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.

For me, the only unsettling surprise was the discovery that a movie featuring a diabolically unrestrained Nicolas Cage performance could be so unengaging.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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."

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is the only genre where you can paper over the flaws with a handful of well-staged set pieces, and thanks to Timo Tjahjanto, it manages to upstage the original on that front.

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.