There are some funny lines peppered throughout, but more often than not, it feels like the easiest and most simplistic version of this story rather than going for something either truly darkly subversive or hitting the emotional heights it’s going for.

Exit 8 can feel inspired, but only in fits and starts.

If you think ballerinas using their dance skills to fight and kill bad guys sounds fun, Pretty Lethal does deliver on its premise. However, it takes too long to get going, and is ultimately a somewhat amusing trifle instead of the more fun spectacle it could have been.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie ditches an engaging story in favor of a pipe-bursting amount of Easter eggs, but that’s not an all-together bad thing.

A tale of miserable spouses plotting each other’s demise, it doesn’t always work, but its action comedy stylings are enough to keep it entertaining even when it swerves into ugly excess or extraneous subplots.

The sequel to Bollywood’s biggest hit is bigger, longer, and just as vicious in its on-screen butchery, but has far less artistry and visceral allure. The continued spy-revenge saga runs a mind-numbing four hours, during which it sheds all semblance of human drama in favor of naked political propaganda that reveals the emperor has no clothes.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is an agreeable, if unnecessary sequel which, through its larger scale, proves that less is often more.

Effectively moody, but disjointed and over-reliant on played-out horror audio gags, Undertone sounds better in concept than it plays on screen.

War Machine has just enough juice to prevent it from being a Snore Machine.

Scream 7 packs in plenty of satisfying slasher action, and may even bring some lapsed fans back into the fold by focusing down the scope of that action after Scream 6, but the new ideas it does bring to the table are either too thin to fully explore or ill-advised enough to detract from the success the movie does find in playing the hits, the deep cuts, and the killer tracks.

Psycho Killer may "have a Hulk," but it's also a parade of missteps and missed opportunities.

Crime 101 has everything a heist thriller ought to have… but not much else.

In the Blink of an Eye is a disaster of its own making, living in the shadow of far better sci-fi films of old, and never doing anything interesting with any of the ideas it throws out.

On the heels of several other Dracula-based films in very recent memory, Luc Besson’s take on the story doesn't do enough to set itself apart, despite its fair share of weird comedic moments.

Iron Lung has terrible pacing and very low energy from the start. The scenarios that Fischbach has put his character in just aren’t compelling enough to watch unfold, with scenes that drag on and on.

Shelter ticks all the action boxes for a Jason Statham film, boasting a charismatic supporting cast to ground the conspiratorial stakes with some thrillingly playful fight sequences to boot. But its lackluster script works against the acting calibre of its stars.

A headache-inducing screenlife film that straps Chris Pratt to a chair and holds its audience hostage too, Mercy squanders its potential as a sci-fi thriller about the dangers of entwining justice and artificial intelligence. The result plays less like the tongue-in-cheek mystery-thriller director Timur Bekmambetov seems to be aiming for, and more like an advertisement to tech investors, making the movie chilling in unintended ways.

Return to Silent Hill isn’t the worst entry in this video game movie series, but it fails to accomplish anything that the source material doesn’t do better.

Kate Hudson and Hugh Jackman’s performances are a treat in Song Sung Blue. They sing and perform their hearts out, but none of it ends up in service to a coherent vision, let alone one that says something meaningful or profound.

Anaconda is a disappointing follow-up for Gormican, who cannot crack the code on Sony's bewildering aquatic not-really-horror reboot. A cast of proven funny people are lost in a thick brush of hacky bits and ineffective storytelling, unable to machete their way through to a redeeming climax. There are brief bursts of creature-feature excitement and belly-tickling humor, but way more stretches of bafflingly unclear ambitions that feel like they're struggling to keep the "movie within a movie" gimmick afloat. It's Anaconda without the aqua-horror chills, throwback practical effects, and midnight-movie entertainment—what an odd choice.

The film’s themes may be fundamental in their commentaries on parental gender disparity or qualities about motherhood so many refuse to publicly acknowledge, but they still land like a haymaker. You’ve gotta hand it to Ramsay; she’s a fearless visionary when rocking on all cylinders—which, frustratingly, Die My Love only dishes out in smaller servings.

Wicked: For Good brings Jon M. Chu’s movie-musical duology to a climactic conclusion that’s dark in every sense of the word. With harrowing action scenes, heart-wrenching musical numbers, and excessively dimly-lit scenery, this sequel compounds all of the problems of the first movie while introducing some wholly new ones of its own. Dual leads Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande are as luminous as ever, electric whenever they’re sharing the screen together, but there’s a lot of movie to slog through to get there.

