Our culture has changed in monumental ways when it comes to dating, romantic connection, sex, and how marriage is viewed by younger generations. The genre itself needs to evolve in tandem with this. Despite their momentary delight, films like Office Romance tell us that Hollywood is stuck creating outdated movies for a version of our romantically yearning culture that doesn’t exist anymore.

Toy Story 5, which was directed by studio stalwart Andrew Stanton (who co-wrote the script with Kenna Harris), is both the best thing Pixar has done since Turning Red and disappointing in a way that only something you once found utterly captivating could manage to be.

Most of its gags require not surprise but surrender. Because while some dumb jokes are (as noted) funny the first time and never again, on the opposite end of spectrum lie those bits that are funny only after the fifth or sixth or 11th time, at which point the comedy comes not from any inherent wit but from the doggedness of the teller. We laugh because we’re defeated.

Backrooms suggests that while we’re teetering on the verge of something new, filmmakers are going to have to do more work to wrestle these nonnarrative, non-centralized ideas into something that can sustain a story.

Riley’s film only works in fits. Its stunning visual bravura can’t distract from what’s lacking within its filmmaker’s arsenal of storytelling tools.

Few recent movies better embody the vibe that in a spiritual vacuum all that matters is momentary sensation, a dry quickening of the pulse to counteract the emptiness of what we might still choose to call “existence.”

Drab and stone-faced to a fault, The Mandalorian and Grogu struggles to capture the inventive vitality of the better Star Wars movies with action scenes that feel frustratingly pro forma and lifeless performances that seem determined to lull us to sleep.

None of the female characters in the film acts in ways that suggest Farhadi has actually given much thought to what it’s like to move through the world as a woman.

There’s probably a smart, chilling film to be made about the terrors of smothering and relentless adoration — one imagines what Rod Serling would have done with something like this — but this isn’t really that film.

In his latest, In the Grey, Ritchie takes this compulsive, hyperanalytical love of preparation to comical levels. Intentionally, but maybe not productively: As the screen fills up with lists and the narrative overloads on data, we may find our attention drifting.

Maybe this frivolous little movie reflects our own world back to us in more ways than we might wish to admit.

Karia’s film is uneven, but, as with its aforementioned staging of “To be or not to be,” it tosses enough new ideas around to keep us watching.

I was never bored by Normal, but I’d also be lying if I said I was ever excited by it. Maybe it’ll help you forget your troubles for an hour or two, but there’s also a good chance you’ll forget the movie itself in even less time.

The Mummy is an enormously silly gross-out flick that for some reason believes it ought to be a meditative slow-burn affair.

Nobody ever feels like a real person in this movie, but we’re pulling for them anyway. The same could be said for the film: It’s not particularly good, but I selfishly want it to be a hit anyway, just so we can bask in the genre for a little longer. The world was a better place when rom-coms roamed the land.

Its comedy is successfully awkward and discomfiting until it’s evident Borgli isn’t interested in exploring people so much as using their mistakes as gristle to create an endless sprawl of socially awkward scenarios with all the grace and interpersonal cognizance of an edgelord. It is only through the sheer force of the actors involved that the movie is engaging and entertaining.

For all its bloodshed, the movie’s not sharp enough to land a cutting blow — or even to break skin.

Ready or Not 2 moves at a decent clip and is generally entertaining, but there’s something deflatingly lazy about its slate of rich assholes, which is heavy on standard-issue entitled daughters and smug failsons who treat the staff like props.

Palestine 36 offers an interesting and valuable perspective on a relatively unknown period in history, though I wish it wasn’t so thinly spread out. Jacir wants to show a cross section of people’s responses to these events, but the result often feels like scattershot scenes from a longer miniseries, flitting from one character to another with little narrative thrust or cohesion.

There are certainly some real laughs as well as some groaners, but at times you want the film to just get on with it. Mainly because once you get past the shtick, there’s an intriguing story there, fun and rousing in its own right without need of additional silliness.

It feels hurried, generalized, inattentive. There’s no specificity, no immersive sense of people actually living their lives. Again, that’s probably partly intentional. But it sure feels like a miscalculation for a movie about the survival of humanity to have so little humanity in it.

See You When I See You grapples with serious subjects, and everybody involved surely meant well. That’s just not enough.

The Invite is primarily a comedy, and it does have some solid laughs, though the character interactions can also feel so manufactured that our bullshit detectors start going off fairly early.

The Moment, directed by music-video wunderkind Aidan Zamiri, feels like a half-hearted hybrid of a real concert doc and a This Is Spinal Tap-like satire. It’s a little too afraid to go too far in either direction, and the end result is pure brand management.

What Primate lacks in terms of narrative complication, it makes up for with cinematic smarts, as director Roberts ably uses form to build suspense, conveying plot points via images instead of dialogue and refreshingly avoiding the usual jump-scare clichés.

The movie is all concept and, well, not quite no execution, but such confusing, conflicted execution that it makes the entire exercise feel like it was messed with after the fact.

Rental Family might be a modestly likable, often uneven movie about a fictional American actor in Japan, but it’s also a thoroughly fascinating movie about a very real actor in the midst of one of the strangest careers I’ve witnessed.

One of the pleasures of afterlife movies is the leaps taken visually, but Eternity looks hopelessly mundane. Still, the actors are game, and that’s half the battle.