Noelle is the sort of film destined to be discarded, a cheap holiday tchotchke with no staying power.

Pleasant and preposterous in almost precisely equal measure, the film never offers anything less than two all-time British actors having the time of their lives, which makes it hard to get frustrated that it seldom offers anything more.

If the film’s story is steered by a hard-nosed focus on the large and small of what actually happened, the way Emmerich tells it feels more informed by WWII movies than it does by the war itself.

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 Current War forces viewers to spend so much time wading through its aesthetic that it becomes easy to lose track of its ideas, or grow too bored of them to bother following along.

With muted characters and a conventional structure, the movie struggles to find the fun or the spirit, humming between high notes and low notes to fall flat in the middle. While its heart is in the right place, Gay Chorus Deep South just doesn’t sing.

Perhaps writer Demos-Brown and director Kenny Leon hope to tap into our collective consciences, but it’s difficult to be moved by such hackneyed, all-too convenient storytelling and overwrought sentimentality.

Doctor Sleep shows considerable effort to ingratiate itself to discerning cinephiles, from the moody Newton Brothers score to cinematographer Michael Fimognari’s dark blue nighttime palette; as a whole, the movie conjures an eerie and wondrous atmosphere that blends abject terror with a somber, mournful quality unique to Flanagan’s oeuvre. But his pandering to dueling source material results in a jagged puzzle beneath both of their standards.

Equal parts reverent and narcissistic, humble and grandiose, this Nick Knight-directed curio is both a tribute to the Lord and a testament to West’s unparalleled ability to get in his own damn way.

For all of the film’s strange omissions, and its struggles to thread the needle between appealing to children and trying to show them how wild our world really is, this passionate and beautifully shot film is worth celebrating for how clearly it conveys the raw truth of that idea.

It’s hard to imagine a more crystalline look at the suppleness of someone’s self-identity (and the moral dilemma of someone else choosing to overwrite it) than Ed Perkins’ Tell Me Who I Am, a documentary so harrowing and horrific that it can only bear to scratch at the surface of its remarkable story.

As lucid and intense as it is underwritten, his second crack at the Maywan District murders might be much less nuanced than his first, but this riveting thriller still manages to amplify its subject much louder than Krauss has been able to before.

Paradise Hills posits that its entire world is a shell game built on outdated ideas and a resistance to originality, but it’s the film itself that’s most woefully unable to ever go anywhere new.

The movie arrives at an eye-roll inducing final twist, and hints at an inevitable sequel. But this app isn't exactly begging for an upgrade.

“Dark Fate” might close the door on the “Terminator” franchise, but every dull frame of it suggests that we’ll be trapped in that vicious back-and-forth ’til kingdom come. The good news is that you can forget about everything that’s happened since the summer of 1991.

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.

Despite the good vibes and amiable callbacks to the previous film, “Zombieland: Double Tap” is only ever amusing when it’s breaking new ground. That just doesn’t happen nearly enough.

DeBoer and Luebbe have further expanded their nutty vision of suburban ennui and the painful consequences of keeping up with the status quo into an unsettling and amusing send-up of human behavior.

An overlong blend of kid-friendly “Game of Thrones” warfare and standard-issue metaphors of intolerance, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil finds plenty of ways to build on the original premise, but few that resonate any better than the last flamboyant ride.

What we’re left with is a benign, artless, nothing of a movie that feels cobbled together with the same app-driven, gig-economy mentality that Phil is trying to disavow. Entire characters are ordered à la carte and forgotten about as soon as they leave our sight, as “Jexi” races across its story with the listlessness of someone blankly scrolling through their social media feeds.

A(nother) disposable Netflix thriller that fails to do anything with its potentially clever premise, Brad Anderson’s Fractured isn’t the first modern riff on “The Lady Vanishes” — not even close — but it’s one of the few that finds a compelling new backdrop for that Agatha Christie-esque tale of conspiracy and gaslighting.

That this film can stand on its own, all while paying tribute to the show that helped birth it, is maybe the most impressive escape act of them all.

Mister America is the kind of comedy that can pivot from lethargic to legendary on the turn of a dime (if only for a minute or two).

Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon’s animated The Addams Family introduces the Addams gang to a new generation by way of a retrofitted origin story that shakily attempts to hold fast to its original charms while cramming it inside decidedly modern trappings.

While the film’s first half boasts universally strong performances (even babyAisha gets some screen time), it’s Chopra Jonas who emerges as the film’s driving force.

The action that clutters the last hour of this movie is never compelling enough to feel like anything more than a bloody distraction, but the characters vibe together so well on their own terms that the walking dead only need to provide an existential threat.

Caught somewhere between a genealogy project, an oral history, and an in-depth video essay about the iconic scene that seared “Alien” into our imaginations, it reaffirms the film’s basic power without probing deeply enough to achieve any power of its own.

It’s a project that was made to restore a certain way of seeing; to punch a hole through the screen that separates people from the reality of what’s happening in their world. But in trying to get so close to the truth without touching it, Hassan almost fell into the same gap that he was trying to bridge.