Skyscraper plays out like a metaphor for diminishing returns — Johnson keeps climbing, higher and higher, until there’s nowhere left to go but down.

Trial by Fire is completely reignited by the scenes between Dern and O’Connell, who form a compelling bond through a thick sheet of plexiglass. More than just an acting masterclass, the probing, delicate conversations between their characters build towards a harrowing tap dance between hope and surrender.

The numerous belly laughs are undermined by jarring flashes of darkness that never organically sync with the plot.

The third act is crammed with twists and revelations that ultimately seem forced, and can only offer truncated reconciliations. And yet there’s something to be said for the pleasure of watching Sasha, still a bit silly and definitely in need of more life experience, succeed on her own terms and in her very own movie.

The warts-and-all honesty that Baker brings to the table doesn’t prevent Sutton from repackaging his story as a simple cautionary tale about an industry — and a society — that will fatten people up just to eat them alive. At least it’s a tale that Baker lived to tell, and refused to let anyone else tell for him.

What Sam Boyd’s tender and winning debut feature lacks in originality and ambition, it makes up for in honesty and charm.

Despite its flaws, Umma is an impressive debut for Shim, the kind of outing that hints at plenty more under the hood or tucked inside a massive suitcase, just bursting with secrets.

Bad as this movie can be, there are far worse things in our world than a story about the value of love and kindness, and the joy of sharing those things with those who may never have known them before (kudos to Cumberbatch, who sells the climactic transformation).

It’s as if “Cabrini” is trying to separate the Christian ideals of the saint’s teachings from the political realities of putting them into practice; as if it’s trying to flatter the moral principles of its conservative audience without pushing that crowd to embody them. Just scan the QR code in the credits, pay a few movie tickets forward, and let the hard work of solving anti-immigrant discrimination become somebody else’s problem.

Like many (or all) of the movies Burton has made this century, Dumbo is a shallow pop spectacle that’s forced to rely on its more superficial charms; unlike many (or all) of those other movies, this one actually has superficial charms on which to rely.

We’ve yet to see if Kate McKinnon can lead a movie, but she sure as hell can steal one. She did it in “Ghostbusters,” and she did it again in Rough Night, which is surprisingly funny despite a wild premise riddled with potential pitfalls.

The more engaging question is where Bernadette disappeared to for the two decades before the movie begins. It may not be much of a mystery, but where Bernadette went is far more believable and broadly real a story than where she ends up. It’s a story that’s too complicated for Linklater to tell here.

Plaza steals the show with her killer instincts and comedic timing. If she can keep an operation this overstuffed afloat, there’s nothing she cannot do.

If Stanleyville initially assumes the posture of an Off-Off-Broadway adaptation of “Dogtooth” — one happy to revel in half-baked ideas and hand-me-down humor — its commitment to entropy randomness gradually coheres into an identity of its own.

While “Otto” may reach fresh audiences who’d otherwise balk at subtitles, this sluggish rendition is unlikely to inspire anyone to seek out the original.

Me Before You is such a wonderfully uncynical movie that it almost doesn’t matter that it isn’t very good.

Commingling an overwrought spin on something like “The Babadook” with the kind of bland nonsense genre fans should expect from a Blumhouse flick in March, The Woman in the Yard is effectively a cinematic garage sale peddling parts from better movies.

The film’s threadbare story runs parallel to some compelling ideas about masculine insecurity, internalized pain, and the price of genetic privilege, but Anvari’s well-calibrated jump-scare machine is too preoccupied with gross effects, unmotivated jolts, and that strange rash that’s growing in Hammer’s left armpit to engage with any of them.

In tying its story to the saga of Daniel LaRusso, Karate Kid: Legends resorts to repeating his journey entirely, leading to a martial arts film that has limited new moves compared to what audiences have seen 40 years ago.

An electric lead performance and a growing sense of self make it worth your while to see that Izzy gets where she’s going.

The more it generates spectacle, the more you notice how the screenplay fails to keep in step.

While “Jason Bourne meets Temple Grandin” might sound like an interesting idea for a studio write-off, “James Bond meets Michael Clayton meets Rain Man meets all of their friends and enemies” is a dull movie that’s too full of distractions to pay out any dividends.

Rather than forge a believable relationship between Grace and Del that stokes our interest in the future, this uneasy two-hander strings us along by raising dull questions about the past.

It’s a stupid movie with deep ambitions, energized by that trippy neon palette, and the occasional hot beat.

The movie is a visual investigation into the roots of sexual liberation in societies steeped in repression. Watching it from start to finish is a means of engaging with the inquiry at its center.

It’s not that Absolution is any worse than the awful likes of “Retribution” (quite the opposite), but this seedy crime saga makes it uniquely clear that Neeson’s special set of skills have taken him as far as they can.

