The First Purge is every bit as nakedly, hysterically symbolic as its predecessors. But if there’s one thing that the current political climate is teaching us, it’s that a subtle touch isn’t always the solution.

Eddie the Eagle trips plenty, but Eddie, insufferable as he may be, represents the people that in spite of failure being visible at the bottom of a 90-meter ski drop, still take that leap.

That world is so well-realized that the film is worth seeing, but it’s a mild letdown given the number of philosophical queries that it raises, only to leave ultimately unexplored.

Moxie is an inspirational and cathartic journey, representing a dilemma most feminists have faced at one point in their lives. The question of how to use our voices is an important one and Moxie shows that the answers are as varied as the women and men making them. But it’s also an honest look at the challenges and frustrations on the road to gender equality.

Those who follow it down its strange little alley will be rewarded with beautiful music, Isabelle Huppert, and a table-flip for the ages. See it with your mom. It’ll be weird. That’s what Greta would want.

Legacy wears its heart on its sleeve and you can feel the love for the source material. There’s an endearing and timely focus on building community, which is foundational to real witchcraft, and the message that our differences are what make us strong is one worth repeating at every opportunity. Unfortunately, there are key ingredients missing in the cauldron, and the film feels stilted by its narrative arc.

Orphan: First Kill is an almost impossible film to put your finger on, walking that incredible tightrope between chintzy direct-to-video schlock and purposeful, delightful camp. It looks like a BBC production shot for $5, but that leans even harder into its Lifetime-movie-on-crack presentation (and lets you grade its moments of visual grace on a massive curve).

TrumpLand is a valuable film for the open-minded, undecided voter, or those who can’t seem to reconcile their seeming dislike for Clinton with a vote for her; an extended rant on likability in politics is especially effective.

At 90 minutes, Becky should be a taut, hair-raising thriller, one that keeps you at the edge of your seat. It doesn’t. Instead, the thing ebbs and flows, peaking when you expect it to, and sinking when your heart’s just beginning to race.

It all gets a bit too loosey-goosey by its repetitive, redundant climax — there just aren’t enough good jokes left to cover for the fact that, yes, we get it, the bear did cocaine.

Fuqua isn’t interested in pushing the genre forward so much as respecting and updating the model accordingly. The director focuses on establishing his gang of gunslingers sturdily enough that the action becomes easy to engage with, and even get excited about.

It’s a miserable experience — a dull, dated copy of something we’ve seen before — and takes way too long to ever get moving. (It never really does.) In the end, an unimaginative script and underutilized actors make The Little Things as trivial as the title implies.

While the film’s final thesis is a Facebook post with typos at best (delete your accounts, and so on), Niccol is still terrific when he’s breaking down rules, questioning protocol, and testing new ideas.

It’s great to see Arnie and Linda Hamilton in the saddle again, and Davis and Reyes are welcome additions to the cast, but it’s probably time to terminate this franchise for good, and be thankful they went out on this serviceable note.

This sort of small-scale revenge piece is a pretty common occurrence in the direct-to-VOD market, but what elevates Silent Night is Woo’s skill with action, in concert with the lack of dialogue.

The Dead Don’t Die is a zombie movie of an odd stripe, and for all its blatant synthesizing of influences, it never shakes off the impression that it’s working out exactly what it wants to be as it goes along.

Patient, meditative, and sanguine, Adopt a Highway is a rugged slice of Americana.

This is Meg Murry’s movie, and while DuVernay’s visually stunning film may occasionally stumble, Reid does nothing less than soar.

A smarter film would’ve more deeply explored the interpersonal dynamics between these four very different lifelong friends, but Book Club presents its central quartet as a blandly supportive girl group and mines drama from their far less interesting individual romantic storylines instead.

The question is whether its lol-random approach will appeal to you, or whether its giddy need to throw everything at the wall just flattens into an obnoxious desire to please. Prisoners of the Ghostland knows exactly what it is, but that may not necessarily be a good thing.

Like its unstoppable heroine, Alita: Battle Angel is something strange and unique and special, built from the finest repurposed parts.

The unbridled mess that is Aline is just off-kilter enough to warrant a look, no matter how well you know Céline Dion.

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is another magic trick that shows it takes the right alchemy to make something flourish, even if it takes years of experiments to determine the right combination.

There’s a note of reflexive, self-aware irony to it, but portions of Knight of Cups feels as though they’re indulging in precisely this same kind of early-college navel-gazing.

