Richard Whittaker

The best moments are when Keery and Campbell get to be blue collar schlubs facing down these messy menaces. Maybe if there was more of their back-and-forth and less of Neeson and Torchia’s distant double act, or vice versa, then Cold Storage might balance between its gruesome and goofy aspects.

For all of Elordi’s mutton-chopped brooding and Robbie’s vamping, there’s something shallow and glib about “Wuthering Heights.” Yet again, the psychosexual classic tragedy has been turned into a well-crafted mass-market potboiler.

Call it what it is: Luc Besson’s Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a copy of a copy.

Making a movie about how annoyed you were that your label tried to force you to make a concert movie is just 103 minutes of Charli xcx relitigating an argument she already won, just with added product placement.

The result is something that feels like an adult’s idea of a sophisticated kids’ movie, its sense of adventure and imagination overruled and undercut by its tone of mature melancholy.

Raimi plays with the audience’s loyalties, making the insufferable Brad increasingly sympathetic and Linda more unhinged and despicable by the minute. Yet ultimately Send Help devolves into two awful people being awful to each other for two hours.

In Cold Light is far better constructed and executed than its generic, straight-to-video title might imply, but it’s too monotonous – in the literal meaning of the word – to reach its aspirations or to really use its cast.

Prows lets all those subplots divert him from saying something meaningful about how even the best-intentioned of cops end up part of a nightmare machine. Luckily, the plentiful and creative gore splatters enough blood and ichor to provide camouflage disguising those shortcomings. Or rather, enough to make Night Patrol entertaining – just not enough to completely obfuscate what it could have been.

For all the effort that Van Sant and his team put into making Dead Man’s Wire look like 1970s Indianapolis, its ability to really summon the spirit of the era only goes skin deep.

We Bury the Dead is already too slow and mournful to pass as popcorn entertainment, and it’s rarely quite thoughtful enough to bring its art house horror aspirations to life.

True, the odd quill may scratch the surface, but there’s nothing really penetrating.

Rønning doesn’t seem confident in his storytelling acumen, relying instead on running narration provided by real-life TV anchors cold-reading the least convincing announcements this side of a Fox News host talking about Portland.

These digressions aren’t enough to build anything like a real conversation about the Austin-made classic. There needs to be something more.

It feels like Glander was hoping to create something that all the former kids that grew up on Cartoon Network’s wild, weird era will gravitate towards. But the reality is that it’s not as bizarre, creative, transgressive, or even just plain entertaining as the average episode of The Amazing World of Gumball, and that was about a 12-year-old cat boy and his fish friend.

Luckily, Ne Zha II still retains the charm of the best parts of the original, with the young rapscallion Nezha still a hyperactive bundle of mischief, hand stuffed down his pants like Dennis the Menace, waddling through jade palaces as he defies his destiny. May he stay as chaotically endearing for the inevitable part III.

It’s rare to say about a contemporary film, but maybe it could gain from a little didacticism, a little lecturing, a little clarity to ensure that its muddied purpose becomes clearer. Instead, its idiosyncrasies obscure its insights.

The real engine that keeps the movie moving isn’t the cliched script or the spectacular race footage. It’s Pitt.

With M3GAN out of her recognizable body for most of the film, it becomes clear how much of the success of both films comes down to Davis’ delivery.

If only Fight or Flight knew that what it does best is hectic mayhem then maybe it wouldn’t be such a bumpy ride.

Peeking its head out from this pile of trash is the ghost of one of the year’s most wildly entertaining movies.

Misericordia feels like a big metaphysical shrug, sluggish to the point of lethargy.

It’s hard to blame the actors for not grasping the tone when it seems to elude the filmmakers.

There’s an important message in here, especially when it comes to the financial inequality between men and women in sports. But rather than using the 17-year-old Shields’ pugnacious attitude to really explore how she landed body blows on the sexist establishment, The Fire Inside just ends up shadow boxing.

Even compared to his last film, the bifurcated dual character studies of In Our Day, A Traveler’s Needs feels less like a completed movie and more like an acting exercise.

Oppenheimer never quite embraces the absurdity and madness of his own proposition, and instead engages in a surprisingly flat tragicomedy of manners.

In his three-acts-and-an-epilogue structure, Guadagnino inserts more story than Burroughs intended, and Queer becomes aimless.

There’s none of the visceral artfulness that Scott managed in the original. Quite simply, if you can’t make man-on-baboon hand-to-hand combat interesting, why do you think you can make a sword fight fun?

In George’s odyssey, McQueen attempts to emulate and skewer the classic British boys’ own adventures by juxtaposing it with social realism, but it ends up divided between the two instincts. Blitz is also burdened by a surprisingly leaden script filled with paper-thin Cockney stereotypes.