William Bibbiani

A big, sprawling romantic comedy with large emotions and messy characters and shoutouts to your favorite love stories. The enthusiasm comes across, and it’s infectious even when the movie doesn’t quite work. Which is most of the time.

Toy Story 5' is an easy movie to like. It’s just too redundant to completely respect.

Some cheap, stupid comedies are funny enough to get away with it, and Stop! That! Train! isn’t one of them.

[Michael Sarnoski's] latest isn’t deep enough or captivating enough to make the same impact as his previous movies, but it’s a mature work that makes a valid point, and Hugh Jackman gives an excellent lead performance.

The Furious hits like a sledgehammer — frequently with a sledgehammer — and it leaves a refreshing aftertaste.

It’s so bombastic and enjoyable that it’s easy to forgive that the story doesn’t work. I won’t forget that the story doesn’t work, but it has my forgiveness.

A funny and frightening, heartwarming and heartbreaking, confrontational masterwork that explores our shared experience of the present, and reveals what a morbid mistake it is to expect the frivolity of the past to heal our current pains.

Critics aren’t in on the joke, we are the joke. A bad review for Scary Movie is like giving it five stars.

Travis Knight’s Masters of the Universe is so blah, and so embarrassed of itself, that it could very well be the final nail in the coffin for 1980s nostalgia.

If this movie was nothing but a sightseeing tour of disquieting office buildings Parsons probably could have gotten away with it. But the more 'Backrooms' tries to have a point, the more pointless it feels.

The Breadwinner' has more stale corny bits than a Kellogg’s factory dumpster.

Maras’ sturdy, competent direction isn’t enough to turn 'Pressure' into anything more than a nifty historical anecdote that can’t sustain a feature-length motion picture.

Thea Sharrock’s film effectively skewers institutionalized misogyny and sexist comedy movie tropes, but the message was clearer and more powerful in the original short, which was allowed to be disturbing without also having to be funny.

This movie is like a car ride through Cawker City, Kansas, that doesn’t stop at The World’s Largest Ball of Twine.

It’s a deft and enjoyable blockbuster, easily the most purely entertaining Star Wars movie since the 1980s, even though it’s hardly the most meaningful or ambitious.

Every once in a while it’s useful to take note of a film that’s technically competent but utterly uninvolving.

Curry Barker’s supernatural nightmare Obsession is a better version of Wonder Woman 1984.

So emotionally, dramatically, philosophically complex that it’s tempting to put on professorial airs and focus entirely on its depth. But it is also, just as importantly, electrifying to watch.

It scrolls past thoughtful ideas, too quickly to fully process them, and the experience is as cacophonous as the typical social media feed. I’ll grant you it’s thematically appropriate but it’s not cohesive filmmaking.

Mortal Kombat II isn’t the best Mortal Kombat movie, but it’s hard to deny that it comes second. At least with the number 2 and all.

Swapped won’t change the world, probably, but it’s a step above a lot of similar films and an effective fantasy story for all ages.

So what if it could be a little shorter? The length of the journey makes RZA’s destination more meaningful.

It’s easy to forgive cheap aesthetics and a rushed finale when the middle of the flick, the sharktastic bloodletting where no character is safe, is such a hoot.

We like to joke about how "this meeting could have been an email" but if all The Devil Wears Prada 2 can offer is Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep, Stanley Tucci and Emily Blunt on-screen together again, then this film could have been a Zoom call.

As cozy farm animal detective stories go, it simply can’t be bleat.

The problem isn’t that the new 'Animal Farm' is unfaithful, it’s that the changes aren’t an improvement.

I Swear is the real deal, that rare biopic that doesn’t just tell a real human being’s story — or worse, give you the superficial, reassuring gist — but invites you into it.

The pieces of this survival thriller don’t work together in any meaningful way, they just occupy the same space, and that makes 'Apex' less exciting than if the filmmakers had just stuck to one of their guns. Any of them.