This is Shyamalan at his worst, a speechifying, moralizing scold who wants your adoration but doesn’t want to put in the effort, or himself at risk, to earn it.

With layered direction that emphasizes quiet moments over outward emotion during scenes of tragedy, and soulful performances all around, The Art of Racing in the Rain is just the right kind of tearjerker with an injection of positivity that our understandably pessimistic society needs.

If there’s one apt element Seinfeld and company bring to Unfrosted, it’s that they knowingly treat it like a bunch of silly bullshit.

Stuber, although supported by the odd-couple chemistry between its two leads, ends up as stale as if it was made 20 years ago.

Leave it to a new version of I Know What You Did Last Summer to highlight that there was never anything particularly interesting about I Know What You Did Last Summer in the first place.

Locked Down is a crushing miscalculation on every level that should’ve stayed locked up.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts keeps it simple enough, which is smart, because franchise creep is going to hit like a ton of bricks within a sequel or two, especially given its ending. Rise of the Beasts isn’t quite as intimate or grounded as Bumblebee, but neither is it as cumbersome or dull as the other Transformers movies.

This exhaustively sanitized, overly saccharine take on the hero’s journey is certainly nothing new, but it remains rather uninteresting.

Even in Kristin’s quietest, most contemplative moments, Collette can’t stop bugging her eyes or yanking down her mouth – which, to be fair, is a natural reaction to being repeatedly poisoned over the course of 101 endless minutes.

Revived and pumped up for the sequel, Wan’s synthy semi-psychedelia still makes for a delightful trip, but maybe Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom could have used a little fresh air; for all of the eye-popping colors, creatures and action flourishes he engineers in and around the sea, there isn’t a single sequence as front-to-back satisfying as the surface-world rooftop chase in Italy that popped off the screen in the first movie.

Directed by Julius Onah, Brave New World is as visually lifeless as the most lifeless MCU thrillers, marred by needless overcutting, flimsy digital backdrops and stilted composition; thematically, it says nothing confidently and even less coherently.

Without a strong thesis, cohesive plot or narrative payoff, A24 thriller Opus struggles to communicate the filmmaker’s messy musings.

Boredom. Annoyance. Anger. I experienced a range of emotions and perfected my eye roll while watching Endings, Beginnings, the new movie from director and writer Drake Doremus (Like Crazy).

All of A Little White Lie’s problems can be summarized by Alex Wurman’s score. At first promising, inviting and light to compliment the fundamental cheeriness of the genre, it becomes all-encompassing, bearing down on the viewer with a menacing edge.

Particularly when it comes to charming lead performances and superficial cameo appearances from Megan Fox and Sydney Sweeney, Night Teeth delivers formulaic fun without much for viewers to sink their teeth into.

The Roads Not Taken works when Bardem and Fanning are on screen together, where Potter’s experiences caring for her sibling rise to the writing’s surface and give the narrative a punch of honesty.

Like Green’s first 2018 Halloween reboot, this is a badly overstuffed film that largely ignores the inherent strength of what should be its central story—three generations of Strode women, facing down The Boogeyman—in favor of random, gratuitous action scenes and endless subplots.

It’s not especially fair to criticize the movie that could have been made, rather than the one that was actually made. But even on its chosen terms of a family dramedy, People feels lopsided.

Suburbicon warns of the dangers of moral rot infesting our communities. No word yet on the effect that chronic smugness might have.

At his heart, Feig isn’t really a satirist – or an action director, despite his repeated efforts. He still makes a convincing underdog, though, fighting his way through misbegotten genre that shouldn’t work here nearly as well as it does.

Instead of exercising artistic liberties over the written word, Louhimies goes all-in on putting those words on screen, a task too great even for nearly two hours of runtime; maybe Attack on Finland would work better if fashioned into a miniseries. Even then, though, it wouldn’t work as the entertainment it aspires toward.

Unfortunately, Fear Street: Prom Queen simultaneously goes out of its way to steal directly from all its major influences, demonstrating little if any original thought.

It all adds up to another frantic grab by a studio desperate to wring success from a superhero universe they’ve never fully understood.

Arizona bathes its absurdist satire in the bleakest humor and takes a sober glance at the consequences of America’s worst modern economic calamity.

In her debut theatrical performance, Cabello is charming and handles the script, particularly the throwaway lines that lovingly mock the genre, with aplomb.

The movie stars are present, the film looks slick and shiny, and the adventure doesn’t ever let up, but something about it ultimately rings hollow, and by the second hour, you’re left wondering what the point of all of this is, at least until the characters outright explain it to you without any real emotional payoff.

Isabelle Huppert walks on screen in Luc Bondy’s False Confessions intent, it seems, on reminding audiences that she can do anything, including turn a modern adaptation of outdated theater tropes into near-vital product.

Though it does hint at the toxicity and conspiratorial nature of a powerful institution, it never finds root in overt observations. It handles too many threads—childhood tragedy, murder cover-ups, clandestine spiritual rites—without the dexterity to effectively weave them together.