The Twin builds mysterious dread rooted in paranormal possessions and possible cult activity, but its ill-serving payoff vaporizes the crippling weight of loss fastened to each character.

For a work titled Gehraiyaan (Depths), this much-anticipated film doesn’t delve much below the surface. Like a pretty skipping stone, it skims across some ostensibly choppy waters, only to submerge with a gentle plop at a distance—leaving me confused and perplexed.

There are glimpses of comparably daydreamy thrillers like Come True or The Feast that give themselves to the fantasy of mania, but A Banquet fails to grab attention like these more ambitious companions. It all builds up to a cinematic Irish exit.

Do not let anyone tell you that Joker captures our specific time, represents our specific society, both births and defines our specific zeitgeist, grabs ahold of our specific faces and breathes smoke down our throats. It doesn’t. Joker is, more than anything, fine. And we, more than anything, are not.

Execution isn’t the problem here—the acting, direction, editing, set design and costuming are all done well enough. It’s that these elements add up to something that doesn’t feel subversive at all, just vaguely aware of itself.

For the first time in its storied history, a Pixar movie feels like a straight-to-DVD entry: undemanding, mildly amusing, utterly disposable.

Winslet is doing an impression of Cate Blanchett doing an impression of Mia Farrow in September.

Leave tells a story about the monsters of humanity, but is shy about terrifying its audience—a tragic flaw that cuts the genre’s volume like unplugging an amplifier mid-performance.

Joke’s way over, guys, and everyone’s now uncomfortable, thanks. Now, who needs a drink…?

Early on, the self-deprecating stuff takes on a studied air, and in the final stretch, the filmmakers seem to think they can shock-cut and rug-pull their way into something resembling psychological horror. The weirdness isn’t really weird enough to pull this off; it’s all the self-indulgence without much oddball pleasure.

Very rarely do you get the sense that anyone involved in Christopher Robin had a really strong take on the material or an innate understanding of why these characters have resonated for nearly a century.

Rarely does it ever genuinely feel like a horror movie at all, in fact. Instead, it’s more like a halfhearted feminist kitchen drama, with the occasional “scary” beat inserted under protest, a horror film via technicality of labeling and marketing rather than any particular intent. It wants to be just about anything but.

Nobody expects all Christmas movies to be masterpieces. But it’s hard not to be disappointed by low-energy affairs like Tiffany’s, which is nothing more than a mindless attempt at adhering to the Christmas movie algorithm. Even the Grinch would probably ask for something more.

Outside of Vikander’s performance, Tomb Raider tends to go on autopilot, either too scared or uninspired to reimagine this blah action-adventure material.

It reaches for the heights its progenitors offer and struggles to maintain an identity of its own.

The challenge of a film like The American Society of Magical Negroes is that the joke rarely goes beyond the single line premise for the movie, missing the opportunity to offer a biting analysis.

Keaton seems to take another hitman part as an opportunity for contemplation, a decision that leaves Knox Goes Away feeling like someone hollowed out a DTV thriller in hopes of finding existential despair in the empty spaces.

Hold Your Fire certainly illustrates an oft-forgotten slice of history, assembling aestheticized archival footage of tense crowds and police in peacoats scattering like ants on the streets of New York. But through clumsy structuring and skin-deep attempts to appease both sides of the coin, Forbes does not heed his own advice, misfiring entirely.

Too often, Fallen Kingdom has all the soul and grace of a well-prepared business proposal—you can sense all the money being invested into an intellectual property in order to reap a sizable windfall and ensure the franchise’s continued commercial viability. It’s as scintillating as a retirement plan.

The Dead Don’t Hurt is stuffed to the gills with western tropes, with not a whole lot to add to the genre, especially in terms of furthering feminism onscreen. It may not be the worst western in the world in terms of women’s rights, but that is hardly a reason to commend a film that’s only missing the whore with the heart of gold.

It’s a shame. Jeff Ryan’s Mean Spirited voices relevant and vile concerns about social media soullessness, but its commentary is neutered by shaky execution.

History of Evil has something to say about the sad state of our nation–-and where it’s headed should we continue to regurgitate the same racist bile—it just doesn’t justify the means before its end.