Osgood Perkins’ latest dark trip has a powerful Tatiana Maslany performance and cool aesthetics to thank for keeping Keeper from getting completely lost in the woods.

Now You See Me: Now You Don’t serves as a reminder of how they manage to coast by just enough, providing a good time thanks to the notable talent and charm of their expanding cast and the inclusion of the magic trick element to provide a unique flair. It’s the epitome of “We’re just having fun here” entertainment, and while little of it resonates, it mostly gets the job done.

Roofman’s excellent performances are hampered by a middling script that’s executed with minimal visual flair or excitement.

A House of Dynamite has the acting and directing goods, but its weak resolve arrives late in the game.

The Astronaut has a game lead in Kate Mara and the decent stagings of a monster mystery, but it winds up being a humdrum offering in a genre usually teeming with imagination and innovation.

Tron: Ares somehow forgets where it came from and relentlessly revisits the original, only making the latest version of the Grid paler by comparison.

Swiped is constructed well-enough for the movie it’s trying to be, but its lack of ambition and nuance keep it from being its best self. It can still be a worthwhile enough watch for Lily James’ admirable performance as Whitney Wolfe, but the movie never affords its subject the same level of depth as what James tries to imbue her with.

Bugonia is a film that tries to balance barbed sci-fi themes and conspiracy looniness funneled through Lanthimos’ trademark quirks, but it slips off the pommel horse on the dismount.

V/H/S/Halloween is an enjoyable assortment of vicious holiday horror shorts that might take a step backward after last year’s fantastic V/H/S/Beyond, but it’s hardly a throwaway sequel.

Justin Tipping’s flimsy football horror movie Him is papered over with colorful lighting but underscored by bland ideas. Despite Marlon Wayans’ bravura performance, it makes very little visceral impact while en route to one of the most confounding third acts of any horror movie this year.

While it picks up threads from the original, like the mysterious curse of their dying drummers or stage props misbehaving, nothing gets anywhere close to the original.

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle offers plenty of action and some emotional flashbacks, but it suffers from an overuse of flashbacks that undermine the story's pacing.

After a strong first act, The Conjuring’s intended finale disappoints, keeping its central duo of Ed and Lorraine away from the action for too long.

Bambi: The Reckoning is an audaciously bloody but distractingly humorless creature feature.

Pete Davidson does solid enough work in a more dramatic role and the supporting cast does the best they can with the material, but The Home collapses under its muddled messaging, overly familiar and sometimes ridiculously heavy-handed imagery, and a lack of tension.

Osiris is an Aliens retread that brings the firepower and little else.

A movie that’ll just about keep young viewers’ attention, Smurfs is part Rihanna jukebox musical, and part flimsy attempt to give the little blue critters an identity that’ll stick.

Though the aesthetics are consistently on point – great camerawork, suspenseful use of shadows and light – its characters and plot lack coherence. Tension builds promisingly in the first half, but by the climax, muddled action and shallow character motivation sap the suspense, and any opportunity for commentary is wasted

There’s a fun slasher buried beneath the too-faithful reboot plot of the new I Know What You Did Last Summer. Unfortunately, it’s overshadowed by too many callbacks to the first movie in the series and too little originality. The mix of new stars and returning favorites provides some urgency, but does little to give it an identity all its own.

Abraham’s Boys has some interesting ideas when it comes to a Van Helsing-based Dracula spinoff. Unfortunately, its weak visuals and lack of atmosphere stop it from fully delivering.

Amazon’s Heads of State is a near-humorless buddy comedy film, saved by its compelling leads and elaborate action sequences.

Despite a strong performance from Nick Offerman, Sovereign is a film that’s inescapably slight and with little to say with its painfully relevant story of modern extremism.

The Old Guard 2 is a disappointing sequel that isn’t as fun or engaging as the first film and doesn’t do enough with its face off between Charlize Theron and Uma Thurman.

Please Don’t Feed the Children has a few things going for it – namely capable lead performers Michelle Dockery and Zoe Colletti – but Destry Allyn Spielberg’s boring, predictable first feature definitely doesn’t feel like it comes from a descendant of filmmaking royalty.

There’s a disappointing amount of “same old thing” to Jurassic World Rebirth. Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, and the rest of the cast are intriguing and sympathetic throughout, but Gareth Edwards doesn’t quite recapture his signature flair for grand-scale visuals nor does David Koepp find the magic of his original Jurassic Park screenplay, opting to follow that movie’s structure as more of a remix than a rebirth.

