Roxana Hadadi

It’s a testament to Macdonald and Skinner that they inject chemistry into their characters’ underwritten pairing. Their performances are what make “Falling for Figaro” an entertaining distraction, even as the film plays out exactly as you would expect.

Director Henry Jacobson’s gory thriller is initially quite effective when it complements the lies families tell each other with arcs of jugular blood.

What Tell It To The Bees accomplishes for queer romance it abandons with an ending that is committed to unnecessary melancholy.

It’s familiar, it’s generic, and it feels like a test of how far we’ll lower our standards.

It’s a shame Maggie Q was so busy carrying The Protégé on her back that she couldn’t make time to kick the film’s embarrassing script into shape, too.

The film’s intermittent delights are momentarily satisfying, but then numbness sets in, like the brain freeze that blooms after you slurp on the film’s titular ice-cream treat.

Another unimaginative woman-led action flick written and directed by men who telegraph their twists and lean on flashbacks instead of bothering to write character development, Kate mistakes “Women can kill just as well as men!” for some sort of new idea.

Momoa can believably howl in anguish and throw a devastating punch, but he can’t carry a script this muddled.

There’s Someone Inside Your House is intermittently effective, but ultimately unremarkable, and it feels like a product of its time in disappointing ways.

Goth is a scene-stealer, and some of Levy’s visuals are memorable in their otherworldly quality. Cinorre’s initially provocative vision of vengeance at least makes Mayday worth a look.

Rarely has a sequel been this listless, this creatively bankrupt, or this unaware of the charm and appeal of its predecessors. Rarely has a film been this craven in appeasing an imaginary audience by mimicking what came before it and refusing to challenge itself in terms of dreaming up a new world, crafting new characters, or fashioning new stakes.

Burger has crafted a shrug of a movie that insists teenagers should follow the rules and submit to the greater good, but fails to imagine what toll that kind of sacrifice would really take.

That go-for-broke violence has always been a core component of Mortal Kombat, and this reboot succeeds because McQuoid and his team remember that, and have the self-awareness to acknowledge it. It isn’t a flawless victory, but it is lizard-brain fun.

Needle in a Timestack lacks the interior worldbuilding necessary to pull off its heartstring-tugging intentions, and the result is a movie that unintentionally confirms how no good ever comes from men who obsessively refuse to leave women alone.

Night Teeth isn’t genuinely original, substantive, or scary. But as a remix of the vampire thriller’s most lizard-brain-focused qualities, Netflix’s latest Halloween offering is appreciated for how few demands it puts on its audience.

The Unforgivable transcends its own self-importance and becomes an experience that is often rattling, challenging and haunting.

The ways Zone 414 lifts from its predecessors, borrowing elements from character development to costuming to questions about the utilitarianism of our physical bodies, denies it identifiable or entertaining qualities of its own.

Artemis Fowl, the first Disney movie to have its theatrical release completely scrapped because of the COVID-19 pandemic, is bland and incoherent, with paper-thin character development, unimaginative world building, and a lot of daddy issues.

Mark Wahlberg should never be in a science fiction movie ever again. While the Paramount Plus exclusive streaming movie Infinite isn’t entirely his bad — the direction, script, and overall absence of creative vision also range from nonsensical to embarrassing — it suffers profoundly from his bland, phoned-in, looking-for-the-craft-table performance.

The flubbed ending is more glaring because the film is otherwise so enjoyable and relatable. It’s achingly familiar in its exploration of what seems to the seniors like a final dash toward adulthood and its accompanying freedoms.

Between its evocative ensemble, fluid editing, and interest in Aboriginal culture, High Ground is worth a watch, even if it ultimately feels overshadowed by the message it’s trying to send rather than being defined by the story it actually tells.

Untitled Horror Movie is the kind of finely tuned exercise that benefits from the chemistry of its cast, the managed-expectations feel of its storytelling, and a firm awareness of the kind of low-stakes entertainment so many of us might appreciate right now.

Its truncated ending, and the sense that there is far more to this story than what “Platform” includes, puts a damper on the otherwise-engaging documentary.