Perry’s self-produced soap opera scribble is the kind of hilarious so-bad-it’s-good romp in which the man behind the curtain invites his viewers to roll their eyes.

There's nothing slick or entertaining about the crumbling existence of Pomes' unsalvageable antiheroes.

Free Guy is nothing if not a movie that wins you over in spite of your better judgment and best defenses, but its “be the change you wish to see in the world” energy feels like a micro-transactional smokescreen for a corporate monoculture that only values creativity so far as it can be used to fool us into paying for things we already own.

Maybe Ordinary Angels is so accessible to godless critics and church-going civilians alike because it focuses on a circle of hell that everyone in this country has to enter at some point, no matter what they might believe in: the American healthcare system.

The Reyes family is a fun group, and “Blue Beetle” is at its best whenever it lets them lead the way.

Eisenberg’s performance is left to affirm that art can truly happen anywhere, but when he’s offscreen it doesn’t seem to happen anywhere else.

The volatile friction between the movie’s wildly conflicting energies works as a curious backstop for this cautionary tale about not giving into grief and despair. No matter how grim things get (in life or in Ghost Lab), you never really know for sure what’s going to happen next.

The film suffers from a pair of unfortunate missteps, the first of which is plain from the start and only gets worse as the film drags on.

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?

Like all of the best rock docs, it will make you want to listen to the band’s albums. But after the second hour has come and gone, you might decide that you’ve listened enough, after all.

A satire of sequels, remakes, and (of course) reboots that always happens to be all three of those things, Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is both a flippant look at how the nerd industry is eating itself alive, and a more sincere — if still very stupid — tale about making room for the next generation.

Where Wild Life could have been a nuanced look into how wealth and ecology collide, instead it’s merely just a celebration of these rich people doing the “right thing” with their money. But who really pays?

Damon and Affleck are low-key one of the most perfectly measured duos of the last 25 years . . . so it’s no surprise that they bounce off of each other so well here, but their natural chemistry is more pronounced in the context of a movie where everything around them feels so forced, and their characters’ grounding idiocy is more refreshing in the context of a movie that betrays that realism at every turn.

While it has a few appealing qualities, as a whole it amounts to a well-intentioned bag of missed opportunities.

The problem with this hokey courtroom drama isn’t that it says the right thing in the wrong way, the problem is that it ultimately doesn’t say anything at all.

The action scenes in Machine Gun Preacher work fine on their own, but they cheapen a work that attempts to command great importance.

The directors never quite find the right symmetry between scenes of life and art with those that uncritically glorify violence.

Lightyear is the first movie that Pixar has released in theaters since the start of the pandemic, a return to normal that would probably feel more exciting if Lightyear wasn’t also the first Pixar movie since the start of the pandemic that feels like it only belongs on Disney Plus.

If the film had focused on its set pieces and not made time for dialogue scenes, One Shot would be a helluva ride. But there’s no getting around the fact that these are cardboard characters, even by action movie standards.

Slumberland is nothing if not an exhausting roller-coaster of missed opportunities, virtually all of which stem from the film’s lack of a solid emotional foundation.

As Angie feels caught between many worlds, so does her story. A little bit teen sex romp, a little bit female friendship plug, a little bit Asian American immigrant story, Inbetween Girl has no shortage of things to say. It just needed to trim out the noise so we could hear them.

The film is too close to — and too impressed by — the simple fact of what just happened to see under the surface, or even bother to look that hard.

Anyone who’s hacked through enough “Demon Slayer” to keep pace with “Mugen Train” can surely handle what this movie has to offer. It’s the rest of us who might want to think twice.

The making-of story is well worth hunting down and can make this broadly underwhelming movie almost worth the watch.

Spry enough to sustain its wisp of an idea but too contained in both story and setting to resonate beyond its most basic thrills, Next Door is a pleasantly unfulfilled promise of a debut.

This could be entertaining in the right hands. Here, it just feels smug.

Vivo grows increasingly generic and forgettable as the film goes on, and the closer its furry hero gets to finding a silver lining, the more viewers wish that he never went looking for one at all.

There's an undeniable anthropological value to Allen's footage — imagine if one of David Koresh's most-trusted disciples had recorded every second of his time in the Heaven's Gate — but his film is far more compelling as an artifact than it is as a narrative.