Michael Phillips

The remake is just like the original, but there’s more of it. And less.

After the persuasively strange first chapter’s over, “The Life of Chuck” is a duller kind of strange.

The saving graces are Agudong and Kealoha. Their characters’ sibling relationship, fractious but loving, keeps at least five toes in the real world and in real feelings, thanks to the actors.

The teaming of Robinson and Rudd periodically gets Friendship in gear. But the film’s primary comic impulse equates to the sound of gears grinding, in an attempt to shift from second to third.

Given its premise, you wouldn’t expect The Accountant 2 to go for quite so much buddy comedy, but life is full of surprises.

Just when movie theaters don’t need another one, The Amateur comes along to join the roster of 2025 releases that lack the knack, the juice and exciting reasons for theatergoers to theater-go.

Opus has its moments. But even the surprises aren’t especially surprising.

By the end of Novocaine, it’s as if the filmmakers — who have talent, and who are now off and running in a commercial sense — forgot how their movie started: with Quaid and Midthunder getting the material and the screen time needed to hook an audience’s interest, before the jocular sadism commenced in earnest.

The movie wouldn’t feel human at all, really, if not for the convincing emotion bond established between Mackie and Carl Lumbly as Isaiah.

It’s solid craft, but it’s craft wedded to a style of filmmaking that feels wholly impersonal, even with a top-flight director at the helm.

Taylor-Johnson is a solid actor, but on the page and in performance, Kraven’s barely there and too cool to care about what’s happening. Which makes it hard for moviegoers to care.

Too often, though, the magic in Wicked remains stubbornly unmagical. And whenever Erivo isn’t around to make us believe, and take the mechanics of Wicked to heart, Part I reveals what’s behind the curtain, an adequate set-up for next November’s second act.

The book’s melancholy spareness has been replaced by a “Here” existing somewhere in a pristine, remote suburb we’ll call Uncanny Valley Falls, a few miles away from real life.

In 2024 a movie about a live-TV countdown to destiny, once upon a time in ’75, needs more than moderately skillful reverence, and reaction shots of people cracking up at colleagues, to show us what it might’ve been like to be there.

[Moore's] gripping in ways the rest of the picture is not, transcending the thesis points and comic exaggerations simply by playing against the comic extremes and holding a card or two, always, in reserve. She reminds us here how good, and tough, she is at her best, when she gets half a chance.

The Instigators isn’t that bad, but it’s lazy, low-stakes stuff. Everyone on screen has done and been better.

Good, bad or middling, very little of Shyamalan’s works can be described as tightly plotted, well-sprung suspense.

The script never quite feels itself; it feels like contradictory impulses playing out in shuffle mode. And the scale of the movie does the putative romance no favors.

Chapter 1 feels like throat-clearing — a serviceable horse opera overture to a curiously dispassionate passion project.

Just about everybody on screen in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire lightens the load. But sometime around the eighth or ninth round of expository mumbo jumbo concerning the ectoplasmic nightmare about to happen, the movie starts moving sideways, not forward.

Only Viswanathan, wonderful in “Hala” and others, comes close to locating a tone that makes some human sense inside this wildly uneven material, careening all across the character-to-caricature spectrum.

All worldwide musical phenomena carry with them some enigmatic quality that encourages, deliberately or not, a kind of adoring guesswork on behalf of fans. In Bob Marley: One Love, both as written and acted, Marley himself remains more cipher than enigma.

Anyone But You isn’t terrible, or a travesty. It’s eh-notherthing ehltogether.

I realize writing a new Christmas screenplay can’t be easy; to get made, it must check a certain number of predictable boxes. Murphy is game, but only in a few moments with Ross — small-talk scenes not dependent on forced wonderment or reaction-shot gaping — do they appear to relax and enjoy the company.

Napoleon was many things, and with this dutiful career highlights reel, Phoenix and his director deliver glancing blows to as many aspects of the warrior-tyrant-genius-fool-lonely heart as cinematically possible in two and a half hours.

"Songbirds and Snakes” takes its job SUPERseriously, with more solemnity than imaginative excitement.

It’s an odd one, indecisive about its tone and intentions.

The Exorcist: Believer has its moments, but we’ve had a half-century of this stuff. And the filmmaker in charge has to show us something new; there’s more to life, and moviegoing, than coasting on cherished memories of projectile vomiting and head-swiveling.