Once Upon a Deadpool doesn’t offer nearly enough new gags to justify its cheeky family-cut re-release. Sure, the bits they add are great – Fred Savage’s hostage situation with Deadpool should have been a cool third of the film – but in the end, it’s a retread as limp as one of Wade Wilson’s re-growing limbs.

It’s a breakneck conclusion to what’s been a breakneck restart.

While the focus occasionally gets lost in the filmmaker’s personal inquisition, it remains a thought-provoking, challenging cap to Greenfield’s life-long body of work.

It is impressive, though, the way the movie works to incorporate new online phenomenons, from Bitcoin to swatting. The latter bit, especially, resonates as one of the film’s most unsettling elements, if only because it feels so depressingly possible. Truly, it’s surprising just how soul-crushing Dark Web becomes after luring us in with so many intriguing mysteries, but, hey, this is the internet we’re talking about.

It’s a shallow exercise in gimmicky scares, but that might be its greatest virtue: it’s a horror film of modest aspirations, avoiding the convoluted mythology of the rest of the series by planting a bunch of scary stuff in a room and setting it off. It all amounts to empty calories, but it satisfies in the moment.

Aladdin could wind up working well for young audiences yet again. For everyone else, however, it’s a bland copy of a lush original. It has the same themes and characters, but without the heart or nuance, despite being 38 minutes longer.

Not all of Killing Gunther lands as well as it should. The humor feels inconsistent at times.

Even if this story doesn’t hold its weight, it contains several worthwhile themes and ideas. Emancipation is an average film searching for something better, but can’t figure out how to get there.

Ma may not cover entirely new ground, but the execution still manages to be refreshing.

This new Lilo & Stitch manages to capture the real emotion embedded in this story, while also nailing all the fun that comes from an agent of chaos discovering he has a heart.

Humor Me is essentially the feature film adaption of writer-director Sam Hoffman‘s web series Old Jews Telling Jokes, and much like ideas that are typically created for a web series, the execution of the material appears to be just a bit too lacking to serve the purpose of a full-length film.

Renfield knows exactly what it wants to achieve and does so effectively, anchored by its lead performances and some very enjoyable super-violent action sequences which earn its R rating honestly.

On top of trying to be a Big, Important Film, Jones is also meant to be a showcase for McConaughey’s post-Oscar relevance as a dramatic actor, and he turns in a solid but unmemorable lead performance.

Another Evil may be a cheap thrill, but it has a unique take on the haunted house genre. Here’s a curious horror comedy that gets richer with every unexpected minute.

Honestly, points go to Chaves and crew for trying something different with The Devil Made Me Do It: perhaps recognizing the formula was getting stale, they decided to try balancing it with some new procedural tricks. But all it ends up doing is scattering the film’s sense of identity even further; we still get the scares, but they don’t work as well, mostly because they deal with people we don’t care about.

Every time you think Hypnotic has fully lost you, it’ll do something just interesting enough to pull you back in.

For Charli’s most devoted fans, The Moment offers worthwhile glimpses into her creative process and the pressures she navigates, but as either comedy or commentary, it never quite breaks free from the very commercial constraints it sets out to expose.

Lyne’s return to the sweat-soaked stage trades bodice-ripping intrigue for repetitive boredom and psychosexual mind games with a straightforward descent into semi-madness.

As a family movie, Detective Pikachu is enjoyable enough. But if the Pokémon games drew players into the world through immersion, it’s then strange that the first major live-action adaptation frequently races through those moments of immersion in order to get to the next sequence of middling buddy-cop banter.

Don’t let Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk‘s technical achievements carry the full weight of its errors. The plot and its poor execution leave the camerawork struggling to find much to dazzle with.

The Hollars deals in weighty personal tragedies, and yet neither the treacly, offbeat humor nor the moments of more straightforward pathos tend to work for any real length of time.

When Lawrence plays to the cheap seats, the film comes to life. When she’s the blank slate expected of a spy thriller, it falters, because it doesn’t play as though she’s concealing or deceiving. It plays as though she’s empty

Compared to a lot of other Adam Sandler movies, Hubie Halloween is watchable without being actually very good.

During the film’s livelier moments, there are some real laughs that erupt, and watching Tatum and Johansson play off each other is a charming reminder of a simpler time. One when America dreamt of the moon, and stars were still the reason audiences went to the movies.

Like Father is confidently shot and showcases some lovely Caribbean scenery, but Rogen’s biggest strength as a writer/director is her masterful understanding of tone. She’s crafted a genuinely moving father/daughter dramedy in what feels like a heightened studio comedy.