Rasoulof knows a much more challenging and incomprehensible reality than many of us ever will, but it’s missing from the straightforward obviousness of The Seed of the Sacred Fig.

You can’t fault an attempt to transform a viral sensation into the next bonkers realization of contemporary horror that exploits our ever-volatile online climate—but you can always fault a genre film that doesn’t do the chosen genre justice.

This exhaustively sanitized, overly saccharine take on the hero’s journey is certainly nothing new, but it remains rather uninteresting.

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.

Failing to be incisive or moving, Marshall is content to be genial and unthreatening—two adjectives that have never been used to describe the long, hard, ongoing fight for equality.

With a solid cast and decent predecessor, Tall Girl 2 could have been a compelling watch, if only it didn’t make the mistake of relying on a premise that the first one had to go to unreasonable lengths (or heights?) to disguise as something else.

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.

While attempting to highlight the inconsequential nature of “rich people problems,” the film isn’t incisive or clever enough to parody the very cinematic sensation it’s unintentionally playing into.

Meet Cute has more on its mind than so many mid-2000s rom-coms, and sure looks a hell of a lot better, so it’s all the more crushing when so much of it turns out to be just as gratingly plastic.

Director Yeon Sang-ho, who staged genuinely tense sequences in the first film, just seems suddenly out of his element here when expected to produce a grander action spectacle.

There are some individual moments and elements to like here, but taken as a whole, Bohemian Rhapsody is mostly a flatline with occasional blips of life here and there—and not nearly enough to bring the whole body back from the dead.

It’s everything a teen horror movie should be—messy, bloody and even steamy at times—but doesn’t add much to the slasher clichés we’ve seen before.

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.

The corroded mineral walls, dehydrated trees, and all of nature’s other décor are wonderfully shot, and the performances aren’t to blame, but The Seeding just doesn’t have the storytelling mindset to protect its characters from looking like fools instead of victims of horrific circumstances.

With the current onslaught of half-baked political horror commentary, sometimes it really is just enough for a film to simply focus on the scares for once, but be forewarned that The Exorcism of God’s subpar plot and politics definitely don’t do it any favors.

Uncharted spends a lot of time scraping up meager points for what it isn’t, rather than what it is. It isn’t a superhero movie, despite the budget. It isn’t CG’d within an inch of its life; there appears to be some location shooting in the mix.

Stuber, although supported by the odd-couple chemistry between its two leads, ends up as stale as if it was made 20 years ago.

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

The reason such a colorful mainstream family time-waster should exist is to string together a bunch of zippy PG-rated action set-pieces. In that sense, the film succeeds at the basest level, thanks primarily to the beautifully crisp animation, a big step-up from the first film’s overtly plastic CG look.

Allegoria uses an anthology format to unleash the evils behind a writer’s insecurities, an actor’s doubts and a painter’s perfectionist ego, but struggles as most anthologies do to find meaning behind shorts that begin and end before any substantial climax.

Though it does hint at the toxicity and conspiratorial nature of a powerful institution, it never finds root in overt observations. It handles too many threads—childhood tragedy, murder cover-ups, clandestine spiritual rites—without the dexterity to effectively weave them together.

Pacific Rim Uprising’s jokey tone fails to leaven the movie’s leaden clatter, and so any attempt on Boyega’s part to be heroic feels a bit shrouded in irony. But at least he registers: Eastwood may be even duller than Charlie Hunnam was in the first installment, and Spaeny plays the spunky Amara with maximum attitude and a paucity of charm.

As much as I love to harp on Despicable Me 3’s lazy and cynical execution, this is a fairly inoffensive, zippy and colorful time-waster for the little ones.

Suburbicon warns of the dangers of moral rot infesting our communities. No word yet on the effect that chronic smugness might have.

For a directorial debut, Aloners showcases Hong Sung-eun as an exciting new voice—hopefully next go around she’ll give us a little more to chew on.

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

Justice League may be a more functional film that its predecessors, but it also lacks the style and go-for-broke big ideas that made Batman v Superman such a fascinating shitshow.

