The final result of "Wicked: For Good" falls between the best and worst case scenarios: some big worthwhile changes and additions show a smart adaptational instinct, but it's still less entertaining than "Part 1," marred by inconsistent plotting, lackluster humor, and fewer exceptional musical numbers. It's good enough, but I could be happier.

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.

If you watched any of the set pieces in Havoc entirely divorced from their wider context, you might find them thrilling, if a little derivative. Within the film, however, they do very little to raise the blood pressure back up after extended detours in a generic crime conspiracy difficult to get invested in. He's still a talented action director, but this plays a little too safe for my liking.

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.

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.

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.

The action in this film is honestly better than anything in the recently released "Kraven the Hunter." The sequences toward the beginning of the movie are particularly impressive.

Adams' great performance aside, Nightbitch is just a good but not great movie — and oddly enough, its biggest obstacle to greatness might be that it's not quite weird enough.

Deadpool & Wolverine isn't the height of the MCU, but it is the height of the MCU right now, and for a franchise that's struggling at the moment, it's the shot in the arm that the MCU needs.

The Running Man is such an enjoyable race while you're running it, but once you make it past the finish line and start reflecting on the experience, it leaves too much to be desired.

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.

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.

With go-for-broke performances from the always compelling Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley, both of whom can be safely relied upon to bring the weird when asked, The Bride! is fun to watch, even if its narrative leaves something to be desired.

While the movie does a fine job sending off the Warrens, it lacks some of the charm of its predecessors, and in the end, feels more like a comforting rerun than an exciting new horror effort.

There was no chance of "The War of the Rohirrim" recapturing the magic of the Peter Jackson "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. But Hèra's defiance in the face of the despair her enemies want her to feel has something of the trilogy's inspirational quality.

Whether or not it proves a financial success, Bad Boys: Ride or Die is shocking in how effectively it pleases a crowd. It continues the work of "Bad Boys For Life," breathing new energy into a thirty year old franchise that, on paper, should have ran out of steam by now.

M3GAN 2.0 is too tiring to sustain enough laughter for even an ironic recommendation.

Between characters who have no depth to them, cliched dialogue, and a strange approach towards the dynamics between an abuser and their victim, it's hard to recommend "It Ends with Us" to anyone but the most diehard Colleen Hoover fans. Pour one out for Blake Lively and Jenny Slate, who both deserve so much better.

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

While some of the old magic might be a little lost in translation, "Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F" still manages to deliver just about everything we could have hoped for from a legacy sequel in this franchise. It's funny, it's action-packed, it's got heart, and it's got Eddie Murphy proving once again that he's still got it. What more could you want?

All in all, though, this is a more than respectable remake of Lilo & Stitch.

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.

Although it falls apart slightly in the third act (a treat the director is unfortunately unable to shake here), a tense narrative and unsettling performance from Josh Hartnett makes Trap a delightful late summer thriller.

After the Hunt is a slog that wastes the talents of its stars on unlikeable characters in befuddling situations, rarely coming near a coherent plot point with any degree of competence.

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

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.

You're Cordially Invited is good at what it does, even if you won't be thinking about it long after the credits roll. And if you do think of it, all you'll do is laugh.

Not a great movie, but "horror-comedy where unicorns kill rich people" is the sort of high concept that guarantees some level of entertainment, and excellent casting helps compensate for its weaknesses on the screenplay level.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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. 

If at times a little belabored. With an all-in performance from Benedict Cumberbatch and a unique visual style, "The Thing With Feathers" is an inescapably compelling drama — even if its concept is perhaps a bit more interesting than its execution.

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.

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.

This film is a slog to get through, and by the end you almost feel as though you yourself have been trapped in the hole for weeks.

Anchored by Diaz and Foxx's combined star power and a general sense of pleasantness that never fades, it's a solid little action-comedy with a bit of family fun at its core. The bad news, if you want to look at it that way, is that there's not much else there, leaving the film a hollow, though pleasant, experience.

It's a movie about the boundless imagination of children that could only have been made by a cynical adult mind, careful to restrict itself from attempting anything bold so it can algorithmically copy everything that has worked throughout decades of Amblin classics, albeit devoid of genuine heart or charm.

Shyamalan may have inherited her father's love of the twist ending, but the one she creates in "The Watchers" is as unearned and unsatisfying as they come.

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.

If nothing else, it's a true feat that a movie with this many writers and this tangled an editing process ultimately wound up as solid as it did. Yeah, a lot of the action set pieces are inconsistent and choppy. Much of the CG work is reliably cheap-looking and rushed. But in the end, they pulled together what could have been an embarrassing disaster into something entertaining and, at times anyway, inspired. 

For a director whose recent work output suggests he moves straight onto the next project the second he calls cut on the last, it's surprising how much of Fountain of Youth feels reshot in post.

It's a singular thrill to see how deftly Hardy blends weird comedy, genuine pathos, and even pseudo-homoerotic undertones into the kind of performance that would win Oscars if it weren't housed within such a deeply unserious, commercial film product.

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.

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.

Few artists worth making movies about have led lives that can fit neatly within the confines of a feature film's runtime, but Michael Jackson's in particular feels too Herculean a task to undertake, given the complexities and challenges of his history. Yet "Michael" is an exuberant and entertaining film that sends the viewer home happy, salivating for another installment to stretch the foregone conclusion of its own success. 

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.

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.

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

Instead of a slightly silly, character-driven series that spins off Michelle Yeoh's Emperor of the Terran Empire character, we get a hastily thrown together buddy comedy that lacks any semblance of humor or, for that matter, buddies.

I laughed at more jokes than I expected to in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.

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.

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.

It's almost impressive that a movie all about the power of imagination could be so creatively bankrupt and incurious about the world, but this misguided kids' film manages to be all that and so much more (or less, depending on your perspective).

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

Mercy is not a good movie, with hackneyed dialogue and stock performances that, ironically, seem like they themselves could have been generated by AI. But worse than that, it's a movie that pushes insidious views about AI, law enforcement, and privacy laws under the guise of a brains-off action thriller.

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.

The '94 film's characters were more vehicles upon which to project outside feelings about grief rather than individuals one could actively grieve for, so that is an area with room for improvement. Alas, almost every other decision made in this remake actively works against the principles of good drama, good entertainment, and good messaging.

The Electric State is a soulless exercise in the same vein as a "Borderlands" or an "Argylle," a joyless affair that feels cobbled together by studio executives who are trying so desperately hard to manufacture a crowd-pleasing success by replicating formulaic genre beats and characterizations, that they never once stop to ask why anybody would care about the story they're trying to tell.

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.

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.

While Roth and his production designer, Andrew Menzies, do many of the sets justice, particularly when the ragtag group goes to the city center, the story just can't live up to this. "Borderlands" is a poor man's version of "Guardians of the Galaxy"; while it may look kind of pretty, it has none of the personality of that earlier movie. Don't waste your time on this one.