While the script co-written by Kusijanovic and Frank Graziano is hardly revelatory, Murina is nonetheless a strong directorial effort from a first-time feature helmer.

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.

Though Smith’s charisma and charm are appreciable, it simply adds an artificial sense of pleasantness by way of steering clear of thornier issues. The end result feels less like a documentary film and more like a devotional favor.

The final product is visually and sonically luscious, but narratively and thematically lackluster—a frustrated misstep from a veteran artist that still deserves praise in the right places.

Juvenile is as juvenile does, but the Broken Lizard fellows supplement their puerile nonsense with abiding endearment. They’re idiots, but sincere, disarming idiots. Like the characters they play in both movies, they mean well, but meaning well comes in second to antics when spending your career making concerted efforts to avoid responsibility.

At his heart, Feig isn’t really a satirist – or an action director, despite his repeated efforts. He still makes a convincing underdog, though, fighting his way through misbegotten genre that shouldn’t work here nearly as well as it does.

González-Nasser offers glimpses of what might make the work rewarding enough to stick with, and, with it, how elusive those feelings must be.

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.

Golja and Gossett’s joint appeal—his rascally charm, her coltish earnestness—gives The Cuban soul, shining light through the gloom of brain decline and the horrors of an ambivalent healthcare system. Who needs validation when you have heart?

Yet in spite of this promising narrative foundation, the film’s gruesome effects and the compelling performance from Blumm, Son seriously suffers from assorted perils of predictability and protractedness.

The film’s highlight is the swaggering Sorvino. More charming with age, like wine or scoundrels, he manages to enrapture without pandering, entertain without sacrifice or compromise.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is everything you could reasonably expect from a Sam Raimi-Kevin Feige collaboration, but not much more.

Ghost Stories’ failure to see its established ideas through to the end doesn’t totally negate the viewing experience. Each segment remains effectively chilling in a vacuum where the movie’s climax doesn’t exist.

With a tight 87-minute runtime, Caveat would have made for a perfectly lean chiller had it opted to maximize the claustrophobia inherent in literally chaining the viewer to one terrifying location for the entirety of the film.

As far as structure, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 has pretty much the same flaws as its source material. Freed from the confines of the literal arena from the first two books/movies, the overarching sequence of events seems ragged by comparison.

Luckily, Hewson’s grounded performance and Carney’s witty script largely succeed in keeping this treacly dramedy afloat.

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.

Were Nozkowski’s debut not blessed with Henry’s ridiculous acting abilities and the film’s constellation of warm sentiments, it would have collapsed into an unexamined chasm of its own social pitfalls.

Enjoyable as it is, Scott’s movie is adrift in a closed system, a massive warship floating around a coliseum.

Though Quan and his supporting cast are often a delight, and the film’s fight scenes are worth strapping in for, this is a movie that makes a choppy mess of its brisk runtime, and wastes a lot of its potential with a molasses-slow, often baffling second act.

While glorious to look at, the movie still feels slightly hollow. All the right pieces are there, but an emotional connection to the characters is lacking.

After establishing the characters with such elegance and grace, the movie proceeds to nudge them toward an endpoint that is beautifully shot but curiously chilly, lacking the catharsis of something more old-fashioned.

Despite solid performances and hints of daring brilliance, Lisa Frankenstein feels disposable because its winks and nods downplay its uniqueness—not to mention that we are in the third decade of being perpetually awash in nostalgia for and satires of the 1980s.

American Symphony itself is at its most mundane when focused on the professional life of the rousing, youthful musical multihyphenate. And, because it builds its structure around the creation and premiere of his first symphony, much of the film bundles that mundanity into the kind of behind-the-scenes footage accompanying a concert doc.

Like his Shell remake, the Sanders Crow makes something oddly compelling out of a bad idea.

What’s most compelling about the documentary is the archival footage (some previously unseen) of the bands during their first fledgling efforts, though the presence of the tangible music that shot these musicians to stardom remains elusive.

