Waugh’s action set pieces don’t surprise so much as operate with impressive efficiency

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.

Well-known for penning the scripts for Adam Wingard films like You’re Next and The Guest among other recent horror-thrillers, Barrett retains the essence of his previous writing collaborations in his directorial debut while paying constant homage to the films that inspire this specific project.

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

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.

Screenwriter Scott Teems reflects on Leigh Whannell and James Wan’s Insidious franchise by showing the Lamberts after a decade’s worth of otherworldly traumatic repression, which disappointingly gets away from what’s otherwise made this series so sinisterly supernatural.

While the Russos and Holland clearly want to break out of their professional boxes, pulverizing this film with their big swings, Cherry is a bomb.

Book of Love ends up being a surprising mix of sweet and salty, silly and sincere, that earns those coveted rom-com sighs.

The lone beacon of subtlety and warmth here is Dave Bautista, a man I would like to give a long hug. Bautista is able to extract quiet moments of genuine empathy and reflection from the shitshow droning on around him, yanking whatever depth is available from the shallow husk of a character he’s given.

Bissell creates a unique horror-comedy that isn’t just interested in laughs and scares, but also in looking at the humanity of her characters that truly believe they are trying their best.

For all its supposed irreverence, the movie feels product-tested to the moon; there isn’t a single shot that isn’t trying to sell you something. The movie also has some of the creeping bro grossness of some of Vaughn’s other films.

The movie seems to pre-suppose that in our desperation to spend time with Wahlberg and Berry, any empty stupid simulacra will suffice as an excuse.

If you’re using “fabulous” to mean fable-like, then The Fabulous Four is in fact fabulous—in that we’ve seen it in too many other stories before.

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.

Heart of Stone is murky, drab and always going the wrong speed. It’s either motionless, allowing exposition scene after exposition scene to lay out the boring details of what might happen if the wrong folks get control of The Heart, or erratic, dicing its badly remixed action sequences like it was trying to avoid a copyright strike from the movies it steals from.

This time around, Murder Mystery 2 isn’t much of an actual murder mystery at all, less interested in the deductive skills of the Spitzes than in their indefatigable charm.

It’s difficult to think of a biopic that so thoroughly embarrasses its subject in the process of attempting to honor them the way Churchill does.

There’s not anything in Pain Hustlers that’s worth your valuable time. Better-told versions of its story abound. More thoughtful takes on the opioid industry and the harm it causes everyday people are plentiful.

The King’s Man is an off-putting installment in a series that should have already ended.

Perhaps what was once haunting and unsettling on the book page has not, in more overt staging, translated well to the screen.

It’s not a great film by any means (I’m mixed-positive on Farrelly comedies, generally), but Ricky Stanicky does succeed in fashioning a fairly consistent number of gags that got a rise out of me even if the narrative, especially as it careens into the third act, feels like a one-note joke that’s getting stretched a little too far.

There’s an inspiring story at the center of Next Goal Wins, but that story deserves better.

And as far as criticism goes, the tedious and trite, regressive and ridiculous Voyagers doesn’t need any more than it’s already going to get.

Clean is irrefutably, deliciously bad. But there is something unironically beautiful about movies that are just plain awful, movies that dare to provoke your senses at all instead of simply sating them with something pleasant and “competent enough.”

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.

Everything I’ve been asking for from a Resident Evil movie? Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City accomplishes.

The Long Night’s understanding of horror genre fulfillment is nonexistent, no more satisfying than rice cakes with a little red food coloring splashed on to mimic spooky decorations.

It might not fix videogame movies overnight, but Mortal Kombat might finally deliver their sweepingly bad reputation a devastating fatality.

It is glorious to see a predominantly Asian cast, including Asian-Americans, and extended scenes set against a gorgeous Thai backdrop. However, there’s little else to enjoy in this middling martial arts flick.

The issue with Night Swim isn’t that it’s ridiculous, it’s that it doesn’t understand quite how ridiculous it is.

Backstory is fine. Seeing King introduce scores of anonymous leering henchmen to their varying deaths is better.

The sparse action scenes are useless jumbles, tossing bodies in misblocked blurs of messy motion—like a human game of 52-card pickup—or encased in total darkness. If we can’t see anything, this gamble suggests, maybe we won’t think that what we see is bad.

