The movie doesn’t drag, but it’s a major drag all the same.

Lopez indulges a different form of movie-star vanity than simply making herself over as an unstoppable woman of action. The movie pretends to conceal her mothering sensitivity, but it’s actually flaunting the same maudlin old-man sentimentality that drives so many Liam Neeson vehicles, minus the genuine anguish Neeson can usually summon on cue.

Its dedication to Long’s point-of-view is admirable, but Lee’s filmmaking hits the brakes like a student driver, sacrificing what made the framing narrative enticing in the first place.

Like its muddy multi-movie gamble, the ideas are there for Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. But like its characters, it’s happy to follow the path of least resistance.

Though Cohen has made a formidable name for himself in the visual aesthetics of rock ‘n’ roll, his feature debut is unfocused and emotionally flimsy, no doubt a product of Cohen’s first-film inhibitions.

Aside from the one chilling scene grafted straight from The Ten Steps and its gorgeous, historic filming location, The Cellar just isn’t that deep.

Ticket to Paradise has all the components for a successful rom-com: A strong cast, a playful and inventive premise, a beautiful location. But the cast isn’t given much to do, the premise gets lost along the way, and even though the film was shot mostly on location in Australia, its oversaturated and sterile cinematography makes it look like CGI.

Yet there’s some kind of invisible force here, hurrying things along in the hopes of a future team-up, making sure this feature film arrives more undead than alive.

Before We Vanish is almost too much of a stretch for Kurosawa, veering from gory sci-fi horror to screwball comedy to marital drama to alien conspiracy potboiler without the necessary connective tissue to give his genre cocktail equilibrium.

White Elephant too often proceeds as dull and dreamy, an occasionally violent eulogy for a life of crime for which we have little context.

Directed by Ben Wheatley, Meg 2: The Trench earnestly takes on the challenge of being even more brazenly goofy and ludicrous than the first film.

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.

Life Upside Down is a clunky, graceless movie, but it’s utterly engrossing as a stage for letting Odenkirk, Mitchell, Huston and the rest vent their own stir craziness. If you think of the film as more of an outlet than a functioning narrative, it gains value. But that reflective detail isn’t enough to hold our attention, no matter how likable and gifted its authors.

Phillips simply tries to do too much.

To Catch a Killer positions itself as a manhunt feature intent on saving the day. It has all the right pieces: A young misfit cop, a twisted serial killer, two equally killer lead actors. It’s just missing two crucial pieces: Suspense and coherence.

As soon as you say They/Them out loud for the first time, you’ll realize that it’s a wickedly clever play on words. Unfortunately, that’s the last time the horror film displays any behind-the-scenes wit or gumption.

The Devil Made Me Do It proves that, with The Conjuring franchise at least, the devil you know is far, far better than the one you don’t. Chaves doesn’t quite manage to close the Warren files, but his efforts in the universe are now two of the weakest.

Wolf Man grasps the sobriety of how easily men are acculturated to violence by other men, but loosens its hold around the start of its final act: the insularity of its world becomes a crutch rather than an asset, and the plot reassigns the task of solving male abandon to its female characters.

Despite a furiously alpha-male James McAvoy raging through the movie—nearly making this new take into an enjoyable, scareless, hoot-and-holler romp—Blumhouse’s hollowed-out remake undermines its nasty source material with its Americanized sheen.

Like the rest of Annette, the dry humor isn’t funny enough to fully sustain its cool-kid commentary and the filmmaking is never grand enough to fully sell the caricature.

True to its genre-defining premise, the Malay actioner doesn’t break much ground during its lackadaisical story of an in-over-his-head gambler attempting to make good, but Bakar shoots it with enough inconsistent, eclectic energy that it’s occasionally more watchable than its ideas deserve.

It’s the thought put into the writing that leads Promising Young Woman astray: The movie knows what it’s about, but waffles over how to be about it. The ferocity Mulligan funnels into her performance hints at the story that could’ve been—merciless, cool and vividly stylized. But her ruthlessness, her “no fucks to give” demeanor, isn’t matched by the picture surrounding her. She realizes her promise as Fennell struggles with her own.

Unfortunately, There’s Someone Inside Your House is a considerably more rote endeavor in mass-market horror filmmaking—competently shot and staged, but decidedly familiar, it displays none of the emotional nuance or attention to character detail we’ve associated with Brice in the past.

Because the script never lightens up on these non-stop angst moments, Crater suffers from a case of tonal whiplash. One entertaining set piece of jet-pack play or a scene with the kids binge-eating a stash of never-before-eaten foods can’t possibly overcome the tsunami of melancholic moments the adult filmmakers can’t seem to stop indulging in.

Not just an incredible waste of a spectacular performance, but a film more caught up in ogling tragedy than dealing with it.

By only brushing up against the factors that make its case fascinatingly, timelessly American, The Burial stays soft, a trial by pillow-fight—but that’s how you please a crowd.

Familiar pieces playing a familiar game to familiar ends won’t make Martyrs Lane anyone’s favorite horror movie, but it’s put together well enough to offer comfort and intrigue in small doses.

