Matt Singer

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.

At a certain point, Deliver Me From Nowhere sort of loses the thread of its stripped-down, unadorned approach.

Him fumbles a solid premise with a tedious, one-note execution that delivers very few scares and zero insights into either of its central subjects.

It’s so many different kinds of movies crammed together; a paranoid thriller, a stoner adventure, an issues movie of the sort that used to be the Hollywood studios’ bread and butter but rarely get made today in the world of IP and risk-averse corporations. That’s one more reason to see it, and another reason to marvel at the fact that it exists at all.

It’s nice to see Reiner, McKean, Guest, and Shearer acknowledge their age and have some fun again, even if they never come close to matching the invention and creativity of the old Spinal Tap.

Washington and Rocky’s scenes are flat-out electric. Even when they’re just talking over the phone, there’s an intensity to their scenes sorely lacking from everything that precedes them. In fact, Rocky brings so much passion to his scenes that Washington actually has to level up his own game up to keep pace. The pair’s confrontations prove to be Highest 2 Lowest’s high points.

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.

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.

This Superman does something more impressive than make the audience believe a man can fly. It makes them care about the man doing the flying.

F1 never quite says “It’s not the car, it’s the driver” — but it comes awfully close on several occasions. And it makes it clear that when it comes to action movies, it’s not the subject, it’s the director. That strikes me as a pretty old fashioned notion, and a good one.

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.