Slattery and Bernbaum’s adherence to genre standards may hold Maggie Moore(s) back from doing anything new in its space, but not from doing anything worthwhile. There’s nothing wrong with a messy low-level crime movie done right.

There’s a very scary, thrilling, insightful movie to be made about these kinds of accidents and the people they happen to. Silo isn’t it.

Quicksand swings and misses as the next buzzy nature-born thriller. Beltrán can never decide if he’s making an upscale SYFY B-movie or an overserious examination of marriages so stale that self-destruction seems the only answer.

When King and Efron are grooving to their boss/assistant bickering beat, Affair is the most believable and entertaining. As for the rest, it’s been done better and with more depth in a zillion other films.

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.

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.

Black Butterfly plays as little more than the act of snickering adolescents toying with their audience, complete with an insulting final scene that confirms the film as a total waste of time.

When Donowho brings The Old Way back to the well-trod ground of old Westerns, it’s just plain old.

Although the premise teeters on being twee, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey mostly works because its self-awareness keeps it from devolving into cliche … until it doesn’t.

Maybe this isn’t the sophomore picture we’d hoped for, but it’s sharp and insightful regardless.

It’s as if Neeson is attempting to maintain the same schtick from Taken, with the children remaining the same age despite his own age ever trudging onward (there’s a twisted Dazed & Confused joke someone could make here). It is a workaround refutation of his mortality without the use of de-aging CGI.

Like its confusing title, Mother/Android never really figures out what it wants to say.

Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Back to Black—her attempt at telling the taboo tale of one of music’s most tragic figures, Amy Winehouse—leans too much into the dark cloud looming over the singer’s sad demise, in turn fumbling what could’ve been a rare, successful dramatization of fame and addiction.

The Takedown isn’t a radical or revolutionary movie (it is still about good-guy cops), but it’s refreshing relative to its genre contemporaries.

Dark Phoenix was always destined to fail. Limiting the sprawling story to one main arc severely debilitates the original’s emotional resonance, but avoiding Apocalypse’s swollen plot and stakes-less character narratives means reigning in an essentially big saga and cutting all of its awe down to some rote CGI. To make this work in one movie is to deny the essence of the source text.

It’s just passable popcorn entertainment for a Friday night on the couch, and not on the same level as more inspired Netflix genre movies from the likes of Mike Flanagan, such as Hush or Gerald’s Game.

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.

Wingard’s Death Note moves like a bullet and doles out practical gore and overheated melodrama in equal measure.

This is Shyamalan at his worst, a speechifying, moralizing scold who wants your adoration but doesn’t want to put in the effort, or himself at risk, to earn it.

With layered direction that emphasizes quiet moments over outward emotion during scenes of tragedy, and soulful performances all around, The Art of Racing in the Rain is just the right kind of tearjerker with an injection of positivity that our understandably pessimistic society needs.

If there’s one apt element Seinfeld and company bring to Unfrosted, it’s that they knowingly treat it like a bunch of silly bullshit.

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

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.

Locked Down is a crushing miscalculation on every level that should’ve stayed locked up.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts keeps it simple enough, which is smart, because franchise creep is going to hit like a ton of bricks within a sequel or two, especially given its ending. Rise of the Beasts isn’t quite as intimate or grounded as Bumblebee, but neither is it as cumbersome or dull as the other Transformers movies.

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

Even in Kristin’s quietest, most contemplative moments, Collette can’t stop bugging her eyes or yanking down her mouth – which, to be fair, is a natural reaction to being repeatedly poisoned over the course of 101 endless minutes.

Revived and pumped up for the sequel, Wan’s synthy semi-psychedelia still makes for a delightful trip, but maybe Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom could have used a little fresh air; for all of the eye-popping colors, creatures and action flourishes he engineers in and around the sea, there isn’t a single sequence as front-to-back satisfying as the surface-world rooftop chase in Italy that popped off the screen in the first movie.

Directed by Julius Onah, Brave New World is as visually lifeless as the most lifeless MCU thrillers, marred by needless overcutting, flimsy digital backdrops and stilted composition; thematically, it says nothing confidently and even less coherently.

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

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).

