Oliver Jones

You feel the late genius through the way Day carries her body, so lissome yet creaking with the weight of both her talent and addiction. The Rise Up singer not only matches our imagination’s version of Holiday, but somehow beats it: she seems so present yet ethereally sozzled in a manner that suggests she may be operating on another plane.

In its best moments, The King’s Man feels like you and your friends have just dumped out your great grandfather’s dusty crate of tin soldiers to create a game that has no rules whatsoever beyond doing something ridiculous. But the movie’s politics? Ugh. They are the cinematic equivalent of your British uncle complaining about cabbies with foreign accents or claiming that Brexit didn’t go nearly far enough.

The film itself plays like an extended riff on the famous scene where the Frankenstein monster befriends a little girl.

Instead, we just sort of soak in the despondency, like lukewarm water in a half-filled hot tub. While sometimes touching, the results of this noble experiment lack dynamism. Eventually whatever is fresh about the approach is undercut by a familiar will-the-man-child-finally-grow-up trope that has made some of Apatow’s lesser films feel insular and self-indulgent.

With its stunning John Ford-like vistas of a corpse laden Sahara and a vast Mediterranean Sea empty of aid vessels to help an immigrant ship overburdened with desperate and sick North Africans, Garrone has—on the surface—made a lush and monumentally disturbing feature-length commercial for staying home.

This dumpling and rocket-fueled contraption continues to employ the same seemingly unstoppable one-two punch: a steady drubbing of painterly and balletic cartoon violence and the unbounded—and increasingly turned out—enthusiasm of the series’ resident Zeus of Skadoosh, star Jack Black.

As he has shown in other directorial efforts—most especially 2007’s Gone Baby Gone—Affleck has a real knack for both building narrative momentum and attenuating a film’s emotions until they ascend into a satisfying catharsis.

They came in fleeting glances, befuddled smiles and odd-timed pauses that the iconic pair share with each other before the movie shuffles them from one frenzied and inconsequential story beat to the next. In such stolen moments, you sense the depth of a friendship so profoundly felt and so deeply comforting that you think to yourself, I would follow these guys anywhere.

Dream Scenario might have worked better as a character study, which is clearly what Cage wants it to be.

It is a doom-invoking, cathartic and strangely satisfying head-trip that’s also a bit ridiculous.

While Dauberman is still figuring out how to effectively build suspense (Daniela’s various forays into the Artifact Room seem to take as long as visits to the DMV), he does a good job of varying the types of scares he uses to shock his audience. He also leavens the tension with just the right amount of humor and does well with his recreation of the ’70s.

The series’ trademark blend of character comedy and absurdist sight gags is in full display, served up with just the proper amount of postmodern self-awareness that adds to the fun rather than detracts from it.

Too queer for some, not nearly queer enough for others, Uncle Frank is fated to become the green bean casserole of this holiday’s film streaming options: designed to appeal to everyone, but destined to remain uneaten.

The nostalgia is so thick in Saturday Night, Jason Reitman’s furiously busy paean to the nascent days of SNL, so unrelenting and potent, that eventually it unmoors from the film and begins swallowing its characters whole, like the titular alien in Steve McQueen’s The Blob.

What it lacks in textual depth, it makes up for with the genuine sympathy it evinces for characters that most films would dismiss as stupid, depraved and undeserving of our empathy and concern. Like Freud, Scheinert seems to understand that even people who commit unspeakable acts deserve our understanding.

The honesty of the actors and their commitment to each other bails the movie out. They manage to find truth in a highly manipulative situation, and that’s something even the least stardust-sprinkled among us can appreciate.

Unlike many of the other films of its ilk, The Rhythm Section never feels the need to move beyond Stephanie’s sadness and sense of loss. This is really a tragedy thriller more than it is a revenge thriller.

This is a movie that’s back-loaded to the extreme: all of its action takes place in the last 20 minutes. Not that Leigh would ever be confused with Tarantino, but it would have been considerably more engaging to have started with the main event and moved backwards to how we got there.

While Vengeance doesn’t always rise to the level of its ambitions, it is admirable to see Novak spit acid towards the privilege systems that make careers like his possible...But by repeating the same reductive and representational mistakes of the media it so pointedly criticizes, Novak’s film unwittingly becomes yet another part of the problem.

Godzilla: King of Monsters is a film that seems to paint with sound — sometimes Pop Art, but more often large canvas Jackson Pollock splatter.

The result is a well-intentioned but ultimately torpid film, one that feels much more concerned with saying something important than it is the far more noble task of conveying a compelling story worth telling.

