Mike Ryan

Most of The Commuter is a pretty fun ride.

Making this installment complicated is it doesn’t have an ending. It literally ends during the middle of a scene. After 2 hours and 20 minutes of Fast action, even I was taken aback when the credits started to roll.

I think Spaceman itself is maybe just a couple tweaks away from being something truly special. But, as is, it’s kind of this oddball movie that I’m glad exists and I truly think Sandler is really terrific.

It has a killer premise, yet the movie seems to actively resent its own fantastic idea and just, instead, decided to become a fairly average romantic comedy — only with a lot more Beatles songs than the average rom com.

Look, I’m not a scientist, but, again, chances are, during this movie, you will just run out of adrenaline. Your body will say, “sorry, tapped out, you’re on your own.” So my advice is you might want to pre-schedule in some time for a nap right after. Please make more movies with real stunts. Please make more movies like Ambulance.

At the end of the day (or, anytime of the day, really) I think I admire Aquaman more than I like it. It’s certainly ambitious.

The Lion King is a monumental achievement of technological advancement. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

It’s just a really long, more coherent version of that story. I certainly didn’t hate it like I hate the prior version – and, admittedly, I do like it more than Batman v Superman – but all the character motivation in the world still doesn’t help the foundation the whole thing is built on.

What’s remarkable about Good Joe Bell is Wahlberg plays the role in such a nuanced way, by the end of the movie you want that rousing speech. But it never comes.

So what we have here is a coked-out bear on a murder spree and, honestly, it’s literally everything I would want from a movie called Cocaine Bear.

Though, yes, by nature the story does have to be a little convoluted after the events of T2 (and this time, it’s basically just a whole new evil entity), but Linda Hamilton is Terminator. And that’s why Terminator: Dark Fate is the best Terminator movie since T2.

This movie, hot damn. It just does not care. I can’t help but respect all of this. Please create an honorary Oscar for The Beekeeper.

There were times it felt like The Rise of Skywalker was put together by reading angry reddit boards, just throwing in anything a fan might possibly want to see. It really is baffling.

Detective Pikachu is one of those movies where, for about half the movie, I was trying to force myself to like it, until I just gave up. I kind of got the sense a lot of people around me were doing the same thing.

Most of the film involves meeting yet another new character, then being told yet another long story about his or her mysterious past. At times, The Crimes of Grindelwald feels more like some sort of Harry Potter encyclopedia or appendices than it does an actual movie.

The Spy Who Dumped Me does an effective job of putting these two outsiders into the world of a violent action movie, but then the plot of the action movie has some truly head-scratching scenes. But, whatever. This is an August movie and Kunis and McKinnon are funny and that’s what you’re paying to see.

The biggest problem with Skyscraper is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

Look, I am in desperate need for entertainment and if Trolls World Tour is all you’re selling, well, right now, I’m buying. And here’s another thing: I like everything right now. There are no bad movies. If your piece of entertainment can knock off a couple hours of my day, that’s literally all I’m asking for right now.

Even though there are some fun scenes with The Marvels trio, I’d be hard-pressed to recommend this to anyone who isn’t an MCU superfan. Again, even *I* was a bit lost with the latest in the Kree and Skrull political relationships — I felt lost by it all and I’ve seen every movie. I bet a pretty straightforward plot involving the main three characters would have gone a long way.

If this movie was going to hit with people, I think I would be one of them. I know the people in this movie. Many of the people remind me of people in my own family. But it didn’t hit. Again, I don’t know who Hillbilly Elegy is for. Well, except maybe J.D. Vance.

The good news is you get about an hour of a movie that could be deemed “entertaining” or “enjoyable.” The bad news is, after that first hour (and like so many movies inexplicably do today), someone decided, “Look, hear me out, what if about halfway through we make this movie super convoluted? Like to the point it would be hard to explain the plot to anyone?” And then someone else decided, “Yes, that’s exactly what we should do.”

Both McGregor and Hawke seem to be having a nice time with each other. Part road trip movie, part “watch these two knuckleheads do wacky things because of their anger and grief,” they contemplate each other well, to the point I hope they make more movies together.

Look, I get it, scripted films are not documentaries. And, sometimes, creative license has to be used to move a story forward. But I’ve never seen a film distort its facts in such a punitive way. It’s like the movie wants to punish Freddie Mercury.

Yes, this movie is so stupid! But that seems to be the point. And Serkis knows the heart of these movies is the relationship between Eddie and Venom.

I’m not sure who a faithful adaptation of The Call of the Wild would even be for in 2020. Instead, we get a pleasant movie about Harrison Ford having a nice time, laughing it up with his dog pal – and I really can’t imagine a better way to tell this story than that.

It’s just filled with a lot of stupid characters who all do stupid things to the point that the “plot” is just some crazy afterthought of nonsense. What a mess.

Irresistible could have been something that was just a pleasant enough, throwaway comedy – and it feels like that for most of its running time. If only Stewart read his own word, “resist,” and resisted that ending – that urge to try to turn this movie into something it just isn’t.

It’s not as good as the first Shazam movie, which explored what it’s like to be a superhero when, in reality, you’re still just a kid. In this sequel, that aspect is still mentioned quite a bit, but not really explored.