The strong results of segments like “Stork,” “Live and Let Dive” and “Stowaway” buy the series a brief reprieve for now, but the yearly releases feel increasingly like a beast that will never be satiated.

While its plotting can’t quite keep up with its fantastical flourishes, My Oni Girl still proves a pleasant, albeit slight production with just enough going for it to appeal to 2D animation enthusiasts.

In the moment, what it does do well is tease the increasingly metaphysical conclusion that is swiftly approaching, which looks to shed some of the “slasher movie” trappings and embrace the idea of a supernatural evil that resonates and repeats across centuries and generations of lives. Here’s hoping that the Fear Street trilogy can stick the landing.

Even at their breeziest, Crano’s punchlines cost exorbitant amounts of discomfort.

Juxtaposing human-sized drama against classic Toho iconography and one jaw-dropping silhouette after another, King of the Monsters is often more magnificently overwhelming than not.

Samuel’s The Book Clarence is a grab bag of ideas and genres that sometimes hit their mark, but in general don’t land a believable arc for the title character.

A sequel of rare sincerity, Bill & Ted Face the Music avoids feeling like a craven reviving of a hollowed-out IP or a cynical reboot, mostly because its ambition is the stuff of affection—for what the filmmakers are doing, made with sympathy for their audience and a genuine desire to explore these characters in a new context. Maybe that’s the despair talking. Or maybe it’s just the relief of for once confronting the past and finding that it’s aged considerably well.

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.

While a lot of this stuff is undeniably enjoyable, it also resembles a frenzied fever dream.

The premise itself might seem like one set up for failure, but Monday manages to stray away from the petty voyeurism of blow-out fights in order to convey something deeper about love and relationships.

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.