Vince Mancini

Don’t Look Up is a strong idea (with story credit to McKay and journalist David Sirota), and lots of the individual jokes work, but at times it gets so caught up trying to make fun of so many different things that it seems to lack an internal logic. Satire in and of itself isn’t quite a story.

Sure, the characters fight a lot (it is an action movie directed by a stunt guy, after all), and the fight work is consistently above average and sporadically funny, but they spend so much time talking about why they’re fighting, and whether they should fight that Bullet Train often times feels more like a yak-fest than an action movie

Amsterdam goes from wacky farce to preachy allegory before finally coming to rest as a sneakily profound riff on finding personal edification, just when it matters.

The film doesn’t try to alter Berg’s most essential quality, that he was a mystery.

Little would’ve required Oscar-caliber writing and a once-in-a-lifetime child actor to pull off, and it just doesn’t have those. It has Regina Hall but it can’t use her.

It’s silly, thoroughly disposable, and a breezy 90 minutes long. What else could you ask for?

The Protege‘s stunts are actually pretty good.

The action set pieces are hit and miss, mostly not the worst thing I’ve ever seen, and if there’s one thing Tomb Raider is actually good at, it’s giving death more gravity than you usually see in these kinds of movies, where faceless henchmen are dispatched with nary a second thought. For the most part, though, Tomb Raider is content to be the kind of movie that reminds you of other movies without differentiating itself from them.

In a lot of ways, Child’s Play seems like a good idea that the people involved didn’t have either the time or the talent to execute properly.

The cinematography looks great and the cast (Pugh, Styles, Pine, Nick Kroll, Kate Berlant, Kiki Lane…) are mostly acting their butts off. It’s all very alluring and sexy and intriguing right up until the point when it reveals that it has nothing to say.

I Free Pretty is surprisingly resonant for a high concept light comedy, offering all the catharsis of watching someone truly discover herself and own it, as well as the awkwardness and pain of watching someone needlessly tear herself down and self-sabotage.

This is a movie that’s just good enough at a handful of things without really being great at any one. The who’s-going-to-live, who’s-going-to-die of it is compelling enough, though never quite white knuckle intense. And while there is some thematic heft, it’s never explored quite deeply enough to leave you thinking about it after you leave the theater. The acting is solid from top to bottom, if never quite delicious.

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.

The movie shouts things that should be subtext so loudly that what’s actually happening tends to get drowned out.

Painstaking subjectivity maybe isn’t the prize it seems when the subject is syphilitic, incontinent, and senile. Context is not the enemy.

As relatively weak as the CGI is, The Meg is brilliant at giving its dopey characters consistently entertaining dialogue and striking the perfect balance of clever/stupid without being overly self-aware.

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.

Usually when you overtly acknowledge the tropes and standard story beats in a movie like this, it’s for some purpose, some comment about what we like about or what it means to be a comic book movie. Samaritan is really none of that, it’s more like discount comic book movie slurry.

Never before has a streaming release so capably evoked “Summer blockbuster.”

The Son plays disturbingly like an obtuse memoir written by a deadbeat dad who, try as he might, can’t figure out why his clinically depressed son’s vibes are so bad.

From the very beginning of Angel Is Fallen, the camera is far too close to everyone’s faces while the frame jiggles slightly and parts of it cycle in and out of focus as if the action is happening down on the field and we’re watching it from the nosebleed seats through a telescope. Is this an artistic choice or a logistical compromise? Either way, it sucks.

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.”

Something about Mortal Kombat‘s total lack of pretense towards nutritional value is weirdly refreshing.

Bloodshot‘s bad composition doesn’t give us enough space to appreciate its cleverest conceits. It trades lucid composition for “emotional truth,” but mostly it conveys the emotion of someone throwing energy drinks at your head.

The remake has the right tone, an interesting angle, a delightful supporting cast, and Anna Faris acts her butt off, but there are times it feels like she’s doing it opposite an upturned broom.

Even on a technical level Breaking In is shockingly inept.

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.

If Without Remorse has any value at all, it’s as a headscratcher. You know it doesn’t work, but what were they attempting here?

