Sam Adams

Mufasa was almost inevitably destined to be Barry Jenkins’ worst movie, and it is. But it’s not a black mark on his record, just a blank space on the timeline.

The movie can’t compete with the Missions: Impossible and Fast and Furiouses for visual spectacle, so what it offers by way of compensatory heft is a tangled plot full of double-crosses and hidden identities, combined with a ponderous gait that suggests that more than the mere world is at stake.

A New Legacy is much slicker and more appealing than the original Space Jam, in no small part because James is approximately 50 times the actor Jordan is. But it’s also because corporations handing a bag of unrelated IP and ordering screenwriters to come up with a story around them is the template for most studio filmmaking now, if not all of contemporary existence.

Irresistible might be a movie for the moment before or the moment after, but it feels entirely out of step with the one it’s in.

It has a loping, lowkey charm and doesn’t require too much of your attention, and the plot is predictable enough that you could miss substantial chunks of it and not lose your way. You’re in the passenger seat, and it’s a nice ride as long as you don’t care where you’re going.

Trolls World Tour was made to play in theaters that can’t open, celebrating a kind of performance that’s on indefinite hold. All I could feel watching its climax was how much I miss that feeling of being together in the dark, and how long it’ll be before it feels safe to do it again.

Birds of Prey often leaves you puttering around the edges, being grateful for its modest achievements: fight scenes that are, if not exciting, at least coherently staged, and Robbie’s comic timing, which is so often sharper than the lines she has to deliver.

A documentary about one of the most mediated, image-conscious people on the planet sounds like an oxymoron, and though director Lana Wilson is no hagiographer, Miss Americana is hardly warts-and-all.

It’s frenzied, briefly infuriating, and eventually, grudgingly, satisfying, but it’s like being force-fed fandom: Your belly is filled, but there’s no pleasure in the meal.

Frozen 2 doesn’t have its forebear’s ungainliness; in many ways, it’s more efficiently engineered. But it’s also far less surprising, even taking into account that a sequel’s first task is to give people what they expect.

Flanagan is more faithful to "The Shining" than he was to Shirley Jackson’s "Hill House," but he ends each with a twist that functions as a smug reproach.

Hobbs & Shaw is a ridiculous movie, and sometimes it’s in the best way. I laughed at the audacity of its stunts, while shaking my head a little bit at their silliness. But I also despaired a little bit when I checked the time at what felt like it might be the climax and discovered there was still an hour to go.

Far From Home, which brings back Homecoming director Jon Watts and screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, sometimes strains to match the intensity of the all-out battles in its dialogue scenes, and there are too many exchanges where characters reel off a dozen overlapping half-jokes in the hopes that you’ll come away with the feeling something funny was said.

Despite its sizable budget, Detective Pikachu has a similarly run-down quality. What story there is barely makes sense, and it feels as if large chunks have been taken out at random. But in a world packed full of franchise-extending would-be blockbusters, there’s something strangely appealing about its patchiness.

Like last year’s "Ralph Breaks the Internet," the movie evolves into a parable about toxic masculinity and the danger of mistaking darkness for depth, but Lego Movie 2’s frequent flips to the real world subject its underlying text to a scrutiny it can’t bear, and take the fun out of reading between the lines. Lord and Miller have always known what they’re doing, but here it feels like they need you to know it, too.

It’s also hard not to judge it against the movie it might have been. In 2000, Unbreakable felt like an anomaly, a superhero movie that steered clear of camp and dug into the genre’s bedrock. It could have been thrilling to extend that approach into 2019, where superheroes storm the multiplex on a monthly basis, and there’s no longer a need to laboriously explain the culture behind them. Unfortunately, it seems that laborious explanations are the part Shyamalan likes. He’s the evil mastermind detailing his plot for world domination, knowing that the villain’s monologue is a terrible cliché but unable to resist the urge.

Coogler’s Creed interrogated the Rocky series, including the great-white-hope subtext of the originals, from the ground up, but Creed II just skims along the surface.

It certainly doesn’t work in Mid90s’ favor that it is the third movie released in the past two months to focus on an outsider with a turbulent home life seeking out community in the world of skateboarding. Even without the unflinching documentary "Minding the Gap" and the sure-handed docufiction "Skate Kitchen," Mid90s would feel phony, but the former’s understated and thoughtful treatment of its protagonists’ real-life tragedies contrasts sharply with Hill’s attempts to wring pathos from his manufactured ones. Next to them, Mid90s just looks like a poser.

Venom wants to be something different, an off-kilter dark comedy whose protagonist doesn’t need to be cleaned up so he can fight alongside Iron Man someday. But it’s also terrified to step out of line, and the stench of fear overwhelms whatever wisps of fresh air have sneaked through the cracks in the doorway.

Skyscraper is like the last stage of a national trauma, the weakened form it takes before it passes out of the body politic for good.

Fallen Kingdom understands that, as much as Jurassic Park has the shape of an action movie, its roots are in horror, and Bayona takes evident glee in drawing out his scares.

Not too far beneath the movie’s superficial abrasiveness is a desperate desire to be loved, a puppyish determination that is both hard to resist and, eventually, difficult to endure.