Unfortunately, despite all this talent, Bubble never amounts to something wholly unique—falling into predictable tropes and a narrative that ends up being a little too self-serious for a parkour adventure with bubbles.

The Rental has De Palma vibes with Fincher’s cool, but lacks the former’s exploitative pleasures and the latter’s cinematic expertise. It is, however, satisfyingly composed in terms of approach, giving the audience flashes of brutality to come or shooting it from a distance, heightening the shock and lending bloodshed sharp flinching power.

At its best The First Purge functions like a much-reduced Purge movie retread. It’s not that it’s bad, really. It’s that we’ve seen this before.

Ruskin’s examination of the social and political elements that enabled the Strangler, and which held people like McLaughlin in contempt for attempting to serve the public good, is bold. In his next film, he should apply that same boldness toward an aesthetic purpose, too.

Flashback certainly isn’t perfect, and despite the effort it took to fully immerse myself in the narrative in a way that made sense, there is something admirable about the message it wants to put out in the world.

Nobody watched Luther for serious social commentary or a moral compass—you watched it because Idris Elba is a beautiful man with arguably the world’s best voice ,and you got to see him catch bad guys played by other good actors. On that level, Luther: The Fallen Sun delivers.

As far as COVID movies go, 7 Days is certainly in the top tier of that still nascent subgenre—whether that’ll be true this time next year, we’ll have to wait and see.

It’s a star vehicle intent on dulling its leads’ shine, a slick blockbuster relying on narrative and visual restrictions, a cynical movie about the power of friendship. And yet, even as Wolfs undermines itself, it’s a charmingly prickly (or charming, despite its prickliness) mess.

Like any obviously competent action director, Johnson establishes geography and spatial stakes with rigor, but then, like any incompetent action director—cough, Peter Berg, cough—he loses focus, the idea of the action overtaking its execution. It’s frustrating, because Johnson clearly understands what he’s doing.

This revolution may be televised, but aside from the rawness that too rarely brings it near its potential revolt, it’s an underwritten rerun.

It is hard to capture the utter joy of watching a live musical on the screen, but it’s here that Mean Girls falters.

Gilroy isn’t a drudge, of course, and Washington is Washington. If nothing else, the film rides on his mesmerizing performance and on Gilroy’s talent for character study. But after Nightcrawler, seeing Roman J. Israel, Esq. coast on craft rather than on transgression is nothing short of a letdown.

After so long playing with the legacy and impact of Spider-Man, No Way Home finds its way back.

The Scribbler is overwrought, absurd, occasionally exploitative, completely lacking in subplot, takes a good 20-25 minutes to really get going and has acting that varies from excellent to, well, less-than-excellent. It’s also hugely fun!

While not compelling enough to be one of the two options—either a destructive or awakening force for our own personal simulations—winkingly proffered in the doc itself, A Glitch in the Matrix still has genuinely gripping segments.

A forgettable sci-fi with standout elements—making the most of what he’s got left, even if it’s not enough.

As movies about a Liam Neeson character marinating in regrets before punching and shooting his way out of immediate danger go, this is a pretty good one, by which I mean at one point Neeson smokes a pipe while driving a car. It’s also Lorenz’s best as a director by a fair margin, a movie that feels inspired by Eastwood and old Westerns, but not beholden to them.

Brimming with potential that it doesn’t exactly follow through on, You Are Not My Mother is nonetheless another aesthetically rich horror film that clearly mines an individual’s personal history.

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.

None of the players here were in Ben Affleck’s The Town, but this feels like a companion piece to that one, too, in both its entertainment value and occasional overplayed hangdog Damon-Affleck pathos.

While this suspension of narrative convention is a welcome deviation from the cut-and-dry formula of many coming-of-age films, Giants Being Lonely stops just short of actually saying something salient.

The Batman is ambitious and dedicated to its vision, but despite some rather obvious clues, it can’t crack how to make the World’s Greatest Detective seem like one at all. Rather, we just have another passable Batman, not different enough to outrun his legacy’s ever-growing shadow.

