Matt Singer

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

Yes, 28 Years Later is gory and violent and the zombie kills with that jerky Bullet Time iPhone rig are cool. But the film is also thoughtful, even contemplative at times.

Look past the surface of this remake and you’ll find ... basically the exact same movie you’ve seen before, and could watch at home anytime you want. There are no surprises, except maybe the total lack of surprises.

Forget about three branches from one tree; this is the first branch presented for the third time. They might as well have called it Karate Kid: Déjà Vu.

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

Thunderbolts* is a nice reminder of what this company is capable of at its best. It looks good, it sounds good, and it really does turn its protagonist’s pain into an effective allegory about rejecting despair and apathy in favor of action and brotherhood.

The way Coogler resolves Sinners’ central ideas within a traditional horror story framework is truly masterful. He plays the audience like a fiddle. Or a blues guitar.

The slasher-style kills are effective, and a couple of the tossed-off quips are good for some chuckles. (I liked when Leoni informed her guests that her butler was “making my famous moussaka” for dinner.) But a lot of the film lives up to its title. It’s just lifeless.

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.

Novocaine belongs to the same cinemasochistic tradition as movies like Evil Dead II and Crank, where the audience is invited to derive twisted pleasure from watching a heroic leading man get the crap beaten out of him in inventive ways. It’s not as good as those movies. But on its own terms, it’s painless enough. Pleasurable even.

Like I said: Inconsistent.

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.

Stoller cooked up a solid premise, assembled a funny cast, gave them some good scenes to play and lines to deliver, and let them do their thing.

In an earlier era, Babygirl might feel less novel, and its unwillingness to push its story into truly uncomfortable territory might be a bigger issue. These days, when Hollywood has pretty much abandoned sexuality as a topic of serious discussion, the film can easily lay claim to the title of top dog.

Turning Mufasa’s rise to power into its own movie makes sense, although doing it in this style, and with so much prequelitis about less-essential elements of The Lion King mythos, still seems like a strange choice to me.

That’s Kraven the Hunter, and all these Sony superhero movies, in a nutshell: Bait and switches designed to maintain a license until the next actual Spider-Man film.

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 reason to see this Nosferatu anyway is its handsomely detailed production, which is soaked in gothic atmosphere thanks to incredible design, cinematography, and that creepy Skarsgard performance.

Without the musical heart or stirring adventure of the first movie, Moana 2 relies on a surprising amount of gross-out humor and meta jokes to keep audiences engaged.

All of Wicked’s best moments are still the ones from the stage. There are a lot of those great moments, though; certainly more than I expected. When Erivo’s Elphaba hits the soaring high notes in Wicked’s signature song, “Defying Gravity,” it’s enough to make you wish the wait for the second half of the film was only 15 minutes, instead of an entire year.

If Anora does well and enables Baker to keep making quirky films about the lives of richly-detailed working-class people, that’s great news. His is one of the truly unique voices in American film today.

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.

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.

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.

The best vocal performance in Transformers One by far comes from Brian Tyree Henry, who puts so much feeling into D-16 rapid transformation into the menacing Megatron that you almost buy that he goes from Orion’s loyal bestie to his sworn mortal enemy in the span of about 10 minutes.

When you have Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen, and Natasha Lyonne as your central stars, some things don’t need to be said out loud.

It takes way too long — nearly an hour of a 105-minute movie — for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’s actual story to emerge and for Keaton to take center stage again. Once he shows up, though, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice springs to life. Er, make that afterlife.

It’s as if remaking a John Woo movie finally gave John Woo permission to make a true John Woo movie again.