You know the characters, the beats, and the general arc. You know how it will end before the first act concludes, and that’s fine. The journey’s pleasant enough.

If you walk into Mary Queen of Scots looking to be dazzled by some great performances and rich art direction, you’ll walk out satisfied, no question. If you want something more than that, it’s likely the reaction will be more mixed.

There’s a lot going on in Hail, Caesar!, but in the end, it’s all a bit too silly to register as important.... Nonetheless, Hail, Caesar! satisfies that one criterion that matters most in Hollywood, and will for time immemorial: it’s entertaining as hell.

Greyhound is the bare essentials when it comes to war films. With little character development on paper, the narrative finds victory through Hanks’ patient physical performance and the craftsmanship within the battles.

The Day Shall Come remains a riveting watch, though, if only for Morris’ deft, lightning-fast pace and the cast’s mastery of his language. ... The problem is that the film’s humanity is often eclipsed by its big-picture message and satirical edge.

Skinamarink clocks in at a hefty 100 minutes, and as Ball’s approach to horror lies in the hidden and the mysterious, it might have been more effective if left as a short film instead — because of Skinamarink’s ambiguous and nebulous fear factor, viewers are left more wanting than satisfied after the striking final scene.

I might not be able to tell you what exactly Assassination Nation is, but the one thing I can confidently say is that it’s not easy to forget or dismiss.

Bailey is genuinely great in the role. But the changes added to the original story feel superficial, only giving the narrative an illusion of depth.

The Platform does away with any sense of coyness, launching immediately into its brutal tale. This focus on the captives in their cells is wise considering the few frolics it takes into backstories only distract from the action at hand.

For a film designed to spawn ancilliary products and sequels, Pets is not entirely without its charms

Skin certainly has its blemishes, but it’s occasionally excited and secure in its willingness to build an off-the-cuff alt history for an under-discussed facet of filmmaking.

It: Chapter Two doubles down on the exhausting jump scares and CGI that plagued the 2017 original. Yet for all its faults—and there are many—it’s still an enthralling and emotionally affecting piece of blockbuster filmmaking.

Sunfish is visually rich in the way that manifests when a filmmaker genuinely loves their subject or setting, and Falconer's Michigan roots are on full display throughout, and it left me truly excited to see what this young talent does next.

Miss Sloane is a smart, thorough film about a rare subject that is also as breathless, broad, and crowd-pleasing as your standard Grisham thriller.

Revenge is one big fuck you to a genre that has treated women like meat — often literally — and she takes back the reigns with incredible muscle. But what makes the movie riveting is how Lutz’s transition from damsel to destructor is filled with all kinds of tumbles.

What’s most unfortunate is that The Family Fang leaves so many ideas on the table that would have made for a far more fascinating film, one befitting its unique premise.

It falls short of an instant classic. It’s not a mind blowing achievement in horror. But The Witch is a solidly good film.

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.

The series moves forward with the succinctly-titled Scream, the first without Wes (this new film is dedicated to his passing), and one that goes full-tilt into horror movie metacommentary, perhaps to its detriment.

The fundamental disconnect behind Massive Talent, besides its deliberately shaky tonal shifts, is that it feels like a career corrective for a man whose career shouldn’t need one.

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.

The problem is that, for all of its cinematic merits, there’s something strange about this particular vampiric parable.

As legal dramas go, it’s quite good; as a Todd Haynes film, you struggle to see the talent for which he’s known.

If someone decides they don’t like you, there’s nothing you can do about it. If enough people share that opinion, they can absolutely destroy you. Combine that with an always-fantastic Cage, thoughtful and buffoonish in every gesture and tic, and it makes for a delightfully mixed bag.

Louder Than Bombs is a ghost story disguised as a domestic drama.

While the ride is often entertaining and the performances mostly satisfying, it’s a frustrating experience, like watching the journal of the least self-aware person you’ve ever met come to vivid, whining life.

Creed 2 is a commendable chapter in the franchise, thriving from a strong commitment to character, mostly thanks to Stallone’s reverence to his own legacy and the new one being created for Jordan.

In What Drives Us, Grohl reminds us of the transcendent, transformative power of live music on both sides of the stage and makes the itch to get back in the pit that much more tantalizing. It gets lost a few times along the way to its destination, but the journey is certainly a lot of fun.

A touching film that perhaps spends a bit too much time digging in the wrong places.

It’s a sparse film, to be sure, but one authentic to the time in which it takes place, even if that authenticity reads in a significantly different light in our own time.

Despite its flaws, the film still manages to win you over, even if it never actually surprises you, making it quite an assured debut.

Angela Robinson, who wrote and directed the film, has managed to take what could have been a tawdry or salacious look into Wonder Woman’s naughty roots and give her real-life characters – and their genuine love for each other – the same amount of respect that any vanilla, monogamous heterosexual historical figure would receive.

