There’s no question about the talent on display. Coel is one of our most hypnotic screen performers, and had Hathaway decided to put her prodigious talents toward pop stardom instead of an Oscar-winning acting career, she’d be one of our top icons. Her Mother Mary performances are so fantastic it leaves you wanting more — of her, but not necessarily this plodding movie.

Forbidden Fruits can’t reconcile all of its influences and just ends up as a collection of references and high style without much staying power — it’s essentially the fast fashion of girly pop horror.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come feels behind the ball, not ahead of the game, and unfortunately, this is no escapist, or even cathartic, horror romp. Read the news instead if you’d like a real scare.

Made up of stylish pastiche, girl power slogans and one go-for-broke performance, The Bride!, like her Monster, isn’t much more than an assemblage of parts, and the slipperiness of time, place and character leaves the film unmoored and unrooted. Here comes The Bride! — unfortunately, she’s brain dead.

The surface pleasures of Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights may be plenty, but the story itself, well, it never achieves climax.

Maybe every filmmaker should make their own Dracula — it’s a text that certainly can be quite illuminating

Fuller demonstrates a strong command over his visual domain, but the pat allegory he presents about the monsters with whom we have to learn to live feels a bit muddled.

Thanks to Grande’s emotional performance, what does shine through is Glinda’s personal story about embracing change, stepping into her own power and defining what it means to be “good,” on her own terms — not because it’s her brand. This is decidedly Glinda’s movie, and that is the one good thing.

Bone Lake offers up an appealing surface, but it’s just too shallow to get very far.

Johansson’s direction is serviceable if unremarkable, and one has to wonder why this particular script spoke to her as a directorial debut. Though it is morally complex and modest in scope, it doesn’t dive deep enough into the nuance here, opting for surface-level emotional revelations. It’s Squibb’s performance and appealing screen presence that enables this all to work — if it does.

There are some affecting inner child healing moments here, but without details and specifics, this is a big, bold swing, but a beautiful miss.

The character and Qualley’s performance is so beguiling that it would be a delight to watch Honey O’Donahue solve any manner of mysteries of the week, “Columbo”-style. It’s a shame, then, that the particular mystery at hand in Honey Don’t! is so convoluted and nonsensical.

It’s not bad. The reboot of The Naked Gun tosses off a few sharp and/or stupidly effective gags of the hit-and-run variety, nice and quick.

The remake is just like the original, but there’s more of it. And less.

After the persuasively strange first chapter’s over, “The Life of Chuck” is a duller kind of strange.

The saving graces are Agudong and Kealoha. Their characters’ sibling relationship, fractious but loving, keeps at least five toes in the real world and in real feelings, thanks to the actors.

The teaming of Robinson and Rudd periodically gets Friendship in gear. But the film’s primary comic impulse equates to the sound of gears grinding, in an attempt to shift from second to third.

Given its premise, you wouldn’t expect The Accountant 2 to go for quite so much buddy comedy, but life is full of surprises.

Just when movie theaters don’t need another one, The Amateur comes along to join the roster of 2025 releases that lack the knack, the juice and exciting reasons for theatergoers to theater-go.

Opus has its moments. But even the surprises aren’t especially surprising.

By the end of Novocaine, it’s as if the filmmakers — who have talent, and who are now off and running in a commercial sense — forgot how their movie started: with Quaid and Midthunder getting the material and the screen time needed to hook an audience’s interest, before the jocular sadism commenced in earnest.

The movie wouldn’t feel human at all, really, if not for the convincing emotion bond established between Mackie and Carl Lumbly as Isaiah.

It’s solid craft, but it’s craft wedded to a style of filmmaking that feels wholly impersonal, even with a top-flight director at the helm.

Taylor-Johnson is a solid actor, but on the page and in performance, Kraven’s barely there and too cool to care about what’s happening. Which makes it hard for moviegoers to care.

Too often, though, the magic in Wicked remains stubbornly unmagical. And whenever Erivo isn’t around to make us believe, and take the mechanics of Wicked to heart, Part I reveals what’s behind the curtain, an adequate set-up for next November’s second act.

The book’s melancholy spareness has been replaced by a “Here” existing somewhere in a pristine, remote suburb we’ll call Uncanny Valley Falls, a few miles away from real life.

In 2024 a movie about a live-TV countdown to destiny, once upon a time in ’75, needs more than moderately skillful reverence, and reaction shots of people cracking up at colleagues, to show us what it might’ve been like to be there.

