Richard Whittaker

Mortal Kombat commits the unforgivable sin of actually being boring duing the middle hour of training and exposition. Even when it finally gets into full combat mode, there's no tournament, just a 30 minute throw down between a bunch of vaguely recognizable characters.

It's hard to say that any other edit would be better, because Brothers by Blood is one single, grey mass to the bone, an unfortunate use of a sterling cast and a book that deserves a more textured retelling.

What could have been a worthy tribute becomes a by-the-numbers melodrama.

There are some great sequences of just Tom and Jerry that feel like Tom and Jerry. There's just so much else, too much else, going on, and most of it involves the cast staring at animated animals added in post.

In one of those odd happenstances of cinema, The Beast shares those themes of processing romantic trauma through temporal displacement with Alice Lowe’s Monty Python-esque Timestalker: but La bête lacks its pithiness and humanity.

A tedious mix of Reno 9-1-1 awkward humor and the queasy provocation in Tim and Eric's Awesome Show, Great Job!, it felt like Dupieux was trying too hard, and Deerskin feels like the injection of the leather obsession just never quite meshes with the rest of the story.

It’s not that it’s unfunny or completely without charm: it’s that the script feels like an abandoned The Secret Life of Pets sequel into which Garfield has been crowbarred.

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.

The script by Mike White (who may have been locked in the writer’s room by Illumination Studios after working on the superior Migration) and series co-creator Ken Daurio feels like a stack of B-plots stapled together rather than a full story.

Red Notice barely feels like a film, which is fine. It’s a series of set pieces flimsily bolted together with Reynolds doing the Reynolds thing, Johnson doing the Johnson thing, and Gadot doing the Gadot thing.