Zaki Hasan

Once the fleeting novelty wears off, what remains is a movie caught in tonal limbo. It’s too convoluted for kids, too slight for adults and too self-aware to be taken seriously.

At its core, Star Trek: Section 31 suffers from a kind of existential emptiness. It appropriates some of the surface-level iconography of “Trek” but fails to uphold its spirit. It nods to continuity, but the dense lore feels like a gatekeeping exercise and the breezy tone undermines the gravitas of its own premise.

The Garfield Movie is a reheated tray of stale lasagna.

By the time we get to a kaiju-inspired third-act throwdown involving multiple giant sea monsters and a mystical trident, this story feels like it’s gotten too big for its small frame.

It exists within a franchise but doesn’t add anything to it, ultimately feeling as hollow as the reanimated corpses it centers on.

Occasionally amusing but rarely engaging, it leaves one feeling like they’re standing to the side and watching someone else play a video game.

It’s a pastiche of a pastiche, cycling through familiar tropes without adding anything to them; turning what could have been a fascinating critique of society’s superhero obsession into just another way of indulging it.

At 88 minutes, Minions: The Rise of Gru struggles to find enough story to encompass its run time, ending up feeling substantially longer as a result.