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.

For all of its craft, 40 Acres feels fenced in.

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.

The film only skims here and there the personal elements of how Ramsey’s obsession has shaped her mindset, instead working hard to seemingly unearth juicier “controversy” around the woman where little of it honestly exists in any way that is consequential.

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.

In its fusion of Edwards’ craft with characters who aren’t thunderously stupid or unlikable, this is the best Jurassic movie in ages – in part because it works so comfortably as an ooh/ahh/run/scream monster movie.

The overall structure of the movie is just race, break for argument, race, occasional montage, race some more; it gets a steady rhythm going but it’s not exactly white-knuckle suspense, either.

It’s a little too pre-programmed and self-conscious to be truly witty, yet the tone it strikes and the genre space it carves out feels undeniably itself: part comedy, part sci-fi mayhem, with remnant notes of shlocky horror.

As sobering as the film gets, it remains, as a work of art and expression of Victor’s thoughtful voice, a real joy.

As a story about children finding a place to belong, discovering their true sense of self and realizing that parents and parental figures love you even when they don’t always understand you, Elio is a lovely, if not particularly original story.

It is a film attuned to decline, not just to the pain it can cause, but to how it refracts memory, presence, and touch. Above all else, it’s a film acutely aware of memory’s place in a person’s sense of identity, how it can unfairly slip through hands desperate to hold on.

As with the first film, the look of 28 Years Later is key to its effectiveness.

The opening of the movie has some perfectly timed visually-delivered laughs, like an early car scene involving an accidental failure to reverse, and the bottle-episode staginess of later scenes limits the visual invention. Still, by this point you’ve boarded the ride, and Oh, Hi! keeps you captive in a way that Iris only dreams of: by sheer force of Gordon’s personality.

It’s not often that a rom com/dramedy works so hard to not be the very thing it purports to be until it feels earned. But Song labors with purpose, executing skilled character work and intimate, honest conversations to earn her swoon-worthy Materialists climax and resolution.

Everything’s Going to Be Great just has characters and ideas waiting in the wings to rush in nonsensically.

An occasionally inscrutable and tonally unpredictable look at family, (lack of) empathy, self-centeredness and societal (and generational) rot, the film veers wildly between the genuinely disturbing and cynically comedic as it indicts Japanese society’s particular ennui toward happiness, satisfaction and aging.

Most of the time, though, How to Train Your Dragon’s live-action craft fails to match the equivalent in its animated counterpart, even with original filmmaker Dean DeBlois on hand for his live-action feature debut.

Sweeney’s film, his second high-achieving, high-wire act in a row, lives on the line between yearning and helpless fixation.

A paranoid thriller that sneaks in its character study so stealthily that it takes a while to realize who is actually being studied.

Visually, the film can be a bit rough around the edges, but at its heart it is built from the kind of pulpy sci-fi goodness that longtime series fans have likely been craving.

If nothing else, The Life of Chuck proves that Flanagan’s control of tone and pacing extends to more than just ghost stories, infecting the rhythms of everyday drama with a haunting, heartfelt doom.

It’s fascinating and enlivening to watch how the fusion of two intensely familiar subgenres–serial killer thriller and shark-starring B-movie–can result in a work that is somehow brimming with life and verve.

The pulse-pounding, gag-heavy climax of Ballerina, meanwhile, attempts to cover up the fact that the film is only truly redeemable in the action-laden third act, after a clumsy and disjointed 70 minutes of paper thin revenge plot theatrics, growled out by actors of an embarrassingly high pedigree.

The Italy-set farce can boast 96 minutes of smooth comedic chemistry, but struggles to organically integrate its believable characters with the madcap situation it’s building around them, ultimately feeling like it’s missing some final push into more subversive territory.

Mountainhead promises and delivers a takedown of those tech bros who now rule our society, although there are few genuinely schadenfreude-derived smiles to be had in the exercise.

It’s arguably led astray by an imperative to swing in the direction of pulpier (and sellable) revenge story, backloading its genre goods so deeply that when they finally arrive late in the game, they derail the more contemplative mood that has been established. Tornado is left stranded between tones, set adrift without a rudder.

There is a better film somewhere in Bring Her Back, but it has instead been formatted into an unrewarding and unrelenting exercise in unpleasantness.

It is a solidly sweet and corny live-action children’s film at a time when kids are mostly being sold live-action remakes of perennial streaming-service rewatch faves.

