Vince Mancini

Pet Sematary is beautifully acted, suspensefully paced, competently staged, and overall is pretty successful at delivering that chilling sense of unease and redolent grossness that the best adaptations of Stephen King’s horror stories do. Yet its departures from the source material and from the previous, 1989 adaptation are lateral moves at best, and its capacity to ultimately deliver on the promise of its premise is middling — though not any more so than in the book or the previous adaptation.

Having been conceived by a lawyer, Marshall feels designed to present the case that Thurgood Marshall was a great man, without letting too much nuance cloud the issue. Depth, complexity, moral gradations — these are dangerous notions in a story you’re presenting before a fickle jury. Marshall takes the same approach.

King Richard is another kooky success story that never really interrogates what it means to be successful.

Perhaps Kusama was trying to bring a greater authenticity to the self-destructive detective trope, and fine, that’s a reasonable goal, but the movie around it isn’t quite grounded enough to pull it off.

The sequel is like watching a good friend come back from a study abroad with an affected accent that you can’t talk them out of.

We seem to be doing the same old Aaron Sorkin thing, and in the absence of any meaningful expansion of his skill set, that thing has become defined by increasingly diminishing returns.

Mary Queen of Scot’s characterizations are confused, its themes murky. Such that when we leave the theater our dominant impression is “boy, that sure was a story, huh?” Which is to say, a tale in which a lot of wild things happened but we’re not entirely sure what they meant.

In hitting so many bullet points from the boardroom presentation justifying its existence, it’s a wonder that Life of the Party manages to work in anything personal or natural at all. And it does, which is a testament to the talent of the people involved (McCarthy, Gillian Jacobs, and Maya Rudolph especially). I just wish I could see them in a movie that wasn’t trying to be everything to everyone.

It’s certainly fair that Creed II would be about fathers and legacies and trying to avenge the family name, but without political context, the big fight is no longer a clash of ideas.

It’s a technological grand slam and a thematic sacrifice bunt.

Cyrano is gorgeous to look at and periodically to listen to, but narratively it’s a lazy take on the material, combining Victorian ideas of purity with Love Actually clichés prizing impotent schoolboy pining over actual connection. In spirit it’s a lot more like the boring, beautiful Christian than it is the audacious homely Cyrano.

In Men, Garland has a lot of great little ideas, with brilliant performances and viscerally compelling imagery, but lacks one big idea to tie them all together.

The central flaw of Ocean’s 8 is that “people looking cool” isn’t much of a story. It’s a poster, maybe even a trailer, but not a story, and not a movie.

Almereyda making a show of himself as storyteller takes away from his story, and seems to betray a lack of confidence in it.

Long on set up and leaden dialogue, short on resolution, The Darkest Minds is set in an apocalyptic future where teen movies no longer have endings. Oh, wait that’s the present.

It’s not that I especially expect my superhero movies to have coherent messages or good politics (though Black Adam does dangle that possibility, tantalizingly) it’s that Black Adam’s ambiguous function in the story feels not only un-crowd-pleasing but kind of cowardly.

A lean heist movie with this cast could’ve been an incredible thing, and the performances alone keep Widows from ever being too boring. But the story got away from them on this one. A movie that’s about too much ends up being about nothing.

Despite some interesting wrinkles and a few jokes here and there, Dark Fate is what all Terminators since T2 have been to some extent: a little too reverent to T2 — not only about time travel but an attempt to perform it.

Richard Jewell is ultimately a character assassination that rests on hackneyed narratives and lazy assumptions. Which makes it exactly the kind of thing it thinks it’s railing against.

The Laundromat doesn’t do a good enough job tying threads together.

Waititi spends so much energy trying to convince us that this story is universal that he often loses what made it novel in the first place.

The Spy Who Dumped Me‘s action is just so big and loud that it obliterates any quiet character moments or clever wordplay.

No Time To Die belatedly reveals that what we were watching wasn’t an action thriller or a kooky spy caper at all, but a melodrama, a kind of massive budget telenovela about an incorrigible heartbreaker finally allowing himself to be vulnerable and find true love.

Tag never transcends the basic fact of being the kind of movie with a slow-motion rap walk scene, and even when it’s decently funny and reasonably entertaining (which it usually is!), it remains ever constrained by the basic shticky irreality of the format.

It’s scholarly to the point that it’s bloodless, a dowdy tweed jacket of a film.

In spite of how visually dazzling and legitimately entertaining it is, Ready Player One is at its heart, a celebration of the gormless rube. It is a paean to the schmuck. To celebrate it uncritically is to become one.

It’s an impressive movie in many ways, dizzyingly complex and intensely brainy, but if you don’t buy into the complex plot and its many (MANY) twists, they tend to be more tiresome than exhilarating. It’s a loving, labyrinthine homage to a genre I’m not sure deserves it.

Goofiness and occasional sub-par acting is forgivable in YA space fiction. Less acceptable is the consistent disrespect and disregard Voyagers shows toward its own characters and premise. If the eternal question is “what did you want this movie to be?” Voyagers’ consistent, unmistakable response is “sort of like other movies.”