The film has more success in smaller beats, when it’s not hamstrung by over-the-top performances or obvious drama. It has just enough going for it to hint at the deeper story beneath the surface: a film only about half measures, not the kind that dishes them out on its own.

The imagery and impact of Kindred is impressive, and while it may not stick the landing, the path there is well worth flying.

It’s a fitting third act for an overly safe film that only feigns at its ambition, and it leaves “The Adam Project” seeming less like a natural fit for Reynolds’ talents than an ill-fitting star vehicle for someone who’s never been less interested in stretching his limits.

Its genuine, gentle charm holds far more appeal than the icky “Kissing Booth” series.

It’s a genre blend that’s delightful, baffling, and surprisingly ruthless in its decisive direction with a holiday twist that isn’t necessary for the plot but certainly ties the zany concept together.

There’s far more of Snakehead that works than doesn’t, and Leong shows a serious flair for crime dramas. Together with Chang and Wu, the talents of the film are for an electric trio, including stars worth watching and a director very much on the rise.

Santana was cast prior to making her gender transition and had never acted before. Her personal experience brings such legitimacy that she would probably succeed in the role even if she sucked at line reading. Fortunately, she doesn't.

It’s perfectly entertaining, using Barker’s inventive tropes to tell a solidly gory nightmare, but it’s a pale vanilla shadow of the original.

Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby has the hallmarks of a contemporary Hollywood spectacle. It's missing the explosions, but make no mistake: Gatsby is one glitzy misfire.

As the tension builds to its harrowing conclusion, and Alex begins to bare his teeth, Mathews pulls enough tricks from his sleeve to make Discreet a worthy digression.

While the film’s first half boasts universally strong performances (even babyAisha gets some screen time), it’s Chopra Jonas who emerges as the film’s driving force.

The Bride! is full of rage and feeling, striking an anarchic pose against oppression. But who it’s yelling at, who it’s yelling on behalf of, remains out of focus, the mystery of whatever Elsa Lanchester’s Bride might’ve been thinking left unanswered.

Don’t Make Me Go is a sweet, charming, and eventually daring dramedy with tons of heart.

Passion simultaneously parodies its plot while elevating it to a strangely involving exercise in cinematic drama. The filmmaker has either lost control of the material or maintains the same calculation of his protagonists. But the entertainment value associated with that uncertainty is the essence of his career.

Magic in the Moonlight belongs to the pool of lesser Allen comedies, yet Firth and Emma Stone — as the alleged necromancer Sophie Baker, the object of Stanley's scrutiny and eventually his affections — bring all the zany energy they can muster.

Netto and Schindler are less interested in pulpy sadism than they are in pure suspense.

If the emotions in Goodbye June are as transparently manufactured as the fake snow that falls outside of the hospital windows, they’re all bundled up in a warm blanket of truth — the truth of how loss has a gravity that can bring a family closer together if they let it.

A reductive documentary that’s far too focused on the big picture to really unpack the human element.

As Levinson swings wildly for the fences, Assassination Nation yields a modicum of payoff.

Even Allen himself, appearing in front of the camera for his first role since 2005's "Scoop," looks a little lost in the mess.

The result is sometimes overlong and wears out its welcome, but it clarifies Hosking’s distinctive tone — a playful and often charming blend of outré humor and genuine emotion that makes him one of the most distinctive new voices in current cinema.

Iron Lung is audacious and at times astonishingly boring. Still, it feels more enthusiastic and celebratory than many blockbuster adaptations built on safer math.

Most segments have a fair share of cheap scares, but they also delve into the art of the build-up, as if delivering a series of grim jokes with bloody punchlines. Consider it a 21st-century take on "Tales from the Crypt."

Shows none of the edgy storytelling looniness present in Stiller's finest work. Instead, every element seems calculated to service an easygoing commercial product that plays up the sentimentality of the scenario while rendering it inoffensively bland.

Life spends its first act building up some big ideas, but eventually unravels into another monster movie in space.

Lacking in chemistry, clarity, and conviction, Neon’s latest rendezvous with Perkins hits like a crumbling marriage that would serve everyone involved by ending as soon as possible.

