Anyone hoping for a more mature plot or emotional weight should probably resign themselves now: Galaxy tees up endless potential sequels and spinoffs, and it looks like the Super Mario moviemaking machine not only has a proven formula at this point, it’s sticking with it.

Pixar has been alternating between playing things safe with sequels to its hits and taking bigger swings with emotional human stories. Hoppers sits awkwardly between these impulses, recycling emotional moments and plots from other films while eschewing any clear moral or big moments of character growth.

Maybe the most baffling thing about Scream 7 is that it’s not an off-the-rails franchise-ending disaster. It’s entertaining enough, with a few fun side performances and the easy prickliness of Sidney and Gale’s friendship. But it’s missing the giddy carnival-ride audience-movie thrills and clever meta-humor of previous entries, and the more serious material simply isn’t insightful enough to take its place (or distract from its craven origins as a corporate patch-job).

Between the confusing plot elements, the middling horror, and the dodgy acting, Five Nights at Freddy's 2 is a step backward from the first movie. It’s a disappointment: While there are moments in the movie that fans may enjoy, and plenty of robots causing chaos, the story is a mess if you don't already know the ins and outs of the series.

Now You See Me: Now You Don't is a fine movie — although it does have some glaring flaws — but its biggest sin is promising a long-awaited sequel only to deliver something completely different: it’s a reboot masquerading as a sequel, aka a requel.

While there’s plenty of CGI-packed action, there’s no real tension.

Rønning’s dazzling action sequences and the killer soundtrack might be enough to satisfy fans, but Tron: Ares feels just as likely to get lost among a sea of the type of films Tron inspired.

The Conjuring movies seem consciously designed for people who use horror movies as comfort-watches. There’s no need to begrudge some well-made (if frustratingly drawn-out) sequels following heroic characters through a few satisfying shivers. But it might be just as well if Last Rites does wrap up the series as advertised. By now, the gentler rhythms of retirement fit these movies almost too easily.

Until Dawn’s movie adaptation doesn’t fail because it’s not faithful to the game. It fails because it’s boring, in a way the game never was.

Minecraft is a game for absolutely everyone, and the movie gestures at including the same audience, with a few clumsy attempts at meaningful character relationships and personal arcs. But those subtle elements are disconnected and often contradicted by later scenes.

Snow White is supposed to be a story about how inner beauty is more important than outer beauty, but honestly, this movie has neither.

To the degree that Love Hurts feels like a movie at all, it’s because Quan puts so much heart into his work, and so much squeaky-voiced comedic talent, paired with the speed and flexibility that makes a fight scene thrilling.

By trying to make Star Trek: Section 31 everything regular Star Trek isn’t, Osunsanmi and Sweeney fulfill the show’s promise to boldly go where no one has gone before. But its one-and-done story concludes without the plot itself ending up anywhere particularly unexpected.

The movie is so twisted up in its own metaphor that it can’t muster up a single ounce of terror for the one thing we all came to see: a werewolf.

Nothing in the movie seems to matter, from its internal lore to the extraneous sequel setups that appear out of nowhere to the characters’ own ethoses. Audiences have not cared much about Sony’s non-Spider-Man Spider-world movies. That’s no surprise when the filmmakers seem to be this indifferent as well.

Venom: The Last Dance is so buried under its moving parts that it can’t do justice to any of them, in spite of Marcel’s efforts.

When I say that Don’t Move is the modern equivalent of a Corman movie, that might make it sound more trashy or exotic than it really is. It’s not some future cult classic. But it is an expedient, efficient piece of filmmaking that does exactly what it needs to do, no more and no less, to exploit one great idea — the terror of being trapped in your own body, unable to move or speak.

Nightbitch has an ample supply of sharp observations, but it retracts its claws too soon and too easily.

It’s spiky, entertaining stuff, and although it’s played mostly for laughs and thrills, it’s a setup with real thematic teeth.

Uglies winds up being yet another uninspired, forgettable entry in the deluge of YA dystopian movies that make my passionate defense of the genre such an uphill climb.

As the film stands — it’s a fun but halfhearted execution of a killer concept, relying more on sentiment than suspense — it’s just a mild bummer to find out so soon.

Borderlands is the one kind of movie that’s the hardest to get excited about: the kind that lands in the middle space between a project with its own strong identity, and a compromised adaptation trying to play to the masses. It’s tough to live in the borderlands.

It’s hard to buy this movie as a love letter to anything but Marvel Studios’ corporate conquests. Deadpool & Wolverine has made its hero the worst kind of comic-book character: one who doesn’t stand for anything.

