While the movie contains some genuine heartfelt moments, the thread connecting them all is flimsy, and the core conflict is overdone. By focusing on a clichéd dilemma and doing nothing to make it particularly unique, Always and Forever concludes the trilogy on a flat note.

The movie is brisk, good-natured, and amusing, but these aren’t qualities that demand the resurrection of a low-rent cartoon empire. The charm of Scooby-Doo and his friends doesn’t have anything to do with the world of bizarre Hanna-Barbera TV curiosities they helped spawn. It comes from their mysterious ability to survive well past their seeming expiration date.

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

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.

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.

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.

1917 is a noble, failed experiment in breaking the rules.

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.

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.

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.

In classic unpredictable Liman fashion, this jumbled and seemingly truncated adaptation of the first book in a YA trilogy is nonetheless likable, entertaining science fiction.

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

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.

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.

Disney Plus’ original Christmas movie Noelle is like a recipe where all the ingredients are delicious, then realizing, once the dish has been cooked, that the flavors cancel each other out.

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

The film is full of potent human drama (largely coming from Gourav’s performance), but as an examination of the world’s intersection with modern India, it usually lands on the wrong side of inauthentic.

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

Burger has crafted a shrug of a movie that insists teenagers should follow the rules and submit to the greater good, but fails to imagine what toll that kind of sacrifice would really take.

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

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.

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.

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.

Apart from some compelling procedural elements, the movie is mostly style, and that style is a generic mess of tics: pseudo-documentary quick zooms, exchanges of fraught glances, and handheld camera work.

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.

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.

Moore and Jenkins are obviously aiming higher than a self-aware noir pastiche, or at least something off to the side of one. Yet those elements of the movie are a lot more enjoyable than sort-of-dream sequences featuring yet another guy in clown makeup.

Amulet attempts to yoke together serious drama with over-the-top genre satisfaction. Instead, it winds up tying itself in unsatisfying knots.