Kline’s movie works best when it blurs the lines between the people of a nerdy subculture and the style of their obsessions.

Seimetz has crafted the perfect anxious monster, repeating an idea often enough to let it take root without explaining so much about it that it can be rationalized away. It’s all nestled within a dark — and at times, darkly funny — psychological horror movie.

Few movies have ever struck that balance quite as well as Craven’s four Scream movies. Thanksgiving doesn’t quite reach that series’ meteoric heights, but it comes far closer than anything else in recent years — including the Scream franchise itself.

The Cursed has its own mythology and some unnerving, bloody innovations around what’s basically a werewolf story, but Ellis gets a lot of his mileage around the standard creature-feature horror-story things he doesn’t do.

Its statements about gender, violence, trauma, and entitlement are blaring and blatant, with little room for ambiguity or interpretation. And that absolutely seems to be the movie’s primary point.

In an exhausted, introspective, dad-jokey way, Bad Boys for Life gives these boys a definitive ending. It isn’t one fans ever expected, but it’s highly watchable.

It helps a lot that the filmmakers have footage of the couple and their climbs going back to 2015. That sense of scale does a lot to put their growth, both personally and professionally, on full display.

This is a rom-com, formulaic and comforting and breezy, with some action trappings, but with no expectations that anyone needs to care about the results of that action.

In spite of the dystopian premise, Kosinski brings a light touch to Spiderhead. Colorful cinematography and spirited editing contrast with the characters’ tragic backstories and bleak living conditions, and highlight the disparity between the chemically induced highs and nightmarish lows of Abnesti’s experiments.

Designed to fit, then subvert and smash, archetypes, the two leads of The School for Good and Evil and their strong friendship turn the movie from fantastical fun to memorable delight.

The concept of a kid getting magical powers that help him escape his mundane life isn’t anything new, but The Main Event stands out by avoiding overplayed clichés and focusing on the emotional message.

It’s highly competent throughout, and outright brilliant at times, but it lacks the necessary level of connection with the real world. And by the end, it’s lost track even of its own hard-earned but fragile sense of emotion.

For the most part, Weng weaves adventure and sentimentality together, but when it comes down to it, Finding ’Ohana works when it focuses on the ohana at its core.

This movie does one thing, and does it well, via methods that escalate to nearly cartoonish proportions. And it’s clear in absolutely every grim, gory, gutting-it-out scene that Helander and Tommila know exactly who they’re making this movie for.

All three leads are terrific — especially Vikander, whose Japanese is impressive — but they’re working with material that doesn’t measure up to their talents.

Sometimes, for a good time, all you need is a great actor and a story that seems like a real bad idea.

Director John Hancock and lead actress Zohra Lampert collaborate to produce something stranger and vaguer than the film’s countless contemporaries, giving the heroine far greater agency.

The animation is gorgeous and crisp, and the script keeps its referential nature low-key. This could easily be someone’s first Bob’s Burgers experience, and it remains likable enough throughout that it probably wouldn’t be their last.

The current DC movie universe is always dark, but it seems that with a movie drenched in the neon aesthetic of the ’80s, they’ve finally found a way to dim even Wonder Woman’s light.

The goal isn’t to find a killer, so much as it is to emphasize the ways women’s stories are often dismissed, and how people who aren’t well-off aren’t offered the same institutional consideration and care as the rich. It’s a compelling point to make, but one almost lost in the movie’s murky execution.

War Machine hits all the right spots for this kind of movie. It’s lean and propulsive. The practical stunts are impressive and immersive. And Ritchson, even playing a man so throttled by his own past that he doesn’t want to feel anything, is a compelling screen presence.

The latest from Spanish writer-director Alberto Vázquez is transgressive and aggressive to a degree that’s hard to fathom: It weaponizes cute cartoon creatures against its audience, and introduces innocence and beauty in order to tear it apart on screen in the most horrific ways possible. The film isn’t an easy watch, but it is a bold and memorable one.

Ron’s Gone Wrong could be a movie about the perils of social media, but it works better as a movie about recognizing that friendship requires work, no matter whether the connection blossoms through a high-tech device, or the old-fashioned way, in person.

As Jasmine, Zoe Renee gives Master its naked emotional center. But its anchor is the terrific Regina Hall, as quietly magnetic here as she was in the underseen Support the Girls.