The dialogue (by Ritchie and three other screenwriters) is lumpy and unconvincing, but that’s not why anyone watches a film like this. It’s a romp, disposable but sturdily made, with satisfyingly blunt action scenes that have been framed by a true master.

Regardless of what mode filmmakers lean into for a shark movie, they need to bring something worthwhile to that mode. Under Paris gets about halfway there on every front — drama, thrills, terror, character conflict, humanity-versus-nature messaging — and not much further than that.

Ride or Die, the joys of Smith and Lawrence’s characters getting on each other’s nerves during improbably explosive shootouts is constantly derailed, as the script workshops or retcons every previous element from prior movies into the grand scheme of this one.

Kingdom merely seems like an act of franchise maintenance, a reversal for a series of unusually thoughtful blockbusters. Every frame is a technical marvel. And every minute of it is probably better spent watching something else.

The movie represents months and months of sustained labor from hundreds of people, including many of the most talented and recognizable names in their field, in the service of a story that possesses no satirical edge, nor any human connection. It takes whatever pleasure that can be derived from a Pop-Tart, and chokes on it.

Arcadian does a few things remarkably well for a sci-fi/horror movie, but it needed a lot more to really spark: more commitment to its vaguely realized setting, more energy between the two very different brothers at its center, and above all, more Nicolas Cage — either version of him.

After four movies, it isn’t really a surprise that the Kung Fu Panda machine is running out of steam — thankfully, though, it has just enough power left to churn out some genuine laughs at the end.

Mielants is too tough-minded to be caught, it turns out, but that’s bad news for the rest of us. Will nurses a glimmer of hope in the darkness, only to snuff it out completely. This is a bleak, bleak movie.

Howard and Rockwell are both funny, charismatic actors, but it’s a struggle for them to build real romantic chemistry amid all Argylle’s layered artificiality.

Miller’s Girl is a luxuriant meal for [Ortega], a chance to play a variety of facets of the same girl while finding the connections between them. For everyone else, though, it’s short rations, and more than a little underbaked.

The movie is a tepid botch on pretty much every level.

The movie, which chronicles the personal tragedies of Wilkerson’s life as she conceives and researches the book, is an awkward hybrid of these two approaches, neither of which fully succeeds. It’s a drama that wants to be a documentary, and it’s at its best when it’s just reeling off Wilkerson’s fascinating ideas at full flow.

Wish is all about the twinkling star in the night sky, the one many a Disney hero has wished upon. Perfectly calibrated for that Disney magic! Except this movie is a little too perfectly calibrated.

The Expendables movies had one trick, and that trick has been played out. Director Scott Waugh has to resort to something else with Expend4bles: finally trying to turn one of these projects into a good action movie.

What’s especially strange about The Killer is that Fincher achieves almost everything he sets out to, but he sets that bar dispiritingly low.

Craig Gillespie’s Dumb Money is neither dumb enough to capture the bonkers nature of the story nor smart enough to turn it into an entertaining or even informative tale.

There are no surprises in The Last Voyage of the Demeter. Just about everything in the story plays out exactly how the average horror fan might assume it would, exactly how they know it will, because the movie begins with the end of the story, then does little to play up the dread that comes with that knowledge. And most of us, unfortunately, know too much about this story already.

It’s basically a checklist of the most beloved items from the Disney park attraction. But here’s the thing: It kinda works?

It’s a disappointing facsimile of the much better Indiana Jones films that preceded it. It’s all competently put together, with entertaining enough sequences to capture an audience for its lengthy two-and-a-half-hour run time. But it plays the game so safely that there are few memorable moments at all. Ultimately, the film is just a painful reminder of how good we used to have it.

Fast X suffers from the same condition as latter-day MCU movies, where it’s so laden with internal mythology that it feels more like homework than popcorn entertainment.

The defanged action sequences don’t leave an impact, and what was once an engaging story about Greek myths and destiny has been downgraded into a cliched “battle” between technology and faith/magic.

The end result for Netflix is a missed opportunity to redefine a generational star as a bona fide action hero.

Helander’s camera work and the fight choreography from veteran stuntman Ouli Kitti are surprisingly restrained in an action movie whose creatives were clearly delighted to find as many ways to kill people as possible.

Despite Baird and Pink’s best attempts at cinematic tension and surprise twists, this story plays better elsewhere, in the retellings with a firmer grip on reality.

This new take on Mario is so faithful in its efforts to recreate iconography from four decades of video games that there’s almost no energy left to expend on reaching the unconverted. The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a sermon for the Nintendo faithful, their children, and few others.

If the story was clunky but the look of the movie was confident, assured, and engaging, there would be something to write home about. But in trying to do everything with Quantumania’s story, screen effects, and setting, Reed doesn’t create much of anything.