[Moore's] gripping in ways the rest of the picture is not, transcending the thesis points and comic exaggerations simply by playing against the comic extremes and holding a card or two, always, in reserve. She reminds us here how good, and tough, she is at her best, when she gets half a chance.

The Instigators isn’t that bad, but it’s lazy, low-stakes stuff. Everyone on screen has done and been better.

Good, bad or middling, very little of Shyamalan’s works can be described as tightly plotted, well-sprung suspense.

The script never quite feels itself; it feels like contradictory impulses playing out in shuffle mode. And the scale of the movie does the putative romance no favors.

Chapter 1 feels like throat-clearing — a serviceable horse opera overture to a curiously dispassionate passion project.

A major sticking point is that none of these characters have been developed into people who are interesting enough to carry what is ultimately an exceedingly thin story, and the lack of intrigue becomes a glaring issue.

Just about everybody on screen in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire lightens the load. But sometime around the eighth or ninth round of expository mumbo jumbo concerning the ectoplasmic nightmare about to happen, the movie starts moving sideways, not forward.

Only Viswanathan, wonderful in “Hala” and others, comes close to locating a tone that makes some human sense inside this wildly uneven material, careening all across the character-to-caricature spectrum.

All worldwide musical phenomena carry with them some enigmatic quality that encourages, deliberately or not, a kind of adoring guesswork on behalf of fans. In Bob Marley: One Love, both as written and acted, Marley himself remains more cipher than enigma.

Anyone But You isn’t terrible, or a travesty. It’s eh-notherthing ehltogether.

I realize writing a new Christmas screenplay can’t be easy; to get made, it must check a certain number of predictable boxes. Murphy is game, but only in a few moments with Ross — small-talk scenes not dependent on forced wonderment or reaction-shot gaping — do they appear to relax and enjoy the company.

Napoleon was many things, and with this dutiful career highlights reel, Phoenix and his director deliver glancing blows to as many aspects of the warrior-tyrant-genius-fool-lonely heart as cinematically possible in two and a half hours.

"Songbirds and Snakes” takes its job SUPERseriously, with more solemnity than imaginative excitement.

It’s an odd one, indecisive about its tone and intentions.

The Exorcist: Believer has its moments, but we’ve had a half-century of this stuff. And the filmmaker in charge has to show us something new; there’s more to life, and moviegoing, than coasting on cherished memories of projectile vomiting and head-swiveling.

The way My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 has been staged, filmed and edited, every new scene and each exchange has a way of being undermined by the filmmaking choices.

The strongest minutes in The Good Mother belongs to Chicago-trained Karen Aldridge. She takes care of business so well in her monologue about her character’s grief and loss, her exit from the narrative becomes just one more oh-well factor in an indifferent Albany noir.

So what’s missing? The usual scarcities in modern screen comedy: visual finesse and some wit to go with the gross-out stuff. Little things start adding up against Strays.

While many will find Revoir Paris moving, for me it’s because the performances do the heavy lifting, effortlessly, while the material lays everything out too neatly. The mess of life, the anguish of what Mia is going through, deserves a clear-eyed exploration and a little less gloss.

At this point in the life of this ol’ archaeologist, Indy’s theme song has become not just a sound, but practically a sight to behold — even in a movie that isn’t.

Though based on a graphic novel, both movies have the feel of a first person shooter video game. Hemsworth’s physical stature does a lot of the heavy lifting, literally and otherwise, but Tyler is not a character so much as an avatar.

Keaton is the one who brings both effortless gravity and subtle levity to a film that, without him, wouldn’t have much of either.

My affection for a lot of the earlier F&F movies has everything to do with the people on the screen, and the squealing of the tires. Not so much the world destruction. Outlandish mayhem needs better visual stylists than Leterrier.

Mainly, Cage keeps finding the damnedest ways to topspin his line readings so that you never know where a sentence is going. May the next outing with Renfield and Dracula, should the public and Universal decree it, be a little funnier and little less too much.

Fortunately, this loud, hectic movie doesn’t overstay its welcome, but it wouldn’t have the material to last a second longer. It’s bright, busy, inoffensive and exactly the opposite of the weird, dark, edgy 1993 movie adaptation. That may be better for the business of Mario, but it’s not exactly terribly interesting either.

Disarming one minute, baldly manipulative the next, Champions is a tricky one.

The movie, let it be said, is not awful, but the kinetic battles are chaotic, and the look of the Quantum Realm is oddly drab in its interweaving of digital and VFX elements, seeming at times to be more like several first drafts of a new “Star Wars” franchise instead of a natural extension of this one. Midway through, as everyone on screen was restating their interest in getting home again, I thought: Same!

