Simon Abrams

The makers of Going to Mars do right by Giovanni by showing how she speaks for herself.

Five Nights at Freddy’s has most of the right elements for a good post-Amblin kiddy fright-fest, except maybe good dialogue and distinct characters. Watching the movie, one gets the sense that the games’ morbid personality has been sanded down to its most generic jump-scares and banal revelations.

If you’re watching Leo, it should be to see Vijay show off in between animal attacks, car flips, and celebrity cameos. And even if you don’t expect much from Leo, it still might give you exactly what you need.

Night of the Hunted might have been a productively grim exercise if it didn’t feel like Alice’s dilemma wasn’t just a pretext for more ostensibly shocking talking points.

Whatever promise the “V/H/S” horror anthology franchise started with is barely present in V/H/S/85, a low-energy potboiler that promises to transport genre fans back to the analog past for some reason.

While “Creation of the Gods I” is not yet a personal, let alone essential, series, you can see glimpses of the epic that director Wuershan has arguably been working his way up to since “The Butcher, the Chef, and the Swordsman,” his wildly uneven, but occasionally disarming 2010 breakthrough.

Four Latinx-themed horror segments of variable quality are sandwiched between a modestly amusing wrap-around story about a haunted traveler, simply called “The Traveler.” It’s not enough, despite some amusing performances and effects-driven thrills.

The main reason that Jawan doesn’t deliver more than what Khan’s previously delivered is because its creators seemingly included every masala-style sub-plot that they could think of.

Eventually, the lack of werewolf-related carnage is the least concerning thing about My Animal.

Finley deserves credit for adding extra wrinkles to Anderson’s story, but Landscape with Invisible Hand doesn’t cut deep enough to leave a mark.

The Icelandic/German conspiracy thriller Operation Napoleon would be as comforting as its airport thriller plot if it weren’t also baggy, joyless, and spiritually depleting.

The Beasts may not be realistic, but it is genuinely eerie.

It’s just over 90 minutes long, but Streetwise still feels like an epic poem, shrunken down and sparingly polished for maximum effect.

Fear the Night often feels like it was made by artists who understand the type of movie that they’re making but maybe don’t really care enough about making it, either as a by-the-numbers genre exercise or a repudiation of its fans and their need for pseudo-enlightened catharsis.

Some of the familiar and faithfully recreated twists and turns of the original “One Cut of the Dead” still land here, but not enough to make this leaden remake seem endearing or zany enough to pick through.

Rather than dig into what’s specifically changing about their relationship, Duplass and Eslyn focus on armchair psychology and black-box speeches to explain away what’s really going on with these two men.

A few compelling emotions and themes are suggested but rarely well expressed in Nimona, a sometimes cute but mostly hyper and overextended animated sci-fi fantasy.

Eventually, this outstanding reboot’s most generic elements appear subordinate to the title character’s deranged, boyish, and sometimes romantic subjective reality.

The bittersweet Korean drama Aloners works best when it’s a character study about an isolated thirtysomething’s behavior instead of whatever her creators think should be done about it.

There are hints of a deeper movie here, but the one on-screen sticks too closely to stories and ideas we already know.

Killing bigots is a fine enough pretext for this sort of watered-down post-grindhouse entertainment, but if you’re honestly going to go there, you can’t stop til you’re past the point of apology.

Between underwhelming action scenes and draining expository dialogue, Assassin Club often leaves its cast out to dry.

Hypnotic may not be clever or energetic enough to keep your mind from wandering, but it is charming in its own stumbling way.

Ratnam and his collaborators stick the landing on their gargantuan pot-boiler, and while Krishnamurthy’s world may not look as grand as it seemed, either in the moviemakers’ heads or on the page, it is big enough to get lost in.

You never have to wonder or try to understand what the characters are feeling because they never stop telling you how to feel. The answer, invariably, is sad and fearful, but From Black is neither, really.

Ride On isn’t a generic beat-em-up but a stingy elegy to a bygone era of filmmaking and an unbelievable melodrama about an older artist and his estranged daughter. A lot of emotional baggage is attached to Ride On, and very little of it gets unpacked.

Zlotowski’s stylized depiction of Rachel’s life is overly fastidious. Many creative decisions, from the score to the camera blocking, took me out of the movie. Instead of a complex character processing involved, compound emotions, I saw a talented filmmaker lightly touch upon a range of emotions while also studiously avoiding dramatic clichés and stereotypes.