A frequently heartstring-tugging inspirational dog movie that does little to excel beyond acceptability yet manages to not be a complete drag to watch.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die is a genuine crowd-pleaser, just undeniably captivating, funny and raging, neon-pink copaganda.

Where Josh Ruben’s Scare Me soars thanks to tension delivered through imaginative monologues, LaBute’s latest is mostly benign chatter that rambles its way to an unimpressively expected conclusion.

Strays is bad, but it’s not offensively so—and it’s certainly better and more watchable than something like Cocaine Bear (a low bar to cross, albeit).

It’s directed and edited in totally competent fashion. But none of that justifies taking the time to watch an often tedious reworking of a story you’ve already seen so many times before.

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.

This may not be Assayas operating at the peak of his powers, but there’s no use in denying the thrilling efficiency that propels the overstuffed yet nimble two hours of Wasp Network.

Unfortunately, even False Positive’s shortcomings are uncharacteristically boring, generic and empty.

It’s a little too pre-programmed and self-conscious to be truly witty, yet the tone it strikes and the genre space it carves out feels undeniably itself: part comedy, part sci-fi mayhem, with remnant notes of shlocky horror.

It’s a shame that its studio didn’t more heavily market Captive State. Smart, layered, tense, well-executed sci-fi like this should be nurtured in movie theaters.

Psycho Therapy’s screenplay derails it in its closing minutes with genuinely whiplash-inducing abruptness, running out of gas when it’s still seemingly far from its natural finish line.

Adulthood makes the occasional odd choice, setting up elements that seem like Chekhov’s gun-type instances that never get around to paying off, and it’s never quite as tense as Winter probably envisioned it would be, even when it builds up a head of steam. But there are enough moments of either well-calculated gallows humor or generational commentary to keep things moving briskly along, and both Gad and Scodelario find room to have a new definition of maturity thrust upon them.

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?

While Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between boasts a solid premise (Who doesn’t want to see two charismatic teens embark on a breakup date?) there is no way in hell anyone could sit down and not predict how the thing is going to play out.

I’m not sure White ever cracks his own film’s code, but you can tell he’s passionate about whatever Outlaw Johnny Black becomes. That conveyance elevates what could have been an even messier modern Western with throwback appeal.

There’s a natural tendency to want to like Greta so that you don’t feel like a killjoy or a snob. But as much as I appreciated Jordan and his actors’ balance of high and low, I rarely treasured its trashiness.

Despite the intriguing subject matter, this documentary can’t stay in the air.

Orphan: First Kill isn’t an especially scary movie, nor is its class-war commentary especially subtle or insightful. Through sheer force of personality, though, these elements are rendered immaterial. Like Esther, the movie has a keen sense of how to weaponize its own audacity.

Don’t confuse Becky for a smart movie. It won’t teach audiences anything valuable, or even new, about the disease of white supremacist ideology. It won’t leave folks holding hands in solidarity against racism and prejudice at a time when solidarity is like oxygen. It will, however, provide a brief burst of catharsis through the brutal slaughter of white supremacist ideologues, for whatever that catharsis is worth.

Once again, Bekmambetov has delved into new possibilities of digital filmmaking, capturing the complexities and anxieties that have become inextricably linked to our reliance on technology.

I don’t love every storytelling element, but I do adore all that involves the star of the show, an aggro bear on obscene amounts of blow. You’ll get what you pay for, and can we ask much more from Cocaine Bear?

There’s a worthwhile story in here about the long-term effects of trauma, how society disregards and casts aside adolescent girls, how quick we are to blame the victim, how bullying can lead to terror—but all these messages gets lost in translation.

Good on Paper wasn’t that good as a stand-up segment; as a movie, it should be permanently erased from the memories of anyone unlucky enough to have seen it.

While most of the story takes place in a constrained setting and it wastes no time in introducing us to the dangers of being trapped in a metal box with a delirious Nicolas Cage performance, Sympathy for the Devil’s inability to paint its characters in anything but the broadest strokes makes it difficult to see past the artifice of it all, dulling its attempts at dangling these people’s fates over the precipice.

Even with its last act problems, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is an effective return to the cautionary tale that is Panem.

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.

Together, McCoy and Williams make The Owners stand out. Newness is a big ask for movies visiting territory this familiar. Two outstanding central performances, however, make a much more reasonable expectation.

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.