Schrader pushes the somber score and just-the-facts cinematography as close to pure explication as possible. There is visual storytelling, but little in the way of mood or evocation.

None of it ever escalates past a baseline of digestible insanity, which isn’t really all that insane when the pasts of Cage and Taylor are littered with the skeletons of seedier films and more preposterous premises.

Netflix’s adaptation of author Kate DiCamillo’s The Magician’s Elephant makes some fatal tone mistakes in trying to smoosh together comedy, tragedy, childhood wonder and animal exploitation—which clash pretty hard.

Under the Eiffel Tower is a functionally enjoyable film bookended by an opening and a conclusion both dogged by distrust in the audience’s reading comprehension.

The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot is an exquisitely boring movie, a promise of high-concept adventure that only delivers a stiflingly melancholy ode to the unknown soldier.

I Love You Both perhaps would have been best imagined as a short, but it makes for a breezy watch.

Despite a few moments of heightened bliss that remind us what kind of talent it has in front of the camera (and the operatic possibilities of Hong Kong action), Raging Fire’s dull discussion of policing never lights a fire.

It’s no wonder why Schrader, an older artist whose life and career have been defined by a seemingly limitless series of controversies, took to bringing to the screen the story of Leonard Fife.

As stimulating as it is, the animation ends up being more pictorial than expressive—an initially fancy but eventually rather monotonous way to dress up what is ultimately a mundane drag of a detective procedural.

Chaos Walking feels like a condensement of Ness’ trilogy of books instead of a straightforward translation of the first, and consequently there’s too much that needs to happen in too slim a running time, which leaves little space for making the movie’s conflicts matter.

The film’s observations, as filtered through the duo, feel utterly simplistic, and gain gravity only by the enthusiasm in Goode and Hopkins’ performances.

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.

It’s a movie about a toxic relationship that digs into the harrowing psychological details of mental and verbal abuse without exploiting it. It’s also a single-minded PSA picture — indie portraiture with hardly any identifying details filled in.

I found myself undeniably charmed by a lingering warmth in the coldness of Fingernails, no doubt helped along by the performances of Buckley and Ahmed.

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

Lake of Death would have been better off talking less, and scaring more.

A well-acted, well-reasoned two-hander that struggles to swerve around the contrivances of the genre.

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.

As soon as you unearth a place’s past, it lives on in you—changes you. This is the heart of folk horror that Enys Men speaks to, but its dull, repetitive, padded delivery of images makes its genre findings (in words British enough to befit the film) weak tea.

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.

Writer Josann McGibbon’s script plays it safe from beginning to end. The potential cleverness of the format is never tested or pushed to explore any truly weird choices for Cami.

Ambiguous, open-ended storytelling is by no means a defect in its own right, but Spin Me Round becomes increasingly frustrating in its tendency to introduce narrative tangents without any intention to elaborate or connect them.

Any time Goodnight Mommy tiptoes toward the brink, there’s a hand waiting to yank it back toward mundanity.

If ever there was a case made that being on the right side of history, in the right place and with the right story isn’t enough to make satisfying non-fiction, Kim’s Video is it.

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.

Boredom. Annoyance. Anger. I experienced a range of emotions and perfected my eye roll while watching Endings, Beginnings, the new movie from director and writer Drake Doremus (Like Crazy).

Unfortunately, Norwegian director Tommy Wirkola’s Hansel & Gretel is just another entry in Bland Fairy Tale Theater, a shapeless riff on those hapless German siblings with the worst parents ever.

Despite the ingredients at hand, Pearce and company never really pull it together in a manner that realizes the potential. The result is a pulp buffet that feels like it should have been a gourmet meal—a Golden Corral of genre conventions (that leaves the audience feeling about as satisfied).

The most frustrating thing about Jeremy Power Regimbal’s directorial debut is there’s part of a very effective thriller here. It’s just not the good part.

A Compassionate Spy is not a thrilling recollection of treason. It has little to say about the actual espionage that Hall pulled off when he was an 18-year-old Harvard grad working on the Manhattan Project.

Really, this is a diverting kiddie movie that struggles most visibly when attempting to graft some kind of moral sensibility onto a story that – spoiler alert? – gets resolved by the good guys hitting the bad guys really hard.

With In the Earth, Wheatley hits a brick wall, but he hits it hard enough that whether one sees the film as successful or not, the effort remains admirable.

The result is a movie that seems more interested in instruction and reassurance than pushing at or playing with sexual kinks. In other words, it’s ultimately about as sexy and unpredictable as a corporate performance review.

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.

Farrelly’s too busy making a Big Important Movie instead of making a movie that matters.

Sigh. If only a good cast was enough to salvage a plodding, tedious film from the snowy wreckage.

Bleak and crisp and cold as an Icelandic waterfall, Lamb is a movie with a sheepheaded toddler in great knitwear, the vague looming of something sinister and a filmmaker that can’t seem to wrangle it all.

Though the premise is gripping and the acting overwhelmingly solid, Here Are the Young Men falls short when it comes to communicating the raw emotional essence of preemptively coping for a future in decline.