Friendship feels custom calibrated to give Robinson the best possible debut as a cinematic leading man. It’s not just a vehicle for one comedian, though; it’s a timely commentary that, in its own way, slightly deflates the pop sociology notion of the male loneliness epidemic—an idea that basically excuses the anti-social behavior of men who won’t or can’t try to make friends with each other.

Unfortunately, Fear Street: Prom Queen simultaneously goes out of its way to steal directly from all its major influences, demonstrating little if any original thought.

Thanks to Trier’s visual flourishes, and the carefully constructed script co-written with frequent collaborator Eskil Vogt, the many metaphors of the handsome edifice connect brilliantly to the emotional turmoil of its occasional inhabitants.

The obsession of Alpha’s mother with her daughter’s health is never played for shock, but presented with conflict both internal and external, a trial encountered as a result of genuine love.

Lilo & Stitch is not only incredibly well cast, it also brings the movie into 2025 with some smart changes and thoughtful additions.

The movie stars are present, the film looks slick and shiny, and the adventure doesn’t ever let up, but something about it ultimately rings hollow, and by the second hour, you’re left wondering what the point of all of this is, at least until the characters outright explain it to you without any real emotional payoff.

Gorgeously shot and intellectually/emotionally provoking, the film tantalizes with transcendent revelations but is simultaneously unbalanced in how it approaches its characters and minimalist storytelling.

Excoriating and exhilarating in equal measure, it is the first truly great movie to deal explicitly with the unique madness and malice that the global pandemic revealed, a kind of touchstone for a time and place that with only a few years remove feels at once as fictional and otherworldly as a sci-fi novel, and at the same time the very real-world harbinger of the political shifts that proceeded.

It’s a film that’s filled with so many wonderful moments that it’s a joy to behold, and even at its darkest it unfolds with a sense of radical frivolity.

Kandhari’s film emerges as an off-kilter treatise on identity, and what cultural, social, and physiological elements can shape it, even well into adulthood.

But even for a highly satisfied 30-year fan of Mission: Impossible as a Hollywood institution, this adventure is a little exhausting, and leaves Cruise looking ready to move on to the next world, even if he refuses to admit as much on screen. He’s a great actor and peerless movie star. Maybe it’s time to find another mask to put back on.

Macdonald’s film gets plenty creative in its threadwork, but feels like it could still use a few more passes in order to hold together in the long run.

Final Destination Bloodlines does deliver. The elaborate opening set piece is one of the series’ best.

Anyone nostalgic for their grandmother’s cooking will no doubt feel its inexorable pull toward the kitchen.

For a film that spends this much time yammering about wind speeds and precipitation measurements, it’s surprising that Watch the Skies does feel like it can break through to a general audience primed for sci-fi adventure.

If the movie’s adult characters are conveniences, its evocation of teenage yearning-slash-horniness (and the ways those can get mixed up) feels pretty real, even in the more outlandish moments.

It benefits from a strong central protagonist’s performance, but is simultaneously let down by a screenplay that collapses under the slightest bit of scrutiny. Clown in a Cornfield simply isn’t as smart as it needs to be in order to prove that it’s more than its title.

The fight scenes will make you laugh more than the dialogue, and it doesn’t survive a bumpy landing, but led by Captain Hartnett, Fight or Flight takes advantage of its budget airline resources for a knowingly ludicrous romp.

Ultimately, The Trouble with Jessica runs out of gas and limps in the direction of a contrived conclusion, lacking the mercurial spark that all its characters attribute to Jessica at one point or another. If only the experience of watching the film could be as engaging as the implied experience of knowing her.

It might be too busy for its own good, but Thunderbolts* still manages to zero in on something few recent Marvel entries have had the capacity to convey: the human beneath the hero.

Havoc doesn’t lack for recognizable faces for the American market, not with Tom Hardy, Timothy Olyphant and Forest Whitaker front and center. But it’s also not really interested in giving those performers real roles to chew on. Rather, Havoc is primarily a canvas for Evans to paint in bullet holes and viscera, delivering wave after wave of hilariously over-the-top, comic overkill, at least in its back half.

For maybe half its 103-minute running time, maybe even a little more, Until Dawn gets by on its spookhouse variety and surprising humor.

A highly subjective horror experience, Fréwaka rarely gives concrete answers as to the reality of what we’re seeing, but that never makes its potent imagery and outstanding performances any less effective.

That’s the true power of Affleck and Bernthal’s collective charm offensive: They can make a junky story about a computer-brained savior of human-trafficking victims resemble a whimsical hangout session.