The way My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 has been staged, filmed and edited, every new scene and each exchange has a way of being undermined by the filmmaking choices.

The strongest minutes in The Good Mother belongs to Chicago-trained Karen Aldridge. She takes care of business so well in her monologue about her character’s grief and loss, her exit from the narrative becomes just one more oh-well factor in an indifferent Albany noir.

So what’s missing? The usual scarcities in modern screen comedy: visual finesse and some wit to go with the gross-out stuff. Little things start adding up against Strays.

While many will find Revoir Paris moving, for me it’s because the performances do the heavy lifting, effortlessly, while the material lays everything out too neatly. The mess of life, the anguish of what Mia is going through, deserves a clear-eyed exploration and a little less gloss.

At this point in the life of this ol’ archaeologist, Indy’s theme song has become not just a sound, but practically a sight to behold — even in a movie that isn’t.

Keaton is the one who brings both effortless gravity and subtle levity to a film that, without him, wouldn’t have much of either.

My affection for a lot of the earlier F&F movies has everything to do with the people on the screen, and the squealing of the tires. Not so much the world destruction. Outlandish mayhem needs better visual stylists than Leterrier.

Mainly, Cage keeps finding the damnedest ways to topspin his line readings so that you never know where a sentence is going. May the next outing with Renfield and Dracula, should the public and Universal decree it, be a little funnier and little less too much.

Disarming one minute, baldly manipulative the next, Champions is a tricky one.

The movie, let it be said, is not awful, but the kinetic battles are chaotic, and the look of the Quantum Realm is oddly drab in its interweaving of digital and VFX elements, seeming at times to be more like several first drafts of a new “Star Wars” franchise instead of a natural extension of this one. Midway through, as everyone on screen was restating their interest in getting home again, I thought: Same!

Magic Mike’s Last Dance might’ve worked better if it had fully embraced the mantle of 21st century comedy of manners. As is, it’s tentative, wanly comic. As the great Russian stripper Anton Chekhov showed us: Without the funny, the serious has a harder go of it.

With a smooth overlay of LA sights and sounds, and a side of blueprints stolen from “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and “Meet the Fockers,” “You People” ends up a lot less insightfully funny than “Black-ish.”

I love what The Whale is doing for Fraser’s career. But not since John Wells blanded out the movie version of “August: Osage County” has a well-regarded play looked quite so at sea on screen.

Loosely entwining a half-dozen major characters, though two or three get disappointingly short shrift, “Babylon” thins out all too quickly, settling for a strenuous ode to the dream factory and its victims and exploiters, who occasionally make wondrous things for the screen.

Emancipation is never dull, but it’s rarely without its box office instincts for falsification front and center, alongside its star. And while it has been built on the scarred back of a real man, the movie is too busy with the business of entertainment to focus on the “real” part for long.

Wendell & Wild may not succeed, but I took heart from this: At least it doesn’t succeed in unconventional ways. That’s a sign of serious talents struggling with two of the most dreaded and unavoidable words in commercial cinema: “story problems.”

It’s a premise for a pitch, not a screenplay, at least not a sharp-witted or interesting one. I’m not fussy. I’m not looking for the most interesting romantic comedy in history with this one. But I do wonder if some writers are so determined to stick to a formula so slavishly, they forget to make the characters funny, or to make characters rather than vaguely delineated personae in the Clooney vein or Roberts vibe.

Director Mike Barker’s slick, vaguely pernicious take on the material is a blend of dead-serious anguish and feel-good vindication. While many will find the results effective, others will not simply resist the guessing games and pulp instincts at odds with the trauma, but actively resent them.

David O. Russell’s Amsterdam is very plush in the looks department. Enjoying the costumes and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s lighting and some of Russell’s shot designs will get you through it. But only if you don’t have to listen to it, or track it, or believe in the people on screen.

Everything not right with Don’t Worry Darling wasn’t right from the beginning. Even a good director — and Wilde is that, though her hand in developing this material clearly wasn’t without some wrong turns — must deal with script problems if they’re there, in the story, lurking and waiting to mess everything up and send audiences out muttering, wait what?

The spirit’s almost there to pull it off. But the movie does grind on.

