This Minions prequel would have to go some to make it as flimsy, but Steve Carell is pricelessly funny doing the voice of a pre-teen wannabe villain wrangling an army of goggle-wearing little buggers and you could do worse in a search for animated family fun

Amy Adams excels as a stay-at-home mom going so crazy in confinement that she turns into a feral dog in protest. It’s a daring idea until the script chickens out as a ferocious feminist fable and sinks into cotton-candy quicksand. Bummer

Is it a great movie? Nah. It's too slick a Marvel package for that, with surprisingly meh special effects and an energy that’s more desperation than inspiration. But stars Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman are willing to bust a gut to make you laugh. So there’s that.

Anything for Halloween? You bet. Lock up the children—the Sanderson Sisters are back in a bewitching sequel that returns Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy to the roles they created in 1993 just in time to put a funny-scary spell on you.

Ethan Coen’s lesbian road movie, cowritten with his wife Tricia Cooke who identifies as queer, is raucously funny when it doesn’t go slack and make you wish he’d reunite soonest with his sibling Joel for a bit of the old Coen brothers magic that fails to materialize here.

Inside this manic jumble about a family of prehistoric ‘Flintstones’ knockoffs lies a brightly animated bauble that speaks to the power of staying connected even when forced apart. Pretty good for a cartoon, especially during a pandemic.

Only glints of the old whiplash magic remain in chapter 10 as thrills give way to thudding formula and paycheck acting—not you Jason Momoa—that slow down the action to forge the limping runt of the F&F litter.

Christian Bale tries to solve a murder at West Point, circa 1830, with the help of young cadet Edgar Allen Poe (Harry Melling). But what should be a gothic mesmerizer ends up a dreary exercise to doom and gloom that’s an endurance test for audiences.

Even with Spider-man Tom Holland and new Batman Robert Pattinson in the leads, this violent tale of backwoods sin and corruption suffers from a severe case of too-muchness.

Shot with a poet's eye and a tin ear for dialogue, this tricked-up thriller about the horror of getting old too fast brings out the best and worst in M. Knight Shyamalan by throwing a wet beach blanket on a Covid-resonant premise about sudden death and the collapse of time.

If long, loud and ludicrous is your kind of movie escapism, check out director Michael Bay’s latest shot of adrenalized, de-humanized filmmaking as a psycho bank robber (Jake Gyllenhaal) commandeers an ambulance as a getaway car. Entertaining? Exhausting is more like it.

The mostly improvised drama about a trans man reuniting with his family can feel clumsy and contrived, but it soars on waves of raw feeling thanks to the deeply felt, deeply moving performance of Elliot Page in a role he wears like a second skin.

With so little to show for its staggering ambition to synthesize modern New York with the fall of the Roman Empire, Francis Ford Coppola's all-star, self-financed passion project is a mess, but the lion who made it is still roaring, even in winter.

Mad trippy or catastrophic? This DC superhero epic is actually a mix of both, dragged down by exhausting multiverse hopping but flashy fun on the wings of captivating star Ezra Miller and the grumpy comic perfection of Michael Keaton as a Batman on the ropes.

Are you ready to party? Here's the musical blast we need right now to cure our pandemic blues. Corny? You bet. But an all-star cast, led by Streep, Kidman and Corden, wears its unruly heart on its sleeve as Ryan’s Murphy’s plea for tolerance sings, dances and laughs our troubles away.

Firing up the Oscar race for Best Actress, a virtuoso Jessica Chastain raises up this formula biopic about televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker by redeeming her reputation as a cultural joke in clown makeup and finding the soul beneath the sparkle.

Ryan Reynolds leads an A-list cast in this ‘Back to the Future’ nostalgia trip that coasts down well-worn roads instead of paving new ones with fresh imagination. But there are still laughs and tears to be had this cynicism-free throwback to ‘80s family entertainment.

Think of it as Jaws on Safari and you'll have some idea what to expect from this generic thrill machine that requires Idris Elba to look great (he does) while doing battle with a digital lion.

The fourth round for Will Smith and Martin Lawrence isn’t a bad movie, really, just another mediocrity trying to cash in on what came before, the kind of money grab that’s killing movies by serving leftovers as the main course. Resist, people, before it's too late.

A stirring true story about the triumph of an eight-man rowing crew at the 1936 Olympics fits right into director George Clooney’s old-fashioned love for underdogs, but the exciting races are muted by thinly developed personal dramas that feel pokey and predictable.

Though this horror sequel about a coven of teen witches wastes time on delivering scares instead of developing character, the feminist fire of filmmaker Zoe Lister-Jones sees to it that there’s more here than a Halloween throwaway.

A bear does cocaine and kills people. That’s it. Director Elizabeth Banks revels in deliciously cheap thrills, but then treats her overqualified actors (Keri Russell, the late Ray Liotta) like bear chewtoys while the overcrowded script drifts into hibernation.

It’s a risk doing a prequel to this hit film franchise without the power surge of star Jennifer Lawrence and the safe and sorry result, set 64 years before Lawrence's Katniss Everdeen ever drew breath, is seriously overlong and underwhelming.

Despite widening gaps of logic in its slow-burn mystery plot, this twisty, killer-on-the-loose, dark-night-of-the-soul thriller features top turns from Denzel Washington and Rami Malek as L.A. cops chasing a psycho, played by a scary and diabolically funny Jared Leto.

Michael Keaton’s second go as star and director stumbles but rises again on the strength of Keaton’s ability to bring his bristling intelligence as an actor to his work behind camera in this darkly comic film noir about an L.A. hitman losing a fraught battle with dementia.

Fighting their way out of the flowery tearjerking in the film version of Colleen Hoover’s mega-bestseller are a timely movie and a stellar Blake Lively performance that both take measure of domestic violence and the women who get to decide when enough is enough.

Eddie Murphy is 63 now and sometimes the jokes seem just as retirement ready, but seeing the this comic legend return to the cop role he created four decades ago—along with many of the old gang— at least squeaks by as primo fan service.

After the infamous slap that sidelined his career, Will Smith returns as a runaway slave in a sorry but noble misfire that offers the disgraced actor pitifully few chances to bring dimension to a real-life character the script traps in a swamp of misery-porn cliches.