Matthew Monagle

We may live in a golden era of action steamers and stunt choreographers-turned-filmmakers, but Expend4bles never learns to embrace its own limitations. It strains for spectacle and only intermittently delivers on its actual strengths.

It’s a credit to Brown, Morgan, and Sadler that the story works at all. These actors maintain the illusion that The Unholy is a competent horror movie for far longer than it deserves. But in the end, there are just too many pieces missing to make this a coherent whole.

Ultimately, City of Lies is more James Elroy than docudrama, resulting in a tired police thriller that hitched its wagon to an untenable star.

Perhaps time will be kind to Drive-Away Dolls; the cast of rising stars seems destined for greatness, and the setting will sharpen into focus the farther we move away from the decade. But it’s hard not to feel that Drive-Away Dolls is the sum of its production history: a decades-old concept that missed its window for relevance.

Time may ultimately be kind to Cooper’s first foray into the horror genre, but the present holds nothing but darkness.

In the end, Dominion brings back likable characters and has the good grace to move at a fast clip. It is a testament to how low the bar has gotten that those two elements feel like enough to make it a passable summer movie.

On Fire does the best it can with what it has. It’s still not enough to move the needle.

The original Shazam! may not have broken new ground as a superhero movie, but it did what the rest of the recent Warner Bros. superhero films seemed unwilling to do: Restore compassion to the realm of heroes. Shazam! Fury of the Gods loses the thing that made it special.

Whatever points The Little Things scores for a morally ambiguous ending are washed away in the hours it takes to get there.

For each of the film’s visual achievements, there are narrative and developmental issues. As much as Edwards’ world invites us in, we are constantly befuddled by the way his characters move through their environments.

Those obsessed with first-person and screenlife films may want to explore Profile from a strictly technical standpoint, and they are welcome to do so. Everyone else can avoid it entirely.

Moonfall is bad – the wrong kind of bad – because everything in this formula fails to hold up its end of the bargain. The effects are muddled; the supporting cast is terrible. The only thing Moonfall delivers on is the big ideas, but by the time the movie begins to layer in the sci-fi absurdity, the film is already three-quarters of the way home.

It is frustrating to watch Fear carelessly oscillate between creature feature, haunted house movie, and folk horror.

The film struggles to carve out a distinct aesthetic for its violence, alternating between crass comedy and cartoonish violence with no sense of how to combine these two into something sustainable.

Dear Evan Hansen is a rare musical that must be seen to be believed. Few shows are less equipped to grapple with their subject matter; watching someone Wikipedia the plot synopsis of the musical in real time remains one of the last true pleasures available to us as a society.

There are times when China’s brash marriage of national cinema and onscreen largesse can work for foreign audiences – bless you, The Wandering Earth, you madcap delight – but when the approach misses this badly, the results are excruciating. Consider The Rookies an easy miss for even the most dedicated Chinese action cinema fan.