Peter Travers

Jokester Karl Urban leads a cast of battling gamer brawlers against a plot that doesn’t exist. No matter. All you need to love it is blind devotion

Forget anything new. Director Renny Harlin is merely spitpolishing his same old bag of shark tricks. But the dude knows how to deliver assembly line product like nobody’s business.

Jason Segel and Samara Weaving get laughs, but their murder comedy is total tonal chaos.

This sugarcoated and sanctified biopic sees Michael Jackson as a creative musical genius with a terminal case of arrested development. Except for the glorious music and star Jaafar Jackson, this is an insight-free gloss on a life minus anything raw, relatable and scandal adjacent.

Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel are dynamite in a pop rock opera from director David Lowery that wins points for visuals and suffers from a terminal case of grandiosity

Rushed off to Netflix when theaters are readily available, this fitfully competent “Jaws” ripoff will have to do until the real thing comes along. Condolences to leading lady Phoebe Dynevor who deserved better.

In this romcom that evaporates while you’re watching it, a mismatched Halle Bailey and Regé-Jean Page fight a losing battle to outshine the scenery.

Even when the laughs evaporate in the final stretch, Gaten Matarazzo and Sean Giambrone know how to breathe comic life into a stoner buddy comedy that’s high on its own shitfaced supply.

Peachy for fans and painful for newbies, this animated joyride is on the run for box-office glory. So what if doesn’t have an ending. It just stops as if totally exhausted. Now that I can relate to.

If you need to spot the narcissist lurking behind a friend or lover, this Maria Tomei bonbon may be just instructional romcom you’re looking for. Or maybe not.

A zowie Zazie Beetz takes a fiery axe to anyone who messes with her sister, but we’ve seen it all before and better. Boring is too small a word to hold the heaps of tedium that come with relentless repetition of kill scenes where no one dies

This animated tale of a grumpy fish is as bland as blueberries, yet some wonder if sad Mr. Fish can inspire suicidal thoughts. Nah. Positive messaging swims will all these fishes.

In his final film, James Van der Beek raises the bar on a standard-issue thriller through the sheer force of his talent and magnetism.

Maika Monroe brings battered heart and soul to a Colleen Hoover soap opera that renders “big” emotions with the small details that make them count.

Cillian Murphy’s gangster icon Tommy Shelby makes his big-screen debut in a standalone film that can’t stand up against the great series that spawned it. For all its entertaining fan service, it’s an unnecessary coda to an unforgettable TV classic.

Despite Christian Bale and a wow Jessie Buckley as Frankenstein and his missus, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s big swing at remaking a horror classic is a hot, unholy mess. One caveat: no one who still values artistic risk should dream of missing it.

Watching Lesley Manville and Ciarán Hinds is usually time well spent, but this woebegone wintery love story makes you want to jump into an Amsterdam canal.

In this sadly stunted comic thriller, a delightfully depraved Glen Powell must kill seven of his family members to inherit $28 billion. Would you? By the end, the film’s lockstep quality commits the worst crime of all by killing our interest.

This hoop dreams animation romp from producer Steph Curry isn’t NBA quality, but it gets the job done for family fun. The inclusivity messaging abut teamwork is laid on thick, but still worthwhile for immature audiences of all ages.

Margot Robbie and Jacob Eloridi get steamy in Emerald Fennell’s overheated but undercooked take on Emily Brontë’s classic Gothic romance in which they suck each other’s faces with a wild, porny abandon that would shock Victorians. No complaints here.

The bloodsucking Count is back again, but this time in a strangely bloodless love story that even wickedly seductive fangboy Caleb Landry Jones can’t save from the cliché stockpile.

See this romcom for the soft side of Kevin James as a jilted groom in Roma and Italian scenery that’s gorgeous in any language. That’s the only way to come out ahead.

The visuals dazzle, the plotting not so much in this gender-switched take on “Hamlet” as a warrior princess revenge epic from Japanese anime master Mamoru Hosoda.

Props to Charli xcx for grabbing her brat moment at Sundance. The dance-pop princess shows real acting potential, even though this misbegotten mockumentary gives her few chances to show her range.

In this slow but touching biopic, Claire Foy excels as an academic who buries her grief about her father’s death by caring for a predator goshawk, so both can relearn to fly.

Maika Monroe plays a drug dealer facing off with her rodeo champ dad Troy Kotsur in a by-the-numbers thriller minus any real thrills. It’s the hints of a better film—fiercer, funnier, more attuned to a woman’s point of view—that nag at you.

As killer ape movies go, this one’s a bloody wonder—it’s too bad no one bothered to add plot, character or a reason to care

Before it reverts to moldy zombie tropes, this low-budget, no-frills survival thriller puts a fresh spin on the familiar thanks to Daisy Ridley as a human living among the walking dead.

