Tomris Laffly

With a confused tone stuck between satire and horror (that also informs Malkovich’s eccentric, out-of-place performance), and various half-baked ideas about cultural icons and toxic fandom, “Opus” mostly feels like a missed genre opportunity.

[A] generations-spanning yet emotionally and visually flat familial movie.

The human dimension that gives the film brief jolts of energy never takes root. Instead, audiences are left grappling with a stuffy maze, albeit one presented with handsome production values and a filmmaker’s striking visual touch.

Krasinski’s concept borrows generously from Pixar films like “Monsters Inc.,” but is so chaotic and half-considered that you don’t feel as inspired as you should be, making it hard to submit to the film’s alternate reality.

Sadly, the film plays more like an artless quickie than a fully fleshed-out romance.

With the exception of “The Tragedy of Macbeth” Oscar nominee Kathryn Hunter’s fiercely committed performance, much of this well-designed but boring film yields a shrug.

Finley loses his exacting handle on the material, allowing the story’s more commonplace ideas to dictate its direction in ways both unsurprising and a little rough around the edges.

Ben Affleck steps back in front of the camera in a weighty but weary comeback drama that feels like catharsis.

Despite a worthy message about the importance of embracing one’s past—blocking your trauma is no fruitful way to deal with it—“Insidious: The Red Door” still fizzles in its final stretch, becoming an over-plotted labyrinth of loose ends that drags more than it entertains.

The film’s tonal inconsistencies hurt its impossibly talented co-leads considerably.

The Good Half reclaims attention every now and then with its occasional humor and grace notes around its side characters. . . But what we eventually get with The Good Half doesn’t even feel half good.

“The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes,” unlike the stellar predecessors of the series, feels curiously starved for real insights into the opposing shades of the human soul.

A cringingly syrupy tale of overdue bonding between an estranged father and his only offspring.

It’s curiously difficult to stay engaged with Mock’s film that merely puts forth a paint-by-numbers assembly of the wealth of material it has at its disposal.

Sadly, the film doesn’t live up to its charming premise, spending most of its runtime chasing its own tail with pointless jokes and dog-related puns that are only mildly amusing, along with an undercooked love story that doesn’t know how to steal our hearts.

Shrewdly, Watts goes for something subtle and soft here — instead of clichéd garishness, her performance hinges on her doleful gaze and melancholic tinge, ultimately helping Penguin Bloom honor its real-life character’s journey with some respect.

Rushing through an emotional journey with an uneven pace and clumsy dialogue, The Lost Husband aims for familiar sentiments around loyalty, family and sacrifice, but bypasses sincerity, the most crucial ingredient.

Ultimately pointless, Overboard makes you wonder why it exists at all when it offers neither a fresh angle into modern-day relationships nor an improvement upon its predecessor.

For a tender movie that follows an old man on a long and demanding multi-bus excursion to honor his late wife’s wishes, the placid affair has curiously little emotional range, and an even narrower sense of stakes

More troubling is Neeson’s baffling disappearance for long stretches of time, when screenwriter Frank Baldwin gets too enamored with the supporting clan while failing to expand upon them.

Perhaps it was enough for “Book Club” to merely exist as an act of rebellion against the stubbornly young-skewing studio fare. But this follow-up needed to give us more, something along the lines of a sharper film deserving of the earned legacies of Fonda, Keaton, Bergen and Steenburgen.

Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget is something sadder than the worst movie of 2023. It is the year’s most disappointing.

A slight comedy that sadly embraces neither the worthwhile questions that surround its central premise nor the story’s dark humor potential.

It’s never a good sign when characters in a film promptly declare: we are aware you are watching and we’re here to teach you a thing or two.

The angst it spreads throughout feels all too mild and forgettable to cast an unnerving curse. You know, the kind you’d crave from a horror film with lasting scares.

Three Christs opts in for frustratingly broad characters that feel like half-considered caricatures and Jeff Russo’s sentimental, strings-heavy score that flattens whatever modest edge the movie might have had.

Perhaps Wilson would have benefitted from the subtle method of Jaws, or even The Reef, by prioritizing teasing over showing. But here, the shark’s frequent appearances and unrealistic looks lessen the impact of the fear it’s supposed to spread, despite some truly unnerving camerawork by Tony O’Loughlan.

While Chappelle neatly outlines the tragic events caused by his spiritually bruised protagonist, it’s hard to stay engaged with his philosophical query that divides arguments into distinct rights and wrongs early on, and only asks shallow questions.