Pulling focus from what is essential to The Legend of Ochi, from acting to artifice, throws the experience into haze–and not the fantasy kind, either, but the distended, stumbling kind that lets the pace go limp as the themes go slack. It’s to Saxon’s great credit as a visionary that The Legend of Ochi justifies the experience anyway, on the strength of its rare craftsmanship alone.

Aside from these weaker moments, April is overall equal parts disturbing and enthralling, arresting and miserable; a gorgeous slow-burn pressure cooker that culminates in a quiet condemnation of the powers complicit in women’s suffering while offering no catharsis.

Its performers make the most of their meager resources–they get a lot of mileage out of that baby doll–but in a genre powered by questions of ideology and ethics, Daddy is too milquetoast to memorably deliver its opinion.

Sinners is a vampire story with something to say about America’s unresolved sins and reinforces that Coogler is one of his generation’s best filmmakers, mining something fresh from every genre he tackles.

Categorizing Dead Mail is the exact sort of detective challenge faced by those sorting letters in the film’s post office dead letter unit: It’s a psychological aesthete crime story with occasional giallo tendencies, a film that will immediately become one of the strangest and most unconventional things on Shudder.

As a blistering exercise in sustained tension, Warfare works. As a depiction of the toll war takes on the body and soul, well, it’s pretty good at that, too.

Drop is ultimately a nice movie about an abuse survivor being terrorized by seemingly omniscient forces, loaded with moments that don’t really hold up to scrutiny and well-sold by Fahy’s performance.

Psycho Therapy’s screenplay derails it in its closing minutes with genuinely whiplash-inducing abruptness, running out of gas when it’s still seemingly far from its natural finish line.

Before we get to its many faults, it’s worth noting G20 gets one part of its concept correct: casting Viola Davis as the President. Getting the vibes right when casting your President is the most important first step when making a film in this subgenre.

If Hell of a Summer is supposed to spoof the horror movies it resembles, it never settles on a satirical point of view from which to approach them. If it’s supposed to actually imitate them, well, even worse; the original Friday the 13th is no classic, but it’s got a damn sight more atmosphere than this.

A Minecraft Movie‘s fan-pleasing salvation is knowing when to Do The Thing; it understands why its audience pulled themselves away from their consoles and PCs to spend an afternoon in the theater and delivers it to them with diamond-pickaxe precision.

Together, these intersecting storylines yield more than enough funny, gross and surprisingly sweet moments to keep Freaky Tales chugging merrily along, even though it feels quite clearly calculated for the midnight festival crowd in particular.

The Friend asks, often with a good-natured smile, what can and must be salvaged from tragedy, and how we make room for this hazmat effort in a hectic life.

Though it’s a slighter production, Oliveros’s film still has plenty to recommend it, with his smart direction and a raft of fun performances making for an engaging hour and half.

I am a constant skeptic of romantic comedies, but for a Hallmark-ish feeling rom-com that withholds any substantial emotional exploration of much of its subject matter, The Life List List still managed to charm me.

On its terms, and especially with an ending I read as ambiguous, The Woman in the Yard is also unflinching enough to maybe count as daring, and maybe Sollet-Cerra’s most viscerally moving film. It’s also among his least playful, least comforting. Your anxieties can’t follow you around if you can barely make it out of bed.

It’s tough to watch Secret Mall Apartment and not fall under the spell of Townsend and his earnest collaborators, possessing as they do the idealism and righteous conviction of young people in a bygone era who are quite certain that they’re going to change the world.

The film, where two broken yet kindly individuals find within each other acts that elevate their emotional mood, is surprisingly effective and truthful. Much of this is due to the strong performances, especially by the two leads that never succumb to being maudlin or obvious even when the situation edges towards the farcical.

At times arrestingly suspenseful, at others bitterly funny, but often inert in its transitions, Misericordia is an occasionally confounding mixed bag, but one that stands out for the realistic recriminations of a place where grievances run deep and mercy comes with strings attached.

Ash could be a rumination on the nature of identity, or the destructive colonial spirit of Americans, or the indescribable horrors of a world beyond our own ruined one, but despite all of its cranked-up imagery and sometimes-confusing storytelling, it’s tidier and less thought-provoking than any of that – a genre exercise, capably extended.

At its most powerful, The Twister is remarkable for the brief moments it captures that are so rarely reflected in an accurate way.

There’s a lot of talent on the screen, some catchy music, and some wonderful visuals and design choices, but none of it ever quite adds up to something bigger, leaving us with a film that’s ambitious but strangely hollow.