The script for Spiderhead makes a rookie mistake: It lets the audience get too far out ahead of the Teller character’s moral and narrative awakening. Hemsworth has some icy, rascally fun with his scenes; when Teller and Smollett get some time together, on their own, the story flickers to something like life. But even at 100 minutes minus end credits, the film’s stretch marks are undeniable.

The action is perpetual, and perpetually in need of a better director, and editing that heightens and sharpens our pleasurable excitement instead of dulling it. The appeal, I suppose, of the far-flung, constantly roving storyline this time around is its latitude for different sorts of mayhem and different genre shout-outs. But all too soon Jurassic World: Dominion made me long for the best bits of Spielberg’s “Lost World” or J.A. Bayona’s “Fallen Kingdom.” Those folks know how to set up a shot, vary the rhythm and deliver the payoff.

I suspect the Cage fans who will enjoy this movie won’t care if it’s fundamentally sloppy and lazy moviemaking. The star of the show is neither.

What good is a movie that can’t stop moving, or screaming, long enough to pace itself?

The movie has a good shot at a huge streaming audience. But does it have the creative instincts of a good movie? An OK one, yes. It’s too bad The Adam Project is only that, since the cast isn’t dogging the assignment for a second.

First hour: pretty lousy and not much fun. Second hour: pretty lousy but more fun, and the movie has the benefit of getting stranger and stranger as it gyrates.

I wish this movie offered a little less running commentary and a little more running — anything, really, to get itself off the treadmill of self-critique and self-congratulation and actually going somewhere new.

Now and then The 355 sticks a landing.

This movie is more risk-prone than the majority of Marvel titles. Yet it frustrates, even beyond a screenplay full of self-competing interests. And as far as MCU fatigue goes — well, at this point, it goes pretty far.

In his fastidious, exacting, extraordinarily blinkered creation, writer-director Anderson this time has driven straight into a cul-de-sac, stranding every sort of good and great actor in the cinematic equivalent of a design meeting.

Mainly, the movie we have here reminds us that what works on a stage, within the non-realistic world and performance momentum of stage musicals, lessens a lot of story problems that movies tend to heighten.

As a sort-of-true-crime comedy, spinning a yarn of middle-class larceny and extreme, deeply unlawful couponing, it’s likely to offend no one but the most grimly law-abiding consumers among us. But like the people it’s about, you want more.

Stillwater feels like a movie filmed in a slightly blurry state of mind, then reshaped in the editing stage into a whole new blur. You don’t know where it’s going, and that’s a plus. Yet director and co-writer Tom McCarthy’s drama is as uncertain as his good movies, “Spotlight” highest among them, are quietly confident in going about their business.

There’s a good movie in the story of Joe Bell and Jadin Bell. The good one struggles to emerge from the good try we have here.

On the whole, I’d go with the 2018 basketball comedy “Uncle Drew” over either “Jams.” One-joke movies, all three. But it helps when the gags don’t stop at the reference point and dribble in place while the clock runs out.

What we have here is a smoothly crafted error in judgment.

The cast generates the goodwill. Madison and Quinn bring heart and some shrewd dramatic instincts, while Cook and Sterling settle comfortably into a sincere comic key.

I’d love to say it isn’t half-bad, but I can’t, because it is. It’s roughly 50 percent bad. The other 50 percent is better than that, even with a running time that threatens to never stop not stopping.

The acting’s uniformly strong, and the script is distressingly weak.

Wiig and Mumolo work so easily and smoothly together, you feel like an ingrate for not enjoying their efforts more in these script circumstances (especially since they wrote it). Now and then, though, the payoffs arrive.

I wish the results were better, and a lot stranger. Cahill’s world-building has its moments, though. And the filmmaker did determine — correctly — that it’d be fun to have Bill Nye, the science guy, in a bow tie, portraying a sniffy scientific researcher.

In Pieces of a Woman Kirby never seems to be building up artificial climaxes or big reveals; she works on a quieter, truer level. Too much going on around her ends up working against her.

I laughed at a good deal of the movie, but a good deal more of it left me with (Cohen’s intention, probably) the taste of ashes in the mouth.

It’s a movie about a movie star taking out the trash, leaving behind a lower body count than usual, but executing his duties faithfully, and with a predictable dash — the right kind of predictable — of world-weary charisma.

