Garfield is fine, if a bit one-note in his show-must-go-on energy. The real issue is that the film is maniacally focused on Larson as the uber-struggling artist in a way that eventually feels monstrous, devouring any other character or concern that happens to cross its path.

Hitchcock diluted by De Palma diluted by mid-tier M. Night Shyamalan leaves you with, well, bottom-tier Shyamalan.

I wouldn’t call Little a showcase for Issa Rae, who gets one of her first significant big-screen roles, but anyone who can bring this much life and intelligence to such tired material certainly deserves praise.

This is a film of clashing ideas and clanging style.

By the movie’s merciful end, you wonder what a nice guy like Superman is doing in a mean place like this.

The cultural context is at once vague and oppressive—there’s constant talk of “chi” and “ancestors”—to the point that it’s nearly rendered meaningless. With Yifei Lu in the title role, posing elegantly but not given much of a chance to project any sort of inner life.

The songs don’t offer much distraction from the silly story.

F1: The Movie is a corporate conglomerate on cinematic wheels.

When you hit a home run with Gadot, who was so thrilling in the 2017 film, you might want to make a sequel that keeps her at the center.

Wow, when this thing eventually curdles, it really curdles into something rank.

At least in Kinski you can see why Schrader thought Cat People might work. Her feline eyes are part of it, but it’s the mystery behind them, especially in the second half, that almost redeems the project.

The Happytime Murders is at its best not when it’s at its most “adult,” but when the filmmakers find new, surprising ways to employ their puppeteering creativity in the real world.

There are at least four movies stuffed into Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and about a third of one of them isn’t half bad. I don’t think that math adds up to a decent film, but if all you need is a roaring dinosaur every 15 minutes or so, it might not matter.

It’s become a crutch for critics to say that this or that movie is so generic that it must have been generated by AI. I’ve resisted, but I’m finally going to play that card in regard to Wish. Thanks to a banal familiarity mixed with a dose of inhuman idiosyncrasy, the movie feels as if someone fed the opening Disney logo sequence — of fireworks bursting over a fairytale castle — to an AI program and asked it to spit out a 95-minute animated musical in the mode of the studio’s classics.

This bloated, big-screen take on the DC comic is dumb, but not nearly dumb enough.

Bad in ways that are similar to 1989’s Road House—namely, an uneven handle on how seriously to take its silly premise.

Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson are the reason to see Men in Black: International—she has a comic precision that nicely deflates his humorous hubris—but for some reason the movie doesn’t bring them together until a third of the way in, after failing to establish any real sense of their characters.

Not controlled or competent enough to work as a spoof, a serious action flick, or anything in between.

To its credit, the movie gently questions Nyad’s compulsion—especially as it relates to her treatment of Bonnie—but it’s too eager to sweep all that under the rug when it comes time for the triumphant final swim.

Even while understanding that much of Belfast is supposed to be from the perspective of Buddy (Jude Hill), a young boy who witnesses the beginning of Ireland’s “Troubles” in his working-class neighborhood (and serves as something of a stand-in for writer-director Kenneth Branagh), I still felt a type of artistic naivete at work—a belief that all you need is black-and-white cinematography and a cute kid to create something of deep meaning and emotion.

The film clumsily stumbles into feminist significance in its final moments, without having laid much groundwork for it beforehand.

If joy and liberation bursts from the best Astaire-Rogers films, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle is defined by restriction.

Much of Vol. 3 feels like a combination of those exploitative ads from animal shelters and the Japanese body-horror endurance test Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Aside from that, the movie offers about 3,000 subplots and 2,000 supporting characters.

Watching Dune is a bit like trying to dig your way out of a sandstorm. Wave after wave of lore and nomenclature pile up around you until you finally succumb, and are buried. At which point you’re best off giving up on the movie as any sort of coherent, compelling piece of science-fiction and simply embrace it as camp.

This is noir as costume party.

Absolutely no one—Oscar voters included—should find Mortensen’s performance anything other than excruciating. From the hand gestures to the accent, it’s as if he jumped out of a vintage photo at The Olive Garden shouting, “Unlimited breadsticks for everahbody!”

Before it goes completely off the rails into yoga sex and ill-advised special effects, The Keep manages to establish an intriguing sense of atmosphere and dread.

The audience is never fully let in on either character’s interior life, as we skip from incident to incident. This is despite Streep and Nicholson working overtime—a strange sight for two effortless actors.