The performances are sweltering...This isn’t a good thing. Yes, it’s fitting for the setting – a humid, suffocating Louisiana mansion where the family of an ailing tycoon (Burl Ives) connives to inherit his fortune – but the overall result is like watching a melodrama in a sauna. It’s just too much.

Kudos to Patel for not making a dull vanity project for his feature directorial debut, but Monkey Man is still a rough watch of its own kind.

This is a crazed and lurid character portrait that spends most of its time psychoanalyzing itself.

Women Talking reduces women to their words, as the title implies, a choice that is bold but limiting.

Thoroughbreds has a brazenness that’s promising, then, even if it also seems to be a bit too taken with its characters’ amorality. The movie works hard to make your eyes open wide, but doesn’t seem to realize that a squinting introspection can have its own sort of edge.

At its best, this is galaxy-brain, comic-book stuff rooted in a tactile sense of place. Unfortunately, Eternals runs nearly three hours and is bloated with elements that have served other MCU installments well, but fall flat here.

This is largely Dickens as farce, which is occasionally fun—Peter Capaldi is a delightful Mr. Micawber, whose creditors are so insistent they try to yank his rug out from under his front door—but it often feels forced.

When Pieces of a Woman is at its best, it’s focusing on this traumatized couple and how neither knows how to make room for the other’s grieving process, partly because their respective processes conflict. Unfortunately the movie wants to be so much more.

I suppose if you wanted to be really generous to the film, you could argue that this Dumbo takes a subversive swipe at Disney, its own corporate overseer.

A Woman Under the Influence made me wonder: What’s the point of only showing a mentally challenged character’s distress? Is it fair to reduce Mabel to her rock-bottom experiences?

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever suffers from a giant, Chadwick Boseman-shaped hole that it can’t fill, no matter how many characters, storylines, and muddled, chaotic action sequences it tries to throw on the screen.

The real problem, however, is that neither Molly, nor Newbury, nor anyone on her staff is very funny.

The animated action in The Bad Guys 2 has the deftness and ingenuity of a Mission: Impossible movie, but in terms of storytelling, this follow-up to 2022’s The Bad Guys represents a step back.

I’m convinced more of Hawke’s passion for the man than his place in music history.

Other than these visual delights, Moonfall isn’t much fun.

It’s all wild, but too intentionally amped up to be any fun.

In Drive-Away Dolls, almost every line is squeezed a bit too hard for cleverness, while the acts of violence frequently cross over into callousness. And although Qualley’s verbal dexterity is impressive (even if it owes a lot to Holly Hunter’s Edwina in Raising Arizona), her performance mostly made me eager to see what she might do in the future, with stronger comic material.

Director Ridley Scott and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski lacquer things with the right sheen—and the outfits and hairstyles, if nothing else, will keep you awake for the nearly three-hour running time—but House of Gucci’s promise as a campy, fact-based crime melodrama is only realized when Germanotta is running the show.

Maestro does manage an incredibly moving later section depicting Bernstein’s response to Felicia’s struggle with cancer (though much of these scenes owe their power to Mulligan), yet I ultimately came away feeling that the movie was more interested in Cooper as an artist than Bernstein.

By the time Streisand takes over the entire movie with the title number, in which the massive waitstaff of an upscale restaurant gathers to sing and dance her praises, I couldn’t help but wonder what all the fuss was about.

Just about every line of dialogue written for a child or teenager is painful (the movie must have been dated a week after release), though I suppose that helps Hocus Pocus work as a time capsule. Far more charm can be found in the largely practical effects and sets.

Director Justin Lin (making his fifth Fast film) nicely balances chaos and clarity in one early chase scene through the jungle, but later lets the visual bombast take over.

All in all, Tomorrowland suffers from the quality that defines many of its characters: outsized vision and ambition.

When the plot is this much of a lark, it’s in need of far lighter execution than this.

Partly an impale-the-rich horror comedy, partly a fantasy monster movie, and partly a father-daughter trauma drama, Death of a Unicorn tackles more tones and ideas than a firmly established filmmaker could probably manage, so it’s no surprise that writer-director Alex Scharfman, making his feature debut, struggles to rein this in. But you have to admire the ambition and bonkers vision.

Director Wayne Wang and his dreadful cast – the performances are almost across-the-board atrocious – had no chance.

There are moments when Godzilla: King of the Monsters resembles a fantasy version of a National Geographic documentary—except those tend to deliver far more stunning visuals without any special effects whatsoever.

Cummings is a unique talent; Snow Hollow is just an awkward fit, beyond the ways he intends.