Vince Mancini

Blindspotting excels at capturing a feeling and expressing it with style and kitsch, but there are times when you wonder what new insight they’re offering beyond the rhymes.

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.

Mottola still shows a clear flair for the humanistic, good-natured comedy of Superbad and Adventureland, and most of the joke writing in Confess, Fletch is sharp, to the point of being exceptionally so.

it’s a silly action comedy where the action is actually fun, the jokes mostly land, and neither detracts from the other. All in all a reasonably fun streamer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We know what we’re getting with this particular genre, and The Marksman, starring Neeson as a Texas rancher protecting a young boy from drug cartels, is a perfectly adequate exercise in providing it. If it lacks some of the panache and grindhouse appeal of previous installments, it also avoids the xenophobia and general mean-spiritedness.

Finland is a weird little place, and Dual is a weird little movie.

The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker was smart to explore this subject and in many ways is a good start, but as it stands feels frustratingly incomplete. Sometimes maybe competing doc projects are a good thing.

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.