While Much Ado About Dying strives to be a tribute to caretakers and Chambers’ dearly departed uncle, its baggy structure, dictated by David’s declining health, renders the film frustratingly inert.

Ideally, you want your action comedies to contain compelling action sequences and funny comedy. At the very least, it’s fair to expect one of the two. Despite a semi-compelling relationship at its core, “Old Guy” isn’t nearly as funny as it thinks it is, and its set pieces are quite flat by action standards.

Antebellum might have been a movie that met this awful moment, but its confused attempt at seeing yesterday in today resolves as a throwback to a time when anyone could actually overlook it in good faith.

Expert craftsmanship can't rescue Triple 9 from the constant feeling of a pulpy remix.

It’s entertaining enough, but this is a story that doesn’t feel real, mostly because it isn’t.

Sam Levinson’s exasperatingly gorgeous Malcolm & Marie is a lot like the two people who lend its title their names: confident and insecure in equal measure, stuffed to the gills with big ideas but convinced of nothing beyond its own frenzied existence, and reverent of Hollywood’s past at the same time it’s trying to stake a new claim for its future.

Ludicrous and dramatically unsatisfying as Pompo the Cinephile might be, its kid-friendly portrait of life on a movie set captures the same electric crackle that make far better films like “Day for Night” and “Irma Vep” such irresistible ads for joining the circus.

Maybe the pictures should get small again; it might be the only way to save an MCU that seems dangerously close to getting too big to do anything but fail.

If you can vibe with that whiplash-inducing comedic opening — gallons of vomit mixed with some magical holiday sweetness — you just might be in the right frame of mind to receive what’s to come in this hyper-violent, occasionally funny, and often oddly charming holiday trifle.

It’s a story that has its share of unnerving sequences, but like its pivotal character, it feels stuck between two worlds.

Daphne shouldn’t be this captivating, but with Woodley’s vulnerability and full-scale charm backing her up, Endings, Beginnings is able to capitalize on a seemingly thin premise.

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

Powell is an exceptionally promising filmmaker, but by the time he arranges all of his ducks in a row for the finale, he’s lost track as to whether Lucas is continuing the cycle of vengeance that has poisoned so much of his family, or if he’s breaking it.

With a thinly sketched premise and a Hail Mary pass at emotional depth arriving late in the final act, the film feels like a series of vignettes draped around Stalter’s charms. Unfortunately, charisma alone doesn’t make an interesting narrative.

Connery more than proved he could carry a movie away from 007, and the film remains pretty enjoyable, even if it’s an uneasy blend of the kind of gritty crime picture that Lumet would make his stock-in-trade, and the lighter caper flick so popular at the time.

Wildcat is too tame in its portrayal of suffering to let its Catholic undertones sing or take powerful cinematic form, resulting in a work where paradoxes are half-baked dilemmas that seem too conveniently solved, and life itself is something that happens far off-screen.

Freeland is clearly having fun behind the camera, but broad and superficial performances mean the fun doesn’t always translate.

Brosh McKenna knows her tropes, and when she finally, finally brings rom-com vets Witherspoon and Kutcher together IRL (for an airport-set love declaration, of course), we’re reminded why these things work so well, how cozy and comfortable the inevitable it is, how wonderful to wrap everything up with a big bow, even if we saw that gift coming from a mile (or 20 years) away.

When Tomb Raider digs into its more creative action, it’s about as entertaining as popcorn entertainment gets these days. It’s when the film falls back on the old tropes that things grind to a halt.

Psychokinesis doesn’t leave you with much more than a bittersweet feeling about it all, but it’s an appropriately different takeaway from such a refreshingly different superhero movie.

None of the characters in Klaus are as delightful as they are well-drawn, and Pablos’ film never earns the holiday spirit it tries to manufacture down the home stretch. But there’s no denying that the future of “traditional” animation looks a little brighter than it did yesterday, and that’s reason enough to celebrate.

For all its of-the-moment charms, Escape Room can’t shake its more basic genre trappings, eventually giving itself over to tired and predictable revelations and flimsy twists.

Hacking Hate can charitably be construed as a subversion of social media incentivization, a filmic attempt to channel free-floating rage towards powerful entities who make money off of human fragility and social discord. But as an exercise in positive or progressive radicalization, it falls short of its aims by communicating well-known problems without offering solutions beyond the need to soldier on in the face of such vast hatred.

A riveting but utterly ridiculous melodrama about the burden of guilt and the value of bunny shit, Atom Egoyan’s “Guest of Honour” layers one absurd turn on top of another with the confidence of a veteran architect, and yet — even at its most perversely entertaining — this very unpredictable movie only feels as if it’s working in spite of itself.

How we look from the outside versus how we are on the inside doesn’t always lineup, and that disparity can shake the visions we have of ourselves. The metaphor extends to “Skincare” itself as a film that looks bright on its face but ends up dull despite its best efforts and self-care.

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.

It’s not that darkness isn’t a part of the film, but that The Short History of the Long Road approaches even the most tense interaction with a bent toward positivity in all people. It’s, in short, nice.

The director excels at generating a nervous energy around his character’s mounting desperation, and the movie’s intermittently engaging for that reason alone.