William Bibbiani

So it’s not an instant classic like The Invisible Man. I think we can all live with that. It’s still a scary and interesting movie about a wolf man, anchored by a haunting performance from Abbott, who understood the assignment and went for extra credit.

Gracey may film Better Man through a thick veneer of showbiz glitz but — thanks in large part to the fact that, again, the star is a CGI chimpanzee — the film’s heaviest scenes sneak up on you and pack a wallop.

It never quite kicks into high gear, and plays a lot more like a TV movie from the 1990s — a very good decade for historical TV movies — than a major feature in the 2020s.

It’s hard not to feel a bit scammed, like you just bought a brand-new AAA game and found out most of its content is still locked behind an additional paywall.

It’s in little danger of becoming a classic but it’s gratifying to know that Barry Jenkins made this film his own, telling a fine story with genuine emotion and visual aplomb.

It’s not consistently hilarious but it is consistently imaginative, sometimes even breathtaking.

There are about two minutes in 'Carry-On' that are as exciting as any other action movie this year, and about 100 minutes that are pretty fun too.

A superficial illustration of the artist’s allure, interspersed with endless, increasingly comical shots of people watching him perform and smiling beatifically.

The fourth best animated Lord of the Rings feature, which sounds pretty good until you remember there are only four of them.

This Count Orlock is a gruesome monstrosity, gnawed on and gnarled, as repulsive as movie monsters get. But he is now also that sexual creature, a hypermasculine 1970s porn star, as virile as he is virulent.

There’s nothing particularly terrible about Moana 2, but the fact that it’s necessary to write 'there’s nothing particularly terrible about Moana 2' means something still went wrong.

Even the quietest moments of 'Flow' are tainted by existential threat. It’s suspenseful and pensive and painful in a way few films strive for, and fewer still achieve.

The story’s playful, subversive reinterpretation of 'The Wizard of Oz' as a work of propaganda, designed to obfuscate the true story of how political dissidents and minority groups are demonized by fascist con artists who trade in theatricality instead of competence, is fully developed and still (to our collective dismay) incredibly salient.

It’s cheap and it’s silly and it has a laughable premise that some people will mistake for terribleness. But it’s also winking and whimsical. It knows what it’s doing and it’s doing it on purpose. Somehow it actually kind of works.

There are exactly enough thrills to fill a 90-minute movie, including the closing credits. No more and no less. So thank god 'Elevation' is short or it probably would have stunk.

It’s a little happy, a little sad, a little off-putting, a lot like going home again. And it’s always interesting.

One emerges from the theater thinking we may have just had a good time, but the more it sits with you, the more you realize that no matter how epic the battles were — and they certainly were epic — they didn’t have anywhere near the same impact as the original.

Christina Milian and Devale Ellis are adorable. That’s the whole movie in a nutshell. Nothing else has to work in order to get what we need out of it. Pentatonix can’t even play themselves convincingly, at all, and it still doesn’t hurt this thing.

Red One might not save Christmas but at least it saves face.

This isn’t the first sequel to desperately transplant its characters into a tropical or jungle locale, and it isn’t the best. Then again, the competition includes Weekend at Bernie’s II, Speed 2: Cruise Control and Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise, so it isn’t the worst either.

Neeson]’s trapped once again in tired tough guy material, bringing gravity to a film that’s already dragging him — and the audience — down.

A bright, entertaining, intelligent film about how easy it is to get distracted by superficiality, and how important it is to look at Christmas — and by extension, Christianity — from a fresh and even critical perspective.

The time travel stuff is mined for funny jokes for a few minutes and then the film shows zero interest in all the worms it’s uncanned. It’s a whole lot of “what ifs” and not a lot of “then whats.”

It’s got great heroes, a memorable villain, and more whimsy than is probably recommended by medical science. Which is to say, just the right amount of whimsy.

All that effort and innovation and ambition amounts, in Zemeckis’ film, to little more than a mawkish intergenerational drama. Here genuinely seems to believe that the history of the world peaked with the possibility of mom and dad getting a divorce.

Brian Netto and Adam Schindler’s gimmicky nail-biter is intense and creative enough to quicken your heartbeat and make you wonder if you’d be clever enough to survive in the same situation.

A cheeseburger on Amazon Prime’s value menu, but they left out the cheese. And the meat.

A road trip fugitive movie which barely works as a road trip, or as a fugitive movie, or as a movie.