It’s a remake that lacks identity, urgency and enthusiasm—such a shame after Keith Thomas’ outstanding horror debut.

The voiceover-heavy storytelling is exhausting and weightless, despite Keshavarz’s clear affection for and closeness to these women.

If playwright Theresa Rebeck, who receives co-writing and story credit, brought a fresher perspective to this material at some point, it has been slathered in screenwriterly varnish and a sense of take-charge female empowerment best described as EuropaCorpesque.

It’s not especially fair to criticize the movie that could have been made, rather than the one that was actually made. But even on its chosen terms of a family dramedy, People feels lopsided.

The movie has its moments. But Thor wrestling with the Hulk is more realistic and, frankly, more relevant to the current facts on the ground.

It is far enough to one end of the docu-spectrum that it shares a border with “advertorial,” though I think it would be mean-spirited and beside the point to call it propagandistic. It seeks to educate. It doesn’t do a very thorough job of it.

It Lives Inside shows that a generic, uncertain script isn’t improved with a single coat of paint, especially if the ugly original is bleeding through the patchy, translucent renovation.

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

For all the technical achievement on display, as impressive as it is that you could recast a main role in so short amount of time, All the Money in the World is disjointed and frazzled.

When Miss Juneteenth isn’t trafficking in tropes, it’s a history lesson, and not the entertaining kind where you forget you’re actually learning; the textbook kind.

Where the Crawdads Sing is shallow, predictable and just broad enough that you can understand why it sold so well as a half-lurid paperback. Newman’s work adapting it makes its derivative elements as obvious as a bad accent, but its chart-topping, tone-deaf mediocrity is faithfully replicated.

[Keaton] has the kind of presence that makes you sit up and pay a little more attention to whatever he’s saying, and his restless, punchy manner is unsentimental enough to sell sappy material, even as he appears to sidestep it. Goodrich ultimately requires more sidestepping than one man can handle.

While Hale and Wolff have separately done strong work in prior romance films, including Hale and Hutchings’ prior winner, The Hating Game, they can’t spark any sizzle here.

If Eirene Donohue’s script gave us more scenes to really get to know Amanda and Sinh as fully formed people, maybe A Tourist’s Guide to Love could have been memorable. But there’s really no chemistry, heat, or wit between Cook and Ly.

The wreck of Wonka stings because of the clarity with which we see King’s eye for visual comedy and lavish setpiece staging, squandered on a movie where branding was always going to eclipse beauty.

It’s depressing to see a film miss the mark in so many ways within such a by-the-numbers genre, but who knows? Perhaps by F*ck Love Three, this directing duo and writing quartet will finally have a grasp on what makes a rom-com tick.

Miguel Wants to Fight is a flyweight comedy with the misfortune of coming out the same year as the similarly style-forward, action-spoofing teen reckoning Polite Society.

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.

Director Justin Chadwick has managed to concoct a story so overladen and contorted it would actually probably be more satisfying to watch actual tulips growing. In the ground. In real time. (At least then the visuals would be beautiful and the story would make sense.)

Apart from some stray moments of youthful exuberance, the film version of 13 has been scrubbed as clean as any high school musical, so that it resembles any number of sitcomy streaming programming—erasing the very novelty that made it sing on stage.

This is a showy exercise, Ponciroli purposefully hamstringing one dimension of his film and then expecting to be praised for rising above the very adversity he created, and not even the bloodthirsty action can salvage it from pretentiousness.

The Mountain Between Us is Grade-D bunkum with the good fortune to have actors working their hardest to sell it like Casablanca.

Fans of the series will likely bask in the warm feelings, particularly a handful of scenes following a one-year time jump toward the end, like Tolkien devotees reveling in final stretch of Return of the King; agnostics may regard this same section as if it’s, well, the final stretch of Return of the King, playing to the similarly unconverted.

Making such an insubstantial film about one of our era’s greatest technological shifts isn’t just annoying. It feels downright irresponsible.

There are plenty of little chuckles throughout, but the movie doesn’t incorporate seemingly throwaway gags into its narrative like an expertly timed Harold-style improv. More often, it feels like the Broken Lizard boys are trying to salvage what works and re-use as much of it as possible.

