An affectionate love letter to a bygone era of growing up, Ping Pong Summer brims with specific pop culture minutiae, making it easy to assume the movie has been intended as a farce, but it has more going on beneath the surface.

Those expecting a balanced perspective might be tickled by the couple's chemistry but disappointed when the film opts not to make that relationship more central to the plot.

Set aside the contrivances and creepy plot twists, and Michael Suscy’s Every Day offers up a timely message about acceptance and the nature of love that’s especially welcome at the moment. Unfortunately, the movie falls short of doing justice to that idea.

By trying to provide a little something for everyone, it ultimately offers precious little to anyone.

Apocalypse, for all its faults, has the audacity to make the MCU look small, and the conviction to make the DCU — if there even is such a thing — look foolish for confusing self-seriousness with gravity. If only these characters were allowed to be as complex as the ideas they fight for, Apocalypse could have represented a new beginning for superhero cinema.

Dazzling but disjointed, ambitious but unconvincing, Mirzya stumbles under the weight of its own epic aspirations.

Despicable Me 4 already feels like six episodes of just such a show, crammed into a single unwieldy, disconnected, and oddly episodic outing.

Smothered by its lighthearted approach, The Monuments Men attempts to make a grand statement about the valiance of dying for the sake of art, but fails to create it.

Red Christmas rarely deals in gore for gore’s sake in its early going. By the end, however, it becomes such an exercise in sensibility-testing brutality that any message about the fragility of the family unit is as murky as the cinematography.

Even if the execution isn’t always where it needs to be, Katz and screenwriter Simon Barrett still deserve their flowers for conceiving such a purely cinematic idea and swinging for it with so much confidence.

Thin and politically disengaged as this diverting Euro-thriller can be, it never forgets how even the most desperate of people can be left to suffer in plain sight — nothing but figures in a landscape.

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

It may not break the mold in many ways but one, but the impact of that one is far from trivial.

Heimann is so focused on the spectacle of it all that he forgets to do anything with it emotionally or formally, dragging everything to a close, as we return back to the beginning with little of anything meaningful or engaging occurring over the film’s running time.

Colony is literal and uncritical in the application of its ideas so that genuine fear is obliterated in exchange for a blasé familiarity. We don’t expect superlative fascist critique at every turn, or a treatise on team-level failure within behemoth institutions, but at least bring emotionality and intimacy with your more clear-eyed pacing.

Although not exemplary, Janie Jones at least manages to give its tired scenario a sense of legitimacy.

There's a certain elegant simplicity to the movie's execution that maintains a spirit of familiarity but also keeps the material afloat.

Who are these people? Why should we care about them? Not only does this inauspicious debut struggles to answer those basic questions, it never finds a believable way to ask them.

A minor cult classic that cast a long shadow. Its cinema verite aesthetic, which combined deadpan narration, publicly available music cues, and chilling reenactments, created a kind of true crime sensationalism that would be borrowed by everything from Unsolved Mysteries to the current found footage horror craze.

The film seems destined to live on as in-flight entertainment on nursing home-sponsored trips to Vegas, but a good cast and some well-placed sentimentality elevate it into something almost watchable.

Côté often frames his protagonists in such precise compositions that the world they inhabit is inescapably artificial and symbolic, rather than dramatic.

Hamm’s adaptation of the material is competent enough, offering all the striking shots of the Swiss Alps and extra-laden battle scenes that any historical epic connoisseur could ask for. Bang checks all the boxes as a leading man, emitting the rugged sexiness and unflinching bravery required of a historical figure who transcended his own lifespan and achieved true immortality.

Passenger may lack the interpersonal and mythological complexities required of a proper, obsession-worthy classic. But Øvredal is nevertheless skilled at trapping his audience inside a disorienting, semi-liminal space where anything can happen… and it probably will. Like the best late-night drives, it’s an outing without a meaningful destination that lets you have fun in total darkness.

While it’s less than the sum of its parts, those parts know how to deliver.

Slack and shambling ... Often hectic and sometimes heartfelt but very seldom funny, “Final Cut” is disappointing because it lacks the boldness of the original, yet even more so because it abjectly foregoes the kind of “fuck it, we’ll do it live!” creative mania that it’s meant to embody. Some of the movie’s jokes are just too well-constructed to fail, but too few of them land hard enough for the movie itself to succeed.

A music biopic so broad and hacky it makes “Jersey Boys” seem like “All that Jazz,” Kasi Lemmons’ well-acted but laughably trite Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody is an anonymous portrait of a singular artist — a by-the-numbers “Behind the Music” episode that needs 146 minutes to say almost nothing about a once-in-a-lifetime voice.

The film suffers enormously from its slippery grasp of history, all of its narrative thrust slipping through the cracks between fact and fiction.

The Fallen Kingdom is at its worst when attempting topicality (the testosterone-fueled Wheatley refers to one of our heroes as a “nasty woman”) or when beefing up its crass plot.