James Gray’s Armageddon Time is the kind of movie you get when a talented filmmaker thinks back upon the painful moments of his childhood and then, after close reflection, decides to remake The 400 Blows.

With her sweet face, alert eyes, and a tail that forever waves in the air like a maestro’s baton, this is a dog worth following, no matter the breed.

Trevorrow does not add one fresh idea to this franchise. We are simply too far along in this technological revolution to think that the computer generated creatures themselves are enough, no matter how artfully they are arranged.

All of this furious, empty noise keeps reminding you that you’re watching a cheesy horror film that is not confident enough in the story it’s telling to avoid succumbing to old tricks.

The first of Kevin Costner’s monumentally ambitious four-part western cycle, Horizon: An American Saga, Chapter One is a vivid reminder of how rousing an experience it is to see a grandly produced epic in that most American of all genres, while falling well short of actually being that experience.

Rarely if ever has a film ostensibly about and informed by cinema been so thoroughly un-cinematic...And un-emotional: that spark of love is also missing in action. Perhaps this is why the film chose to drop the question mark from its title. If it had been posed as a query, the answer would have been, no, not nearly enough.

Every good magician knows that the real trick is making the audience care. For all of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’s mind-bending universe jumping, that particular magic never manages to arrive in the theater.

Like a stack of silver dollar pancakes at IHOP, Bad Dads is more a collection of episodic situations — one at a school fundraiser, the next at a desert casino — rather than a traditional movie. It’s a structure that reinforces the feeling that you are watching a sitcom that has been fused together rather than a movie.

It’s diluted, a little flat, but sweet and familiar enough to evoke long ago memories, if not quite strong enough to give you a reason to bother to remember.

The new film never lags and some of the sturdiest elements from the original — namely the catchy and descriptive tunes by Alan Menken, Howard Ashman and Tim Rice — remain every bit as strong as they were in 1992.

It is a visually enthralling, high-gloss commercial for state power and repressive constructs. This is a product precisely tooled to be what the global marketplace demands of entertainment that is this expensive to make—a win for capitalism that will leave many filmgoers who found a powerful reflection of themselves in the original film feeling like they’ve lost something important and essential.

Which points us to the real issue with this film and so many like it. These super heroic and super histrionic spectacles are multiplying so rapidly that they are recycling their own tropes at such a rate that it is almost impossible to be surprised anymore.

This is a movie where the characters utter the word “weird” enough times to fill an Advent calendar; in truth, the only thing that’s actually weird about it is how middle-of-the-road and mild it is.

The real issue undermining Durkin’s sophomore effort is central to the weaving of the film’s conceit. It looks like a horror movie, swims like a horror movie, and quacks like a horror movie, but it isn’t a horror movie. So then what the hell is it? Good question. After a long, slow build-up, The Nest winds up being as vacant as the Surrey country house of the title, and leaves the viewers feeling every bit as empty.

From its gas-passing piranha (voiced by In the Heights’ Anthony Ramos) to its reliance on phrases like “butt rock” and “grumpy pants” that seem grown in a lab to make the 12-and-under set giggle, the movie plays its target audience like a fiddle.

Pixar’s Elemental is a movie about failing infrastructure, though that may make it sound more interesting than it actually is.

So much of Eastwood’s career over the last two decades has proven that his age and experience has incredible cinematic value when he holds himself to the high standards he set for himself years ago. When he doesn’t, which is sadly the case with Cry Macho, the uninspired results leave you with wistful memories of what once was.

Music video director Director X, making his feature debut, presents it all in a compelling and often intoxicating manner. There is something narcotic and languid about his pacing and camera work that feels purposeful and stylistic when the script is focused but comes off as stumbling and haphazard when the story looses momentum, which is often.

Landing in multiplexes more than a year late after some business reshuffling and rewrites (not a good idea for your bad guys to be Ukrainian gangsters at this moment in history), Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre is a slick and empty-headed spy thriller that is almost instantly forgettable.

If he weren’t voiced by a mellow and serene Kevin Costner, Enzo would sound like Martin Short’s old Ed Grimley character, only with Formula One replacing Pat Sajak and Wheel of Fortune as his object of obsession.

It’s also the kind of storyline that gives quite a bit of cover to the film’s lesser attributes—namely its general small-mindedness and squishy moral logic.

Instead, by reshaping this charged moment culled from somewhat recent American history in his own image, Sorkin has made The Trial of the Chicago 7 about something else entirely: himself.

