The lack of character development blunts any potential for the deeper emotional impact found in the best war movies. The lack of political contextualization further limits how much the film is really capable of saying.

The question remains whether a "Mortal Kombat" movie could ever be expected to be better than this, considering the limitations of the source material. That this sequel translates the simple beat-em-up thrills of the video game into something narratively functional is about as triumphant as it could possibly get for this franchise.

The more this origin story refrains from winking and nodding at the future direction of this characters, the better it is. That it can't entirely keep itself away from this impulse is why it isn't the smooth introduction for a new generation of potential fans it could have been.

For someone enamored with the Wick-verse who just wants a new fix from that world, Ballerina is an unequivocal success. Ana de Armas holds her own as Eve Macarro, a dancer turned assassin trained by the same family that made John Wick such a violent threat.

The vastly overqualified cast stubbornly refuses to phone it in, with their high-wattage charisma acting as the ultimate special effect; their banter is entertaining enough to help distract from just how cheap everything else onscreen looks.

At least half this film — especially the clash between the Evil Queen and Snow White — is enjoyable enough. 

If you've found the previous live-action Predator movies (including Trachtenberg's own franchise-reviving "Prey") to be too heavy on plot at the expense of the carnage, then the brevity of this spin-off is exactly what you'll have been wanting, stripping down the formula to its barest essentials across three brief stories.

Though it may sound like a fascinating sci-fi rumination on the intersection of technology and human life, "Ares" works best as a rollicking action picture with some strong visuals and incredible soundscapes. It lacks the acting acumen and depth of writing to achieve much more. 

Wolf Man delivers some impressive moments of slow-burn body horror but falls short compared to the narrative and thematic cohesion of its predecessor.

. The fact it all adds up to an enjoyable romp, albeit one that never feels as bold as its parts, is likely an encouraging sign that Dan Trachtenberg has attained a similar status to Phil Lord and Chris Miller a decade ago, taking pitches that sound disastrous and turning them into non-compromised crowd-pleasers against all the odds.

It's intelligent without being profound, amusing without being hilarious, empathetic without being gut-wrenching. "Cute" is the word I'd use to describe it overall. By nature it's nothing special, but it's not bad either.

It's the weakest of his three English language efforts due to it feeling like he's watering down his satirical approach, spoon-feeding exposition to his audience alongside each joke under the worry that the parody might go over their heads.

Emilia Pérez can certainly be messy, but it's rarely a mess, and many audiences might just fall in love with its audacious, chaotic energy.

Eden will attract interest for its strong ensemble and for its intriguingly dark true story. It's an entertaining enough way to pass two hours, but it's also not a film I expect people will be thinking about long after they see it.

Yes, it's still rare for a horror film to be longer than two hours, but it's especially rare for a horror film of that length to feel rushed. Terrifier 3 progresses to its climactic living nightmare too fast to be properly processed; this is likely to mirror Sienna's mental state in that moment, but it is still in dire need of an extra couple of beats to build tension before all hell breaks loose.

While it doesn't offer anything you haven't seen in a slasher movie before, the pivot to survival thriller mode feels like a breath of fresh air after a tiresome prior installment with no unique ideas, and no suggestion of any impending change to the worn out formula.

After years of soulless retreads from Disney, this proves you can go some way to recapturing the magic of the originals by hiring a filmmaker who wants to expand upon those earlier stories, rather than lazily revisiting them.

The result is a cute but uneven production that doesn't live up to its impressively imaginative concepts.

Yes, Gen Z absolutely deserves better than People We Meet on Vacation as their equivalent to When Harry Met Sally — but until a worthy successor comes along, this will make for a charming substitute.

The cinematography is gorgeous, and the audacity of the twists can be darkly funny. But thinking about "Cuckoo" afterwards, I feel like I'm missing the key to making sense of and really connecting with it.

There's enough here to win over audiences who loved the original film, particularly in its depiction of the endless bureaucracy of the Afterlife.

It doesn't matter how regressive or repetitive these flicks are. They scratch a necessary itch.

Although the relationship between Craig and Drew Starkey, who plays his reluctant lover, is endlessly fascinating, the film doesn't do enough to explore it, instead taking an odd third act turn into an entirely different plot and dragging out every minute of its runtime with trippy, pseudo-intellectual visuals.

Now You See Me: Now You Don't is pretty to look at, pretty dumb, and pretty freakin' fun.

It is, quite simply, a well-intentioned film that gets lost in the swampy wilderness of its own convoluted plotting and twisted character work, until all that's left is murky water.

As a fun way to kill 95 minutes with your family, "Despicable Me 4" is an unassailable success, even if anyone hoping for more than clearing that low bar may be left wanting.

Whatever happened in bringing this story to the big screen, 100 Nights of Hero starts off enjoyable enough in the moment, but by the time it ends, it's easy to feel underwhelmed.

It's a mechanically functioning, intermittently humorous amusement park attraction whose greatest sin is that it never rises to its hidden potential.

Him is a decent time at the movies and possesses an impressive sense of execution. It's just that the vision its putting forth feels like one we've seen a lot of in recent years, and some pretty pictures and scene stealing moments from the performers can't overcome the sense we've been here before.

Eddington is a fascinating film whose high points are sure to grow in the public estimation with the distance of time, but whose murky themes and punishing runtime have more in common with advanced torture tactics than with traditional cinematic expression.

Maybe there's something I'm not getting here, but as far as I'm concerned, Die My Love comes alive in individual scenes yet feels stultifying as a whole.