Super Troopers 2 is broad and hammy, like a lot of comedy, but unlike a lot, it makes little pretense to realism. It’s proud dad humor. It pokes you in the ribs enough times that the obnoxiousness eventually takes on a weird charm.

It’s a conceptual joke in search of actual jokes. Like a C- term paper delivered on time, the most impressive thing about Fatman is that it’s finished.

Oddly, the most compelling part of Unhinged is seeing just how much mayhem director Derrick Borte and writer Carl Ellsworth can squeeze out of this most mundane of premises.

While I cannot resist an hour plus of delightful Sam Jacksonian shit talk, neither can I in good conscience recommend you staying for the entirety of this film.

Cahill is so effective at blurring the lines and making both “realities” feel equally plausible that it’s hard not to feel your own reality attenuating as you watch it. Owen Wilson and Salma Hayek, something of an odd couple on paper, are also perfectly cast.

Father Stu is exactly this kind of intriguing mix, of illuminating religious philosophy and utterly baffling narrative choices. It’s vaguely inspiring, slightly tedious to sit through, and ultimately unknowable, like any good Catholic sermon.

In the end, the timeliness of 2067’s premise is matched only by the clunkiness of its execution.

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.

Mile 22 is such a freakish chimera of disparate genre influences that it’s kind of fascinating.

The smartest thing Eric Bress did in Ghosts of War was to cast Billy Zane, and the dumbest thing he did was keeping Billy Zane off screen for 90% of the movie.

It’s a movie that’s been in the oven forever yet still comes out feeling half baked. Still, it’s hard not to sense the kernel of something good here. Chaos Walking is a bit like a house with “good bones.” The framework for something beautiful is there, but you’ll have to squint to see it amidst the cracked windows and trash-strewn lawn.

It’s still saccharine, overwrought, blandly acted, painfully earnest, and uber-dramatic, and constantly staring longingly at the night sky and bodies of water for some reason, but… teen romance is all of those things. It fits. Maybe the Sparks formula isn’t so bad as long as Sparks himself isn’t involved.

Red Notice is content to merely mimic the rhythms and pacing of a fun movie the same way Ryan Reynolds has become adept at delivering lines that have the tone and cadence of jokes without the comedic value.

Dare To Dream delivers The Secret‘s philosophy in classic Nicholas Sparks movie format, complete with deferred scholarships, single mothers finding love, and copious Spanish moss.

Roth and Carnahan’s motivations here remain murky and Death Wish never justifies its existence. Divorced of context, it’s like sauce and tomato without the burger.

Exuberantly gross and proudly ridiculous, this Hellboy feels like the picture Glenn Danzig sees in his head when he doodles in his notebook.

Happytime Murders isn’t the funniest or the smartest movie I’ve ever seen, but I forgive it because it isn’t trying that hard. At least, joke-wise. There’s something beautiful about the level of craft that goes into just one puppet, that in many cases ends up appearing in a single, one-off joke about pubic lice.

Blacklight’s filmmakers seem to have spent a lot time trying to figure out why Neeson would have to bonk some heads, and not nearly enough time storyboarding and staging elaborate, gloriously executed head bonks.

This movie is the product of truly deranged minds. It’s a must-see.

90% of the jokes in Me Time are just Kevin Hart doing an excessive act-out for a C+ bit, which will occasionally go on so long that they will, Baba Booey-like, circle around to being funny again through sheer commitment to tedium.

Gotti is technically inept, where every scene feels like a disconnected sizzle reel for a different movie than the previous one, but the fascinating thing it about is less what it fails to do than what it’s trying to do.

Home Team is one of the most conceptually-strange cinematic ventures I’ve ever seen, an image management exercise disguised as a scruffy kids comedy.

“Fred Durst and John Travolta team up to ineptly recreate Big Fan” is a compelling pitch, perhaps the most compelling pitch, and the movie itself mostly delivers on the kind of train wreck absurdism that it promises.

Shut In is boring, inconsistent, imbued with some kind of inscrutable code, and above all lazy, a perfect reflection of the rightwing media ecosystem.