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 Jaume Collet-Serra and his fully crewed vessel of writers never sink all the way to the bottom, but the very best they accomplish is keeping their heads above water.

Ultimately, though, the character animation and sprightly vocal performances can’t quite wriggle out of whatever formulas and secondhand story wreckage Ruby Gillman grabs to assemble its stop-and-go plotting.

Paired with My Policeman’s agile writing and affecting direction, the undeniable chemistry between Styles and Dawson feels like a shining cherry on top.

Ticket to Paradise has all the components for a successful rom-com: A strong cast, a playful and inventive premise, a beautiful location. But the cast isn’t given much to do, the premise gets lost along the way, and even though the film was shot mostly on location in Australia, its oversaturated and sterile cinematography makes it look like CGI.

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.

Deeply silly but more narratively ambitious than one would likely expect, it’s bursting (honestly overstuffed) with ideas and cinematic verve, taking advantage of a slightly longer runtime to really venture into increasingly bonkers metaphysical territory as it draws on and creates new cinematic tropes for movies about witches.

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.

Street Trash is having a blast as it turns most of its characters into puddles of goo, and that’s all you can really ask of it.

The Greatest Hits boasts a compelling and original high-concept plot, but, as can be the case with high concept plots, this leads to much of the film’s first act being occupied by exhausting exposition.

The movie is both a daring and empathetic deconstruction of Monroe iconography anchored by a beautiful performance from de Armas, as well as a miserabilist wallow in exploitation. Like its fictionalized subject, the lines between the two are sad, blurry and spellbinding.

Sigh. If only a good cast was enough to salvage a plodding, tedious film from the snowy wreckage.

I am a constant skeptic of romantic comedies, but for a Hallmark-ish feeling rom-com that withholds any substantial emotional exploration of much of its subject matter, The Life List List still managed to charm me.

Night’s End might be a cautionary tale about our preoccupation with revitalizing clichés, but it proves we have a rising horror star in Reeder. In my eyes, that’s a win for the genre, camp or not.

Vacation Friends is a perfectly enjoyable movie to fire up on a cozy Friday night, as long as you don’t expect too much out of it.

As is, Don’t Look Up is an exhausting and meandering “What if? But also, what now?” If the world really is going to end in my lifetime, these were 145 minutes that I’m never getting back.

Den of Thieves is such a dumb misunderstanding of the genres in which it plays, such a loud, interminable shart of unmitigated machismo, such a heavy-handed rip-off of Heat and The Usual Suspects and even Ocean’s Eleven (and maybe even The Fast and the Furious, but for scumbags) that it feels anachronistic on arrival, the kind of melodramatic, pulpy studio action flick that doesn’t get made anymore because it shouldn’t.

Though the premise is gripping and the acting overwhelmingly solid, Here Are the Young Men falls short when it comes to communicating the raw emotional essence of preemptively coping for a future in decline.

What should be one of the most adrenaline-pinching films of the year has about as much tension as a K-Mart commercial.

More than anything, Your Place or Mine will probably just make you wish you’d watched an old Kutcher or Witherspoon flick this Valentine’s Day, instead.

None of The Gray Man’s still-Bourne thrills are executed with the precise elegance of John Wick, the winking doggery of James Bond or the joyful craftsmanship of Mission: Impossible. Rather, its chaotic Grand Theft Auto filmmaking skates by with the sloppy sufficiency of its own protagonist.

A discarded made-for-TV sequel to Rosemary’s Baby in the ‘70s is now just what most mainstream American filmmaking is, summed by prequel Apartment 7A: something stupid, easy and familiar to watch in the comfort of one’s home, confined to the medium that had once threatened to overtake cinema and is now doing so again all these years later.

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.

I had a good time with Bullet Train. I didn’t hate Bullet Train. I just think that I’ll begin to forget Bullet Train, and in remembering that I’ve forgotten it, I will resent it because I’m an easy mark for crime films and an easy mark for action movies—including but not limited to cheeky R-rated action-comedies

As ruthless as some of the deaths can be, and tongue-in-cheek as the movie’s heightened reality becomes, Y2K remains affectionate toward its characters; it has a surprising amount of warmth and sweetness for what’s essentially a comedy about teens trying to get laid that pivots to a comedy about teens getting hacked to death by robots.

When all is said and done, storytelling this glaringly flawed cannot be overlooked, and the wonderful elements of Amsterdam can only do so much to glue together this faltering house of cards.

Aside from the one chilling scene grafted straight from The Ten Steps and its gorgeous, historic filming location, The Cellar just isn’t that deep.

What’s missing here is heart. While the message of Spirit Untamed is a good one (some things are worth fighting for; you have to let your children make their own mistakes), it’s hard not to see the movie as an easy money grab.