As filmmakers try to figure out how to lasso the internet and tame it for the screen, Cat Person is mostly useful as a lesson in what not to do.

A lot happens in Bardo, much of it surreal. Elaborate musical numbers, dream sequences, alternate histories, and chronological hiccups all factor into this sprawling, whimsical, personal film. But once the lights go up and the spell is broken, all that striking imagery ends up feeling remarkably empty.

Given how unnecessary Rise Of the Damned is, Leyden’s choice to pare down the original RIPD’s summer-movie bombast into an agreeable, swiftly paced supernatural Western qualifies as a rousing success. On the other hand, anyone working in the RIPD universe should also understand the value of just staying dead.

Black Adam is overstuffed with underdeveloped concepts and characters that have been done better in other shows and films.

This was an ambitious trilogy that tried to take the Halloween franchise to new places, but it ultimately falls short, introducing so many ideas that it quickly abandons, while forgetting about the one thing it was always supposed to be about: Laurie Strode.

Pugh’s performance is enough of a recommendation to see this shiny, smoothly finished movie-that-feels-like-a-movie. The production design, costuming, and cinematography are ravishing, and wielded with precision.

In The Whale, Aronofsky posits his sadism as an intellectual experiment, challenging viewers to find the humanity buried under Charlie’s thick layers of fat. That’s not as benevolent of a premise as he seems to think it is. It proceeds from the assumption that a 600-pound man is inherently unlovable.

Anyone suffering from severe summer-movie withdrawal might want to seek this one out, so long as they prepare themselves for a familiar summer sensation. The film pops, then fizzes and fades: It’s a firecracker of a movie, for better and worse.

What’s supposed to resemble a smart, unnerving sci-fi movie looks more like a lecture about male dominance and deception that keeps foregrounding its least interesting characters.

The movie isn’t easy to dismiss. Its awkward comedy is often funny, and its shadowy mystery is compelling, because Abilene’s death does become more of an enigma to Ben as he learns more about her. Performers as eclectic as Holbrook, J. Smith-Cameron, Isabella Amara, and Ashton Kutcher all do their best to bring these potentially elusive characters to life.

Nope is an idea more than a story. It’s a collection of individually captivating scenes, as opposed to an intriguing whole. It’s a handsome picture, but Peele is far too impressed with its handsomeness to work on populating it with fully felt characters.

Janky anachronisms and grating narration aside, the film is aggressively OK, though the dynamic side characters do most of the heavy lifting.

Realism isn’t necessarily the problem here; dissonance is. The Gray Man is a story about assassins who are, we’re told, the very best in the world. And yet over and over again, they are shown to be shitty at their jobs. They incite international incidents. They wage small wars in town squares. And they have a very hard time holding a small girl hostage.

Like The Prince of Egypt or Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas before it, The Sea Beast ditches talking animals and funny sidekicks, but it can’t fully shake off its Disney influences. It’s a whole lot of well-animated beasts and water, with nowhere to flow.

Thor: Love and Thunder isn’t just a misfire, it’s a scam. Its characters only move forward in the most artificial ways. Their status at the end of the film is no more intriguing than it was at the beginning. It’s the worst thing a film in this mode can be: inconsequential.

Rubikon’s plot crash-lands while its sincere intentions are left spinning fruitlessly in space, looking for a way back down.

This is neither a uniquely marvelous film nor a teeth-gnashing pain. It’s OK in the moment, and it evaporates as soon as the end credits roll.

This is a story written and directed by a 23-year-old. That reality defines Cha Cha Real Smooth’s truest virtue (blissful naïveté) and its grandest flaw — a blithering unawareness of reality. It’s a film defined by its myopic, narrow bandwidth.

Firestarter 2022 is a marginal improvement on the ’84 original, if only because it has a handful of redeeming qualities rather than virtually none at all.

[Rob Jabbaz] can’t find the proper measure of finesse and shamelessness to marry his grotesque gore and violence to, given the moral lessons he seems to think he’s obligated to offer.

Sy and Lafitte still carry the day. They give the story a kinetic energy and a loose rhythm, which makes the narrative’s meandering more palatable, even as it fails to break out of the familiar action-flick mold.

While efficiency and originality are both pluses in genre filmmaking, neither of them should come at the expense of creating an immersive world that sparks the imagination, or characters the audience actually cares about. With both of those qualities so woefully underdeveloped, Escape the Field feels not only like a midseason episode, but a premature series finale.

Shepherd is more of a bandwagon-jumping exercise in arthouse horror films about grief than a truly bone-chilling example of one.

It might leave audiences feeling brutalized, exhilarated, amused, annoyed, or all of the above, but will it leave them feeling like they want to drop a thousand dollars on a handbag? They will certainly feel like they’ve just watched a Gaspar Noé film.

