Ross Bonaime

The Seven Faces of Jane is a curious experiment, but ultimately, a failed one.

There is potential within the Shazam! films that have never quite been met. Especially with this latest installment, this often feels like DC’s attempt at having a Spider-Man-esque character in their roster, and if you squint, you can almost see that possibility.

As entertaining as Until Dawn is, it’s fairly light in most regards, other than the kills. While the characters in the game had more time to have intricate connections to one another, these five are fairly one-note.

Edward Berger's latest is all style and no substance, despite giving Colin Farrell a weird role to sink his teeth into.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie captures the spirit of the games, the deep history, and the incredible possibilities that these games have presented for decades, all in one of the most fun animated films in years, with a team behind it that you can feel loves these characters and this world.

After a decade away, Jeunet has returned to embrace all of his worst eccentricities to create an absurd mess.

Frozen Empire attempts to evoke the past with constant callbacks, while trying to make the audience care about a more modern story with characters for a new generation, and ends up failing on both counts.

When the film gets going in its tremendous third act, complete with a moving surprise that reconfigures the entire film, IF becomes a magnificently emotional experience, cathartic and enchanting in equal measure, and just the type of original idea we need more of on this scale at the movies.

With The Son, Zeller is trying to bring the same sincerity he brought to The Father into his second film, and instead, The Son unfortunately feels false throughout.

Who knows what Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank could’ve been when it was originally envisioned over a decade ago, but what it ultimately became is a tiresome, tedious, and uninspired animated adaptation of a classic parody that doesn’t have any of the original’s comedic wit or bite.

Paint is an odd attempt to make a comedy while also doing the least amount to make that comedy actually funny.

The problem is that these types of films feel lazy and could do so much more with their concepts, and while Screamboat tries to combat that with tame references, winks at the audience, and absurd violence, it can’t keep itself afloat.

Yates makes Pain Hustlers part-rowdy dramedy, part-half-assed takedown, and entirely an underwhelming film that attempts to make apparent and bland points.

Waititi’s latest isn’t bad by any stretch, and isn’t close to his worst (again, Love and Thunder, watch your ass), but as a sports film and a comedy, it is fairly average.

Finestkind has all the right pieces to make an interesting drama, but Helgeland can’t get them together in a way that isn’t over-the-top and downright silly.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey tries to be too big and too bold, when it’s the smaller moments in which this film becomes a beautiful journey.

Ty Roberts’ inspirational sports drama You Gotta Believe relies on age-old playbooks to a fault. It’s a true story and a surefire tear-jerker, but Lane Garrison’s screenplay is reductively hokey at the worst times.

Seinfeld has made a directorial debut that ends up feeling like a bowl of sugary cereal: not a terrible thing to eat, but not as fulfilling or substantial as you might’ve hoped it would be.

After the dregs of the first five Transformers films, Bumblebee felt like the shot in the arm that this series needed to make it what it should’ve been all this time. Coming off that, Rise of the Beasts feels like both a step forward and a step back.

With Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, we get the best and worst of the DCEU, but also a reminder that there’s still hope for these characters, with a bit more focus, and a reminder of what works and what doesn’t with this world.

There are a lot of fascinating ideas Green is throwing into Opus, and it's obvious that this is a fully realized concept that he's worked on for years; not only in the script, but in the extra work he's done in fleshing out this world. Still, we don't see enough of that work come across in the finished product, and the ideas here come off as muddled, failing to connect with the audience beyond a superficial level.

In its own way, Persuasion is trying to persuade its audience that Austen was brilliant in her modernity, when Austen already handled that quite well without Cracknell, Bass, and Winslow’s help.

Black Adam isn’t a full-on course correction for the DCEU, but it is an encouraging new installment in this larger universe. Collet-Serra knows how to present this darkness and antihero in a way that’s effective, while also fleshing out one of the most promising additions to DC’s ever-expanding cadre of characters.