Seeing what may be Coppola’s least compelling film has a way of reminding you of all her better ones, especially in the seriocomic vein. Those include the aforementioned “Lost in Translation,” along with “The Bling Ring,” “Somewhere,” even the playfully anachronistic “Marie Antoinette.” If they’re new to you, have at them.

I wish Tenet exploited its own ideas more dynamically. Nolan’s a prodigious talent. But no major director, I suppose, can avoid going sideways from time to time.

In the sadistic yet middling road-rage thriller Unhinged, Crowe literally steers the vehicle delivering the big box of acting, over- and under-. While there’s barely a movie there, a year from now, when the multiplexes of the world will either largely be back, be gone or be something in between, we’ll have forgotten Unhinged.

It’s hard to shake the familiarity of the premise and the set-ups in “Lake of Death The story rhythms wander instead of screw-tighten, and while Robsahm has little interest in Raimi-style pulp or dynamism, the placid surface of Lake of Death rarely gets disturbed, or disturbing.

The movie is made well, if you’re buying what it’s selling, and if you don’t consider a story or a script as crucial to the quality of a thriller.

Bad Boys for Life may be a frantic visual blur but it’s razor-sharp thematically. Its mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make a jaded 2020 audience glad to see these guys again. The movie’s not the point. The boys are the point.

Before long in 21 Bridges, the extent of the corruption becomes the top line of a vision test — far too easy to spot from a distance.

Clarke, among others, deserves so much better. If you watch her amid the suds of “Me Before You” (2016) and now Last Christmas, you see an actor of sound comic and dramatic instincts at the mercy of pushy material. This encourages actors to over-exert themselves in the name of delivering the goods with a smile that threatens to turn into something more like Jack Nicholson in “The Shining.”

Midway isn’t bad, really. Certainly, it gets a lot more done than the cinematic cinder block that was the 1976 historical drama also titled “Midway.”

It’s not a movie, really. It’s a commemorative “Downton Abbey” throw pillow.

Its pace is oddly arrhythmic and the tone is every which way but assured.

It’s a morose sort of screwball comedy with heart, and right there that’s three elements going in related but separate directions.

This material, though, is damn thin. Like so many films derived from the pictures and words of a graphic novel, The Kitchen feels perfunctory and sterile and under-detailed.

How did an apparently sincere tribute turn into such a weirdly clueless vanity project?

Though jarringly violent at times, the film becomes a wash of low-keyed comic attitudes thrown into the works of a crime story.

As stand-alones, some of these work better than others. Director Jon Favreau’s “The Jungle Book” came off as a real movie unto itself, as did Kenneth Branagh’s sincere, well-acted “Cinderella” (I was in the minority on that one). Aladdin, though, feels pointless. It’s cinematic karaoke. It’s an ice show without the ice.

Too often Tolkien lumbers up to its big moments, such as the preposterous climax involving the title character scrambling around the western front, calling out his schoolmate’s name. Fact or fiction isn’t the issue. Either way it plays like hokum.

A fun-for-a-while attempt by writer-director Harmony Korine, American indie cinema’s effrontery kingpin, to go a little bit mainstream. Matthew McConaughey is the reason it’ll get by.

Director James Kent’s pretty, frustrating picture has atmosphere in spades, and a diamond-like sheen, but its tale of hearts aflame is slowly clubbed into submission by an excess of taste.

But Haley Lu Richardson’s in it. She’s excellent. In fact, she’s reliably excellent. In “Five Feet Apart” she goes 10 rounds with dreckdom, and wins. Scene after scene the movie becomes a two-hour demonstration in the art, craft and mystery of what a performer can do to make you believe, in spite of the things they actually have to say.

A satisfying heist movie, animated or live-action, requires more selectivity and less clutter than this one. The movie dashes by door after door, but it lacks the key.

The script by Jordan and Ray Wright, from Wright’s story, wastes little time in getting to what “Fatal Attraction” enthusiasts might call the bunny-boiling bits. But the movie frustrates. And it squanders Huppert, which really is a waste.

There’s not much kick to Isn’t It Romantic, even after it goes over the rainbow. It gets by, and commercially it may well be a modest hit — but has more to do with Valentine’s Day timing than the film itself.

It’s a choppy, frustrating affair, periodically bailed out by some very good actors.