What the film does effectively is revitalize Welles’ work by viewing it through the lens of media consolidation, government repression of art and leftist thinkers, and social justice.

A film that is part infidelity drama and part slasher film while never fully committing to either idea.

Without the grounding of richly drawn characters and burdened by ideas that reflect Pentagon policy papers of the late 1980s rather than our current world, Without Remorse has the feeling of product rather than cinema — just another polished, consumer-facing, slightly stale gizmo scooting down the virtual Amazon assembly line.

To be successful in confronting, understanding and dismantling the institutional homophobia that continues to be a cancer in American life requires depth, perspective, and a sense of inquiry—three qualities in short supply in The Inspection.

The enterprise snaps to life only sporadically, primarily when its well-chosen character actors manage to steal moments of vitality away from the profound indifference that surrounds them.

The Banker is a sadly facile and largely surface level rendering of a profoundly complex problem that deserves more attention.

Despite the lofty and even admirable aspirations of this particular entrant to the ever-growing genre, what it has to offer bears little difference from all the rest: namely, a couple of really bad nights in a very bad house.

While the presence of both Law and Depp is a little distracting — the film could also be called "The Proxy War of the Long in the Tooth Former Hotties" — the acting is generally strong. But here the film’s best assets are also criminally underused.

Both the songs (once again written by two-time Oscar-winners Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez) and the relationships between the characters — strong points of the original film — register with less energy and originality this time around.

To its credit, the latest and seemingly last Guardians installment— which at times can feel like a Spotify playlist in search of a movie— mostly manages to drown out the corporate exhaustion of its parent company with copious and often inspired needle drops, even more hit-or-miss one-liners, and a visual playfulness that recalls actual comic books.

By presenting this crucial cultural phenomenon in a staid documentary form and in the reverent tone of a hushed docent, The League has the unintentional impact of making Black baseball seem like ancient rather than living history.

The net effect of all this techno-philosophic yackety-yak is the not altogether pleasant feeling that you are simultaneously watching a movie while being trapped in an elevator with someone desperate to explain what it’s all about and why you should like it.

If Spider-Man Far from Home is a triumph, as many will argue and its box office will undoubtedly confirm, it is a triumph of capitalism, not art. It is the film’s fervent hope that we, as consumers, are starting to lose our ability to tell the difference.

We end up spending way too much time running over the same old ground. What have we found? The same old fear.

Words are generally a problem for Dolittle—a fatal flaw when your picture is about talking animals. While the words are abundant, most are either perfunctory exposition or anachronistic jokes that fall flatter than the state of Nebraska.

No one was expecting Midnight Run level repartee from Hobbs and Shaw, but is it too much to ask for a bit more than the who-has-a-bigger-penis stuff we get here?

Heretic’s fatal flaw lies in its very conceit. The film seems to have forgotten that when playing cat-and-mouse games, the cat, at least, is meant to be having fun. Here no one is—not Grant and least of all, not us.

Despite its title, Onward is a regressive film, sometimes painfully so.

The movie exists between prestige and genre (or two genres, really, as it morphs in its final third from an escaped fugitive picture to a war movie), yet it can’t quite grasp either the elevated emotion of prestige or the snap of the genre.

The often-stilted dialogue of the teenage protagonists doesn’t fare much better. As a result, many of the performances from the seemingly talented cast come off as stiff and stagey.

Like many third iterations, this one shows signs of the creative team growing bored with what made the story worth telling in the first place.

It is the Oscar winner’s most affected performance to date, which is truly saying something when you consider that she has already played both Katherine Hepburn and Bob Dylan.

Exhaustion of every sort pervades Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. You see it in its dearth of ideas, as the film recycles structure, set pieces and even music cues from the original.

It would be easy to put the blame here on the two stars; expect a lot of misguided chatter about Nanjiani and Rae’s lack of chemistry. But if they deserve blame, it is in their capacity as co-executive producers who approved production on the anemic and half-baked script.

The best of what The Lion King offers is a somewhat technically up-to-date and generally well-voiced reworking of the familiar, but nothing surprising or vital. There is certainly nothing in the least bit urgent about director Jon Favreau’s new telling.

Indeed, considering its trippy visuals and leaden dialog, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil would work much better with the sound turned off (the music is as ubiquitous as it is unremarkable) and Dark Side of the Moon or a bootleg of a Dead show blasting on the stereo.

While The Hummingbird Project may not be reap the benefits of a 13-episode season, at times, watching this dramatically flaccid tale of late-cycle capitalism run amok feels that long to get through.