M3GAN 2.0 hotswaps horror for sci-fi/action to mixed results, but M3GAN’s absolutely heinous wit and killer moves leave her, and not the new genres, the star of the show.

Alma & the Wolf is an amusingly off-kilter combo of monster movie and psychological thriller let down by a disappointing ending – but it’s a showcase for rising star Li Jun Li.

It’s not without its charms, but its slow, rote genre elements yield no rewards, robbing Echo Valley of its thrills in the process.

It’s morally upstanding but dramatically dull, without any of the allure or excitement that made Armstrong’s Succession series such a smashing success.

Fountain of Youth is a robust showcase of Guy Ritchie’s eye for action, but it falls well short of capturing the magic of the quintessential treasure-hunting movies it’s so clearly trying to replicate.

Coming off the triumph of its extension into TV with Cobra Kai, The Karate Kid franchise returns to theaters with Legends, a movie which is far less impactful than that show, yet still reminds us why the underlying story and themes of this series can still connect.

Fear Street: Prom Queen fails to channel both the outrageous aesthetics and the brutal violence of the films it’s imitating, making this indifferently made exercise in YA horror supremely skippable.

Despite a passionate performance from Colby Minifie and some compelling visuals, The Surrender sidelines its deft exploration of grief for drawn-out, pointless supernatural horror.

With Eddington, Ari Aster tries his hand at political satire and turns in his first bad movie.

It’s no Purple Rain – though Jenna Ortega is a much better onscreen foil for Tesfaye than Apollonia was for Prince – but it at least manages to find a handful of visually stimulating moments amid the vapidity.

While its action is reliably thrilling and a few of its most exciting sequences are sure to hold up through the years, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning tries to deal with no less than the end of every living thing on the planet – and suffers because of it. The somber tone and melodramatic dialogue miss the mark of what’s made this franchise so much fun for 30 years, but the door is left open for more impossible missions and the hope that this self-serious reckoning isn’t actually final.

Josh Hartnett does a fine job in Fight or Flight’s intensely physical, one-versus-100 lead role, but the movie doesn’t have much to offer beyond 15 minutes of inventive action and 80 minutes of aggressive mediocrity.

Though it starts out as a promising slasher throwback, Clown in a Cornfield struggles with a jokey tone and a political message that lacks teeth.

The movie leaps to life whenever the bullets start flying. It's the generic gangland stuff in between that's not up to snuff, even with Hardy lending his trusty gruffness to the haunted-cop boilerplate.

Until Dawn is more disappointing than deadly, leaving all the promise of the horror game behind for a jumble of horror-movie re-creations.

825 Forest Road is a stodgy paranormal thriller that doesn’t boast enough character or intensity to reach the heights of its director’s Hell House LLC movies.

Screamboat isn't a good movie, but it can be an entertaining experience if you only care about indulgently bloody kill sequences.

For a big-studio adaptation of a massively popular video-game, A Minecraft Movie lets a surprising amount of its director’s personality shine through. Napoleon Dynamite’s Jared Hess manages to fit some laugh-out-loud silliness into his Overworld saga before surrendering to the obligations of CG-driven fantasy adventure. Thematically, A Minecraft Movie offers a pat world-is-what-you-make-it lesson, but Jack Black and Jason Momoa in particular sell it with a lot of comic enthusiasm.

Writer-director Elijah Bynum fills the screen with some impressive imagery, but it’s all in service of an ugliness that Magazine Dreams cops out on depicting.

It can’t decide whether it wants to tell the real-life story of respected mob boss Frank Costello and his comrade-turned-scheming-enemy Vito Genovese, or if it wants to skewer the entire genre of films they helped inspire. However, with Robert De Niro in both leading roles, there’s always something interesting to watch, even if it’s buried by mountains of repetitive dialogue.

Although Holland takes place in a unique setting full of kitschy Midwestern details, even Nicole Kidman in frustrated-housewife mode can’t sustain the sloppily plotted thriller.

With heavy inspirations from games like Dead Space and movies like Alien and The Thing, Flying Lotus' Ash is an ambitious, visually enthralling sci-fi horror movie. But its tale of a space station terrorized by a mysterious, gooey threat is otherwise empty and derivative, and takes too long to get going.

Opus isn't a tremendously effective horror film, often feeling like a number of A24 horror movies rolled into one. Those looking for scares will be disappointed. The first film from writer director Mark Anthony Green is, however, interesting enough when it has things to say about pop stars and the people who write about them – not that it makes the movie any more chilling.

Death of a Unicorn features fun fantasy ideas, but suffers from repetitive execution.