Shang-Chi is refreshing in how little it’s concerned with big-picture universe-building details. Instead, the movie focuses on an extremely personal story that also implies exciting things about the future of Marvel movies.

With The Harbinger, Andy Mitton depicts a world where closeness to others is everyone’s undoing, which turns a standard haunting tale into a profound time capsule of modern dread.

It has some great, grotesque visuals, which makes it a real shame that this film isn’t getting a theatrical release. And it accomplishes what many fans (including this one) wanted for the series, which was to pull it out of the creative purgatory where it’s been stuck for a couple of decades now.

Wright takes an exhaustive approach to the band’s career, going album by album, talking to collaborators and supporters as well as to the Maels. Throughout, Russell and Ron remain somewhat aloof, perhaps by design. They’re more open about their past and their intentions here than they’ve ever been in interviews, but they aren’t about to give away all their secrets.

Goth is a scene-stealer, and some of Levy’s visuals are memorable in their otherworldly quality. Cinorre’s initially provocative vision of vengeance at least makes Mayday worth a look.

The Lost City doesn’t have the most exciting or novel plot, and it doesn’t push action filmmaking forward. But it does feature two of the moment’s greatest movie stars coming in at the top of their rom-com game, and mixing adventure and love.

Rockefeller only repeats other science fiction, rather than inventing big ideas of his own.

If you already have an investment in the franchise’s volleyball teams and characters, this movie hits. And boy does it capture the epic highs of the show. It’s likely to fully reignite the fandom once again.

In the hands of a more talented filmmaker, this movie had the potential to become a new martial-arts classic. In Reiné’s, it’s the kind of thing that plays well as an evening’s diversion on Netflix, but doesn’t ever rise above the level of “just another good mid-tier actioner."

There just isn’t much to differentiate Next Goal Wins from any other cliche-ridden underdog sports story. But what does salvage it is Taika Waititi’s ability to create quirky worlds filled with lovable characters.

It’s titillation with a side of radicalization. And if any teenagers whose folks have installed parental controls on their computers do watch this documentary late at night with the volume turned down, they’ll learn more about workers seizing the means of production than they learn about sex — which is far more dangerous to the powers that be than any bare breasts or asses.

Although the film’s halfhearted attempt at a message lands with a splat, Cocaine Bear does all it really needs to do, by providing an hour and a half’s worth of winking, druggy, bloody amusement.

The movie’s thread about parental neglect and/or sacrifice is wispy. As a carnival geek show, though, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy delivers the goods, and at greater volume than its unofficial predecessors. It isn’t as personal a movie as the possessive title implies, but the marketing is largely correct: For the first time in ages, a mummy presides over a real horror show.

While there aren’t as many big laughs or surprises as the first film, Ready or Not 2 has some incredible moments.

Flora and Son excels in its humane yet prickly depiction of Flora’s relationship with motherhood.

Night Teeth isn’t genuinely original, substantive, or scary. But as a remix of the vampire thriller’s most lizard-brain-focused qualities, Netflix’s latest Halloween offering is appreciated for how few demands it puts on its audience.

There’s a focus on ritual in Huesera that builds both its horror and its character study in compelling ways.

The Adam Project is zippy, agreeable sci-fi fun that produces a few good chuckles. But in moments where undiluted sweetness is required, the film’s glib writing stands out in a negative way.

Happily is incredibly fun from start to finish. If nothing else, its nagging flaws feel less like errors, and more like untapped potential. Grabinski is clearly onto something, and it’s only a matter of time before he truly finds it.

The film works like gangbusters, and it’s a terrific vehicle for Cage, but not for the reasons people might expect.

These characters move in a world that is stunningly visualized but superficially conceived, and The Colony embodies a genre that seems — perhaps like humanity itself — unable to take a step forward in imagining a different future.

Death of a Unicorn delivers on its biggest promise — a gnarly, funny creature feature with a fantastic ensemble, and all the unicorn-themed gore you can imagine.

Iron Lung is an immersive experience. It traps the audience in a close, suffocating space with Simon and the seeming inevitability of his death, and the sense of terror is palpable and thrilling. It’s a slow-burn horror movie, but it certainly isn’t lacking in scares.

The chemistry between stars Kumail Nanjiani and Issa Rae keeps the romantic comedy charming.

Though it’s packed with remixes of and callbacks to Eve’s history, it’s a dazzling, surprisingly accessible summation of his visual and sonic styles.

The presentation of this filmed version is occasionally rickety, but not nearly enough to stifle such a stellar production.

