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.

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."

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. 

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.

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

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.

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.

Deeply hopeful, spectacularly produced, and equally adept at laughter and tears, Project Hail Mary is the best new movie to hit theaters so far this year.

If Pixar is now just as formulaic as its Hollywood animation peers, then director Daniel Chong's film is a reminder that a stereotypical crowd-pleaser from this studio is made with enough emotional sincerity and visual inspiration to never feel like cheap product fallen off the factory line.

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.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die is both a battle cry and a bleak joke about how unregulated technological progress could destroy civilization and break our souls ... if it hasn't already.

In its artful, brilliantly acted exploration of the moment one learns that the world isn't "fair" and how we keep going in the face of evil, Josephine sets a high bar for all movies to come in 2026.

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.

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.

Chaotic in its depiction of the unraveling of a contentious workplace relationship, Send Help is a profoundly unserious thriller that is nevertheless a crowdpleaser.

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.

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

DaCosta arrives in the world of 28 Years Later with confidence, swagger, and infectious energy, delivering 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple — one of the best horror sequels in recent memory, and a must-see horror film for 2026.

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.

Is The Housemaid a serious movie? No. Is it often bogged down by a clunky script penned by Rebecca Sonnenshine? Yes. Is it sometimes even stupid? Definitely. Is it fun to watch and sure to become a fun staple? Yes, absolutely — thanks to Seyfried and Feig.

The armies of visual effects teams at James Cameron's disposal struggle to hide the fact he's now on autopilot, expanding the world of Pandora without offering anything that feels particularly fresh. Even the set pieces failed to arouse much excitement.

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.

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

Marty Supreme is more than just a vehicle for one of this generation's most vital stars to ball out and push his personal brand. It is one of the most impressive films of the year, an ambitious and exhilarating effort whose biggest sin is fumbling a bit in the finale.

That "Zootopia 2" has anything that will linger in the imagination long after viewing already puts it a league above Disney's other cash-grab sequels, but it effortlessly clears that lowest of bars. It's not perfect, but even the parents dragged along by their kids will be happy to see a third movie — and by modern Disney standards, that is nothing short of miraculous.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

Black Phone 2 hits, it hits – and that's the case pretty much as soon as they make it up into the mountains. With clever set pieces that utilize Ethan Hawke to his best advantage as an even more disturbing Freddy Krueger, Black Phone 2 ups the creepiness factor.

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 another triumph from a singular voice in cinema, and another Lanthimos movie you sort of never see coming.

The majority of the movie is great. Funny and zesty, but still with something to say, Good Fortune is a good time even if the ending leaves something to be desired.

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 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.

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.

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. 

Transcending its gimmick status within its opening stretch and only growing more resonant from there, it becomes that rare horror film you could recommend to people who hate the genre — the set pieces are well constructed, but their impact pales next to a haunting, moving story about a dog and his owner. 

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

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.

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.

A thoughtful meditation on love and grief, Hamnet features career-best performances from Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, and is Zhao's most intimate work to date.

Beyond just being clever and unexpected, there's something quietly powerful to this story of truth-seekers in a post-truth world.

It's difficult not to fall in love with all of the characters in the film, and its breezy sense of humor makes Eternity a veritable crowdpleaser.

Rental Family is a clear crowdpleaser with a sense of humor and charm that will make audiences fall in love with it — if they're willing to accept its unvarnished sentimentality, that is.

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.

Taken on its own terms, Frankenstein is a compelling, at times moving, and utterly gorgeous epic. As a fan of both Del Toro and Shelley, I can't help but nitpick the details.

This is a surprisingly sad movie — just one that also happens to be funny.

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.

Lawrence and screenwriter J.T. Mollner's take on "The Long Walk" is a reminder of why King's stories have historically been well-suited for the screen, replicating the blend of melancholy, coming-of-age character study, and fatalistic horror that defined the very best adaptations of his work.

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 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.

Its narrative structure keeps Weapons continually engaging, while its talented cast of actors brings depth to each character, making this one of the best horror films of the year. 

Overall, this is a comedy that doesn't skimp on the sentimental stuff, although it never comes off as cloying or overly sweet.

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.

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.

Doing double duty as both a romcom and a twisted body horror movie is a tonal challenge that "Together" pulls off successfully, in large part thanks to how fun it is.

The film is not exactly exemplary or paradigm shifting, but it is entertaining, heartfelt, earnest, and largely unashamed of its comic book origins.

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.

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.

As an introduction to the rebooted DC Universe, "Superman" is zippy blockbuster fun. But amidst all its cartoon absurdity, it might just inspire people to make a difference in this universe.

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

At the end of the day, the roar of the engines is loud enough to drown out any meaningful discussions about the intersection of commerce and art. For a movie about cars racing fast, it delivers.

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

28 Years Later is scary and touching and funny and brutal, and I loved every minute of it.

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

It's a nice enough movie, and honestly it might just be the best possible version of a live-action adaptation of its source material. But if you're expecting anything more than an almost exact shot-for-shot remake, you may be disappointed.

Much of Materialists is almost aggressively unromantic, and while it's not without laughs, those are also darker and more uncomfortable than you'd expect.

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 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.

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

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.

Though its long string of wacky plot points might sound convoluted on paper, one shouldn't worry too much about it. The craziest details are mostly there for laughs, and the thematic and emotional through-lines that actually matter remain clear throughout.

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

With Robinson doing his thing and Paul Rudd's straight man delightfully off-kilter in his own way, Friendship is a chaotic ride from start to finish.

Bring Her Back genuinely disturbed me. You can decide whether that's reason to see it as soon as possible or reason to stay far away.

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.

Final Destination Bloodlines is a tremendous amount of fun, especially if you can see it in a theater (preferably with an audience willing to match its energy). I said that Final Destination offers no surprises, and yet this iteration of the concept is a pleasant one.

It's a testament to the charisma on display, and the expertise with which they work, that they all can take center-stage and then step back and let someone else have a turn.

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.

It's at once a fun and crowd-pleasing picture in that classic's vein as well as an extrapolation of what worked so well in the last outing. 

The film is a gargantuan undertaking and its heights will reverberate through pop culture for the foreseeable future. But some of its bigger swings don't quite connect and suggest that it is possible for a movie to try to be too many things at once.

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.

On Swift Horses finally achieves the emotional resonance it's been aiming for just a few minutes before the credits.

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

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

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.

It's a sharp, sexy, and intoxicating drama that has more in common with Patrick Marber's play "Closer" than with most spook stories.

Novocaine is packed full of inventive action set pieces that are alternately gruesome, goofy, and sometimes even both at once. It may not be for everyone, but it kind of feels like the gold standard for this very specific brand of action comedy.

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.

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.

Violent, laugh-out-loud funny, and often cartoonishly macabre, The Monkey is everything "Longlegs" is not, and yet it fits perfectly in Perkins' larger body of work. And like "Longlegs," it's a horror experience that should not be missed.

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 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 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. 

Nobody comes to a "Bridget Jones" movie for realism, but Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy understands what its predecessors struggled to, recognizing that even the most far-fetched of genre tropes becomes more palatable when pitched as cathartic to its protagonist, and the audience more generally.