Kate Winslet makes her directing debut with a script written by her 22-year-old son and acted by A-listers who, try as they might, can’t save it from dying-at-Christmas clichés.

It sounds pretty cheesy and sometimes it’s a whole cheese wheel, but Hugh Jackman and especially Kate Hudson sing and act their hearts out.

Jack Black and Paul Rudd can’t carry the unbearable weight of massive missteps in this comic remake of the 1997 snake movie that was always funnier when it tried to be serious.

What was once riveting now feels rote. What once made us want more of the same now makes us eager for the shock of the new.

Do Hollywood suits think we want nothing more from a Christmas movie than to feed on the dead carcass of an undeserving horror franchise? The scary part is they may be right.

There’s not a twist you can’t see coming, but thanks to Kiefer Sutherland and a cast of up-for-anything actors, this trifle goes down easy and leaves a smile on your face for the holidays that might just last all season long.

A charming Elizabeth Olsen must choose between two men in the afterlife. The trouble with this often-beguiling romp is that it takes an eternity to wrap up. Too bad no one ever learns how to quit while they’re ahead.

The sequel barely makes the grade as holiday fun, but wash it down with holiday cheer, put your brain on low power, let forgiveness into your heart and it’s—sound the trumpets—passable.

Brendan Fraser excels as a failed American actor adrift in Japan. Is his film a shameless soap opera or a far flintier look at human frailty? It’s more like both.

Jesse Eisenberg and his magician crew plan a diamond heist, but slinky, shady Rosamund Pike steals this zircon of a movie

What to do when a great actor is stuck in a not-so-great movie? You bite the bullet and watch anyway for Russell Crowe at his cunning, commanding best as Hermann Göring, a Nazi whose soft-pedaled narcissism gives him gobs of unearned confidence. Enough to fool his shrink (Rami Malek) and the tribunal judges at Nuremberg? That’s the idea.

This intriguing fraction of a biopic rises above a clumsy script and stagnant direction on the strength of watching rock icon Bruce Springsteen, admirably played by Jeremy Allen White, show depression who’s the boss.

Keanu Reeves is an angel of fun in this bright but tonally broken Aziz Ansari comedy about the hell of living in a gig economy.

Ethan Hawke brings back the mask that launched a thousand screams in a tricky treat of a horror sequel that’s perfect for Halloween

Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst find the heart but not the soul in a true-life crime drama that should have cut deeper and hurt more.

There’s good reason to throw stones at Luca Gaudagnino’s teasing provocation about cancel culture. So have at its dawdling, blowhard, philosophical pretensions, but the film—riding on the power source that is Julia Roberts—stubbornly lingers in the memory.

It’s a promising premise—a nerdy CIA decoder (Rami Malek) turns unlikely action hero when his wife (Rachel Brosnahan) is murdered by terrorists—but the movie promises more than it delivers in terms of suspense, escalating tension and a reason for being.

The comic pairing of Jack Black and Jason Momoa makes this video game-turned-PG-movie pablum seem better than the cash grab it is. But not by much. Still, there’s no shame in being strictly kids’ stuff that knows how to serve and entertain its audience.

Charm magnets Jenna Ortega and Paul Rudd do their best to lift this horror comedy out of the quicksand of cliches that surround it but it’s a losing proposition.

This psychological thriller about a demonic hand puppet only works in fits and starts. But watching virtuoso actors John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush let their freak flags fly as nursing home patients in a fight to the death is a blast of fun and fright to make you squirm.

Theo James plays twin brothers on the run from a toy monkey with blood-splattering murder on its mind. Director Oz Perkins doesn’t disappoint with his ferociously funny take on Stephen King’s short story even if he never reaches the horror heights.

For all its imperfections and borrowed horror inspirations, this cheeky romcom scarefest is still one movie Valentine that delivers the goods for shudders and cuddles.

Amy Adams excels as a stay-at-home mom going so crazy in confinement that she turns into a feral dog in protest. It’s a daring idea until the script chickens out as a ferocious feminist fable and sinks into cotton-candy quicksand. Bummer

Angelina Jolie fires up the best actress Oscar race as opera legend Maria Callas, but director Pablo Larraín's muffled cinematic take on the prima donna’s last days commits the cardinal sin that Callas never did as an artist by leaving us on the outside looking in.

Set against the German bombing of London, Steve McQueen stirring WW2 epic misses greatness by failing to fully engage with the starker, deeper implications of seeing war through the eyes of a mixed-race child facing an evil that’s scarily close to home

Neither a filmed play nor an actual movie, the muddled screen version of August Wilson’s great drama about systemic wrongs against Black America is a mixed bag but also a stirring promise from producer Denzel Washington and his family to preserve the work of a theatrical master.