Extremely Wicked is let down by a shaky mixture of tones, and a fairly hokey presentation of its time period.

Between Happy’s family life and a whole new series of challenges for him to tackle, there’s enough freshness to the plot to keep it from feeling like a total rehash of what came before, while still delivering wild golf stunts and a huge range of cameos.

At its core, it’s simply a sweet personal story — made by a guy who, as we see here, started off wanting to do exactly that.

Love Me had the potential to be a little too precious in its storytelling — certainly there’s something profoundly cute about two robots falling in love, as any Wall-E fan will tell you. What keeps the narrative balanced is the raw bleakness of the setting.

While Plummer tries his damnedest to anchor Remember in the high drama to which it aspires, Egoyan’s latest is best forgotten.

For a 33 years-late follow up to a fan favorite? This isn’t terrible, not even close. Will it split the royal underlings that vaunt Landis’s ’88 effort? Maybe. For now, Coming 2 America deserves to be enjoyed as one of Murphy’s better follow-ups.

Trap does have one brilliant touch: At its best, Shyamalan has given us a perfect portrait of the power of straight white male privilege.

A far more intimate portrait of the detective than one might expect.

When we’re able to take a breath and spend some quiet time with the Eternals, their family dynamics and desire to reconnect resonates. And if you’re able to pay attention, the story’s implications for the scope of the MCU are tantalizing. Unfortunately, you have to sit through two-and-a-half hours of muddled motivations and facile exposition to experience any of this.

Andra Day’s Golden Globe-nominated portrayal of Billie Holiday elevates this film and allows us to overlook some of its shortcomings. Her onstage presence is absolutely undeniable. However, Daniels’ interpretation of the singer’s final years fails to fully explore key aspects of Holiday’s life that informed who she was beyond her addiction and activism.

Handsomely staged, exceptionally well-cast, and reasonably faithful, Branagh has revived Murder on the Orient Express in a highly pleasing fashion. Sure, some of its modern amenities may leave something to be desired, but this train is quite sturdy and Branagh respects the ride.

It’s got twists without being tawdry. Attitude, with sincerity. And Banks offers a reasonable rebuke to past ickiness, playing up the best elements of an old TV show’s original idea. Charlie’s Angels 2019 flies in the face of its tricky franchise past, and makes for a solid evening’s entertainment.

As was the case with the majority of blaxploitation films, the original Super Fly’s appeal wasn’t in its story so much as the ways in which it carved out an unapologetically black vision that served to capture a particular era in terms of its themes, music, and fashion. X has done that here, but he’s also crafted a crowd-pleasing summer blockbuster that will appeal to the modern filmgoer.

Windfall has all the ingredients for an unusual crackerjack thriller: a game trio of actors putting in solid work (and, in Segel’s case, tapping into previously unseen layers of menace), some stylish direction, and a cheeky noir aesthetic from the credits to Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans’ brass-heavy score. But the whole thing never quite builds on its mercurial concept the way it ought to; the characters are meant to be mysterious, but instead come across as mere ciphers.

Just don’t expect it to rewrite the genre playbook.

Ghost in the Shell is a visually arresting film, even occasionally an entertaining one, but profound it ain’t. That’s no crime, but dressed up as it is in the trappings of a much smarter film, its significant shortcomings stand out every bit as much as a pair of pert breasts on a supposedly utilitarian body.

Doesn’t dive deep into the mysteries of the human heart, but does deliver some sweetness along with the gyrating and thrusting.

Central Intelligence is genuinely funny, intriguingly plotted, and quite frankly one of the biggest surprises of the year.

Admittedly, big stretches of Demeter are a bit overwritten and unnecessary; there’s no real need for a film like this to exist, especially considering we know how it’ll all turn out. But as long as it’s here, it might as well be celebrated for what it is: lean, effective nautical horror of a type we don’t often get anymore. Seaside scares are a rare thing these days, especially when Øvredal packs this much atmosphere and characterization into such a wafer-thin premise.

Good actors can’t make up for narrative inconsistency. Beasts can’t erase the frustration of seeing characters you love behave in ways that make no sense. One can forgive retconning backstory where it doesn’t belong if it feels true to the fictional world you love. That doesn’t happen here.

The Christmas Chronicles is a passable enough lark, and may well be on the upper end of the spectrum when it comes to modern cinematic Christmas fare.

Unfortunately, The Spy Who Dumped Me struggles to tell a story as compelling as its two leads.

There’s a same ol’, same ol’ wash to X-Men: Apocalypse that wasn’t quite as apparent in the previous two entries.