All told, it’s a surprisingly good time. The Garfield Movie may be as disposable as one of those numbered paperbacks that ex-kids of a certain age may fondly recall from their Scholastic book orders, but it approximates their sense of fun, too.

Without a strong thesis, cohesive plot or narrative payoff, A24 thriller Opus struggles to communicate the filmmaker’s messy musings.

Honestly, though, Along for the Ride is perfectly cozy, in part due to its formulaic nature. It might not be the most visually stunning work—at times, certain shots feel amateurishly disorienting—but it possesses an undeniable artistic heart.

The film’s other performances aren’t as engaging as Seydoux and young Martins, which means One Fine Morning itself sometimes feels like it’s muddling through with Sandra’s same weariness, too faithfully reproducing the repetitions of real life.

Even with effective individual scenes, Silent Night fails to launch; it sets out to deceive its audience, but only really ends up deceiving itself.

The French Italian is frequently clever and observant, but is it consistently funny? Like laugh-out-loud, forget-the-contrivances, hate-the-sin-love-the-sinner funny? Sadly, no. It’s a little too cluttered with dead-end oddities.

Extremely Unique Dynamic is stream-of-consciousness comedy, feeling every bit like something that was filmed over the course of five days, as was reportedly the shooting schedule.

Two does a pretty solid job of putting its audience into the shoes of a couple who finds themselves surgically connected against their will and, naturally, it isn’t pretty. It is full of confusion and terror and adrenaline. I only wish the stakes could’ve been somehow raised to avoid a flat final act, but hey, you can’t always stitch up what’s broken.

The doc has its cake and eats it, too, reaffirming Mendes’ vulnerability without putting much of anything on the line.

Either Ritchie didn’t bring his typical slickness for the ride, or he’s chopped up Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre intentionally to take the piss out of the genre. The effect at least feels more like comfort than boredom.

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.

The good news is if you liked Hocus Pocus, you will definitely like Hocus Pocus 2...because it’s basically the exact same movie except with cell phones, better special effects and a cameo from Hannah Waddingham. Imitation remains the sincerest form of flattery. The bad news is…it’s the exact same movie.

Spirited, with its message of redemption, changing our behavior and doing a little good, arrives at the perfect time. Who better to tell us to start being nice than a singing and dancing Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell?

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.

The film pushes itself to extremes like a broad and black comedy would, but isn’t quite enough of one to come across as anything but cruel.

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.

If You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah does have the feel of an expensive, well-appointed, but not exactly lushly-made family project – maybe even a coming-of-age gift to the younger Sandler daughter – at least it mounts a charm offensive, rather than treating its audience like a pack of easily manipulated rubes.

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.

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.

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.

You won’t find much of this particularly new or enlightening. It’s a little surprising, considering how much thought Leitch (no relation, by the way) has put into the action sequences, how perfunctory and even lackadaisical the rest of the film is.

Hedda is DaCosta’s most direct and purposeful adaptation yet, but like her other films, it’s missing some ineffable push past its beginnings into more expressive territory. The process of adaptation feels more confident than the conclusion.

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.

Ferrari is a loud and thrilling race that leaves the figure of Enzo stranded on the side of the road, unknown and lost.

For better and worse, The Inspection seems like the movie Bratton had to make, a story so personal that some of its biggest emotional confrontations start to resemble a therapeutic exercise.

Although it’s clearly tailored for kids to enjoy as its first priority, A New Age leans into the physical comedy and, for lack of a better phrase, crude humor of its predecessor with success, creating a lighthearted, low-ambition romp that kids will love and adults will enjoy.

When all is said and done, storytelling this glaringly flawed cannot be overlooked, and the wonderful elements of Amsterdam can only do so much to glue together this faltering house of cards.

Worlds are squandered, details are overlooked and, yes, there’s a CGI swarm. For better or worse, and much like the MCU at large, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 has a lot going on.