The extent to which the film fails to deliver on the B-movie promise of its title is staggering and, given the high-quality cast and crafts people stooping to concur on behalf of the film’s high-wire and harebrained premise, it is borderline tragic.

There’s little weight, not much style and even less sense to the psychological terror The Woman in the Window attempts to inflict.

The main issue is the script. The tale it tells is shopworn.

This is a movie that talks endlessly about emotion but displays none of it — and the same can be said for all that destiny chatter.

The filmmakers’ attempts to play around with the concept of the unlikely action hero are only moderately successful.

Most filmgoers will come away only mildly convinced of Bolden’s place as jazz’s inventor and even less sure that the movie they just saw spun a coherent or compelling narrative.

It will more than likely meet fans’ expectations for what they want in a Mortal Kombat movie but will fall short of exceeding them.

Things really have to be precisely calibrated for comedy to work amidst all of this vicious violence—blood pours from eye sockets, gushes from neck arteries, and spouts from nearly decapitated heads—but no such luck. Instead, a talented ensemble of actors must stumble their way through chaotic tone shifts and declarations of irony that feel both uninspired and cruel.

Phil is the only puppet character that registers at all, which is one of the countless ways that the movies falls short of the legacy it is meant to expand and subvert.

Rich in atmosphere but bereft of new ideas about how to scare an audience, The Nun is like being stuck inside a club with cool decor where the DJ keeps playing the same song over and over again.

Some of the visual horror will no doubt be of interest to genre fans, but even there the appeal is limited. In an age when we are awash in efficient and involving horror movies — from "Halloween" to "A Quiet Place" to even "The Nun" (which is not that great but is at least short) — Suspiria comes off as bloated and disconnected.

It is true that with Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Jason has entered the unofficial family business of trying and failing to recreate the inexplicable magic that made the original Ghostbusters such a frothy delight.

Shockingly un-cinematic and utterly devoid of dynamism, the film lacks anything resembling the well-researched insights or sharp-edged comedy that you have come to associate with the former host of The Daily Show.

The humans in the film are blandly generic. But the yetis, while individually distinct, all share a much larger, troubling problem: they don’t have noses.

It is an absurd premise, one made even more so by its execution, which at the hands of veteran Hollywood thriller director Martin Campbell (the one-time director of Bond films who has been in movie jail since 2011’s Green Lantern) is often lackluster and, on occasion, shockingly inept.

The latest jacked up, action extravaganza from stunt man turned director David Leitch (his last film, the not-very-good Bullet Train, is still leagues ahead of this movie in terms of imagination and execution), teems with contempt for the audience it is desperate to win over.

Forget all of it being true; I would have settled for some of it being interesting.

It’s not just emotion and creative innovation that feels MIA in this installment. The film acts as though it’s edgy, but lacks real bite.

As a self-serious horror drama that fictionalizes the real-life exploits of the late author and Catholic priest Father Gabriele Amorth into an absurdly plotted, blood-drenched haunted house movie, The Pope’s Exorcist arrives in theaters Friday the 14 with all the vitality and vivaciousness of a 15th century corpse.

Add to the long-winded title of this film, “…and completely unnecessary.”

The truth is, the film represents a troubling trend in films today, where production and marketing types think they can get by providing shallow examples of things that are popular in the social justice zeitgeist — women being tough-as-nails lead characters, for example — and act like that’s enough. It’s not. Give us real characters; give us good writing; give us a compelling story. Otherwise, don’t bother.

The movie has nary a thought in its red-hooded head, only a lot of blood.

Inheritance has not one iota of the thematic intensity of Bong’s film, nor any of the dynamic relationships that make Succession’s twists and turns impactful. Instead, there is nothing much on Inheritance’s mind, and the relationships end up as underdeveloped as the film’s cliché-ridden dialogue.

By the end, Shazam! feels like a corporate product that’s so thirsty for approval from all quadrants that it never ends up figuring out what it is.

The movie spends the bulk of its largely inert runtime painfully unaware that it is an example of the self-indulgent narcissism it’s intended to send up.

After awhile, Last Blood feels less like a new Rambo movie than the latest installment of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

Rarely will you see a more soul-numbingly empty product of this tragic operation than Halloween Kills, a film that so completely sucks the vitality out of John Carpenter’s and Debra Hill’s original vision that one would be tempted to call it a desecration if that didn’t make it sound like more fun than it actually is.

The best thing about reviewing the new PG-13 horror movie The Turning is that you don’t have to worry about spoiling the ending because it doesn’t have one. It just, sort of, stops.