Oliver Jones

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.

A gentle yet high-caliber mash-up of Sartre and Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket, Carmichael’s film is irreverent, serious, and heartrendingly sad in ways so crushingly honest that the unlikely outcome is spiritual uplift.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dual can occasionally feel like a one-joke film that never bothers to be funny, or where the comedy comes off as so arch that it lands as something else entirely.

Stan’s trip to the moon may fade into the ether, but his ride down the highway with his brothers and sisters, all of them unsecured on the flatbed of a pickup truck is so brimming with immediacy that it won’t even matter.

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.

The pace is always zippy but rarely hyper, and there is just enough space for the film’s many emotional beats to resonate.

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.

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.

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.

Zhao keeps these far-reaching propositions grounded through the laser-like focus of her vision and the precision of the images dreamed up by her and veteran MCU lensman Ben Davis. For once in a movie like this, ocean waves and cloudscapes carry as much weight as the ultra-choreographed battles between intergalactic interlopers.

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.

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.

It’s not for everybody, and it’s far from perfect, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more thrillingly necessary use of the filmmaking form this year.

Marvel's latest movie feels just as sanitized and safe as its other products, even with its killer cast and talented director Destin Daniel Cretton.

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

Even the film’s copious weaknesses are a reason to smile, taking us back to both the series’ B-movie roots and to less fraught periods in our lives.

By the time Wright’s somewhat exhaustive film concluded, every moment of it propelled by a high-octane geeky affection that felt like a newly discovered alternative fuel, I was in the strange duo’s thrall.

By shining the light on Stone, Agrelo’s movie rightfully makes a national hero out of a historical footnote.

For a movie that pulses with joyful expressiveness and brims with possibility, there is a tragic undertone to Ailey.

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

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.

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

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

Yes, it’s a bit helter-skelter, but it is also an adequately enjoyable and untaxing way to kill off a couple of hours.