Magic Mike’s Last Dance might’ve worked better if it had fully embraced the mantle of 21st century comedy of manners. As is, it’s tentative, wanly comic. As the great Russian stripper Anton Chekhov showed us: Without the funny, the serious has a harder go of it.

With a smooth overlay of LA sights and sounds, and a side of blueprints stolen from “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and “Meet the Fockers,” “You People” ends up a lot less insightfully funny than “Black-ish.”

I love what The Whale is doing for Fraser’s career. But not since John Wells blanded out the movie version of “August: Osage County” has a well-regarded play looked quite so at sea on screen.

Loosely entwining a half-dozen major characters, though two or three get disappointingly short shrift, “Babylon” thins out all too quickly, settling for a strenuous ode to the dream factory and its victims and exploiters, who occasionally make wondrous things for the screen.

Emancipation is never dull, but it’s rarely without its box office instincts for falsification front and center, alongside its star. And while it has been built on the scarred back of a real man, the movie is too busy with the business of entertainment to focus on the “real” part for long.

Wendell & Wild may not succeed, but I took heart from this: At least it doesn’t succeed in unconventional ways. That’s a sign of serious talents struggling with two of the most dreaded and unavoidable words in commercial cinema: “story problems.”

It’s a premise for a pitch, not a screenplay, at least not a sharp-witted or interesting one. I’m not fussy. I’m not looking for the most interesting romantic comedy in history with this one. But I do wonder if some writers are so determined to stick to a formula so slavishly, they forget to make the characters funny, or to make characters rather than vaguely delineated personae in the Clooney vein or Roberts vibe.

Hawke and McGregor are the kind of actors who hold your attention as the story evaporates around them. Even so, they deserve far more to play with than they get here.

Director Mike Barker’s slick, vaguely pernicious take on the material is a blend of dead-serious anguish and feel-good vindication. While many will find the results effective, others will not simply resist the guessing games and pulp instincts at odds with the trauma, but actively resent them.

David O. Russell’s Amsterdam is very plush in the looks department. Enjoying the costumes and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s lighting and some of Russell’s shot designs will get you through it. But only if you don’t have to listen to it, or track it, or believe in the people on screen.

Everything not right with Don’t Worry Darling wasn’t right from the beginning. Even a good director — and Wilde is that, though her hand in developing this material clearly wasn’t without some wrong turns — must deal with script problems if they’re there, in the story, lurking and waiting to mess everything up and send audiences out muttering, wait what?

Directed by Tom George from a screenplay by Mark Chappell, “See How They Run” is a throwback with a smirk. Or put more diplomatically: An old school whodunit reconceived as a farce. It’s self-referential (the characters end up snowed in at a country estate, just like in “The Mousetrap”) and simultaneously poking fun at the murder mystery form while also paying homage. If only it were actually funny!

The spirit’s almost there to pull it off. But the movie does grind on.

The performances are honest and true and that gives things a considerable boost.

The script for Spiderhead makes a rookie mistake: It lets the audience get too far out ahead of the Teller character’s moral and narrative awakening. Hemsworth has some icy, rascally fun with his scenes; when Teller and Smollett get some time together, on their own, the story flickers to something like life. But even at 100 minutes minus end credits, the film’s stretch marks are undeniable.

The action is perpetual, and perpetually in need of a better director, and editing that heightens and sharpens our pleasurable excitement instead of dulling it. The appeal, I suppose, of the far-flung, constantly roving storyline this time around is its latitude for different sorts of mayhem and different genre shout-outs. But all too soon Jurassic World: Dominion made me long for the best bits of Spielberg’s “Lost World” or J.A. Bayona’s “Fallen Kingdom.” Those folks know how to set up a shot, vary the rhythm and deliver the payoff.

It’s not quite an airball; you won’t find yourself returning to it again and again, either. But there’s a part of me that’s just happy to see non-blockbuster movies about human-scaled dilemmas still getting made.

At the moment, far too many true crime documentaries function as little more than an episode of “Dateline.” They report information but lack analysis or even thoughtful ideas about how to use the medium of film to tell a story at once shocking and infuriating. Such is the case with Our Father on Netflix.

I suspect the Cage fans who will enjoy this movie won’t care if it’s fundamentally sloppy and lazy moviemaking. The star of the show is neither.