Here’s a sequel we did not need, trapping stars Joaquin Phoenix and the glorious Lady Gaga in a joyless musical retread of moldy ideas. Talk about sucking the life out of a party. Says she to Joker during a fantasy scene, "Come on, baby, let's give the people what they want." I'm still waiting.

With so little to show for its staggering ambition to synthesize modern New York with the fall of the Roman Empire, Francis Ford Coppola's all-star, self-financed passion project is a mess, but the lion who made it is still roaring, even in winter.

Jason Reitman energetically tracks the lead-up to the first episode of SNL in 1975, but the result is only fitfully funny, leaving the cast struggling to register. Best in show are Dylan O'Brien as Dan Aykroyd, Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase and Nicholas Braun in a surprise dual role.

Beauty can be an ugly business so it’s too bad this tense, fitfully funny satire about vanity scammers only goes skin deep. But it’s all flowers for Elizabeth Banks who is sheer bonkers perfection as a cosmetics control freak losing control.

The mostly improvised drama about a trans man reuniting with his family can feel clumsy and contrived, but it soars on waves of raw feeling thanks to the deeply felt, deeply moving performance of Elliot Page in a role he wears like a second skin.

Fighting their way out of the flowery tearjerking in the film version of Colleen Hoover’s mega-bestseller are a timely movie and a stellar Blake Lively performance that both take measure of domestic violence and the women who get to decide when enough is enough.

Since heist movies are a dime a dozen, don’t get your hopes up. But thanks to the easy chemistry between Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, there is the kick of an acting job well done.

This 1960s-era soap opera is less a movie than an excuse for Oscar-winners Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain to dress to thrill and try to kill each other. With stars like these, you can almost forget how quickly the plot drifts off into absurdity.

Is it a great movie? Nah. It's too slick a Marvel package for that, with surprisingly meh special effects and an energy that’s more desperation than inspiration. But stars Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman are willing to bust a gut to make you laugh. So there’s that.

Eddie Murphy is 63 now and sometimes the jokes seem just as retirement ready, but seeing the this comic legend return to the cop role he created four decades ago—along with many of the old gang— at least squeaks by as primo fan service.

Sure it repeats everything it did the last three times, but thanks to Steve Carell’s lovable grump of a Gru and those wild and crazy Minions, the random lunacy remains hard to resist.

Costner’s real reverence for the classic western dances with disaster by passing off the first of his four-part saga as epic filmmaking instead of a trio of speechifying, clumsily linked one-hour episodes that play like a TV series with no direction home.

The fourth round for Will Smith and Martin Lawrence isn’t a bad movie, really, just another mediocrity trying to cash in on what came before, the kind of money grab that’s killing movies by serving leftovers as the main course. Resist, people, before it's too late.

While this sanitized and superficial Amy Winehouse biopic flounders around in search of focus, new star Marisa Abela gives her blazing all to capturing the late singer’s short, turbulent life and lasting art with stunning ferocity and feeling.

No. 10 in the series proves there’s still life, artful cosplay and action monkeyshines in the ape-verse that began in 1968, but a worrying case of franchise fatigue is sneaking in. Whatever happened to quitting while you're ahead?

Mean tweets 1920 version: The incomparable Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley turn a flimsy script about poison pen letters that turn friends against each other into irresistible fun. Any resemblance to today’s internet trolling is purely intentional.

Star Jake Gyllenhaal and director Doug Liman huff and puff to reimagine the bawdy B-movie punch of the 1989 original with Patrick Swayze, but despite putting a fresh coat of paint on this rickety old jalopy, there’s still nothing under the hood.

Michael Keaton’s second go as star and director stumbles but rises again on the strength of Keaton’s ability to bring his bristling intelligence as an actor to his work behind camera in this darkly comic film noir about an L.A. hitman losing a fraught battle with dementia.

Ethan Coen’s lesbian road movie, cowritten with his wife Tricia Cooke who identifies as queer, is raucously funny when it doesn’t go slack and make you wish he’d reunite soonest with his sibling Joel for a bit of the old Coen brothers magic that fails to materialize here.

The great Kingsley Ben-Adir catches the spirit of the Jamaican legend who became the face and voice of reggae and the Rastafarian conscience of his people. But this safe, shallow, family-sanctioned biopic only gives us snippets of songs and scraps of a life.

Another Frankenstein throwback (“Poor Things” has nothing to fear) dressed up as a 1980’s teen sex comedy about a goth girl (Kathryn Newton) with the hots for an undead Victorian pianist (Cole Sprouse). Diablo Cody’s devilish script is sadly tamed by a PG-13 rating.

Ariana DeBose and Chris Messina excel in this space thriller that sizzles with Russia vs America tension but all too predictably fizzles into a mild ride that is better than you might expect while falling way short of the wonder it so wants to inspire.

A stirring true story about the triumph of an eight-man rowing crew at the 1936 Olympics fits right into director George Clooney’s old-fashioned love for underdogs, but the exciting races are muted by thinly developed personal dramas that feel pokey and predictable.