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.

Sandberg finds much of his terror in the tension that exists between light and shadow, an unsurprising discovery considering his previous film hinged on the two. They’re used much more effectively here, however.

There’s plenty to enjoy and admire about this one, even through its uneven moments.

Snow Hollow is a fun variation on the werewolf film that gets by with enough chuckles and blood.

Its essential components touch on the valuable insight that the white imagination often can’t wrap its head around what Black music is actually saying, and the ways it says it.

The results are deeply, charmingly dumb, especially the extended focus on the tete-a-tete between our tic-heavy underdog and his murderous companion.

Kill Your Friends is effective and enjoyable in the way that dusty music compilations are.

It’s tough to recommend She Dies Tomorrow given the high levels of stress and anxiety so many of us are currently experiencing. Seimetz uncannily mirrors the pervasive unease of 2020 in a way that hits a little too close to home. Full disclosure: watching triggered a near existential crisis and multi-day bad mood for this writer.

It doesn’t always work, and the results are more than a little misanthropic (especially given the cruelty of its opening and closing moments). But if that’s your jam, and the prospect of body-swapping assassins coated in guts, gore, and neon appeals to you, Possessor‘s Argento-soaked atmosphere ought to fill that need.

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.

As an extended aesthetic exercise with purposefully cheesy jokes, it might be nice if The Munsters had anything to say, anything at all.

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

There’s some solid action throughout, with sequences that vaguely approach James Bond in their silliness.

Much of Kate Plays Christine is more of a form exercise than it is a documentary portrait, which works to both the film’s benefit and detriment.

While the quality of the film’s craft is up for little debate, though, it’s overall appeal and impact are far more polarizing.

When it focuses on Eichner and Macfarlane, and the ever-complicated mores of queer masculinity, it stays charming and light on its feet. If it were a little less self-conscious about that homonormativity, it’d have a more cohesive identity, and be more of a slam dunk in the process.

What writer and director Kerem Sanga captures so well in First Girl I Loved is high school. What he captures even better is falling in love, or the naïve idea of what it means to be in love as a teenager.

Come Inside My Mind is a moving, engaging portrait of a beloved comedic icon, but like Williams himself, it sometimes lacks focus.

As a teller of tense, personal stories about communities in crisis, Farhadi is an absolute master; but with Everybody Knows, he falls just a bit short of the greatness people have come to expect of him.

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.

Boseman, wildly charismatic, captures Marshall as a magnetic figure, and his drive and fervor are intoxicating.

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.

As a primer for one of the funniest, most emotionally satisfying thumbs in the eye to the super-rich in recent memory, Dumb Money is a pretty good time. That said, it leaves out crucial details and has little time to dig deeper into its cast of characters, making it feel like a cardboard glimpse into a complicated blip in the rigged game of American finance.

While The Accountant 2 isn’t a wholly successful movie, or a wholly successful depiction of autism, it does at least spotlight an autistic character who lives a full life and seems content — who does, in fact, date and do his taxes. It’s not a triumph of representation, but it’s got a better understanding of the subject matter than some government officials do.

Good Burger 2 is a time machine that takes its audience back to a time before adulting became a verb or a burden. And on that front, it succeeds. Not always with flying colors, but just enough for a pleasurable distraction during a chaotic holiday season.

The result is that this film isn’t necessarily for the Pink Floyd newbie, as they’ll be hopelessly confused as to who is who — however, they may still be able to take in the incredible music. And Pink Floyd at Pompeii captures a Golden Age just beginning — a whole lot of spectacular music was soon to come from Waters, Gilmour, Wright, and Mason. You could see it coming, clear as an eruption from the grounds of Pompeii.

Edgerton isn’t as electric as Hawke or Isaac, and the passion-play dramaturgy strains. But as he allows himself to drift from self-torture, Schrader finds some new, compellingly strange ways to tend this well-worn soil.

The Little Stranger slowly mutates into a harrowing treatise on the ways in which absolute privilege can corrupt absolutely.

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is one of the most batshit crazy pieces of outright nonsense this writer has ever had the pleasure of encountering, and while calling it an excellent film would be going way too far, I enjoyed every single goddamn second of it.

American Made speaks in shorthand, in its visual and narrative language alike, and it’s less the ribald ripped-from-the-headlines commentary it aspires to be than a cynically breezy take on an ugly, unduly buried chapter of American history.

There’s an immense amount of baggage weighing down what proves to be a vaguely competent superhero adventure, albeit one that fails to add anything significant to the genre by the end.

Exciting? Sure. Unique? Without a doubt. But it’s hard to not feel frustrated by a script that never seems to figure out what it’s trying to say.