All of A Little White Lie’s problems can be summarized by Alex Wurman’s score. At first promising, inviting and light to compliment the fundamental cheeriness of the genre, it becomes all-encompassing, bearing down on the viewer with a menacing edge.

Particularly when it comes to charming lead performances and superficial cameo appearances from Megan Fox and Sydney Sweeney, Night Teeth delivers formulaic fun without much for viewers to sink their teeth into.

The Roads Not Taken works when Bardem and Fanning are on screen together, where Potter’s experiences caring for her sibling rise to the writing’s surface and give the narrative a punch of honesty.

Like Green’s first 2018 Halloween reboot, this is a badly overstuffed film that largely ignores the inherent strength of what should be its central story—three generations of Strode women, facing down The Boogeyman—in favor of random, gratuitous action scenes and endless subplots.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It all adds up to another frantic grab by a studio desperate to wring success from a superhero universe they’ve never fully understood.

Arizona bathes its absurdist satire in the bleakest humor and takes a sober glance at the consequences of America’s worst modern economic calamity.

In her debut theatrical performance, Cabello is charming and handles the script, particularly the throwaway lines that lovingly mock the genre, with aplomb.

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.

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.

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.

The problem with director and writer Hallie Myers-Sheyer’s film is that it just blandly presents all of the expected cliches of the genre without anything really new or unique to say.

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.

The 70-year-old Neeson lacks both the physical stamina and charisma to pull off the Marlowe character; his fight and action sequences are sluggish and incredulous, and there’s zero chemistry between Marlowe and Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger), the beautiful blond who hires him to investigate the sudden disappearance of her former lover Nico Peterson.

The Lair is an abomination of bad accents (“Texan American” yee-haw, “Unintelligible Englishman,” Australian muddying both), excruciating action hero one-liners, and discouragingly archaic plot choices.

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.

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.

Making it just a little bit smarter—taking out perhaps just one of its multiple, intelligence-insulting ending clichés—could make its plot simply boring rather than asinine, which would make the film dangerously forgettable, able to inflict 100-minute gaps into moviegoers’ memories at distances of up to 500 yards.

While the director clearly has a few tricks up his sleeve for hitting his viewers with the heebie jeebies, what he doesn’t have, at least for The Sonata, is a sense of how to weave those tricks into a unified, cohesive narrative.

In a world full of soulless, self-conscious CGI-rampant action flicks and superhero movies that seem like they were made by robots, Emmerich seems to really care about this movie. And that’s a trend I can get behind.

Padre Pio’s two halves stubbornly, constantly butt heads with each other, stories in catastrophic disharmony.

The Woman in the Window succeeds when it comes to constructing an adequate cinematic language to tell the story of its original source material, but tends to overcompensate for its narrative shortcomings.

With House Party, Calmatic jumps from a prolific music video career to feature filmmaking with the same energy, leading to shorter-burst storytelling that values standout moments over longevity.

Gina Rodriguez, who proved in Annihilation that she’s capable of something so much more addled and kinetic than this, does what she can with such aggravating material, but everything around her insults whatever emotional depth she can mine despite what she’s given.

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.

Three films into his career, Pesce is batting below average: Last year, he dropped his inventive sophomore stunner, Piercing, and demonstrated range and precision not as evident in his hollow, unrepentantly nasty debut The Eyes of My Mother. With The Grudge, the worst proclivities of that movie override the sensibilities of Piercing and combine with studio horror’s “just play the hits” ethos, resulting in one of the year’s most unpleasant releases to date.

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.

It’s possible for cinema to weave this many themes and concerns together into one cohesive film. The Unforgivable simply doesn’t.

Falling for Christmas feels less like a genuine chance to give Lohan a due shot at a re-return to acting as it does like some executive’s opportunity to capitalize on millennial nostalgia.

Theoretically, it’s a solid generator of comic tension, with a clear timeline taking the production through rehearsals, tech, dress, opening night, and beyond. But Peretti dices these segments into so many blackout sketches that the whole thing feels as weirdly protracted and repetitive as the frequent slow-mo shots Peretti inserts for reasons beyond my understanding.

Beck and Woods seem to have an entirely misguided conception of what people love about B-movies in the first place and, like A Quiet Place, 65 flounders in this middle ground because it won’t commit to being a genre film.