While that can be entertaining at times, Shaft mostly reads as an oddly sexless, convoluted, and downright dull continuation. It’s as if the creators are afraid to take the character seriously in an age of ironic detachment. It’s a missed opportunity, particularly at the chance to comment on how being a “complicated man” has evolved since 1971, and how the world has never simply been black and white. Oh, well.

Like any good what-if story, I Am Mother is uncomfortably close to asking “What now?”

Sure, it’s a thrilling ride, but it’s also as memorable as a 75-second roller coaster.

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.

Both Dylan and Scorsese cast a spell in Rolling Thunder Revue, one that Dylan fans will gratefully fall under.

Fails is unsurprisingly exceptional given his relationship to the material, shaping the film’s overall tone as he goes along, portraying a kind of existential tour guide for a place that at once still stands, is being torn down every day, and never quite existed at all.

What Skin lacks in history, context, or behavioral psychology, it compensates for with pure angst, dread, and guilt. It’s the human element, the bare skin as it were, that makes this film stand out. It’s a melodrama with characters that inspire interest, if not fondness.

There isn’t much to love, there isn’t much to hate, there’s mostly just indifference.

While the charm of Always Be My Maybe can and should be attributed to its performers, there’s a real sweetness in its reframing of the romantic comedy as the struggle of two people who already have fulfilling lives, attempting to add to them by rediscovering lost pieces of themselves in each other.

Even if Rocketman is one of those films where you walk in knowing almost exactly what to expect, it still manages to wham, glam, and occasionally elate.

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

In the end, King of the Monsters is too philosophical to be a good dumb movie, and too dumb to be that much fun.

As a crowd-pleasing, emotionally gripping joyride about the ways in which music can change our lives, it’s one to see, and more than once.

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.

It’s a nasty piece of work, and one that at the very least stands as an active interruption of the escapist, family-friendly superhero fare currently dominating the industry.

The film is more than an accumulation of shocking twists and surprises. It’s a tawdry but perceptive meditation on the ways that victims of abuse build walls to protect themselves from harm — and the great lengths that someone would have to go to knock those walls down.

Yesterday is too trusting, too confident in its silly dream, and not fun or passionate enough.

The Souvenir‘s power is deceptive, in a way; it’s only at the film’s end, at the moment of its bracing final image, that its ideas and genre subversions come fully into focus.

It’s a thrilling, surprising, often funny film, centered on a terrific performance.

While the movie’s a letdown in the remake and modernization departments, it’s at least a modest success in terms of ebullient talent and frothy farce.

Murray and Wever are as attuned to their roles as Smith is awkward and miscast in his. But perhaps that’s an appropriate fit for Harron and Turner’s divisive-yet-gripping take on this story: at the end of the day, the Manson women are deeper, more fascinating, and more worthy of exploration than the insecure man that connected them.

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.

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

In an age where “so bad it’s good” has lost much of its meaning in a sea of calculated camp, The Intruder may be one of the few films of recent vintage that truly qualifies.

Endgame manages to effectively deliver reunions alongside farewells, fan service alongside the kind of storytelling which needs to occur in order for the whole billion-dollar machine to keep a’grinding, and a handful of sincere, honest-to-God surprises that make the grandeur of the whole thing feel justified.

Grass Is Greener may ultimately be preaching to the chorus, but its simple messaging could draw in people who enjoy getting high, but aren’t fully aware of the broader political implications. As uses for streaming services go, there are far worse ways to burn down an afternoon.

To make a great romantic comedy, you need a few key components. Stylish direction. Winning lead actors. Likable, lived-in characters. And some kind of unique angle on the well-trod genre at hand. Someone Great offers all of that and more, but it also proves that one of the most important and least appreciated aspects of a successful rom-com is a great script.

It’s a paint-by-numbers would-be blockbuster entirely built around the delusional notion that general audiences can’t be scared by anything more thoughtful than recycled jump shocks and derivative monsters.