A film about nostalgic escape play-acting an old-fashioned genre has plenty of meta potential to comment upon the entertainment industry’s IP obsession and monetization of arrested development. Reminiscence isn’t quite assured enough for either. Instead, it’s pulp that hasn’t been boiled hard enough, its ideas slowly replaced by machinery.

While Don’t Breathe 2 emulates a similar aesthetic from its predecessor and is still able to skillfully build tension, it is ultimately an incredibly disappointing film.

As a fantasy, Damsel convincingly transports us into the lair of a dragon that is often stunning and always intriguing.

Salinger’s world doesn’t feel real, but like an amusement park ride taking visitors through the major stops of an author’s legacy, each moment a checkmark before the literary splashdown. It’s almost stubbornly mediocre.

While Mark Hammer’s script has a few zingers, it’s the stacked supporting cast that makes the movie pop.

[Black] hands us a frenzied combination of action, comedy and criminal caper, patently absurd but well served by knowingly silly performances and solid jokes.

Frankly, Earwig and the Witch looks ghastly enough that storytelling merit doesn’t even matter. It’s a movie almost too ugly to consider beyond the surface.

More giggle-inducing than terrifying, The Meg throws enough incidents at you that it simulates the feeling of being entertaining.

This is a sequel that literally puts on trial not simply its protagonist, but the very storyline that preceded it, making mockery of the simplistic readings that it engendered, while at the same time engaging in the kind of hoarish courtroom antics that make the musical sequences feel almost vérité in stylistic contrast.

It’s a lean, efficient, no-frills film, and that’s as it should be. Begos rejects pretense. He’s making his version of a psycho Santa flick, no more, no less. But the logline’s comic absurdity and the execution of his premise is so straightforward that Christmas Bloody Christmas feels fresh among the season’s horror canon. It’s a Christmas miracle.

Irish Wish reaffirms that Lohan still has command over her acting talents.

It’s endearing to see Burger change his typically harsh tone to create a story awash with such positivity. And just like its French original, The Upside is fairly superficial, but warm enough for the studio dumping ground known as January. One could do a lot worse.

Dark Glasses is forgettable. It’s also an upgrade for contemporary Dario Argento.

When the film makes its hairpin turn from comedy to drama, it doesn’t really fully commit, which has the effect of negating the power of its more serious ideas.

Back in Action functions modestly well as a welcome back to the screen for Cameron Diaz, who is still capable of being as charming today as she ever may have been. It even functions decently well as an action movie for the specific, too-narrow frames of time where Diaz and Foxx are thrashing wave after wave of nameless mooks–whoever the choreographer and stunt coordinators are here, they’ve done the heaviest lifting of anyone on the project. But the film feels absolutely threadbare in all other dimensions.

The movie gets so wrapped up in sorting through the whimsical bureaucracy of discarded IFs that it forgets to create an actual world to hide it under.

There’s room in the horror space for a movie like this – a daft campfire tale best told in the damp morning after, part creature feature and part noodling about the nature of humanity. The Watchers may even find an enthusiastic sleepover audience, with its endearing PG-13 spookiness. But unlike other Shyamalan forays into the uncanny, it’s more functional than fully formed.

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.

It bears an overall feeling that we’re watching a work in progress.

The Boys, Samaritan is not. But even a failed attempt at making a superhero movie out of whole cloth rather than pre-existing IP is welcome, particularly one that challenges the genre’s mores.

Unfortunately, The Tomorrow War isn’t allowed to be the dumb, “just go with it” summer spectacle it should have been, a la Independence Day. Instead, McKay and Dean force it to be a self-aware and “smart” time travel drama, with feelings big enough to crack generational war trauma issues, among lots of things that go “boom!” and “pew, pew, pew.”

Zeller is clearly more experienced as a writer than a director, but even his ability to extract the powerful (if stagey) performances we saw in The Father is missing here, as everyone just insists their lines upon each other with tones borrowed from shouty amateur theater.

Uncharted spends a lot of time scraping up meager points for what it isn’t, rather than what it is. It isn’t a superhero movie, despite the budget. It isn’t CG’d within an inch of its life; there appears to be some location shooting in the mix.

Rarely does it ever genuinely feel like a horror movie at all, in fact. Instead, it’s more like a halfhearted feminist kitchen drama, with the occasional “scary” beat inserted under protest, a horror film via technicality of labeling and marketing rather than any particular intent. It wants to be just about anything but.

Compounded with dull plotting and a truly uninspired protagonist arc, Dogman is a curiosity of a comeback film that only makes you consider the virtues of director jail.

Justice League may be a more functional film that its predecessors, but it also lacks the style and go-for-broke big ideas that made Batman v Superman such a fascinating shitshow.

Though Sound of Violence marks a strong first leading role for Brown (who is cast in the forthcoming Scream reboot), it ultimately fails to impart anything more significant than the raw power of what one good actor with a brain-melting theremin can do for an otherwise underwhelming product.

A Minecraft Movie‘s fan-pleasing salvation is knowing when to Do The Thing; it understands why its audience pulled themselves away from their consoles and PCs to spend an afternoon in the theater and delivers it to them with diamond-pickaxe precision.