From beginning to end, The Six Triple Eight never trusts its audience to actually engage with the material beyond its inspiring surface, evidenced by a lengthy coda featuring title cards that literally restate the film’s plot over archival footage of the 6888th Battalion. Unsung heroes deserve better.

The poorly wrapped The Christmas Chronicles 2 feels like a last-minute gift that someone bought at a gas station on December 24. By the time a bunch of Pikmin-like elves get sloshed on spiked cocoa and start singing “Who Let the Dogs Out,” it’s clear that children will only remember Columbus’ latest out of resentment at how soulless Christmas movies have become, if they remember it at all.

Visually unexceptional when it’s not plain squalid, shameless in its bid for a sequel, The Gentlemen is the film Britain deserves as it staggers backwards into the New Year under the questionable influence of an unabashedly populist leader.

The problem with At Midnight isn’t the gorgeous scenery or the casual believability of the sparks between Boneta and Barbaro. It’s the production quality — mostly that there is none. Episodes of “Bachelor in Paradise” have better cinematography than this Paramount+ feature, making the streamer seem incapable of competently funding anything that isn’t produced by Taylor Sheridan.

Like the poster, Meet Monica Velour is engaging to a point, but leaves much to be desired.

For every scene of dazzling wonder, there’s another of outsized horror; for every big cat who looks ready to jump off the screen, there’s a wolf that appears bizarrely unfinished. There is little middle ground.

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates may not be the first Apatow-era comedy about twentysomethings coming to grips with the fact that they won’t live forever (and it’s certainly not the deepest, as it lingers in your memory for about as long as a Snapchat), but it might just be one of the funniest.

Shana Feste’s initially grounded “Run Sweetheart Run” takes the concept of a “bad date” and runs with it to wild extremes, unfurling a white-hot, blood-soaked yowl of feminine rage in a tidy horror package that can barely contain all its biggest ideas.

Happy New Year provides a rare glimpse into the darker ramifications of war that rarely take center stage in the national dialogue. This struggle has nothing to do with political motives or tactical movements, but rather the battle to retain sanity against impossible odds.

A humorless melodrama about a woman haunted by her past, Malignant sits somewhere between a slasher, a ghost story, and a possession flick, never fully embracing either. The result is a confusing melange of genre archetypes that lacks a clear point of view, even a surface-level stylistic one.

Yeon eventually just throws his hands up and surrenders to the cheesy spectacle of it all with a frenzied third act that finds the entire cast in a death race to the border. It’s here — in an amusingly unmoored but ultimately exhausting sequence that looks like someone trying to recreate “Fury Road” on a Nintendo 64 — that Yeon stops being able to afford his own ambition, and the film’s budget suddenly feels like a rubber band stretched over a hula-hoop.

Little of 21 Bridges ends up being that shocking — it’s tough going when the face a character makes after accepting a phone call can so easily tip off that something’s amiss — but Boseman and Miller make a solid team and creative plotting keep things moving right along.

Just as the frequent cutaways from sexual activity tone down the titillation, Lovelace never garners the energy to construct a fully involving melodrama, rarely rising above Lifetime movie standards. Given the material, the irony here is that the filmmakers play it too safe.

But while that stew sounds familiar, Marry Me takes almost too long to get really cracking, with both romance and laughs in short supply, until a mercifully charming final act.

Along with a few bouncy numbers from “The Greatest Showman” duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, Bardem is the driving force behind “Lyle,” and the train loses major steam without its kooky conductor.

It never crystallizes into a singular experience, and instead collapses in a rush of well-intentioned innovations.

Janney makes a great murderous curmudgeon, but the script’s big reveal strands the actress with a “layered” character who’s never given the chance to transcend the most basic aspects of her archetype. Worse: She only gets to kill like three people!

Emmerich takes the story at face value and delivers a film unlike any of his others. That is to say, a boring one.

It’s easy to imagine a performer more attuned to deliver intense, driven performances unlock the full potential of this character. As it is, The Cut never quite cuts as deep as you want it to.

His new sequel contains as much blatant fan service as you might expect, and some of it is probably even worse than what you’re imagining, but the film eventually finds its footing by making (and committing to) some legitimately bold choices.

Much like its message, Disenchanted reminds us that every moment has the potential for providing us with a happily ever after, but it’s the good and the bad that makes it ever more enchanting. Did we need a sequel to “Enchanted”? Not really, but it’s cute enough to cast a bit of an escapist spell this holiday season.

