Dasha Nekrasova’s bored gamine onscreen presence is quite funny (she suggests a jaded Emma Watson). But much of the acting here is atrocious and the slash-and-splatter ending disappointingly conventional.

The Call of the Wild is aiming to be an old-fashioned adventure movie for family viewing, and it delivers the requisite big warm cinematic hug. And more than being the story of a dog finding his inner wolf and fulfilling his destiny, it’s also an homage to the natural world. And that, wrapped in the adventures of a dog, is a pretty wonderful thing.

If it’s not original ground, Don’t Worry Darling is a visually arresting mash-up of The Stepford Wives and Pleasantville, with its plot about an idyllic artificial ‘50s with pampered suburban housewives religiously dedicated to their husbands and their cocktails, and hints of the decade’s dark side.

A compelling story that’s well-acted, well-written, and beautifully shot is its own reward. The female perspective is pretty neat, too.

I accept the onscreen explanation that this Godzilla is simply on atomic steroids. It’s the movie that’s fat.

At a little more than two hours (about the length of the line to get into the actual ride), The Haunted Mansion sometimes strains to keep up its frenetic pace. But the fun tone is on point, and younger family members in the audience are in little actual danger of being traumatized by fear.

Cronin doesn’t just show you something disturbing—he insists you sit with it until it becomes personal.

If cute was the selling point of this spin-off series, it’s practically out of stock in Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, a movie that has traded in its charm (and, for the most part, its fantastic beasts) for an extended Nazi metaphor.

Dog Days moves along, mostly pleasantly and at its worst is a somewhat-forced good time.

If our planet should collapse into some colossal cyber-punk afterworld, we can take comfort knowing that Milla Jovovich has our back.

Lisa Frankenstein can be fun, but there is a mean-spiritedness to Cody’s script that doesn’t fit with the film’s premise. It comes mainly at the hands of the creature whose victims are far from charming but don’t necessarily deserve the extreme comeuppance that’s dealt to them.

Know from the start: Halloween Ends has some of the best kills in the franchise.

As a study in mutual traumatic grief between doctor and patient, Marionette has some resonance, but the emotional core of the story is smothered by its irritating intellectual pretensions and altogether too much wood paneling.

On the sliding scale of war movies, Emmerich’s Midway is obviously no prestige film like The Hurt Locker or Saving Private Ryan. It belongs more to the school of the original Midway, with Tora! Tora! Tora! as its exemplar. Tell the story of a battle, offer up some sketched-out characters, played with aplomb, add a dash of soap opera and fire when ready. On that scale, for what it’s worth, Midway is a much more solid piece of entertainment than the Pearl Harbor directed by Emmerich’s fellow master-of-disaster Michael Bay.

While it has charm and an interesting twist or two, it lacks bite.

Mohr appears to be in control even when the film takes wild swipes from the absurd to the dramatic. Still, Boy Kills World works.

Reiner’s attempt to create Spotlight-like docudrama of newsroom courage and stoke fresh outrage about government lies is undermined by clunky old-fashioned filmmaking and Joey Harstone’s exposition-clotted script.

There’s a smidgeon more humanity than in the braindead Godzilla vs. Kong, but nowhere near the wit and spirit of Skull Island.

An undercooked ‘70s-style blaxploitation revenge fantasy with a reverse-Shyamalan plot (the “twist” is up front), Alice is an objectively bad movie wrapped around one great, all-in performance.

While there is pleasure to be had in watching De Niro play opposite De Niro, an overly detailed plot gets in the way, making it a listless and frustrating watch.

Dahl’s work demands darkness and an edge, but instead there’s a bright Hollywood-y antic sense to Zemeckis’s The Witches, and the overused and unconvincing FX only serve to trivialize what we’re seeing.

It’s an entertaining fantasy from a kid’s perspective that hearkens back to the days of reading a stack of comics on your bed for an afternoon that never seemed to end.

Until Dawn is a gleeful reimaging of the classic slasher film, modifying the tropes enough to turn the familiar into something fresh.

The violence in Medieval is fast, frequent and fierce and could possibly be the film's biggest draw. History might be the film's initial hook, but it's the movie's grisly depictions of military violence that the film will likely be remembered.

Still, it’s a fascinating psychological thriller, a ghost story with (as Dickens would say) more gravy than grave in its construction.

Self-assured kid actor Coleman and the always-funny Schaal give My Spy some personality, but can we please retire this worn-out idea?

As is often the case with a not-so-great film, I can report that I wanted to like it more than I did. But I just couldn’t.

This is one of those animated features that veers way towards adult references for the parents in the room, while creating occasional mayhem in the pursuit of short-attention-span theatre. The latter fails.