Like Whedon's whip-smart "Avengers" screenplay, Thor: The Dark World manages to acknowledge the inherently silly nature of its premise while compellingly asserting that, hey, sometimes it's fun to suspend your disbelief when the results look this good.

You don’t need to be particularly clever to know how this will all end, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be so boring as it chugs toward cookie-cutter conclusions. Idris Elba fights a lion. It’s genius. So why does “Beast” feel more like a whisper than a roar?

Canoodling more than we’ve ever seen Ed and Lorraine canoodle before, Wilson and Farmiga also seem to have a blast wrapping up their portrayals in a movie clearly created with their stardom in mind.

Though Blumberg treats the topic with admirable frankness, the film’s insights would’ve had more impact if he wasn’t so quick to hop to the next storyline whenever matters get especially thorny.

With one film left in the franchise, “P.S. I Still Love You” effectively operates as both its own feature and a bridge to the more adult questions Lara Jean and company will face in the final offering. It’s a love letter to teen movies of the past, but also a smart look at what they might be in the future.

For a movie so preoccupied with the choices that people can make, Spiderhead invariably makes the least interesting ones available to it, which is a serious problem for a movie streaming on a platform whose subscribers are never far removed from the choice to be watching something else instead.

The overall arc of this “Justice League” coheres throughout, providing occasional dashes of intrigue and inspired visual conceits, and sometimes it’s even fun. Re-centering the drama around ostracized actor Ray Fisher as Cyborg, and drawing out some of the ostentatious fight sequences to their breaking point, Zack Snyder’s Justice League displays genuine effort to make this impossible gamble click.

While formulaic on its face, Green’s film resists the sort of obvious cinematic catharsis expected of such a story, resulting in a final product that earns its emotional beats.

A fun but largely unnecessary fourth outing.

There’s something especially primordial, even biblical, about director Lucio Fulci’s grisly spectacle.

It spreads itself too wide and too shallow, and leaves us wishing that we might have seen more of the journey that has come to define Jones’ adult life: The path to starting a family of her own.

At least it aspires to mine a fresh experience from the all too familiar tedium of watching Hollywood pick a franchise dry, even if it ultimately falls well short of that goal.

When Ricki and the Flash pierces its conventional trajectory with music, it gets more interesting. But the fluff surrounding it holds together well enough.

This is still a pretty familiar journey that's easier to pity than hate -- much like Caplan's character.

In trying to squeeze a half-dozen life stories into its running time, Hands of Stone, the new film about legendary Panamanian boxer Roberto Durán, magnifies that disappointing mistake.

We’re left with something handsome but safe, a film that tries to bridge the gap between children’s characters and adult concerns without ever anchoring itself to either side.

The best thing you can say about Stockholm is that it’s good enough to prove that a much better film could be made from this story.

Fuglsig’s feature debut is ultimately less an action movie and more a procedural, one in which incremental gains and minimal casualties are as much as can be hoped for.

[A] sturdily enjoyable if emotionally uninsightful heart-tugger that aims straight down the middle of the audience for a mildly reassuring experience mostly made with families in mind.

It works because the movie around these actors strikes the right balance between silliness and sincerity, even if only by virtue of being sillier and more sincere than any of the previous installments.

The film also boasts unexpectedly great voice acting; it’s not an exaggeration to say that Oscar winner Foxx thrives as the voice of Bug.

Firebrand pays frequent lip service to the courage it surely required for Katherine to do her royal duties with a straight face at the same time as she cultivated such radical ideas in secret, but little about the film itself reflects the courage of her convictions.

Schroeder tracks the end of innocence in much the same way that the strip captured it each time out. Unlike "Salinger," he hardly makes a spectacle out of Watterson's secluded tendencies. The pileup of interview subjects speak eloquently on his behalf.

We know where this is going. That doesn’t dilute the emotional power of it, of a man seeing where his heart really is and what that means in practice.

If nothing else, the movie makes a strong case for Cox’s astounding resilience, an ability to take even the most routine gig and deepen its potential. It helps that The Etruscan Smile sputters along more than it belly-flops, and stabilizes by the poignant finale.

The First Purge is another absurd B-movie, uneven and ludicrous across the board, but altogether transfixing for the way it funnels Trump-era terror into an empowering crowdpleaser.