The film is admirable for its patient commitment to unpacking the children’s feelings about each other, the building, and other relics from their pasts, all as they learn how to carry their attachments and memories to new places.

The Imaginary isn’t as visually or narratively rich as Mary and the Witch’s Flower, or as transcendent as Miyazaki projects like The Boy and the Heron. But it does feel like a move in the right direction for Ponoc, an effort at finding its own voice and its own footing.

It’s appropriately goofy given the premise and the structure, but a brisk pace and a committed cast turns it into a diverting indie horror-movie spin on a familiar gimmick.

This is a movie meant to introduce viewers to the real emotions people bring to their escapist fantasy worlds. But for most viewers, it’s more likely to simply be a confusing, exhilarating, context-free introduction to the fantasy world itself.

The ending is a bold play in a movie full of bold plays, but it seems designed more to whip up discussion than to draw the narrative together, or to give viewers either a horror-movie catharsis or a marriage-drama resolution.

Ma’s performance remains a rich source of color and emotion; the thinness of Angela’s character, on the other hand, becomes a pall hanging over the movie.

The footage-forward approach does make the whole thing tremendously fun to watch.

James Gunn’s real superpower is his ability to wear this comic-book nonsense lightly — to take it seriously within the world of the movie without feeling like he’s assigning homework.

Its creepy unease lingers, and just as in It Follows and The Guest, Monroe is the face of that unease. That’s the power of a great scream queen.

With the energy of a Saturday morning cartoon that comes and goes, Fowler’s movie entertains and sneaks in a message about feeling sad, alone, and unmoored. It’s not for longtime Sonic fans, but it’s guaranteed to be someone’s nostalgic favorite in the year 2038.

Returning directors Jared Bush and Byron Howard once again blend the high-concept political messaging about embracing diversity with a blitz of visual gags, pop-culture references, and endearingly silly characters that ensure Zootopia 2 never feels too preachy. The film moves at a breakneck pace, driven by several major chase scenes and a flood of jokes that come so fast that even if one doesn’t land, there’s something else to laugh at a moment later.

Even without being compared to Train to Busan, Peninsula lacks the grounding to be able to stand alone. There’s never a dull moment, but there’s nothing to make a lasting impression, either.

Though their conflicts eventually lead to horror-movie violence, the cruelest fate, the movie implies, may be a professional life consigned to malls, overpriced novelty coffee drinks, and other commercial/cultural remnants of a millennial youth.

There’s something pleasurably disreputable about Adrian Lyne’s twisted domestic drama Deep Water — a trashy, tabloid scandalousness that’s almost quaint.

At heart, Vivarium is a puzzle, a story full of twists and thin on character development. To the film’s credit, the alien-ness is effective, lending Vivarium the tenseness of a horror movie and engaging the audience where the story fails.

A Real Pain isn’t a movie about real conclusions or grand statements, but one about deeply personal relationships and how pain and history can affect them. In that way, it’s powerful, as well as deeply funny and touching.

Capone is an ambitious, impressive film. But there’s a bittersweetness to it, too.

It doesn’t fully cohere, but it sure is a party.

The sequel loses the small-scale, intense focus in favor of The Conjuring-level supernatural effects and action. At its best, it’s much scarier than the first movie. But it also comes with a level of full-on action-goofiness that Derrickson and Cargill avoided in Black Phone.

This might be the funniest cast Disney has ever assembled in the MCU. Every character plays off the others wonderfully, giving the whole movie the kind of chemistry that the franchise hasn’t had since the original Avengers.

The movie may not be what fans normally tune into the franchise for, but it’s certainly daring and different, showcasing how the core characters each react to being pushed beyond their limits. The animation is spectacular, with thrilling, complicated, multi-dimensional fights and some actual scares when it seems like there’s no way out.

The movie is full of mood and carefully paced terror that is more sustained than bolstered, with a plotty ending that never pays off the movie’s conspiratorial promise. The good news is, in true exploitation fashion, the movie’s final moments are grisly, pitch-black, and perfect.

While the film isn’t groundbreaking, it’s an easygoing, unchallenging experience that’s suitable for the season.

Like its predecessors, Bill & Ted Face the Music is ultimately just friendly fluff, but Winter and Reeves are charming together, and the need for Bill and Ted to grow up a little helps give the film a backbone.