It’s a crime drama chewed up by a cheeky sense of humor — or, maybe it’s a quirky comedy set against the miserable campgrounds that lie on the fringes of the criminal underworld.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone could make another movie about 19th century Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky that’s as febrile and virtuosic as Ken Russell’s “The Music Lovers,” but dissident filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov ... has risen to the challenge with his usual aplomb, orchestrating a historical melodrama that’s almost as feverish as last year’s “Petrov’s Flu.”

A semi-feral drama about parental fears that isn’t remotely scary enough to catalyze those concerns into the action it puts on screen, Wolf Man runs away from its potential with its tail between its legs. “There is nothing here worth dying for,” reads the “no trespassing” sign on the childhood home where Blake inexplicably returns with his wife and daughter. There’s nothing here worth watching for either.

Before the movie came along, the show had an ardent critic in Liam Kennedy, a criminology professor who believes “PAW Patrol” “encourages complicity in a global capitalist system that produces inequalities and causes environmental harms.” While it’s doubtful the humorless dirge of a movie will make enough of an impression to mold young minds in any lasting way, the critique of “PAW Patrol” is useful as an amalgamation of certain favorite Hollywood themes that ought to be retired.

It’s director Wes Ball who emerges as the real hero here, the former visual effects supervisor proving himself to be the rare filmmaker who can force some genuine vigor into one of these banal modern blockbusters.

Little about Last Christmas is that surprising, but as Hollywood continues to grapple with the idea that the rom-com still has legs and audiences are hungry for comfort food entertainment, it’s a welcome addition to a rebounding genre.

The crime-fighting? That’s nice, but the real fun is in the bonding, most of it at the hand of oddly wholesome sequences in which they all try to one-up each other’s magical skills.

Tellingly, the most pleasurable moments in Nia DaCosta’s “The Marvels” don’t hinge on the audience having an encyclopedic knowledge of all things Marvel. . . . They’re just solid pieces of blockbuster filmmaking: charming stars (like the full-force charisma of Iman Vellani and the appealing vulnerability of Teyonah Parris), sprightly action, and zippy humor.

Many of the problems with Closed Circuit stem from a script littered with first-draft exposition...exacerbated by unimaginative staging.

Contextualized by the documentary, the movie amounts to an enticing narrative experiment even when it doesn't quite hold together.

Holidays is a fun romp with flashes of brilliance.

Like a grand opera, Bel Canto weaves many stories into one sweeping epic.

Unfortunately, while Julianne Moore and Ellen Page go great lengths to make the central romance convince, Nyswaner's undercooked script and Peter Sollett's direction have the opposite effect, reducing Freeheld to a tired formula.

This is irrefutably Kinnaman’s movie, but Connolly fatally undervalues him. He doesn’t trust his actor to walk the emotional tightrope his film stretches taut before him, to sell us on the idea of a father digging himself deeper into a hole of his own design.

Though Pugh valiantly muscles through the melancholy beats of Braff’s melodrama, there are too many other characters and plot threads to allow her to do much besides heave the story forward.

The “Jurassic” sequels were bad enough when they made an effort to evolve — they’re even less worth seeing now that they already come pre-fossilized.

Combining the droll self-satisfaction of a New Yorker cartoon with the wet gore of an Eli Roth movie, Zobel’s tense, well-crafted, and deviant grindhouse take on the national temperature has no trouble caricaturing what ails us, but even that fun combo lacks the killer instinct required to see us more clearly than we see each other.

The good news is that the fans of Antoine Fuqua’s “The Equalizer” — a bland and pulpy 2014 riff on the ’80s TV series of the same name — are in for more of the same. The bad news is that the rest of us are, too.

It doesn’t always fit seamlessly together, but it’s far more entertaining than that might lead on. This is a spirited and sweet spin on classic material that deserves kudos for its balance of necessary updates and affection for the old ways. Mostly, it’s a reminder of what’s actually worth considering and critiquing: the final product. This one is good.

Lellouche may not be an original, but he is a committed craftsman and an avid synthesizer of forms, and if there’s one thing this starry-eyed epic demonstrates, it’s that even well-worn genres can be enlivened by sincerity, surprises and visual punch — in other words, a bit of ouf.

One way or the other, the biggest issue with “The Story of Fire Saga” is that most of it is just too limp and anodyne to register.

It has everything a growing horror freak needs: extreme violence, tons of nudity, vampires, mummies, and apocalyptic bedlam. The movie is slyer and smarter than people give it credit for, and absolutely gorgeous-looking.

Mitchell transforms Neil Gaiman’s sci-fi short story into a vibrant, edgy and at times outright goofy statement on tough antiestablishment rebels and freewheeling hippy vibes, suggesting that they’re not really all that that different.

Racer and the Jailbird speeds along at an engaging clip, but never overcomes the fundamental simplicity of its plot.

