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.