Zaki Hasan

It’s a loving sampler platter full of big laughs and heart that will satisfy lifelong DC buffs, while serving as the perfect on-ramp to the universe for a whole new generation of young fans.

“The Legend of Hank” offers a few hints of the wit and wisdom of its predecessor but is mostly content to coast through a familiar story on the accumulated charm of its star-studded cast of voice actors.

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.

If anything, the fun character dynamics laid out in the first two acts make it all the more disappointing when the final third tips over into noisy excess. But on balance, this ends up being a small complaint.

While not necessarily the very best of this genre, it’s a solid character drama benefiting from strong performances by a top-drawer cast.

The big-screen series has smartly keyed into the character’s long-running (and fast-running) appeal. Like its predecessor, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 knows when to go big, but more important, it knows when to stay small. Go ahead, put a ring on it.

While the latest “Texas Chainsaw” installment dropped on Netflix a few weeks ago, “X” owes so much in style and tone to the 1974 slasher classic it feels like more of a legitimate heir than the film bearing its name.

In addition to being the best of the sequels (with all the jumps, gore and quips we’ve come to expect), the new Scream is very much a movie for this moment, tapping into the vogue for legacy revisitations, and its own privileged status as an elder statesman on the horror scene, to show how the familiar can feel both comfortable and terrifying at the same time.

Sure, some of the window dressing and plot peculiarities are different this time, but there are no real surprises.

The original Ghostbusters was a singular experience that will never be replicated. But Afterlife does take us back into a beloved world and offers the opportunity to hang out with old friends we thought we’d never see again.

While not without charm, the biggest factors working against Army of Thieves are a confused hybrid of horror and heist genre stories and an approach making it unclear which audience – other than the most ardent of Zack Snyder fans – it’s aimed at.

Blood Brothers explores compelling, often heart-wrenching moments; and if there’s a flaw, it’s in how little time the film devotes to the aftermath of that tragic rift.

Val is a refreshingly candid documentary that uses its title star’s impressive array of archival footage to delve into larger questions about the nature of stardom itself.

Ali has done such a masterful job laying out his tableau that we’re not only enamored with the characters, we want to know where they end up.

Even as Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse goes through some familiar paces, it’s elevated by the presence at its center of star/producer Michael B. Jordan.

Godzilla vs. Kong knows exactly what it wants to be, and invests every minute of its two hours living up to that promise. Somewhat understandably the humans are overshadowed by their enormous co-stars, but it is a glorious love letter to these iconic characters’ collective histories, a satisfying culmination of the arc leading up to it, and, hopefully, a jumping-off point for more stories set in this universe. Let’s hope it’s not another half-century before these two crazy kids get together again.

The best thing you can say about this “Moment” is that, at a breezy 92 minutes, it’s a brief one.

Yes, it’s gruesome and violent, but it’s also wickedly funny and surprisingly poignant. And while those Keanu comparisons are always going to be there, Nobody easily holds a candle to Wick.