A misfire that’s as stilted as it is inert.

The bone-crunching action and relentlessly blood-letting feels out of place, and as those sequences start appearing with more frequency, the film loses much of its rangy charm.

It’s both entertaining and smart as hell.

Disney’s latest attraction just isn’t rousing enough to sustain the fun of a 20-minute ride for more than two hours, and the rewards are few and far between for a movie that taps so many resources to reach them.

The film is never funny, and its attempts to wink at the adults in the room are so lame that you wish they’d been left on the cutting room floor, but the deeper the film delves into Tim’s imagination the less imaginative it becomes.

Dumont regards history as a focal point for national identity, finding France’s leadership rooted in dry pontification and meandering religious fervor. He gives us a complex world so keen on taking itself seriously that it becomes parody, leaving only Joan’s stone-faced expression to point to a higher truth.

Even as the story drifts off, Night Eats the World derives its power from a beguiling, provocative implication: It’s hard to confront a hostile world, but gathering the courage to do so doesn’t make the job any easier.

The rare moments when Shoplifters of the World isn’t tripping over its own cutesy fan service reveal a movie that’s listening for the real and mysterious friction that has always transmuted suicidal music into its own kind of salvation.

An imperfect hidden gem worth ticking off for genre completionists, it’s also a suitable pick for Mother’s Day 2025 — one that will remind true horror myrmidons why the best springtime releases so often lurk in mess.

Boundaries breaks no fresh ground and sags into conventional story beats on autopilot, but it’s rewarding enough to hang with these characters and roll with their mudslinging.

There are flashes of subtle resentment to Williams’ performance that register as some of her best work in ages, so it’s unfortunate that the movie’s calculated assemblage of sentimental beats dominate the show.

Kids are always in need of gracious tales about the power of being yourself in a world not necessarily built to embrace differences (of all sizes, of all kinds) and stories like Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken can do that, with fun to spare. But why not get more splashy, why not take more risks, why not get bigger and weirder, when that’s also the aim of the very story you’re telling?

As soon as you find yourself getting potentially sucked in by its sweetness, it throws out a fart joke or another gag that hits at the lowest common denominator. Most grimly, it assumes that its viewers need to be convinced to give the humanity of the intellectually disabled. As a society, we should be better than Marcus Markovich, and it shouldn’t take a movie to remind us of that.

My Policeman isn’t not arresting, and that’s thanks to the work of David Dawson and Emma Corrin, and not the film’s top biller, who was never the lead at all.

Much of the charm of Ticket to Paradise comes from knowing exactly how this story will end — what would a good romantic comedy be without a guaranteed happy ending? — without being totally certain of the journey to get there, because of the originality in the script.

What value there is to be found is in its cast. Hoult and Costa are charismatic, committed, and totally capable of making it feel as though their characters really can’t see what’s coming.

A litany of jolt-focused dream sequences do little to escalate the tension or advance the plot, and Dutta — making his feature directorial debut — hasn’t developed a deep enough skill set for the scares to be as specific to his movie as Sam’s fears are to her immigrant experience.

You People ends up being more of a feel-good rom-com and love letter to Los Angeles than a truly biting satire, but you’d have to hate fun to complain about that.

My Salinger Year often trips on the self-serious nature of its premise, and struggles with an antiquated quality out of sync with its timeline, as if trapped between the character’s genuine experiences and her idealized vision of a literary world that doesn’t really exist.

Ellen Barkin puts on a bold, candid performance in Cam Archer's Shit Year, but the enigmatic movie is composed of too many fragments to sustain her efforts.

The film seems to have been made to suggest something of Faulkner's style in a cinematic medium, and it's certainly laudable that there have been very few concessions to the marketability of a project like this.

A supremely dense coming-of-age drama steeped in weighty blather at the expense of emotional validity.

[An] unevenly written but good-looking directorial debut that gradually runs out of steam.

For a movie with so much going on, (not even counting the CGI cougar Bella befriends), A Dog’s Way Home is wildly devoid of meaning or humor.

It feels as if Guiraudie had two separate ideas for a contemporary urban comedy but couldn’t figure out how to develop either of them, so he stuck them in one script and hoped for the best.

The first two-thirds of Brian Yuzna's Society are admittedly lackluster. Starring Billy Warlock as Bill Whitney, the Beverly Hills-set tale of a rich kid beginning to distrust the world he grew up in takes more than an hour to figure out its footing. But once that happens, Society assumes an unshakable vise-grip that's nearly impossible to look away from.

Benson, who also wrote the film’s screenplay, knows his way around heartbreak, and despite the elevated nature of the story — she time travels, for chrissakes — always finds room to add genuinely relatable elements to Harriet’s incredible plight.