Valerian wants to be weird and sexy but just won’t let itself.

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.”

Cotillard, whose face is often painted in chiaroscuro care of cinematographer Christophe Beaucarne, manages to provide a gravitas and slightly colored deviations from what is otherwise a monochrome character.

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 grotesquerie crowds out the movie’s fleeting cuteness.

The writers are so afraid that we won’t feel the right thing that they embrace a self-effacing humor that ensures we don’t feel anything.

As an aspirational film with too many flaws to overlook, Thriller at best qualifies as an interesting attempt at bringing additional perspectives to horror. Given the potential of this particular niche of the horror genre, that also makes it quite the wasted opportunity.

The film’s cute, zingy, candy-coated tone is seductive enough, and both Hildebrand and Shipp are compelling in their roles. You will, in short, be entertained. But if Tragedy Girls’ subject matter is odious, its tacit, but perhaps accidental, endorsement of the very thing it means to send up is jaw-dropping.

While Chase, Taylor and Konner figure out a way to give us a half-assed rundown of the gangster rise-and-fall we saw again and again in the series, they couldn’t figure out how to make that into any kind of satisfying film—let alone one worth its references to the gangster canon and let alone one that has anything at all to say about the race relations in Newark during its setting.

Sequels have a lot to prove by default, and by default I try to give them a bit more leniency. But there’s not much merit in the way Escape Room: Tournament of Champions skirts around the series’ rules and bends them out of shape, only to discard them when they matter most: In the script and story.

If Eternals had merely been an enjoyable ensemble one-off—an Ocean’s Eleven or Knives Out of the MCU’s very own!—that could have been delightful. But there’s no real magic, Marvel or otherwise, happening here.

This is a universally powerful story, with terrific songs and countless funny and fascinating supporting characters. It’s a classic of performance and sensation. This version, seemingly by design—like that was the damned plan all along—drains every bit of life from it … in order to make it more “realistic.”

This is a ridiculous movie without much desire or energy to get too ridiculous.

Spiral might have rhetorical wrinkles that set it apart from its predecessors, but this franchise is still going around in circles.

As much as I delighted in the whimsy, chuckled at the art-house ambiguity and applauded two men’s depiction of how taxing it is to be a woman, I couldn’t get past her pain and suffering.

The premise of Michael Sarnoski’s Day One hints at a more filled-in world, but plays more like a maudlin, shallow commercial for the franchise, aided by an overused, cloying score and simplistic, navel-gazing character arcs.

Ultimately, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is noteworthy for one thing—not waiting until the third or fourth film to achieve the overstuffed, increasingly garish look one associates with less popular (2007’s Spider-Man 3) and outright ridiculed (1997’s Batman and Robin) franchise efforts.

The true fatal flaw of Harold and the Purple Crayon is that everything—from the story to the visual design—feels like it came pre-packaged in a microwave dinner.

Layton’s failure is frustrating. American Animals is a rare thing, truth that’s legitimately stranger than fiction. Bereft of a cohesive structure, the movie loses purpose, and that rare, strange truth is lost in workaday heist tropes blended with workaday documentary portraiture.

Inside‘s concept holds creative possibility, yes, but without much, if any, applied, it’s just a guy stuck in an apartment for 105 minutes, going through various stages of disbelief, acceptance, mania, determination and setback as days, weeks and months go by, and desperation becomes more of a necessity than a last resort.

Ostensibly, this is a movie about best friends and the exorcism that comes between them. Only the second part of the title lands.

Effectively, the film feels dishonest and, in spite of surprisingly dynamic camera work, intellectually lazy. Ironically, there is enjoyment in watching Binoche and Hamzawi, whose character is rightfully unsympathetic to her schmuck of a cheating husband. Non-Fiction is at least no more clever than Unfriended: Dark Web.

The real problem with The Last Voyage of the Demeter is just how nondescript and unmemorable it is.

Anonymously directed by Mark Pellington, puzzlingly scripted by Alex Ross Perry and handsomely acted by its ensemble—though none of its participants are ever given enough space to fully feel out their characters—Nostalgia is a poor man’s version of other great movies built upon complexly interwoven narratives.