Zaki Hasan

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.

“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.

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

Despite game performances by a slew of returning cast members, it doesn’t justify its existence as anything other than a mercenary attempt by Paramount+ to cash in on audience nostalgia for familiar faces.

Part of what made the prior two “Sonic the Hedgehog” movies work was their playful, controlled scope that still provided engaging, serious storylines. By contrast, the third and latest installation overwhelms with so many explosions and colorful sky beams that instead of pulling the audience in, it has the opposite effect.

There’s a lot in Scream VI to satisfy longtime fans, but it still feels like a step down from the last one.

Taken together, “X” and “Pearl” make for a compelling double-feature showcasing blood-spattered homages to different eras of film.

Two decades after its predecessor, Disney’s “Freakier Friday” plunges back into “legacy sequel” waters — where nostalgia keeps storylines afloat and originality barely treads water.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s bigger, vibrantly colorful and slightly more ambitious, with glimpses of an interesting movie trying to break through, but it keeps snapping back to what’s safe.

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 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.

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