The co-writer-slash-director's proximity to its real-life subjects means he can't put too much of an over-the-top Hollywood twist on the tale, but any intent to do justice to the reality of the story just left me wondering why he would want to tell it again if he weren't going to lean into the gloriously preposterous traits one would expect from the classic disaster movie.

While I wasn't left completely cold by Remarkably Bright Creatures, I found its tried-and-tested clichés far more enjoyable than its wilder idiosyncrasies.

It's perfectly serviceable, never less than watchable, but lacking in anything special that could live up to its twisty potential.

Shelter aims higher than typical Statham fare by taking itself more seriously, but in doing so, it misses the mark on what makes his best work so enjoyable in the first place.

It's not a terrible film, to be sure. At times it's even deeply entertaining, because Coen and Cooke clearly still have a certain sense of magic and charm in everything they do. But this dark crime comedy starring Margaret Qualley as a determined private eye is still lacking in a sense of real direction.

The problem is it can't find nearly enough to say to justify its 148 minute runtime, exhausting interest and failing to build its intriguing big ideas into a compelling story.

I Know What You Did Last Summer is a lazy retread of an already mediocre horror film, with only brief flashes of promise peppered between kills.

Kraven the Hunter isn't a complete disappointment, but it isn't a great example of comic book cinema either. Instead it seems well-suited for our mid era of superheroes and everything else.

The meta-narrative of where The Smashing Machine fits into Johnson's career is more interesting than the film itself, which I found a bit of a bore. Johnson's performance is good enough, and Emily Blunt is truly transformative as Kerr's unstable wife Dawn Staples, but neither get that much to do beyond repeat the same sort of fights (physical or verbal) over the course of two hours in a film that fails to justify why we should be so interested.

Despite a cast of endearing key players, a couple of solid scares, and a story rooted in certain fears a lot of us can easily relate to, it's a film that spreads itself so thin that, by the end, the only thing it can really be is a mess.

What remains in question is how much this story constructed through hints, however well they can be understood, actually evokes feeling. To me, Carousel felt like it was missing something that could have made its quiet slice-of-life scenes a real emotional experience.

George Clooney and Brad Pitt have wonderful chemistry together, as always, and they make sense as two wily, slightly over-the-hill fixers, but Wolfs itself is relatively uninspired.

In trying to reinvent the lazy feline for modern kids, the filmmakers have lost track of the comedic tone that has helped these simple, gag-driven stories endure for decades.

To put it simply: it's just another Christmas flick with an artificial heart — if it even has one at all.

It's muddled in the extreme and few of its cast members make it out of the debacle unscathed, but its willful rejection of what audiences might want to see in favor of what Francis Ford Coppola wanted to make is so bold you almost have to admire it.

It aims to be a nostalgic send-off, but the execution is muddled, forgetting that nobody ever came to these movies for the plot so much as the spectacle its amateur stuntman star provided in droves.

We didn't need The Devil Wears Prada 2 ... and unfortunately, it shows. This might be a legacy sequel, but it feels like a bad knockoff; the "Channel" to the original's "Chanel."

When Karate Kid: Legends is allowed to be its own, stand-alone adventure, it's by far the most charming since the 1984 original.

It looks beautiful, and there are no weak links within the stacked ensemble, but it winds up feeling alarmingly empty.

It speeds through the plot beats so fast, in fact, that it never properly allows you to take part in the murder mystery guessing game for yourself, barely developing its characters beyond the one note they're introduced on, so the question of a motive becomes an irrelevance to anybody watching.

While DDL's acting genius gives the film some spark, those sparks are sapped by lethargic pacing and serious pretentiousness.

The Drama is a very well-crafted, never-boring dark comedy that is unfortunately completely broken at its core, handling a loaded premise in ways that are unbelievable at best and offensively tacky at worst.

Gareth Edwards does occasionally lean into the full-blooded horror potential of this material.

As its clichéd and underwritten story progresses, however, it goes from mildly interesting to underwhelming to actively bad in the end. By the standards of a major release in competition for Halloween season screens with some of the best horror movies of 2025, it's a failure.

It's not a good movie, but it's not that bad for a streaming flick either. If you liked the first one, give this one a try. It won't give you the same warm and fuzzy feeling as the original, but you could do worse.

Director Renny Harlin does his best to maintain the same level of slow-burning dread as he pulled off in the prior film, but it ends up feeling like a mundane, fly on the wall account of the average day at the office for the two surviving killers.

Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, and especially Stephen Graham do their level best, but they're let down by a bafflingly inept script and unimaginative filmmaking from Scott Cooper.

Although it has some bright spots, even flickers of chemistry between its stars Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy, it's let down by repetitive action sequences, an uninspiring reveal, and dialogue that feels as though it was written by ChatGPT.

While its nods to the '90s are all painfully accurate, it seems like Mooney was so focused on capturing the essence of Y2K that he forgot that all of this needs to be in the service of a story that's actually engaging. Sorry to all involved, but 91 minutes has never felt so long.

If we're not poking fun at the inherent silliness of this, like a good "Scream" movie should, then all we're left with is a slasher too afraid to twist the knife.

Whereas parents and kids alike will have been charmed by the first, Moana 2 will be overshadowed for anybody other than the youngest kids watching. It will likely make a billion dollars regardless.

While Jardin is clearly a clever and creative visual stylist, he's a lot less creative with his story. His story ideas need to catch up with his visuals, then he might really have something.