Snow White is really one of the better Disney remakes.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl details the ways tradition is exploited and warped, and to whom’s favor, gently at times, and with a steely edge at others.

It’s all perfunctory, paint-by-numbers, and played out, without the spark or personality that separates journeyman wrestlers from the real stars.

Ultimately, Borderline’s various threads threaten to unravel, but it succeeds in making a point about delusion and both unrealistic expectations and the lies we tell ourselves to make it through the day.

All in all, The Parenting is just a notably scattershot affair, from its poorly defined character relationships, to its questionable pacing (and eventual abrupt ending), to CGI that sometimes looks fine and other times is suddenly and shockingly inept, like what I’d expect to see in a feature from The Asylum or Troma.

The Electric State is one hell of an artistically neutered, sanitized boondoggle, awe-inspiring in its deployment of expensive visuals but largely bereft of any kind of genuine wit, humor, warmth or adaptational deftness.

Novocaine starts with a premise that is Crank-like in its absurdity, deepens it with feeling, and then rams full speed ahead through a litany of stupidities.

At such a brisk pace, I Really Love My Husband makes its point with admirable swiftness and sharpness, becoming an often quite funny tragicomedy of romantic disaster, illustrative of what happens when two people with deeply unrealistic expectations collide and rely upon a lack of communication to avoid conflict.

The new feature, debuting on Shudder today, delivers no more and no less than what it promises: A deeply creepy, ultimately engrossing battle of wills between two phenomenal lead performers.

Death of a Unicorn may not be much more than another peg in an era of eat-the-rich cinema that has certainly become oversaturated in this form, yet time and time again its reflection of our times feels befitting.

Feig and company’s extension of the material gleefully indulges in the same silly B-movie theatrics, including but not limited to: murder, extortion, opulent wardrobes, twin confusion, and incestuous relationships. On one level, its self-awareness and love for its own convoluted nature make it seductively enjoyable. On another, it feels like a familiar, less effective retread of ground already well-tread by its predecessor.

Without slackening its tension, Black Bag sometimes resembles a bitter comedy of manners, which are apparently also kept in the black bag for certain stretches. These are people who like to tell each other what they find irretrievably boring, especially if it’s each other, whether or not they’re even telling the truth about their disdain.

Lovers of classical opera will no doubt find it to be a sumptuous treat.

Cage has never been less than immensely watchable in any movie, good or bad. In those like The Surfer, which falls somewhere in the middle, he continues to prove an unparalleled ability to transcend mediocrity, and turn any performance into a one-man firework show.

Although Morales is an improv queen, the overriding gravitas of Hausmann-Stokes’ direction makes most of the intended comedy wither and land with a dull thud. However, there are some solid performances from the whole cast, and the opportunity to platform this topic is a plus, and in some cases, likely vital to veterans who will watch it.

At times, By Design is agonizingly opaque or borderline insufferable in its pretentious indulgences; at other times it’s laugh-out-loud funny as it skewers equally pretentious targets.

Overall, Last Breath is an exciting, fun, and immersive watch that does justice to the heroic stories of Chris Lemons and the crew members that raced to save his life. It is action packed, visually exciting, and sure to please diverse audiences seeking authentic, heartwarming excitement.

As writer, Woody Bess seems to want to drag more weighty pathos into a format that doesn’t inherently support it very well, and it ends up hurting both the film’s dramatic and comic deliveries at the same time, rendering its performances confused, with the exception of veterans like Keith David and Richard Kind.

Don’t let the film’s attitude or excess fool you: it takes a dim view of the culture in the neck of the U.S. where it’s set, but nonetheless cares deeply for the people trapped there who deserve to live better lives in better places.

Old Guy is a rather careless take on the fusion of comedy and action genres, the kind of film that will throw around an acronym like “PSNI” in the middle of conversation and just assume an American sitting at home on their couch will deduce this stands for “Police Service of Northern Ireland.”

Mickey 17 is in no way a revolutionary follow up to something like 2019’s Parasite, but it’s an entertaining, well crafted ride.

What sometimes resembles a goof on Stephen King becomes a form of tribute to the author’s ability to mine terror from the mere facts of living.

Well into his late period, Campbell still knows his way around a crisp cut, but sometimes that’s most noticeable in Cleaner when he’s not directing action at all – which is a surprising amount of the time.

In Rounding, you can see the basic outline of a worthy psychological drama, but its screenplay fails to turn that vague shape into a fleshed-out story, instead relying on the viewer to fill in the gaps, while the horror elements merely detract from the material that might have worked otherwise.