The director has a novelist’s attention to nuance, and Barrage is at its best during the scenes in which Catherine and Alba are casually trying to redraw their boundaries.

While the movie gets a little too lost in Demers’ headspace, his story brings to light the limitations of the “Blackfish” effect, and shows why the war against marine park cruelty has a long way to go.

An overstuffed espionage thriller that bites off more than it can chew and never manages to find its footing, Olivier Assayas’ Wasp Network is an exceedingly rare gaffe from one of the greatest filmmakers of the last 30 years. Even so, his restless genius can still be felt percolating below the surface and struggling to come up for air.

Trapped in some bizarre movie genre hinterland, wholly resistant to veering too far in any direction, this aimless film isn’t dark enough to be scary, funny enough to be a comedy, or smart enough to say anything about the many topics it seems to want to tackle.

By turns resoundingly human and regretfully half-baked, the film wears its influences on its sleeve.

Useless narrative threads and too many wasted elements give away M3GAN 2.0 as an amateur effort made by a talented horror filmmaker who has not yet mastered action’s specific visual language or skill set.

The film is entertaining enough for most viewers, although some audiences might balk at a perceived lack of comedy from comedic superstar Poehler. That’s not its aim, however, and the film is charming, even without big laughs.

Sometimes clever, often clumsy, and virtually always denying Kristen Stewart the space required to breathe new life into the film’s namesake, Seberg feels off-balance from almost the moment it starts.

Mesmeric but frustrating ... An explosive third act shootout may be the most remarkable sequence that Lou has ever shot, but all of the hard-boiled fireworks in the world can’t diminish the feeling that he can’t identify his muse on a canvas this big.

Embedded in all this is a would-be message about those who trade freedom for security, the human spirit, and so on and so forth, all of which is too muddled to register with the intended force. Captive State is many things at once — or at least it’s trying to be — and every match it lights along the way is quickly snuffed out.

Fackham Hall succeeds because it effectively skewers its target genre, and its top-tier actors know how to deliver a joke to its furthest possible endpoint.

Alex Winter’s amusing but slight film is a wacky romp about intergenerational trauma and cycles of abuse, though that’s pretty obvious from any given promotional image. As crazy as the movie purports to be, there’s never an unexpected moment. Thankfully, this turns out to be less of a problem than it should be.

The fast-paced dialogue and mature-but-wholesome humor creates a general aura of clever high school rapport, aided by a lively supporting performance from comedian Ayo Edebiri (“Big Mouth”). But in trying to be everything in between, the movie ends up being not much of anything.

The Boys in the Boat would be the most old-fashioned movie of the year even if the year were 1994. For at least the first half of Clooney’s latest movie, the comfort food of it all proves to be part of its gently stirring charm, stale as it might be.

While the beats are familiar and even a film about animated pigeons can’t quite break out of the tropes that have long defined the spy film genre, it’s the kind of sweetly demented late-December diversion that should entertain plenty of holiday-weary families.

Stories that are “timely” or “prescient” may be the norm these days, but Spellbound works a little magic to ensure that such messaging, as important as it may be, doesn’t get in the way of a good time for the entire family. That’s another thing we need now, more than ever.

It opens as a stilted, awkward drama, complete with the always-delightful Maika Monroe giving literal voice to what appears to be the film’s obvious theme (mommy issues, basically) — and then it takes a surprising flip.

The result is an entertaining and insightful mashup of tropes, both respectful of what came before and willing to try new tricks. Being a weirdo, it seems, has never gone out of fashion, but now it has a different kind of future to conjure up.

Coggeshall’s script isn’t especially sharp, as the movie really does hinge around that big twist, but the visual approach and performances from the actors give Orphan: First Kill an edge that should satisfy fans of the original.

In between the meandering exchanges lies an unquestionably thoughtful interrogation of a broken system.

Moore’s premeditated attempts to wring some laughs out of this category 5 shitstorm are so half-assed that you wish he hadn’t bothered.... It’s as though he realized that the film could have been just as successful as a podcast, and compensated for that fact by shoehorning in some needless visual razzmatazz.