Instead of exercising artistic liberties over the written word, Louhimies goes all-in on putting those words on screen, a task too great even for nearly two hours of runtime; maybe Attack on Finland would work better if fashioned into a miniseries. Even then, though, it wouldn’t work as the entertainment it aspires toward.

The Killing of Two Lovers is remarkable to behold, but all the technique in the world can’t distract from the holes littering the production beyond cinematographer Oscar Ignacio Jiminez’s lens.

If it’s hard to shake the feeling that The Little Things strives to be Se7en or Zodiac, it still manages to satisfy in a meat-and-potatoes sort of way, delivering its twists and turns effectively while having the confidence to not wrap things up too neatly by the end of its runtime.

Look, as far as toy ads go, Transformers One is tolerable. It’s a little more fully imagined and rounded out than the jankier weirdness of its 1986 spiritual predecessor. The difference is that in 2024, a Transformers cartoon isn’t just selling toys to kids; it’s selling its own sketchy credibility to fans of all ages.

For fans of futuristic sci-fi/action, it should provide an initially engaging but ultimately forgettable experience. Still, coming from Cameron and Rodriguez, even “forgettable” deserves a look.

It’s well-intended, it’s heartfelt and in its small-scale fashion it’s surprisingly ambitious, but it’s also content to cheat its own premise and withhold its genre pleasures, which effectively undermines Barbara’s journey.

A story that could truly individualize a massive, era-defining tragedy. In this telling, however, you’ll follow the plot and shed some appropriate tears, but if you come away feeling cheap, you won’t be alone.

None of The Gray Man’s still-Bourne thrills are executed with the precise elegance of John Wick, the winking doggery of James Bond or the joyful craftsmanship of Mission: Impossible. Rather, its chaotic Grand Theft Auto filmmaking skates by with the sloppy sufficiency of its own protagonist.

Instead of ever actually showing sex, Osteen skirts around the issue by offering up campy, G-rated, fantastical sex-metaphors. Sex Appeal’s contradictory nature never truly lets up.

The dreaminess, a clear evocation of Fellini, feels well-worn and contrived instead of exciting, coasting on aesthetics.

Wakefield is… well, let’s just say, its insights into human nature are limited, at best.

As the final level in this game of go-along, Venom: The Last Dance is still figuring out what a Venom movie needs to be, a tricky juggling of tone and spectacle that will be amusing enough for those tuned into this series’ squishy, uncomplicated rhythms and a numbing headache for folks bewildered by the chaotic and often rudderless existence of a Venom trilogy.

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.

The movie is ultimately harmless, trivial puffery that vanishes from your brain as quickly as you experience it.

Rather than containing relatable multitudes in a compact story ready-made for online sharing, a bigger-screen Cat Person turns paper-thin.

Though director Reinaldo Marcus Green finds winning performances away from his lead, the milquetoast script serves the tennis patriarch a soft lob—one without potential to inspire or excite, and one that’s constantly reminding us that we already know how it ends.

Unfortunately, even though Moonshot aims high, its misfire falls all the way back down to humble terra firma.

Bros says many of the right things, often loudly and directly, as it reblazes an already well-marked trail towards normative convention.

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.

Despite Sandler’s powerful sincerity, Spaceman misses the joke.

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.

Did Desplechin get seduced by the problems that plague filmmakers like himself? If so, he’s done a disservice to his own work, which needed a solution to its deficiencies—not an extended reverie that merely highlights them. [Cannes Version]

More than anything, Your Place or Mine will probably just make you wish you’d watched an old Kutcher or Witherspoon flick this Valentine’s Day, instead.

The movie keeps trying the bank shot of propping up its crazed premise while its lead actress, gamely, almost bravely, tries to undercut it. It never quite makes it, but you appreciate how hard it, and she, tries.

Younger horror fans who haven’t caught up with the earlier films may well receive this one as a perfectly creepy little genre exercise, and there are moments where it plays that way even to a more experienced audience.

If Senior Year had been willing to further develop its affectionate social satire, it might have been a surprise 2020s classic of the teen-movie genre. Instead, it’s dead set on proving it has heart, too, and in the process becomes as thirsty for likes as any teenager’s Insta.

Compared to the eight films preceding it, the mindlessness of Hobbs & Shaw isn’t a sign of humble poptimist genius, just of something less than what it could have been.

For all the hubbub and controversy in the last few weeks leading up to release, it’s an at-best entirely ordinary movie carried almost entirely by Florence Pugh’s performance.

The criticism is less that Mute doesn’t know what it wants to be, and more that it seems to emphatically decide what it wants to be every few minutes, only to then change its mind once more. And every time it does so, it’s the audience that is being left behind.

For a touch-and-go exercise in hoping the audience will fill in not just the narrative blanks but the emotional ones, there’s We Live in Time.

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.

As Wildling’s center, Powley keeps our attention in her orbit, and Böhm constructs a universe around her that’s worthy of her talent (if at times too murkily filmed for its own good). But the movie loses its thread 15 minutes or so into its running time.

It’s a sluggishly slow murder-mystery without much tension, one holding a candle to Poe’s work Nevermore.