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

Where Burroughs achieved the profound in the brevity of the novella, Guadagnino punishes you with longwindedness, ending after (non-final) ending souring the film into a clock-watching endurance test.

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.

With Jakob’s Wife, come for the campy gore, stay for the surprisingly feminist message about vampirism as a way to set you free.

Despite walking well-tread but welcome ground, My Sailor, My Love never fully takes advantage of the comfort that comes with repeating familiar story beats.

When King and Efron are grooving to their boss/assistant bickering beat, Affair is the most believable and entertaining. As for the rest, it’s been done better and with more depth in a zillion other films.

Unfortunately, Gemini Man is saddled with a fatally weak story, almost as if Lee chose a predictable action-thriller narrative so that he could focus his energy on the effects and frame rate. But the result is a quirky-looking movie that’s generally boring.

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.

Even some of its rawest emotional moments feel studiously cribbed from other movies, which is probably why not a single thing any character does throughout Don’t Make Me Go is genuinely surprising or even slightly unexpected. It’s a movie about the unpredictability and inherent dangers of a life well-lived, and you can set a watch to its screenwriting beats.

Writers Kevin Biegel and Scotty Landes adapt Kreischer’s unbelievable viral story about robbing a train with Russian mobsters into a retrospective on the comedian’s tumultuous history with excess—a tonal misfire of fantastical absurdity clashing against emotional confessions.

The Twin builds mysterious dread rooted in paranormal possessions and possible cult activity, but its ill-serving payoff vaporizes the crippling weight of loss fastened to each character.

For a work titled Gehraiyaan (Depths), this much-anticipated film doesn’t delve much below the surface. Like a pretty skipping stone, it skims across some ostensibly choppy waters, only to submerge with a gentle plop at a distance—leaving me confused and perplexed.

There are glimpses of comparably daydreamy thrillers like Come True or The Feast that give themselves to the fantasy of mania, but A Banquet fails to grab attention like these more ambitious companions. It all builds up to a cinematic Irish exit.

Do not let anyone tell you that Joker captures our specific time, represents our specific society, both births and defines our specific zeitgeist, grabs ahold of our specific faces and breathes smoke down our throats. It doesn’t. Joker is, more than anything, fine. And we, more than anything, are not.

Execution isn’t the problem here—the acting, direction, editing, set design and costuming are all done well enough. It’s that these elements add up to something that doesn’t feel subversive at all, just vaguely aware of itself.

For the first time in its storied history, a Pixar movie feels like a straight-to-DVD entry: undemanding, mildly amusing, utterly disposable.

Winslet is doing an impression of Cate Blanchett doing an impression of Mia Farrow in September.

Leave tells a story about the monsters of humanity, but is shy about terrifying its audience—a tragic flaw that cuts the genre’s volume like unplugging an amplifier mid-performance.

Joke’s way over, guys, and everyone’s now uncomfortable, thanks. Now, who needs a drink…?

Early on, the self-deprecating stuff takes on a studied air, and in the final stretch, the filmmakers seem to think they can shock-cut and rug-pull their way into something resembling psychological horror. The weirdness isn’t really weird enough to pull this off; it’s all the self-indulgence without much oddball pleasure.

Very rarely do you get the sense that anyone involved in Christopher Robin had a really strong take on the material or an innate understanding of why these characters have resonated for nearly a century.

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.

Nobody expects all Christmas movies to be masterpieces. But it’s hard not to be disappointed by low-energy affairs like Tiffany’s, which is nothing more than a mindless attempt at adhering to the Christmas movie algorithm. Even the Grinch would probably ask for something more.

Outside of Vikander’s performance, Tomb Raider tends to go on autopilot, either too scared or uninspired to reimagine this blah action-adventure material.

It reaches for the heights its progenitors offer and struggles to maintain an identity of its own.

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.

Keaton seems to take another hitman part as an opportunity for contemplation, a decision that leaves Knox Goes Away feeling like someone hollowed out a DTV thriller in hopes of finding existential despair in the empty spaces.

Hold Your Fire certainly illustrates an oft-forgotten slice of history, assembling aestheticized archival footage of tense crowds and police in peacoats scattering like ants on the streets of New York. But through clumsy structuring and skin-deep attempts to appease both sides of the coin, Forbes does not heed his own advice, misfiring entirely.