It’s galling for a movie that costs so much and takes up so much cultural space to try to do so little, but it’s a familiar disappointment, like the dull ache of a tooth that only bothers you when you bite down on it wrong.

Sitting through its 2 hours and 30 minutes is like gorging on tapas: You wind up both overstuffed and unsatisfied.

In a film of more prepossessing style, the glaring leaps of logic might be easier to overlook, or at least there’d be more incentive to do so, but the cellphone is Soderbergh’s enemy as well.

The best thing you can say about The Strangers: Prey at Night, the sequel to writer-director Bryan Bertino’s 2008 home-invasion creeper, is that it reminds you the original exists.

Eastwood and Blyskal can’t seem to decide whether they want Stone et al. to be ordinary people thrust into an extraordinary situation or whether they were destined for greatness, so they waffle between foreshadowing and simply biding their time.

Great(ish) ideas and terrible ones sit cheek by jowl, original notions and blatant thievery corralled together with no discernible logic. It’s a horror movie one moment, a comedy the next, as if Netflix were streaming several different titles at once.

The Commuter has nothing so heady as the plight of the forgotten man on its mind. The movie, whose screenplay is credited to Byron Willinger, Philip de Blasi, and Ryan Engle, is flagrantly, even willfully silly, juiced with such corny audacity it frequently made me laugh out loud.

Like Barnum himself, it’s an elegant fraud, nice enough to look at as long as you don’t look too close.

The movie slips into a familiar rut and the scenery fades into the background.

Branagh is more preoccupied with the challenges of keeping a movie set in a series of steel tubes visually interesting than he is in engaging its story.

The whole movie starts to feel like a dare or elaborate game, the characters shuffling obediently about the board with no rules to guide them. Myths grow out of a need to understand the world, and to pass on an understanding of how to make our way through it, but Lanthimos just teaches you to be more cautious about his next film.

Barry is the closest thing Tom Cruise has played to a regular Joe in more than a decade, and the part isn’t a snug fit.

Vaughn hasn’t only run out of things to say but people to hate, and without that underlying aggression, the movie feels like it’s just going through the motions. Better luck next time, bruv.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a luxurious, appealingly daffy spectacle, a true vision unchecked by the standards of good taste, and that in and of itself is a quality worth savoring. But its design is pixel-deep, without the underlying thought that makes great science fiction worth revisiting.

Cars 3 is still lower-tier Pixar.

This is a film of highs and lows; there is no middle ground, no moment of silence, reflection or introspection. “Joshua” stays frustratingly on message.

The relationship between these two Fassbenders is at the heart of Alien: Covenant, and it’s one of the few things that really entertain on a level beyond the technical.

Ponsoldt—who also directed The Spectacular Now and The End of the Tour—has a great feel for intimate conversation, but he’s all thumbs when it comes to The Circle’s attempt at stylized allegory.

With The Fate of the Furious, it feels like the movies have gotten as big as they can get, and the gleeful absurdity that drove them is losing ground to the specter of obligation.

Where Hiddleston seems perfectly at home in the digital trenches, gamely swinging at fiendish foes to be added in postproduction, Larson looks like she’s staring into thin air. That leaves us with the monsters, who are, to be fair, mightily impressive.

It’s the kind of movie that wouldn’t exist without awards, and makes a compelling argument for phasing them out altogether.

McGregor’s movie is a half-hearted transcript with no heart of its own, one that commits the ultimate sin of making you wonder whether the book it’s based on could possibly be any good in the first place.

White Girl wants credit for its provocations, but it’s not provoking us towards any particularly insights, just pointing out that white privilege exists and then calling it a day. It’s “Woke af: The Movie.”

Central Intelligence doesn’t feel like the birth of a great comic duo — more like a blind date that goes a little better than expected. The chemistry’s not there yet, but let’s give it another shot.

No matter where Ferguson goes, he finds a way to sit someone in a chair and point a camera at them, resulting in a movie whose stultifying dullness works against the urgency of its message.

The Cold Lands goes flat in this middle section. Gilroy’s visual style is strong, but he doesn’t frame the images to chart Atticus’ development, and Yelich, whose only previous screen experience is starring in the video Gilroy directed for R.E.M.’s “It Happened Today,” doesn’t suggest what’s going on beneath the layers of trauma and withdrawal.

It’s hardly a masterpiece, but then, it shows no signs it ever wanted to be, and sometimes that’s a relief.

Perhaps Gurfinkel means to suggest a society off-course, but the game feels rigged, his conception of male and female roles so limited that the characters have little choice but to fall in line.

Perhaps fittingly, part of the problem with Everyday is that it’s too short, both in micro and macro terms. Ninety-odd minutes isn’t long enough to make the full weight of the elapsed time register.

Paris Countdown has style to burn, where “style” means “uses lots of lighting gels and some camera flourishes,” but it doesn’t have a coherent point of view or a solid take on the genre.

Hellbenders mostly feels like a doodle, an amiable lark that will amuse genrephiles and anyone else with their sights set appropriately low.