Trap House manages to be fitfully thrilling, pulling off a villain reveal at one point that amusingly but derivatively cribs from Spider-Man: Homecoming in particular, but it stumbles to some degree in its clumsy and tonally scattershot portrayal of American law enforcement.

At the very least, it manages to remind us of how miraculous the commitment of human ingenuity can be, when it comes to making a new life possible.

Violent Night isn’t a great action movie, or even a very good one, but George Costanza’s old assessment of Home Alone rings true: “The old man got to me!”

Despite or maybe because of its unusual, constant-reset rhythms, large swaths of the movie actually work. It helps that Derrickson has two genuine stars on his side in the form of Teller and Taylor-Joy who both, lacking an infrastructure for proper romantic comedies, channel that energy into an unusually convincing version of a romance that would normally be obligatory at best.

While the domestic crisis that unfolds is purely hypothetical, the scenarios and potential solutions are supposed to hew closely to what would occur in real life.

The Limehouse Golem has costumes, and drama and an abundance of severed appendages, splattered gore and artfully dismembered bodies, and maybe that’s all any horror fan can ask for. Still: There’s nothing wrong with hoping for more.

In taking care to depict as much disappointment and frustration as heedless creative joy, the movie shunts some of Dandelion’s breakthroughs off-screen. It ends with a triumph that almost seems unaware of the degree to which Dandelion’s story hasn’t quite figured itself out.

Isabelle Huppert walks on screen in Luc Bondy’s False Confessions intent, it seems, on reminding audiences that she can do anything, including turn a modern adaptation of outdated theater tropes into near-vital product.

Corbin’s film is brutal and sad, thanks to its brutal and sad origins and the abilities of Boyega, but its wandering eye is just the latest to gloss over Brian Easley.

Little Joe could use a trim for better deployment of plot and unnerving atmosphere. No matter. Little Joe is a quirkily rattling movie, an off-kilter tonic during the year-end onslaught of movies proclaimed “important” by their studios, and what the film lacks in structure it makes up for in its eerie, cold singularity.

It’s true that no one’s really making films like this anymore, but it’s also true that everyone pretty much wants to.

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

Onward has sections where you worry that it’s a disaster, but it turns out to have more emotional oomph than initially apparent.

When Power sticks to its experts, its case is compellingly assembled, its points lucidly made (backed up with archival images) and its unspoken importance undeniable.

It somehow manages to lack both the true moral murk of a great noir, while also eschewing the elemental drama of a great Western. It’s pretty good at both, though, and Tost seems like he knows it, without letting the movie’s solid craft go to his head.

Once the documentary has made its easy point, it doesn’t have much else on its mind aside from making it again and again. For some, that’ll be eye-opening enough, but I don’t think they’re the people who’re watching documentaries about rap lyrics.

Would all this be better if Flamin’ Hot weren’t based on one guy’s well-documented self-mythologizing? Sure. But like the exaggerated yarns Montañez weaves throughout the movie, the truth is much less interesting. The legend, on the other hand, is colorful, heartwarming and surprisingly fun, and Flamin’ Hot is far from the only movie of its kind to tell a tall tale disguised as an account of actual events.

The traditional, closed-door design of the election invites an inherent layer of mystery and conspiracy, and the staggered voting process – the tallies of each vote are announced in front of the cardinals, giving them a brief recess to reconsider who is worth throwing their weight behind before having another go – provides an attractive structure for drama.

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.

Despite the documentary’s scattered approach, it’s not exactly a chore to take interest in the backstory of such an iconic moment in American cultural history.

Misunderstandings abound in this ultra-lite comedy of errors. Physical pratfalls (think groin area injuries) get a lot of screen time. But there are moments where Mother of the Bride digs a little deeper, especially when it comes to Lana and Emma’s relationship.

Despite Seydoux’s uniquely magnetic ennui – could any other contemporary actress imbue a beautifully bored model with such empathy? — and MacKay’s gameness to bring a little nuance to a real creep in the 2014 section, The Beast has an undercurrent of restlessness, maybe even listlessness.