It’s great when a film leaves you wanting more, but not when you weren’t given much to begin with.

Everything, Everything is a film that achieves its ends in appealing fashion.

Kuso is a hallucinatory, scatological, grotesque, and occasionally hysterical work of utter mania, the kind of wild cinema that cuts through the noise of all safer, more marketable filmmaking.

Houston’s magic as a performer was in her unpredictability; her voluminous range, the trailing vocal journey her famous runs took us on from note to note, measure to measure. When she (and Ackie) come alive on stage, Lemmons’ biopic soars with vibrating energy. It’s all the moments in between that grow ever more frustrating — the thin characterization, the flattening of her story into Behind the Music story beats, rushing from milestone to milestone without taking a breath.

The film may deliver the spectacle of dinosaurs body-slamming other dinosaurs with their mouths, but that’s about all that connects Fallen Kingdom to the wonder and fright of the original film. As a horror movie, it’s diverting enough when it’s not continuously shooting itself in the foot with ideas it can’t explain and doesn’t care to.

This is a film predicated on voyeurism, and while it’s arguably another big ol’ starefest from Refn, the viewer’s patience is earned with unquestionable tension made all the more palpable by its troubled protagonist.

The suspense is solid, with just enough glorious gore to satisfy most audiences, and there are little touches throughout the film that sometimes feel plot-motivated, sometimes don’t, but all prove compelling.

Satanic Panic has a few fleeting moments of inspiration sprinkled throughout its 83 minutes of mediocrity, but it’s not enough to salvage what is a bland effort from Stardust’s feature directorial debut.

How To Be Single doesn’t break much at all in the way of new ground, but it’s a decent walk over well-trodden territory.

In building worlds as detailed and vivid as he’s done here, Besson has essentially allowed the setting to do what’s typically reserved for characters and stakes, and that’s to make us care.

There’s a fundamental problem here, one of conception, not of execution.

Project Power is a hard-R action flick with a neat premise, inventively handled, and a winsome cast to coast us through the creakier bits of the screenplay. More crucially, it’s also got a sense of humor about itself.

Skyscraper‘s knowing sense of transparency about its own corniness turns it into exactly the right kind of summer outing, a tight 93 minutes of consistently well-executed overstimulation that takes itself seriously enough to avoid total self parody while also going out of its way to avoid insulting its audience’s intelligence.

While The Grinch never rises to the level of a modern Christmas classic, it’s an enjoyable enough holiday diversion with a core message that’s as lovely today as it was when Dr. Seuss first wrote it.

Its characters are thinly written, its antagonist is one-note, and its clumsy third-act action climax is wholly perfunctory. Yet despite all that, Dumbo still manages to offer the sweeping old-fashioned magic of an earnest family blockbuster.

Things move at such a breakneck pace and the film is so manic tonally that Rough Night winds up feeling more like a series of vignettes than an actual movie.

Not quite a domestic mystery, not quite a fascinating character study of a frustrated creative, Bernadette feels half-hearted in just about every respect.

Operation Fortune is a spy “comedy” insofar as it generally shrugs in the direction of parody: its characters presume the air of cheeky sendup without actually committing to it, whether it’s Statham’s grumpy skull-cracker or Plaza’s confused deadpan.

It’s all too calculated to really have an impact, to grant audiences an honest chance for catharsis.

The Accountant tallies up its numbers for an achingly long 50 minutes before it starts to finally piece together any semblance of a structured plot.

It’s hard not to think of The Christmas Chronicles series as a series of wasted opportunities. Kurt Russell as Santa Claus, with Goldie Hawn his doting wife, is such an inspired casting choice that it’s a real bummer to see them do so little with it.

In something as herky-jerky and convoluted as The Gentlemen, the viewer has enough to worry about keeping the whole story straight without dreading the next tone-deaf thing to come out of an esteemed character actor’s mouth.

Mowgli is not entirely recommendable, but it’s not a total bust either.

It’s a frustrating experience; a lot of the individual gags work quite well, but they never build to anything cohesive.

Day Shift is one of Netflix’s better action flicks, even if that’s faint praise given the streamer’s weak track record. Perry’s action scenes are fast-paced, with inventive flourishes like the moments where combatants pass a mirror and the vampires’ reflections can’t be seen...But the comic relief is hit-and-miss.

Peninsula combines components from I Am Legend, Mad Max, and the Fast & Furious series for a nonsensical joy ride that, while entertaining, lacks the sharpness of its predecessor.