Director Karen Cinorre has assembled a cast and production crew who work hard trying to bring life to her frustratingly abstract sketch of an idea that never coalesces into a satisfying narrative, or characters worth caring about.

Encounter is a tense, and stylish thriller with some excellent performances, but it’s dragged down by a lack of focus and pointless tangents.

Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody is yet another music biopic that feels like a checklist of events rather than riveting drama.

Despite a great cast, Needle in a Timestack lets the fuzzy logic time travel tropes trample the characters and our care for them and their plights.

Kate Siegel does her best to elevate a simplistic thriller that follows all the same beats you're accustomed to.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a sloppy and gratuitous killing spree with standout deaths but a poorly written story that ruins the experience.

Men, from Ex Machina and Annihilation director Alex Garland, is a folk-horror movie about gendered trauma that quickly falls apart. It skillfully builds tension in its first half — with the help of brilliant lead performances — only to have that tension dissipate when its inventive metaphors become consumed by traditional staging and literal explanations.

Despite solid performances from Zac Efron and Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Firestarter feels stifled in story and presentation.

Metal Lords is earnest with metal but sloppy with character and story. It delivers a rousing finale but the journey there is uninspired and half-formed.

The Cellar has a cool and creepy set up but then fizzles once the answers start arriving.

An artless retelling of major events, She Said chronicles the investigation into Harvey Weinstein in mechanical fashion, flattening its tale of victimhood, paranoia, and perseverance into a journalism movie checklist.

Hulu’s Crush is a queer coming-of-age movie in which very little happens, and whose characters barely exist outside of their joking lines of dialogue. Its young actors are a delight, but even as a story of teenage crushes, it rarely captures what it feels like to be young and in love.

Operation Mincemeat turns an absurd chapter in World War II history into a dour homework assignment.

Choose or Die boots up a retro-style survival horror that will muster up a few delightful scares for the generation of gamers who grew up with Zork and The Valley of the Minotaur. But beneath this terror-filled glimpse of the ‘80s lies not much more than a bog-standard horror flick.

Don't Make Me Go features excellent performances from John Cho and Mia Isaac, but it stumbles big at the finish line.

Madame Web has the makings of a interesting superhero psychological thriller, but with a script overcrowded with extraneous characters, basic archetypes, and generic dialogue, it fails the talent and the future of its onscreen Spider-Women.

An impression of much better action films, spy thriller The Gray Man (directed by Joe & Anthony Russo) wastes its all-star cast by giving them little to work with beyond quips. While it eventually becomes watchable, it spends most of its runtime being visually and emotionally indecipherable.

Me Time has bursts of energy and vibrancy, mostly involving its two leads and their snappy chemistry, but it's also a hodgepodge of predictable buddy comedy beats that doesn't do much to separate itself from what's come before.

Persuasion is a disappointingly limp adaptation of one of Jane Austen’s great romances. While Dakota Johnson does her best to give director Carrie Cracknell a contemporized, charming version of Austen’s heroine Anne Elliot, the screenplay’s foundational reframing of the character strips away everything that makes the book’s version interesting and quietly heroic.

Aside from an unexpected ending, director Robert Zemeckis is basically doing a paint-by-numbers version of the studio’s much better original, just with modern animation and Tom Hanks. And while Tom always tries his best, even he can’t make this redo memorable on its own merits.

The Reef: Stalked is another middling mid-budget fin flick that’s tonally confused somewhere between Shark Week and Lifetime.

[A] one-note, flat comedy.

Despite game performances by a slew of returning cast members, it doesn’t justify its existence as anything other than a mercenary attempt by Paramount+ to cash in on audience nostalgia for familiar faces.

It’s an odd “rock and a hard place” production about survival of the fittest mentalities that can’t help but indulge soapy relationship dramatics amidst an otherwise dire entrapment, which will probably leave most laughing and irritated at the wrong times.

From its anachronistic homages to its tensionless filmmaking, Pearl — Ti West’s prequel to X — doesn’t have nearly as much to say as its predecessor. Mia Goth gives it her all as a villainess who dreams of stardom, but the film can’t decide what to do with her.

Peter Farrelly's follow-up to Green Book is a war drama with some solid laughs and a great Zac Efron performance, but a manipulative script with ugly optics and boring visuals that never achieve the prestige it clearly wants.

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

Goodnight Mommy might be passable as a standalone, but it’s impossible to recommend over the original. Matt Sobel and ​​Kyle Warren venture somewhere new that still doesn’t differentiate nearly enough for its quieter approach.