Like the superhero stories of the ’90s and 2000s that clearly inspired it, Blue Beetle feels like the scrappy origin story we need to get through in order to explore better things in the more exciting sequel. Hopefully, Gunn and Safran see fit to keep Jaime Reyes around for their version of the DCEU, and toy with the true potential of its hero.

Posthumous still manages to charm more often than it disappoints.

It’s worth watching for its disorienting and intoxicating atmosphere, but there’s not much narrative substance beyond that.

While Afterlife is not a terrible movie, it can’t escape the burdens heaped upon it.

Vibes can only take you so far, and Southern and Lovelace’s dreamlike approach keeps us from having a firm grip on the chronology of the times. It also feels like an incomplete chronicling of its subject, given its narrow focus on a few bands and the lack of participation of key figures.

It works, at least for a while — until the real short story stops and it’s time to get rid of the ambiguity.

Grimsby’s provocative, but not stupid. It knows what kind of humor it wants to achieve, and often scores big.

There are a handful of laugh-out-loud moments throughout Staten Island, and one screamingly-funny extended sequence that winds up influencing a great deal of the plot, without spoiling too much. Having said that, your enjoyment will depend on whether or not you find Davidson charming and/or funny.

Snowden is a film of sincere outrage, even when it strains to articulate that outrage in a less from-the-headlines manner.

Even the most grounded of James Bond movies has a certain level of goofy fun baked in; it’s inherent to the genre. And if The 355 had been a bit more conscious of this, it might have been a far more successful movie.

Cohen still has it in fits and starts. That “pedo radar” from Who Is America really ruffled feathers. He’s a performer of chameleonic qualities; see his immersive, anarchic turn in The Trial of the Chicago 7 for a nice contrast. But applying his talents to a sporadically funny, 90-minute SNL political cold open of a film is a little bit of a bummer.

All of Ridley Scott's glorious pageantry is undercut by a script tragically burdened by cliches and characters who make stupid choices.

Carell, Chalamet and their supporting players can only spit-shine a relatively rote addiction story so much; by the time the thrill of their work passes, it’s easy to find oneself waiting for more.

It’s not that a great disaster movie can’t be made in two hours or less, it’s that Roland Emmerich doesn’t know how to do it.

It’s probably a bad sign that of all the players in this film, the dinosaurs are probably the ones one roots for the most. They didn’t ask to be revived for a confusing new era filled with cars and pollution and ridiculous celebrity lawsuits! They’re dinosaurs! They’re innocent in all this!"

Sometimes you’re laughing at the movie, not with it. But there are plenty of laughs, no matter what.

The Little Hours is reasonably entertaining, but it hints just enough at something deeper that it may well leave you wanting.

It’s genuinely funny at times, but at two hours, it drags on for far too long, and Chastain suffers from having to hold up too much of the film’s weight on her thickly padded shoulders. It’s a killer performance looking for a movie to support it, and it’s just not here.

There’s a rich, hilarious novelty to the film’s juxtaposition of glittering pop and ultraviolence, but by virtue of the clear disconnect between story and song, that novelty quickly wears thin.

Mister America aims for the acerbic pitch of a ‘70s alternative political farce like The Candidate, but the parting feeling is that it’s just an overdeveloped ramble. It’s not ha-ha funny, which is fine in the world of a muted humor like this. But like Heidecker’s campaign, it’s not entirely convincing as a satire either.

The Mule is a functional take on capitalism, work-life balance, and the creeping, overlong process that is aging. The tense moments click.

Though it may not be an awards contender, there are still sparks throughout to appreciate, especially in Blunt and Evans’ performances. Thanks to them, there’s a lot of humanity to be found in the film — the best and the worst of it.

A lot of it’s funny — especially any scenes involving Powell’s admittedly charming Finnegan or Hoechlin’s testy McReynolds– but hanging out with these guys eventually becomes a chore.

Kinda Pregnant is a relatively painless, if predictable, diversion.

While it flirts with some exciting and original concepts, The Map of Tiny Perfect Things is plagued with an uninspired story, flat characters, and a pair of romantic leads that have zero chemistry. It’s not overtly offensive, but it’s certainly the kind of movie we won’t remember two time-loops from now.

The performances are strong, and the film excels in isolated setpieces. It’s just a shame to see a neat idea largely go to waste.

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.

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.

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.

While The Call of the Wild is silly, and never completely pulls the wool over the eyes with respect to the CGI, there’s enough meat on the bone to gnaw on before burying it in the backyard.

Eve’s backstory proves relatively trite, and the character is given nothing to connect with before or after she sets off on her quest.

While the film’s intentions are noble, and its story worth retelling, it struggles throughout to lend a lasting weight to its straightforward plotting.

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.