Zaki Hasan

Tolkien’s fantasy world is always worth revisiting, and that makes “The War of the Rohirrim” worthy of watching even if it ultimately doesn’t amount to much once you look past the obvious visual panache.

Despicable Me 4 is co-written by Mike White (“Migration”) and has a bit more wit and heart — not to mention a few more laughs — than the recent entries in the “Despicable” series.

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.

Stylish, playful and buoyed by the chemistry of its returning ensemble, “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t” sharpens the franchise’s act with a surer hand to present a dazzling heist film that doesn’t treat its audience like a mark, but rewards them for paying attention.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

Even as its ambitions are laudable in casting a wide net over a variety of societal ills, the film can’t quite muster the will to follow through on those ambitions and instead succumbs too often to cliche when complexity was required.

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

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.

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.

The Garfield Movie is a reheated tray of stale lasagna.