Timely and opportunistic in equal measure, You’ve Been Trumped Too is first and foremost a hit-piece on a presidential candidate, an entertaining work of agitprop that recognizes how voters are swayed by individual case studies more than they are by abstract arguments.

Becky is as grim and gruesome as any horror movie in recent memory, but that alone can’t save this gross-out thriller.

Even at its most absurd, the movie is chilled by an ominous and ever-present feeling that the world has become smaller than we ever thought possible, and that real nightmares are waiting for us on the other side of every window.

What is obvious is that Huang’s Boogie is a 90-minute aimless mess that sets back as much as it saves.

You’re not likely to find a more jarring — and ultimately exhausting — collision of high pretension and low execution at Sundance this year than the crowdsourced YouTube doc Life in a Day 2020.

The blatantly ridiculous appeal of “Cocaine Bear” is proof enough that the project isn’t lacking in self-awareness, but to what end? It’s not unhinged enough to qualify as full-blown parody, and not smart enough to be called satire. Banks seems uninterested in directly referencing exploitation movies of the past, or in burying winking cultural critiques within the outlandish action. Maybe that’s too much to ask from a movie called “Cocaine Bear.” Like its title, what you see is what you get.

Small edits could have propelled the film into a dark drama instead of something resembling a PSA.

Evil Eye packs plenty of compelling cultural specificity inside its frames, it never attempts to dig any deeper into the wider world of that stuff that would scare anyone.

Truly, The Magnificent Seven is a story of simple pleasures, and it gets the little things right.

Good on Paper can’t quite find its footing, offering insight and sparkle in only fits and starts.

There’s some fun to be had in watching Echo Valley shift into a battle of wits between Moore and Gleeson, as both actors mine devious nuance from the thin gruel of a paperback thriller.

Significantly more intimate and grounded than the previous “Hunger Games” movies (despite being longer than any of them and responsible for seeding all of their lore), “The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” is the rare prequel that manages to stand on its own two feet and still feel taller than the other stories it’s ultimately meant to support.

The Little Things is pulpy and ridiculous and requires some major suspension of belief, but — if you didn’t know any better — you might even say it’s beautiful.

With elegant acting from its two young leads and picturesque cinematography from Matthias Koenigswieser, it serves as a competently executed morality play for audiences craving a bit of unambiguous humanism.

The witch-hunt metaphor that emerges from Abigail’s bullying is more overt than it needs to be, but Shephard clearly didn’t rely on SparkNotes in crafting her film.

Tightly written and sensitively rendered, the devastating film is propelled by masterful performances, led by a bewitching Wood in the role she was born to play.

Ultimately, one just gets the sense that “Knox Goes Away” is unsure of what it’s supposed to be. On one hand, it leans into the chillingly gruesome; on the other, it wants to laugh at the grimness of its own scenarios.

Eubank’s talent for creating impressive worlds with few resources is the movie's strongest aspect, but the concept feels like a never-ending exposition of technique without sufficient depth.

Dramas pile up, some obvious, some not, and Penguin Bloom meanders a bit before coming in to land. The path there might be predictable, but there is still something beautiful when it really takes flight.

“Dark Fate” might close the door on the “Terminator” franchise, but every dull frame of it suggests that we’ll be trapped in that vicious back-and-forth ’til kingdom come. The good news is that you can forget about everything that’s happened since the summer of 1991.

This admittedly uneven first feature stands out for the way it sneaks up on you.

It’s wonderful that Mendes spent the pandemic making a movie about the irreplaceable vitality of movie theaters — even going so far as to paint them as one of the final strings in what’s left of our social fabric. It would have been even better if he spent the pandemic making a movie worth seeing in one.

With plenty of laughs, truly dazzling animation, and some more of the franchise’s signature dance sequences, Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation is a summer treat worth savoring, and a reminder that if we can see past our differences, we’ll find we’re not that different after all.

While the rest of Silent Night is so abysmal that its prologue might as well be the last hour of “Hard Boiled” by comparison, it’s hard to imagine a more appropriate introduction to a movie whose only upside is the vulgar thrill of watching something that feels utterly anonymous and wildly idiosyncratic at the same time.

The suspense comes and goes, but A Single Shot always maintains a firm grip on its sad, deteriorating environment.