What good is a movie that can’t stop moving, or screaming, long enough to pace itself?

The movie has a good shot at a huge streaming audience. But does it have the creative instincts of a good movie? An OK one, yes. It’s too bad The Adam Project is only that, since the cast isn’t dogging the assignment for a second.

I don’t know if this was due to the budget or COVID, but Marry Me feels small in ways that a big commercial rom-com frequently doesn’t and maybe that’s why you can’t fully shake the feeling that this Universal Pictures project is really just a marketing scheme cooked up to highlight Lopez’s real-life music career and some NBCUniversal properties, including the frequent cutaways to a decidedly unfunny Jimmy Fallon, which may be, ironically, the movie at its most honest.

First hour: pretty lousy and not much fun. Second hour: pretty lousy but more fun, and the movie has the benefit of getting stranger and stranger as it gyrates.

I wish this movie offered a little less running commentary and a little more running — anything, really, to get itself off the treadmill of self-critique and self-congratulation and actually going somewhere new.

Now and then The 355 sticks a landing.

Sorkin’s approach is to focus on the things that are happening rather than to inquire as to the contours of Lucy or Desi’s internal monologues, and so they remain unknowable, moving through a biopic that offers little more than an exercise in re-enactment.

Single All the Way cannot sustain itself on Urie’s considerable charms alone, but he’s been so underused since the days of “Ugly Betty” that it’s thrilling to see him in a starring role. If only it was a better one.

This movie is more risk-prone than the majority of Marvel titles. Yet it frustrates, even beyond a screenplay full of self-competing interests. And as far as MCU fatigue goes — well, at this point, it goes pretty far.

In his fastidious, exacting, extraordinarily blinkered creation, writer-director Anderson this time has driven straight into a cul-de-sac, stranding every sort of good and great actor in the cinematic equivalent of a design meeting.

Carr made her long-gestating Netflix documentary with journalist Jenny Eliscu and the pair never comes across as anything less than serious-minded. But their efforts feel limp and plodding by comparison, and sometimes confusing.

McCarthy’s open-faced performance is reason enough to give it your time, even if nearly everything surrounding her feels unworthy.

Mainly, the movie we have here reminds us that what works on a stage, within the non-realistic world and performance momentum of stage musicals, lessens a lot of story problems that movies tend to heighten.

As a sort-of-true-crime comedy, spinning a yarn of middle-class larceny and extreme, deeply unlawful couponing, it’s likely to offend no one but the most grimly law-abiding consumers among us. But like the people it’s about, you want more.

Stillwater feels like a movie filmed in a slightly blurry state of mind, then reshaped in the editing stage into a whole new blur. You don’t know where it’s going, and that’s a plus. Yet director and co-writer Tom McCarthy’s drama is as uncertain as his good movies, “Spotlight” highest among them, are quietly confident in going about their business.

There’s a good movie in the story of Joe Bell and Jadin Bell. The good one struggles to emerge from the good try we have here.

On the whole, I’d go with the 2018 basketball comedy “Uncle Drew” over either “Jams.” One-joke movies, all three. But it helps when the gags don’t stop at the reference point and dribble in place while the clock runs out.

What we have here is a smoothly crafted error in judgment.

It’s hard to pick apart a film that is as well-intentioned as Here Today, which earnestly wants to celebrate life, and every beautiful, tragic, poignant and surprising moment. But for a film that seeks to be so humanist, there’s only one truly human character in it. As likable as he is, that oversight is impossible to ignore.

Four Good Days is a portrait of addiction that wants to dive into the ugliest parts: the detox, the physical deterioration, the flop houses, the things Molly did for drugs. But, despite Kunis’ haggard appearance, Four Good Days only flirts with ugly, pulling away from the most vile details at the last moments.

I’m not saying the film needed to be formally experimental. But as it is, the documentary feels deeply pointless.

Every character is merely a stereotype or symbol, not a fully-fleshed out person. Indeed, one has to wonder what every actor, including Monaghan, is doing in this flimsily written psychological thriller, but perhaps, that question isn’t even worth the speculation.

The cast generates the goodwill. Madison and Quinn bring heart and some shrewd dramatic instincts, while Cook and Sterling settle comfortably into a sincere comic key.

I’d love to say it isn’t half-bad, but I can’t, because it is. It’s roughly 50 percent bad. The other 50 percent is better than that, even with a running time that threatens to never stop not stopping.

While the sentiments feel authentic, the ludicrous plot, filled with holes, doesn’t do the emotional aspects of the story any service.