Richard Whittaker

PAW Patrol: The Movie is bigger and prettier than the TV show, but it's still PAW Patrol. What makes it worth the time investment for kids is that it's really about introducing the street-smart long-haired Dachshund Liberty (Martin) into the team, while giving a little drama to Chase's life as he processes some old trauma about being a stray in the big city.

Worse, the Marvels themselves have any potential chemistry drowned like an Atlantean with blocked gills. All the giddy charm of the Ms. Marvel version of Kamala Khan is lost in a torrent of fannish shrieks, while the demand that the audience feel empathy for grown adult Monica Rambeau who's still pouting that Auntie Carol never came back (Auntie Carol, who was literally off saving the cosmos) is wearisome.

Where so many queer creature features attempt to refract and reframe fairy tale tropes, Jae Matthews' script for My Animal is intriguing because there's always the threat of the real world at the edges.

Under the gentle hand of Griffiths, The Ballad of Wallis Island is both hilarious and delicate, never even making the buffoonish Charles simply a figure of mockery.

Howard, mercifully, dumps most of Vance's political cant in favor of a maudlin, slow, rehab drama, carried on the backs of a cavalcade of wafer-thin characters.

That the audience for Ari Aster’s folk horror might find more pleasure in this Snow White than the average child is telling, since it’s almost impossible to work out who this version of the story is aimed at. Children will be bored, teens talked down to, and most adults will wonder where their Snow White is.

Cobweb's greatest achievement is in ambiguity, in leading the story to its inevitable ending without ever sacrificing that unnerving quality.

Anodyne and asinine in equal measures, The Violent Heart is just brainless.

It takes a special kind of smart to be really, really dumb. And make no mistake, Bullet Train is a really, really dumb movie. Like, every gunshot echoes around its gloriously vacant skull. Because there's also a particular kind of smart-dumb film that is endlessly, idiotically fun, and that's what Bullet Train is.

Unfortunately, the formulaic Spirit Untamed never seems to know which trail it's taking.

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.

Like its bloodline kin, it’s a perfectly scathing glance at power, money, and how the love of both can curdle the soul.

What makes The Front Room universal is that it’s ultimately about power, about who runs the house.

Lackluster and slow even in its supposedly hi-octane chase sequences, much of the blame lies with director Doug Liman.

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.

Luck feels overthought and overwritten. There's a lithe, fun, bright, and much shorter movie in here somewhere.

Annie is a lot to handle, even for the truncated 77-minute run time, and maybe it would work better as a V/H/S 20-minute slot – but then you wouldn't get quite so amazingly infuriated by her. Dashcam, like few films, relies on your annoyance.

It's Eisenberg who finds Ralphie in those narrative spaces, creating a whole and crushingly convincing portrait of a profoundly lost man, and the damage left in his wake.

The experience is a little like being stuck in a Doom Buggy on a day when the ride is very stop-start. The flow of the attraction collapses, becoming individual cool designs but not a story.

It's a hodgepodge of wildly divergent narrative styles, from the mystical to the grisly and into the ridiculous.

The Tunnel may be shrouded in blistering embers and fumes, but it never loses sight of the victims and helpers, of whom there are many. Just as it's an ensemble drama, so it's the community that saves what it can of the day, and gives a feel-good ending with a tinge of sadness.

Director Rebekah McKendry follows up her deliciously disgusting Lovecraftian rest stop comedy Glorious with a feature that doesn't have quite the same twisted ingenuity. Instead, she focuses on good, old-fashioned scares.

As much as Gillan, Headey, and the three Librarians (Bassett, Gugino, and Yeoh) of the gunplay apocalypse embrace the visual stylization and harshly annunciated dialogue, Gunpower Milkshake is immemorable. Like a decent milkshake, it's fine while you're consuming it, but chances are you won't remember it after the last slurp.

It's that rare horror-comedy that is both comedic and horrifying.

The greatest problem is the woeful miscasting of Qualley as Honey. The script by Coen and his wife and sometimes-film editor Tricia Cooke seems to position the gun-free P.I. as a melding of two great noir conventions – the cool gumshoe and the femme fatale – and the camera loves following Qualley in high heels and wrap dresses. Yet there’s nothing much going on beyond those visuals.

Yes, even after all these years, ‘busting will still make you feel good.

The aliens look better than ever, Morgan delivers just the right kind of dry-witted action heroics, and Skylines takes the trip to the stars that the franchise has been promising.

Combined with the glacially slow and uneventful narrative, the end result feels like a feature by a small, cheap animation studio in 2010 trying to make a Miyazaki-esque cartoon.