whole thing feels like a minor installment in an ongoing series.

On the whole, Inside Out 2 lacks the structural elegance of the first film, and it holds far fewer surprises for viewers on a narrative level. Still, whether you call them anxieties or fears, Inside Out 2’s depiction of tween insecurities is right on the money.

Onward’s ups and downs suggest these probably are less magical times at Pixar. But that doesn’t mean with enough hard work or concentration — or maybe just following your gut — that the magic can’t come back, if only for a little while.

At its best, Days Of Future Past feels not just like an X-Men comic book, but like an X-Men comic-book crossover... Like Days Of Future Past, crossovers in comics tend to be light on character development. But when they’re good, the huge stakes and epic scale of the action make them hard to put down.

As a director, Berg is known for his brutal action scenes, and while Deepwater Horizon’s second half is full of intense sequences, the film’s first half is just as exciting thanks to the wonderfully uncomfortable dynamics between Wahlberg, Russell, and Malkovich.

Creed II is very much a Rocky sequel. It’s bigger, louder, and more over the top than its predecessor, with a more formulaic story and more absurd boxing matches. It’s satisfying as a pop confection, but it’s not as special or as rich as its predecessor.

Even if it falls a little short as a character study, the fact that it’s both hugely weird and hugely watchable is impressive.

Surrounded by so many bloated, unsatisfying movies, The Shallows is as refreshing as a quick dip on a hot summer day — preferably in a pool, not the ocean. They tend to be safer and less shark-infested.

A few clunky lines of dialogue aside, the movie mirrors the honorable thief at its center: Methodical, cool, and effective.

The era Enter the Clones of Bruce chronicles wasn’t that long ago, and yet it feels entirely alien to our own.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard is not the best movie of the summer, but it is easily its most pleasant surprise. An unapologetically violent and vulgar buddy action comedy, it updates the template set forth by Lethal Weapon and particularly Midnight Run for a new era.

Back in the day, the endless comparisons between Shyamalan and Hitchcock felt like a bit of a trap themselves. With Trap, though, there’s no point trying to escape them.

I believe Mangold directed the Dylan movie he wanted to, and in some ways A Complete Unknown is interesting precisely because it is a willfully withholding portrait of an enigmatic star. Then again, it's hard to make a completely satisfying movie about a subject that its director seems to believe cannot be understood.

The film isn’t about catastrophe; it’s about the beauty of what happens when everyone works together to solve a problem.

The film works effectively on its own terms as a new variation on a timeless subgenre, and as a warning to people who share their lives freely online.

There were times I wished Freaky was a little bit bolder and more surprising. Still, it’s an entertaining showcase for Vaughn and Newton, and a solid entry in the body-swap canon. In other words, it’s exactly what you think it is, inside and out.

Incredibles 2 is kind of like Jack-Jack; relatively small, extremely smart, bursting with potential, and capable of mutating into a new form in a matter of seconds.

Wright and co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns screenplay falters a little in the third act; it relies on a couple of twists that are either too poorly established or too obvious to properly land. (They might also undermine the film’s themes, although that’s debatable.) Still, even when the story stumbles, the cinematography by Chung-hoon Chung is absolutely gorgeous.

I wound up walking out of The Batman with a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. The more I thought about it, though, the more I appreciated Reeves’ ambitions and his willingness to do something that wasn’t just more of the same old Batman. He really did make you see the character in a new way. Even the stuff in the shadows.

Popstar feels a bit like elite military snipers shooting fish in a barrel. Their aim is true, but the targets are almost too easy — not to mention awfully familiar.

Bill & Ted Face the Music breezes by for 95 minutes, cruising along with the same chill energy that Bill and Ted bring to every room they enter. It’s admittedly very slight, and the ending is way too abrupt. Still, Matheson and Solomon managed to make a movie about how life’s accumulating failures can turn people cynical without making Bill and Ted into cynics themselves.

All told, Barbie is a fascinating movie, even if it is occasionally a little frustrating and often more fun to look at than it is laugh-out-loud funny. I think my daughters will probably enjoy it quite a bit — when they watch it when they’re a few years older.

The film is almost as messy as its characters’ love lives, and the early scenes, which take a long time establishing the various subplots, play less like a dramedy than a comedy that could have used more jokes. But the movie gets more earnest and impassioned (not to mention better) as it goes along.

The fate of the world, and Project Mary as a whole, ultimately rests on Ryan Gosling’s hunky shoulders. The movie might eventually evolve into a two-hander about a pair of mismatched scientists, but one of the buddies here doesn’t even have hands, and Gosling is the only human face on screen for half the runtime. That he manages to hold the audience’s attention, and occasionally makes them laugh and even cry when he has nothing and no one to play off of is a testament to his enormous star power and charisma.

Never Go Back could have used a bit more personality in the bad guy department, and the middle section sags a bit before the inevitable (and satisfying) denouement. But everyone involved seems to understand exactly what kind of movie they’re trying to make, and they deliver on just about every promise made by the title Jack Reacher: Never Go Back.

If you're looking for something lean and unpretentious, you should be pretty satisfied.

So many blockbusters these days are designed to comfort viewers with the familiar; giving them exactly what they expect in narcotizing doses of beloved intellectual properties. While Mutant Mayhem obviously originated from the same commercial impulse, it adds a lot of novel wrinkles to the old Ninja Turtles formula.