It’s a risk doing a prequel to this hit film franchise without the power surge of star Jennifer Lawrence and the safe and sorry result, set 64 years before Lawrence's Katniss Everdeen ever drew breath, is seriously overlong and underwhelming.

Poised between goofy and godawful and plagued by rewrites and reshoots, this 33rd entry in the Marvel cinematic universe is in serious disrepair. The MCU, once the spawner of glories, is stuck in a rut. The time for a rethink is now.

Technically amazing but conceptually old-hat, this sci-fi epic from Gareth Edwards makes a case for artificial intelligence through a bond between a protective human (John David Washington) and a dangerous human simulant packaged as an insanely adorable six-year-old girl. Discuss

The thrills in the first Latino superhero epic from DC Comics are mostly generic but the personal relationships between protagonist Jaime Reyes (a charming Xolo Maridueña) and his irresistibly rowdy and resilient relatives make all the difference. Viva la familia!

There’s nothing new about this queer romance between a president’s son and a prince of England except the way it skips the sorrow to favor the joy. Wishful thinking? Maybe. But for audiences eager to connect instead of divide at the movies, it's about time.

Barbie fever is everywhere, but this botch job about the Beanie Bables—another doll craze from last century—is no collector’s item as it runs off the rails and wastes a terrific cast led by Zach Galifianakis, Elizabeth Banks, Geraldine Viswanathan and Sarah Snook.

It could have been worse, but that’s no excuse for turning an exciting nine-minute theme-park ride into an overlong, star-stuffed 122 minute feature that is only fitfully funny and scary and soon wears out its welcome.

This R-rated sex farce only plays at being dirty. Behind the carnal jokes lurks a Hallmark heart. But a never-friskier or funnier Lawrence, as a 30-ish Uber driver hired to seduce a college-bound kid (terrific newcomer Feldman) is well worth the price of admission. The rest gets a hard pass.

Mad trippy or catastrophic? This DC superhero epic is actually a mix of both, dragged down by exhausting multiverse hopping but flashy fun on the wings of captivating star Ezra Miller and the grumpy comic perfection of Michael Keaton as a Batman on the ropes.

Wait a hot minute here. Can a new Transformers movie actually be bearable? Let’s not get carried away, but a diverse cast and the absence of ham-handed former director Michael Bay qualify as a step in the right direction.

Only glints of the old whiplash magic remain in chapter 10 as thrills give way to thudding formula and paycheck acting—not you Jason Momoa—that slow down the action to forge the limping runt of the F&F litter.

This lively computer-animated take on the video game just opened and it’s already the biggest box-office smash of 2023. Despite lapses into dull and disposable, it’s also a gift for parents seeking family entertainment for the 5-year-old in all of us. Game on.

Before this frightfest chokes on its own relentlessly repetitive blood-splatter, Nicolas Cage proves fiercely funny as a modern-age Dracula whose malignant narcissism sends his errand boy Renfield (a soulful Nicholas Hoult) into therapy for co-dependency.

The tossed-off charm of the original suffers from bloated sequelitis. Still, star Zachary Levi’s comic-book invitation to shake your sillies out will be hard to resist for underserved family audiences.

A bear does cocaine and kills people. That’s it. Director Elizabeth Banks revels in deliciously cheap thrills, but then treats her overqualified actors (Keri Russell, the late Ray Liotta) like bear chewtoys while the overcrowded script drifts into hibernation.

The once playful runt of the Marvel litter has come down with a case of bloated excess and despite the ever-likable Paul Rudd as Ant-Man and a pow villain in Jonathan Majors, the third time is not the charm for a sequel that ignores its own cardinal rule -- less is more.

Despite the lusty efforts of Channing Tatum and Salma Hayek Pinault, stripper Mike’s final whirl is a pale, generic copy of the wow that was. The new focus on female empowerment is admirable, but gender politics are no substitute for naked, guiltless bliss.

As always, Tom Hanks is in there pitching, but this time it’s mostly softballs. The cliched plot about a reformed grumpy old man is so obvious you can see it from outer space.

Christian Bale tries to solve a murder at West Point, circa 1830, with the help of young cadet Edgar Allen Poe (Harry Melling). But what should be a gothic mesmerizer ends up a dreary exercise to doom and gloom that’s an endurance test for audiences.

Noah Baumbach thonors Don DeLillo’s virtuoso 1985 novel about the comic-absurdist chaos of consumerism with a too cautious respect. The result is his most constricted film which only breaks free when he allows costars Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig to fly on their own wings.

A dynamite Naomi Ackie acts and lip-synchs her heart out as the legendary songbird, but Whitney deserved a much better movie than this patchwork, cobbled-together biopic that barely skims the professional highs and personal lows that made up her tragically short life.