It’s worth remembering this era of cinema, and everything it says about specifically male fantasies and male rage. But it isn’t necessarily worth remembering Memory itself.

The creators’ quest for deeper meaning feels strained and overreaching, and it overwhelms the adventurous spirit of the film’s first half. If anything, this is at least a great jumping-off point for Evans, who never wavers, even when everything around her does.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 has just enough laughs to make its shopworn lessons about the value of friendship and (brace yourself) teamwork feel like part of a harmlessly amusing kids’ movie, rather than an insidious way of training kids to expect and even demand franchise bloat.

In short, it’s the “Imagine” video of movies.

Smith’s dynamism painfully underlines the lack of imagination and energy elsewhere in the film.

In the strange and threatening moment it conjures up, Black Crab works quite well. The economical bursts of action are mapped out with clarity and bitten off with curt precision. The quest is simple and the threats are tangible. When Berg and his co-writer Pelle Rådström reach for something more, however, they just close their hands on air. Empty clichés abound.

Watts is fantastic in the film. She excels at desperation and confusion, and she knows how to show naked, raw fragility while disclosing an iron inner strength that’s almost frightening. The film depends on these qualities completely.

A lot about this Chainsaw is under-realized and messy — perhaps because of the project’s convoluted shoot, which saw the original directors axed one week into production in Bulgaria. The final version of the film, directed by Garcia, packs a lot of characters, subplots, and backstory into its 83 minutes, and very few are essential.

Even without the burden of introducing so many characters, the choices propelling Uncharted still lack stakes, genuine peril, fascinating twists on history, or adrenaline-pumping adventure.

Bigbug’s garish and confusing world does linger in the mind after the credits roll, primarily because we’re only permitted to see a tiny slice of it. Trapped in the bottle, looking out, everything looks distorted and larger than life, but vaguely, scarily recognizable.

It offers the bittersweet spectacle of a pretty loony movie trying its best to become a more conventional one. Maybe an outright boondoggle would have been more memorable.

The story is never fully passed along to the younger character; this really is Fiennes’ movie all the way, and probably more interesting for it.

Humor is subjective, but giving an example of Don’t Look Up’s specific jokes feels like a spoiler, depriving you of one of the three times you’ll likely experience a genuine laugh.

If Pearce weren’t so heavy-handed, if were just self-aware enough to know how to connect character with metaphor, then Encounter, a flawed sci-fi flick with a simple premise, could be a great adventure fit for the stars.

Despite a deep ensemble led by a transformative Bullock, Unforgivable moves at a turgid pace, lacking the urgency and pathos required in a redemption narrative with any hopes that the audience will pull for its damaged protagonist.

This is certainly Edgar Wright at his Edgar Wright-iest, but even as he’s arguing against celebrating the past in Last Night in Soho, he’s celebrating it himself, in ways that are hard to escape, and at times, harder still to enjoy.

After over a decade of the MCU formula’s dominance, it’s easy to mistake Eternals’ deviance for profundity. Films that wrestle with difficult experiences can often be difficult to watch, and intentionally so. Unfortunately, Eternals isn’t bold, merely incongruous. The simpler explanation is truer: Eternals is a mess.

The result is admirable for how grim it is in its multifaceted way, but as a whole, Warning is too disjointed and underdeveloped to really make an impact with its dystopian cautions.

The French Dispatch is probably the worst film of the director’s career. But even his worst effort is worth biting the bullet for.

It would be easier to be less cynical if No Time to Die convincingly delivered on its commitments to Bond’s humanity, rather than nudging it into a handful of scattered scenes, around a lumbering, half-baked drama spiked with explosions and car chases.

One Gets Out Alive is a desperate attempt to explore the immigration crisis through a horror lens, à la Remi Weekes’ stunning film His House. But Menghini’s film is an underwritten hodgepodge of hollow scares.

The well-placed message and the imaginative animation will win over the film’s intended audience: young children. But the moves Where is Anne Frank uses to deliver that message may do as much harm as they bring help.

Another unimaginative woman-led action flick written and directed by men who telegraph their twists and lean on flashbacks instead of bothering to write character development, Kate mistakes “Women can kill just as well as men!” for some sort of new idea.

The ways Zone 414 lifts from its predecessors, borrowing elements from character development to costuming to questions about the utilitarianism of our physical bodies, denies it identifiable or entertaining qualities of its own.

The film is missing out on a cohesive vision, to the point where the audience will spend the entire film waiting for the flashbacks and summaries to end, and for DaCosta’s movie to finally begin. But by the end, she’s only offered a visually stunning homage to the original film. For a director of her talent, that isn’t enough.