Mottola and Hamm don’t seem like they’re trying to rewrite Hamm in Fletch’s image, or vice versa. They look more like they’re making exactly the half silly, half sly movie they personally want to see.

The Pod Generation isn’t going to leave anyone with the dread and emotional impetus of a hard-hitting, scary sci-fi future, or the uplift and catharsis of a well-observed satisfying one. It’s more of a placid puzzler than a moving experience, though there’s certainly plenty to see on screen, and plenty to recognize in the commercialization it lampoons.

Working with fellow directors Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger, Gibney has delivered a swiftly paced chronicle of history in the making, rich in both immediacy and uncertainty.

Raimi’s cinematic wizardry lends loads of dazzle to the pack of references and callbacks that make up a large part of the film’s middle. But strip away all the sparks, and Multiverse of Madness is simply leaning on the same cross-referential thrill-of-recognition joy-button that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been frantically pressing for more than a decade now.

Nothing about where the story is going or how it’ll get there stylistically can be taken for granted. That’s one of the biggest joys of Shaw’s projects — the sense of something new and different happening, of that anti-capitalist, anti-conformist, anti-containment bent that stretches throughout the story also extending into every aspect of the film’s aesthetics.

See For Me updates the home-invasion formula with a couple of clever twists and a key relationship. But writers Adam Yorke and Tommy Gushue and director Randall Okita only push the formula so far before they run out of innovation.

For people who just want more stories told in this world, and don’t mind leaving Bird Box’s initial characters behind, the spinoff’s small mysteries and shocks may be enough to occupy a Friday night or a lazy Sunday afternoon. But for people who want more depth out of their sad-dad-found-family horror stories, The Last of Us is already out there. Bird Box Barcelona just feels a little late to the game.

Ballerina may not satisfy all the John Wick stalwarts, but the movie does have its own satisfying angles, thanks to two things the filmmakers do radically differently from the rest of the franchise — and one thing they take straight from the series’ heart.

More importantly, the jokes are sharp, and a lot of them lean on adult sensibilities — though in the way the union bit in Shrek 2 does, instead of being crude or cruel.

Where 2022’s Scream showed how the series could keep adapting and changing to fit new cinematic trends, this one hints at how unsustainable franchise maintenance can feel over the long term, even for a series that’s enjoying its deserved resurgence in creativity and popularity.

Cold Storage makes horror-comedy look as easy and appealing as it’s supposed to be.

The lead actors carry the film, and the individual scenes are strong, though it never quite captures the deep longing that is threaded throughout the original.

It’s a comedy about self-serious criminals for as long as it needs to be, a vampire slasher for as long as that’s fun, and a story about a vampire who craves love and attention by the end, fluidly shifting from one tone and genre to the next at exactly the right moment. Even more impressively, each version of Abigail is just as fun and bloody as the last.

A lot of the plot elements feel overly familiar, but in the few moments where the movie transcends those trappings, it’s a fun, memorable romp.

By the end of Fresh, the film hasn’t done anything more than restating what it made clear at the start: Dating is hell, and women deserve more than to be treated like pieces of meat.

The script lets all three characters get satisfyingly messy, as each of them crosses small lines that surprise the others, in a series of transgressions that pile up until the three people at the end of the film are entirely different from the three at the start.

While it captures the fantastical quirk conjured up in Greenberg’s pages, the edges are sanded down into something more digestible.

This isn’t a Murakami movie; it’s the Murakami movie.

Malignant is rarely scary, but its outlandish bits likely didn’t happen by accident — not when it culminates in scenes so ludicrously over the top that they invite both fist-pumping cheers and wheeze-inducing laughter.

In spite of a few nail-biting sequences, Run is more of a slog than a sprint.

Though any Cage-free attempts at comedy fall flat, the action remains exciting, thanks in large part to Logothetis’ steady-handed, no-frills approach. Who knew putting together a bunch of gifted martial artists and letting them exercise those skills could take an action film so far?

The gratifications of Fear Street: 1978 are not in its few surprises, but in its continued exploration of the history and dynamics of two social-stratified communities separated along the fault lines of unexplained affluence and inexplicable horror.

Villeneuve has spent his career merging intellectual and philosophical queries with striking otherworldly images, but that duality is frustratingly imbalanced in his vision for Dune. The visuals are mesmerizing, but the world-building is flat.

The animation really anchors the movie, which otherwise feels a bit uneven, especially in terms of Anzu and Karin’s relationship.