Moonfall, unfortunately, becomes a mixture of Emmerich’s usual clichés that are starting to show their age, a script that only occasionally embraces the insanity of this idea (even though the third act goes all-in on getting mind-numbingly stupid), and a scope that doesn’t do this story justice.

It’s an experiment that only works here and there, yet when it works, there’s beauty in those rare moments.

If the 1940 Pinocchio showed that any wish your heart desires could come true, this remake shows what happens when your nightmares come to life.

The vibe of Him is trying to make the audience unnerved, but the story and imagery being presented are too goofy to take this attempt seriously.

Unfortunately, Bubble & Squeak far more often embraces the ridiculous more than the realistic, and ultimately struggles to combine these two into a whole that works.

Dominion isn’t just the worst film in this frequently disappointing franchise, it’s also one of the worst major blockbusters in recent memory.

Stanton has done truly incredible, groundbreaking things in animation, and he’s almost certainly got a great live-action film in him, but In the Blink of an Eye makes one wonder if Stanton should go a bit smaller and work his way up to such grandiose concepts like this.

The story might be thin, and some new characters might not get the attention they deserve, yet The Super Mario Galaxy Movie remains a charming, often hilarious, and playful testament to the greatest video game franchise of all time.

Scream used to poke fun at the silliness of horror movies and laugh at the genre's clichés, but now, it’s indistinguishable from the films it once gleefully lampooned, in what is easily the worst installment so far.

Glenrothan is cloying at times, but more often, irritating in its presentation of a story we’ve seen so many times before, done poorly.

Imaginary is a mess of a horror film, with poor narrative choices, obvious twists, and clichéd characters.

With bad direction, terrible acting, and a world that has no weight behind it (especially since most of it was clearly made in a computer), this isn’t the way to bring Silent Hill 2 to the big screen. This powerful survival horror story has been turned into an ugly, laughable adaptation that proves that maybe we should’ve never gone back to Silent Hill.

The Bubble feels like the least personal film Apatow has directed so far, a film that seems like more of an excuse to just do something during the pandemic, instead of Apatow having something to say.

The Strangers: Chapter 2 is a true disaster, one of the worst horror films of the year, and it’s a damn shame this is what this franchise has come to.

If Day has shown anything with Fool’s Paradise and the long road to get it made, it’s that he has passion and a vision, and a dedication to making a project that works for him. Fool’s Paradise might not work as well as it should, but fingers crossed that Day keeps at it.

Blood and Honey 2 still isn’t exactly “good,” and it might be a bit premature to start working on a sprawling Poohniverse, but considering the dregs this series began at, this is a flawed improvement that’s still a bear of little brain.

Freelance, like Cena’s Mason, wants to be something more, but maybe it should’ve settled for something a little more simplistic and straightforward and found the joy in that.

There are fractured elements that, with a little polish, could’ve been something much more, but this is just a generic, unremarkable horror film.

This Strangers trilogy was an ambitious concept that quickly became a disastrous failure that completely misunderstood this series to begin with. Even after all this build-up, this final chapter fizzles out to an underwhelming conclusion of a journey that wasn’t worth taking to begin with.

What could've been a halfway decent dumb idea becomes a full-on nightmare of bad choices and terrible filmmaking.

The Swearing Jar is a decent idea, but the screenplay and editing draws attention to itself in a way that takes away from the film’s biggest moments—a shame considering these moments could’ve been extremely effective if handled in a slightly different way.

By the end of Hate to Love: Nickelback, it’ll be hard to hate these four guys, and in some ways, that’s sort of the point—putting a human face on a band that is often seen as little more than a meme.

A Goofy Movie remains an understated film in the Disney animated film canon, and Not Just a Goof wonderfully reminds us why this is a film that deserves far more attention than it ever received.

The Sun Never Sets is a charming take on the love triangle and a strong return to movies for Swanberg. The mixture of Fanning, Johnson, and Smith works well, and this romance is handled quite nicely without becoming frustrating with all its relationship back-and-forths.