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.