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.