Rebuilding is a reminder that It’s a noble thing to want to make movies about everyday people. Their stories are worth telling. However, a key part to making that endeavor work is being curious about the people you’re depicting, and letting that curiosity — rather than an assumption that you already know everything there is to know — drive the storytelling.

Sweeney may have taken this role with Oscar statuette dreams and “legitimate actress” intent, but thanks to its sketchy screenplay and languid boxing bonafides, the result tends to be as dull and thudding as gloves striking a heavy bag.

On one hand, we have a fantastic central performance, supported by solid direction, decent visuals and sound design, a creepy atmosphere and an effective relationship metaphor. But at the same time, the film is simultaneously being hamstrung by a screenplay that fails to render believable character relationships, falling back on painfully clunky exposition, wooden supporting performances and infuriating character behavior.

By denying us the terror thrills of this no-win situation, leaning into shock and eschewing awe, Bigelow leaves us trundling out of the theater with only the dull ache of impending doom to keep us company. I could have listened to NPR for that.

It’s a hagiography more than anything, one that does benefit from access to an intriguing library of behind-the-scenes footage, interviews and outtakes, but rarely does I Like Me know how to connect this material to any kind of deeper insight into John Candy’s psyche, with a few notable exceptions that ultimately aren’t enough.

Springsteen’s earnestness makes him seem like a nicer, more open-hearted sort than Dylan in A Complete Unknown. It also makes for a less prickly character in a less entertaining movie.

One could argue that the fairly straightforward biographical approach is meant to act as a primer for those have never once tuned into Turner Classic Movies; on the other hand, rapid-fire references to Godard’s contemporaries, including petty feuds and clashing reputations, are calibrated so that cinephilic savants can pat themselves on the back for getting the reference.

Even Dafoe, seemingly incapable of a false note or forced delivery, ultimately must fall in line with the movie’s broad-arc predictability.

With a plot that likewise falls apart under the lightest bit of scrutiny, what we really needed was more judgement of our protagonist, and not less.

It’s like a TV pilot poorly dressed up as a character study.

For far too much of its bloated runtime, it becomes an incomprehensible slideshow of trauma and weakly executed horror imagery, only occasionally revealing the far more effective, character-driven psychological thriller it’s clearly yearning to be.

Beyond a handful of vaguely contemporary references – podcasts; crypto; Stormy Daniels – there’s little sense of the present in Spinal Tap II, not even of the band being particularly out of touch with it. It’s been four decades since the first film! Shouldn’t their resentments be pettier, their epic reconvening more desperate?

For a mystery, Wake Up Dead Man is surprisingly bad at making its ensemble feel essential to the stakes.

So many romantic comedies revel in formula, turning a genre into an embarrassing mating ritual soundtracked by the rustle of screenplay pages and bad scene-transition pop. If nothing else, The Threesome understands a greater range of emotional, physical, and logistical possibilities – so acutely, in fact, that it sometimes wanders away from the “com” part of the rom-com altogether.

Much of The Roses languishes in second gear, with glints of amusement (Colman doing an Ian McKellan impression; the Englishness of punctuating or preceding insults with “darling”) that only accumulate in a way that makes the movie feel a little safe, compared to the genuine rancor and bitterness of the earlier film.

The film needed to be either a dark, moody story about criminals seeking a way to break out of the ruinous track of their exploited lives, for the sake of a baby … or a winking, snarky heist comedy with a charismatic lead character. It instead tries to do both simultaneously, and the clash between those elements is distinctly awkward.

The Galápagos affair has been shrouded in mystery for 90 years, but Eden doesn’t offer us convincing insight. It’s film built from obvious assumptions about what happened there, gained from a frustrating distance.

If only Jennifer Jason Leigh had been available for a few more days of shooting, perhaps Night Always Comes could have put some flesh on the bones of its family drama, enlivening what is otherwise an overly familiar crime caper, but like an absent parent, the supporting elements of the film just can’t be counted on when you need them.

A queer ghost story with devastating emotional power and transgressive themes of domination, selfishness and abandonment, it is all too often hamstrung by plodding stylistic choices and a thin script that stretches many of its interactions until they’re so thin, threadbare and ethereal that they end up just as spectral.

Where The Pickup could have most easily have ideologically separated itself would have been on the comedic side, by leaning into the talents of its marquee names, but it instead represses the delivery of jokes more and more as it goes, becoming merely another tepid crime caper without a more distinct identity.

Like a lot of sequels, it feels the need to go bigger and brasher even as it repeats much of its predecessor. And so despite a streaky-canvas animation style that fuels the characters’ momentum, it eventually feels like a whole lot of pirouettes and flips around a security system that isn’t really there.

Occasionally funny in spite of itself, particularly when relying on tried and true slapstick zaniness and the admittedly irresistible performance of Christopher McDonald as Shooter McGavin, it steadily becomes a punishing endurance run that belabors the same handful of gags to the point of nausea.

Leave it to a new version of I Know What You Did Last Summer to highlight that there was never anything particularly interesting about I Know What You Did Last Summer in the first place.

Christian Swegal’s film is most effective in its early, character-study moments, as it leaves the audience to discover that Jerry, for all of his confidence, has a worldview informed by absolute nonsense.

With an incredibly deep and frankly excessive wealth of archival footage at its disposal, Perry examines filmic versions of the video store experience, drawing conclusions about what they meant to us, how filmmakers used them, and how we processed the end of the video store era.

It’s a kid’s movie with some adult moments and lots of nerdy references, along with new interpretations of familiar characters, just as you would expect.

Although at times it shows a remarkable focus and weight that its predecessor lacked, it also falls victim to the type of cliches and convolution that tend to doom franchises gearing towards the development of still more installments.

A confused mashup of psychological imprisonment thrillers, dystopian social satire and even something adjacent to zombie horror, it’s bereft of actual ideas despite its cement mixer of a premise, struggling to pad out its runtime with 10 minutes of limping credits at its conclusion, leaving 83 minutes as a remainder that feels like a short film or anthology entry dragged kicking and screaming to feature length.