Bruised is a good outing for Halle Berry as a director, though a better reminder of her as a star. Aside from that, however, the story progression is light on impact.

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.

There's some tension building that proves effective, but the film is mostly riddled with superfluous characters and pointless scenes.

The performances range from wooden Moussi to full-on Cage, so it's tonally all over the place. As a whole, it's an absolute mess, which makes it kind of perfect for 2020. Still, within this swamp of style, wildness, and TOO too much, there are some truly exhilarating treasures, chief among them Cage. In short, it's not good, but maybe being a lot just enough.

George Clooney's The Midnight Sky is a gorgeous, glossy doomsday odyssey that feels like too big a winter coat on a small, fragile frame.

Willis and Parker are fine in their respective roles, but neither character is given much spark. Willis sulks for most of the picture, grimacing at his enemies and drinking his way through scenes.

Willy's Wonderland is a no-frills splatterfest that, while straining to fill its runtime, finds mid-level chills and thrills thanks to Nic Cage bashing the hell out of weaponized pizza parlor characters. It's a shoestring slasher that gets the job done while also not fully rounding a few of the corners it teases.

Wrong Turn delivers a handful of timely twists and coats the franchise with a new, and vastly more interesting, sheen. It stumbles at times to balance all the themes it's trying to handle with regards to societal ills, individual value, and self-determinism but the end result is still a warped ride that could set up more thrills to come.

While it does some fascinating things with the zombie genre that we haven't seen since George A. Romero, Army of the Dead ends up bogged down by its own self-importance and forgets how fun it's supposed to be. Its promising opening credits sequence is so much better than the rest of the film.

While sci-fi is generally rife with allegories, a steadier hand was needed here in Voyagers. The messaging, though noble and necessary, feels obvious to the point that it takes you out of the film. The cast is talented and the premise is promising, but the story plays out in a predictable fashion, which also works, in a way, to undercut the meaning.

Wrath of Man has plenty of anger and action, and it's at its intriguing best when the entire story gets sorted out and all the players are on the board, but it stumbles at being a time-release mystery.

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City sticks admirably closely to its source material, but an overly stuffed story and rushed third act hold it back.

What Anderson doesn’t give us is the inner lives of anyone in the film.

John David Washington falls short of the story’s emotional demands, but he brings a desperate physicality as a man on the run, which makes the film just about worth watching.

Belle is a gorgeously animated, futuristic interpretation of Beauty and the Beast that combines dazzling song and eye-popping visuals for a well-meaning yet meandering modern fairy tale. Unfortunately, its heartfelt message is muddled by perplexing plot holes, occasionally grating characters, and a bloated runtime.

Queenpins works best when Kristen Bell and Kirby Howell-Baptiste are allowed to let their effortless chemistry be the focus. Their comedic instincts are pitch perfect as their naïve pursuit of trying to get ahead financially snowballs into a multi-national coupon-stealing scheme that they are entirely unprepared to navigate. But the fun fizzles with depressing side stories, and especially when Vince Vaughn and Paul Walter Hauser commandeer too much screen time with middling results.

Layered with great performances and an interesting story, The Lady in Red is a good, if somewhat dull exploitative play-by-play of the events that lead to Dillinger's death.

The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf isn’t a bad film, but it fundamentally lacks an identity of its own.

House of Gucci starts with such promise as Adam Driver, Lady Gaga, and Al Pacino give performances that bring out the emotional complexity of the historically dysfunctional Gucci family. But then Ridley Scott becomes infatuated with tracking the fall of the corporation and its familial machinations instead of zeroing in on the more compelling personal implosion of Patrizia and Maurizio. Too much of the narrative is given over to side characters and scenes that are overindulgent, which lessens the potency of the tragic story and our investment in where they all end up.

Despite the inherent ugliness of watching a rich kid diabolically dig into a mom and dad who are just trying to save their home for the sake of their own children, Home Sweet Home Alone has some decent wit and heart to it. Archie Yates is good as the new precocious protector of his lair, but it's Rob Delaney and Ellie Kemper who anchor the film and give it something resembling a soul.

Zeros and Ones uses the spy genre as a thin mask for a fever dream that evokes nightmarish uncertainty.

The Last Thing Mary Saw is an intriguing and atmospheric but uneven horror offering, with a disappointingly lackluster romance at its center.

Krysten Ritter, along with Winslow Fegley and Lidya Jewett, provide enough pizazz to keep Nightbooks afloat, creating an engaging supernatural hostage scenario.

Night Teeth's winning lead trio and its glossy, electronic buzz save this Collateral clone from sinking into full nonsense. The film's usually interesting, though it never truly strikes with malice or meaning the way it wants to

As a musical, only a few songs really stand out, which is always problematic. There’s also a staginess to the whole endeavor that feels awkward and ham-handed when transposed onto the big screen. But director Joe Wright does get excellent performances from his whole cast, and creates a lush and beautiful period piece playground for the characters to exist within.

A film with sights and sounds you’ve never seen or heard, it’s an intriguing watch with catchy, energetic numbers, even if it doesn’t always land emotionally.

Escape the Undertaker is a benign but effective use of Netflix's interactive abilities. Pairing the most macabre WWE Superstar with the company's most positive players makes for a fun showdown, one that you might wish had made it to official WWE TV -- not in this form, of course, but as a noble "turn to the dark side" storyline.

All five stories in V/H/S/94 feature a cult-like element, but only one of them feels like a true work of madness.