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.

On the surface, we get a rough-and-tumble action film from the bygone era that serves up the middle-of-the-road divergences that play into a larger scheme of police corruption. However, the plotting gets tripped up by too many self-imposed obstacles that cause this otherwise breezy romp to feel weighted down by its own design.

It’s better than it could be, but it could have been great.

The film starts to risk adrenaline fatigue after the first hour.

However handsomely and efficiently staged, the actual action in this action movie feels immaterial. It’s a foregone conclusion that Mills is going to get his daughter back, no matter what obstacles are thrown in his way.

Loud, gory, sometimes silly, sometimes scary, and nearly always constant fun, Studio 666 is tailored to a pretty specific audience but has the potential to break outside of that niche, thanks to its commitment to old-school horror tropes with a hearty side of rock and roll.

Director Wes Ball frames the film as one long siege on the central city with few exceptions, and while that lends it a certain sense of momentum, after a while the sensation of watching it turns into one of checking off boxes

Even its ornamental excesses become beside the point, because the core conceit actually works. Boy, those George Michael songs bind the scenes together like Gorilla Glue. Nothing says quaint like Tom Ford storefronts, too. But these things fade into something warmer, grander, and even a bit telling.

As successful as its biggest, wildest swings are, it'd really be nice if the plotting of The Marvels lived up to those elements. That said, those other elements are hard to oversell. It might not be the most coherent MCU entry of 2023. But it's perhaps the most purely enjoyable.

Does Rebirth set up a promising new future for the franchise, as its title suggests? Not exactly — again, this feels very much like a stand-alone adventure. But it does prove that it’s still possible to tell a suspenseful and exciting stand-alone story within this franchise; while it might not quite match the original, it at least doesn’t lose sight of its most compelling elements. Dinosaurs might be dying out. But the audience’s desire to watch them gobble up humans will never go extinct.

Scoff, roll your eyes, and shrug all you want, but the hyperbolic nature of The Hunt is all part of the fun, and whether you take this literally, or metaphorically, rhetorically, spiritually, whatever, it all boils down to a big ol’ sensationalized portrait of a very heated country.