Unfortunately, Kill Your Darlings doesn’t know what to do with Radcliffe and DeHaan, good as they are; there’s little sense of how they fit into a larger framework, or what bearing, if any, it might have on its more famous subjects’ later output.

Putting Faulkner’s dialogue in actors’ mouths only underlines the fact that it was never meant to be read aloud, and simply cutting between one perspective and the next does nothing to evoke the rushing stream of collective consciousness that runs through Faulkner’s South.

The movie is a character study in search of a character.

Watching the movie is like riffling through an author’s index cards: It’s all detail and no big picture.

Like a Rand Paul rally rendered in the style of Grand Theft Auto, Silver Circle engineers the perfect marriage of sub-par animation and sloppy thinking.

From its lone-wolf mythology to the high, pealing guitar wails in its score, The Sweeney plays like a forgotten ’80s action movie recently discovered in a dusty vault. A treat, perhaps, for those who prefer their cop thrillers pre-meta, but tiresomely plodding for everyone else.

Trouble is, even a finely tailored suit needs a body to fill it, and A Man's Story never gets its man.

Continental Drift feels less like an extension of a theatrical franchise than an episode of a middling TV cartoon, lolling around on territory that's already been settled. Jokes are recycled so frequently, it's as if comedy writing was eating a hole in the ozone layer.

Black seems to be aiming for some sort of loopy fantasia, a tragic fable about struggling with difference in the small-town South, but he's got more half-finished ideas than he can handle.

Sy and Cluzet give their parts more conviction than they deserve, even when the former is forced to re-enact the falsetto-singing-in-the-bubblebath bit from Pretty Woman. But even their energy can't revive a corpse this dead.

It's difficult to describe The Samaritan, in which Samuel L. Jackson plays an ex-con trying to return to the straight and narrow after 25 years inside, without overlapping a dozen other movies in his nigh-endless filmography, nor watch any scene without thinking of how many times he's drawn from the same bag of tricks.

It's true that Americans contribute disproportionately to the problem, but catering to the idea that we're separate from the rest of the world isn't part of the solution.

The character-building is proffered in bad faith, like every scene in Safe that doesn't involve bloodshed. Statham can sell a punch, but not his own vulnerability.

Entering the minor canon of movies named after sports regulations - move over, "Offside!" - Don Handfield's Touchback takes a handoff from "Peggy Sue Got Married" and "It's A Wonderful Life" and runs it up the middle for a modest gain.

Good For Nothing is billed as the first Western shot in New Zealand, but that tourist-brochure distinction pales besides its more pungent claim to fame as the first Western whose hero spends the entire film attempting to overcome a bout of erectile dysfunction.

At least Black Butterflies gets the tortured-soul part right.

As Wesley Deeds - get it? - Perry is stripped of Madea's fat suit and fright wig, but his performance is so muted, he might as well be swaddled in cloth.

During a dinner with Stephanie's colorfully ethnic family, including a squandered Debbie Reynolds, the reaction shots arrive with bludgeoning regularity, and the soundtrack's burbling organ serves as an incessant reminder not to take anything seriously. Fortunately, there's no danger of that.

Growing up, Smith relates, he thought Halston - born Ray Halston Fenwick in Des Moines, Iowa - "was the coolest," which sets the tone for the movie's googly-eyed viewpoint.

Tran's visual precision is betrayed by his jumbled script, which fails to impose a cinematic structure on the source material.

Chances are, Norman would have seemed like a retread whenever it came out, but it does the movie no favors to release it in the shadow of "Terri" and "Submarine," both far more compelling portraits of high-school loners, and both released to DVD in the last few weeks.

The credibility Bowen and Amy Seimetz, as his fearful ex-girlfriend, bring to their roles nearly legitimizes the movie's underlying silliness.

The movie's gathering of third-rank action heroes provides sufficient brawn but precious little onscreen charisma, although Brian Cox's reliable bluster lights up his handful of scenes as a bellicose baron.

As an actor, Turturro brings wit and a healthy sense of absurdity to many of his roles, but his directorial efforts are notably lacking in self-awareness or restraint.

The subtitles and period setting conjure a smattering of respectability, but in essence, this is arthouse pap, particularly for older audiences, turning the past into a concatenation of worn-out tropes that comforts as it distorts. Think of it as instant mashed potatoes for the soul.

There's something grating about the way The Last Mountain keeps returning to picket-line confrontations between environmental activists.

Wexler breaks the cardinal rule of first-person documentaries: Don't make yourself the subject unless you're worth paying attention to.

The character's miraculous gift never plays as more than a melodramatic contrivance-it's a gimmick, not an outgrowth of faith. The movie reaches for the heart, but only comes back with a balloon filled with fake blood and chicken livers.

Not withstanding rich performances from Wilson and Lonsdale, the film never comes close to embodying that level of complexity.

Rather than peering into the heart of darkness, North just slaps a coat of Art atop her true-crime subject, and the upshot is akin to an especially pretentious episode of "Law & Order."

For the most part, Neshoba is content to treat progress as a matter of reconciling with the past rather than dealing with the present.