AI-loving Marvel hitmakers Joe and Anthony Russo join forces again with Netflix to deliver a $300-million sci-fi epic you can safely half-watch while doing the dishes or making dinner.

Even the most ardent defender of Paul W.S. Anderson’s work might think In the Lost Lands is the kind of mess that proves the Resident Evil director’s detractors right. It’s not just a barely comprehensible failure on its own, but an adaptation that takes a character-based drama and turns it into an ugly action flick.

There’s no snap to the dialogue, no thrill to a majority of the action, and the other characters played by Cooper Hoffman and Lucy Liu (and their relationships to Dolinski) make no lasting impression.

Director Martin Campbell (Casino Royale, The Mask of Zorro) offers some reliably, well, clean hand-to-hand combat without showing us anything we haven’t seen before. Only a mid-film twist and the oddly sympathetic motives of the bad guys distinguish Cleaner from a thousand other movies with basically the same sturdy premise.

What Beat Takeshi’s mob comedy lacks in explosions, it more than makes up for in jokes that bomb.

While the movie's points are clear, they're also cliché – as is the movie's horror. The director's ambition exceeds his grasp, telling a story about characters who are not well-drawn enough to feel either universal or specific. The result is a fraught romance that should be nerve-wracking but instead is mostly dull.

Captain America: Brave New World feels neither brave, nor all that new.

Doug Cockle’s return as Geralt of Rivia is a casting coup worth celebrating. Too bad the movie he stars in is so boilerplate.

But as a comedy, Love Hurts is pretty stale; when not trotting out dopey crime-flick caricatures, it’s simply leaning on the supposed hilarity of a sunny house hunter with a secret talent for breaking bones. You’ve seen many versions of this premise, and better ones, too.

Benedict Cumberbatch gives it his all in The Thing with Feathers, but the horror movie lives up to neither his performance, nor its own heavy-handed metaphor of a bullying crow-creature representing grief.

From the sincerity of the lead performances to the cartoonish gore offered by Werewolves Within director Josh Rubenn. There are much worse ways to spend Valentine’s Day than a genre cocktail for saps and gorehounds alike.

Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon can’t quite salvage You're Cordially Invited, a comedy that's as overcrowded as the dueling nuptials it depicts.

Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare is a bleak, mean-spirited take on a childhood classic that trades Peter’s sparkle-bright magic for overbearing seriousness and disappointingly straightforward thrills.

Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx do their jobs in Back in Action, assuring that it remains mostly watchable. But it’s ultimately a bummer to watch two well-established stars and versatile actors returning to big-budget filmmaking just to make another spies-versus-real-life action-comedy.

Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man is impeccably made, with a unique take on werewolf lore. But the emphasis is on craft over storytelling.

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera is neither better nor worse than the sleeper-hit crime caper that preceded it. Like the original, it’s too long and threatens to become overwhelmed by its own web of underworld intricacies. Nonetheless, with appealing chemistry between stars Gerard Butler and O'Shea Jackson Jr., and a suitably tense third-act heist sequence, it rewards the goodwill the original has built up since its 2018 release.

Better jokes, better imagery, and two (!) inspired comic performances by Jim Carrey give this Sonic sequel an edge on its predecessors.

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is a fascinating idea with a lackluster execution, more interesting as a concept than an actual retelling of one of Middle-earth’s famous legends.

Despite its ferocious source material and lead Amy Adams, Nightbitch is a bloodless tale of maternal doldrums with little payoff.

Jack Black will be enough to lure both kids and parents to the holiday comedy Dear Santa. But Black can’t carry the whole thing himself, and he’s eventually subdued by some deeply questionable story choices.

This sequel doesn’t merit a sing-along and does little to expand on what we already knew about Moana and her friends.

Too sweet to be sordid and too gross to be taken seriously, Ryan Kruger’s Street Trash makes a mess of its anti-capitalist message.

Frothy, self-aware, and straining for laughs, Hot Frosty is a cup of whipped cream with no hot chocolate.

Overlord: The Sacred Kingdom disappoints by stuffing its long runtime with dull and monotonous chatter, and not enough of the grandiose moments that inspire the newest character in the series.

A modest French sci-fi fable whose messages about letting go aren’t half as moving as the images surrounding them.

A one-angle drama spanning centuries, Robert Zemeckis' comic adaptation Here is experimental in appearance, but highly conventional in approach.

Venom: The Last Dance trips over its own tendrils and lets a boring, generic plot, and bad action distract from the surprisingly resilient central relationship between Eddie Brock and his symbiote bestie.