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.

Anaconda constricts its premise a little tighter as it moves along (if only because the absurdity ratchets up in a way that forces the film to adopt a clearer sense of itself), and there are some undeniably amusing bits of stupidity along the way.

Director Derek Drymon does better than you’d expect with Paramount’s spooky new feature film — expanding the swash-buckling legend of the Flying Dutchman (Mark Hamill) into a funny, vibrant hellscape sure to lure in kids and millennials alike.

Alas, it’s not veracity that rules in stories like The Housemaid, but the often mealy delights of Feig’s latest film are routinely thrown into sharp relief by Seyfried’s crisp performance. Motivations, emotions, and machinations might be the building blocks of this sort of housebound thriller, but a genuinely good performance? That’s what can really wipe the floor.

I know that Cameron has committed himself to another two sequels, and now I know why he’s starting to hedge about whether or not he wants to direct them himself; even the most orgiastic moments in “Fire and Ash” left me feeling like he’s ready to come back down to Earth.

The latest Silent Night, Deadly Night is an audacious 2025 season capper for Cineverse and a solid achievement for Nelson, one that promises the director will give us more genre worth unwrapping down the line.

Few leave unscathed as the handheld camera whip-pans and fast-zooms between cringe-comedy and genuine pathos and back again — especially once the hapless prof paves his own road to hell with his good intentions.

Most of all, it’s about the depressing reality that some of us are capable of holding both of those extreme views about a person without noticing any level of contradiction. There might be no fixing such a fundamental flaw in the human condition, but “The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo” does an admirable enough job of dramatizing it.

The trouble here has less to do with verisimilitude than engagement; this story about the power and pratfalls of emotional projection simply doesn’t inspire enough feeling for us to see much of anything on either of its two blank screens.

Watching Ella McCay can sometimes feel like time travel, particularly for those vested in bygone eras of American filmmaking, but if you’re capable of tuning into its wavelength, an old but worthwhile spirit can be found.

Overall, the big swings this wending odyssey takes in merging genres and weighty ideas do pay off — it’s a gargantuan, continent-crossing feat.

The sensory appeal of the technical limitations only lasts for so long. And as a feature, “Dry Leaf” does feel oh so long once there soon proves to be little variety to the bag of visual tricks over three hours.

Scarlet amounts to a frustrating waste of animating and directorial skill for the price of an excessively ordinary story.

Although most of Endless Cookie is cheerfully comedic, it also very much lives up to the “political” descriptor Seth aimed for in the opening.

What could have been a generic sexual awakening circumvents tradition and expectation with surprise developments and increasingly sensual turns. Even when the film toys with cliche, as it does with multiple time-lapse montages of flowers in bloom, it’s still in keeping with Lucija’s viewpoint, to which Djukić becomes so perfectly attuned.

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.

The White House Effect largely steers clear of overly simplistic narratives about politicians exclusively making decisions to serve whatever special interests whose “pockets” they happen to be in. But it doesn’t shy away from the role that the oil industry played in turning a party that initially seemed interested in fighting climate change into one that has spent nearly half a century adamantly denying it.

The result is a roman candle of a movie that feels like it was shot out of a cannon, despite being burdened with the gravity of an implausible dream; a totemic Jewish-American odyssey about where such dreams come from, where they might lead to, and where they’re liable to come apart at the seams along the way.

Worth the wait? Yes, and we can’t wait for the next one to take wing (wink).

If earlier segments of Middletown suggest that we’re building to something revelatory, the latter half feels a bit like a train that chugs on aimlessly after passing its destination. It’s a pleasant ride. It just lacks a little edge.

Of course, I’m fully aware that The Family Plan 2 wasn’t made for the critics. Not because it’s bad (which it is), but rather because it was only intended to be watched by people who don’t care if it’s good. This movie often feels like it was made by them too, which should be comforting to anyone who considers themselves a fan of the franchise.

Through majestic overhead shots of Shahverdi (and her young girl gang) speeding through the mountain-cradled landscape, alternated with intimate closeups (Shahverdi’s expressive face sometimes speaks louder than her words), we’re brought closer to a world both foreign and undoubtedly familiar.

It’s not clear where else the series has to go — both in terms of the character’s journey and the fact that Finland only had so many geopolitical foes in the 1940s — but if the story ends here, our journey with Aatami will have been a satisfying one.

In a crumbling empire where common sense has been eroded by ideology, and the political will to solve a problem can’t hope to compete with the ghoulish impulse to profit from it, creating a new business sector might just be the only kind of healing that the richest country on Earth can afford.

Much like Wicked, Wicked: For Good works its way up to a massive duet between the pair, so emotionally resonant than even the most wicked of audience members will still likely shed a tear (the song is, of course, “For Good”). It’s an unmitigated high note, but it’s a lonely one indeed. Is it alone worth the wait? Maybe, why couldn’t the entire film feel that way?

Come See Me in the Good Light co-mingles the kaleidoscopic themes of genderqueer poetry with the grueling daily management of a deadly illness — and does the vulnerability of its well-chosen subjects remarkable cinematic justice. Through that, White creates a sense of existential wonder and a film bursting with hope for all kinds.

The only people for whom this situation isn’t terrifying are us, the audience, who feel nothing but the purgatorial torpor of sitting through a movie that’s too afraid of its own concept to do anything truly provocative with it.

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.