Gunn, for a time, was uniquely aware of how expendable he was. And The Suicide Squad is thoroughly focused on notions of expendability. It’s also violent, perversely comedic, and despite pacing issues, an impressive effects-driven spectacle.

It’s both a canny contemporary riff on the material and a well-made but only moderately scary slasher.

The film’s intermittent delights are momentarily satisfying, but then numbness sets in, like the brain freeze that blooms after you slurp on the film’s titular ice-cream treat.

Jusu paints a rich portrait of Aisha’s life as an undocumented Senegalese immigrant and nanny under the thumb of a wealthy white family, but the horror elements meant to visualize her internal struggles never quite cohere.

This film isn’t a particularly astute portrayal of war, but it does ably depict sacrifice — something ultimately missing from the movie-star restoration of Top Gun: Maverick. Comparing the two movies isn’t especially fair, but it’s still worth noting that this smaller production is doing more with less.

It’s stupid, exciting, unruly (with a 136-minute run time), and strangely refreshing.

Whether or not it’s to anyone’s particular taste, the fact remains that this is an audacious film that asks viewers to take its hand and come along to some particularly dark, surreal, and grotesque places. Throughout that descent, it holds on with a grip that’s tight enough to keep it from spinning out into ridiculousness. If a film this bizarre can produce gasps instead of giggles, that itself is a remarkable achievement.

Alien: Romulus is made up of roughly two parts: a haunted-house story in outer space à la Alien, and a crowd-pleasing horror-action spectacle like Aliens. The former element is stronger than the latter in this case, and the imbalance is one of the reasons Alien: Romulus feels like a by-the-numbers retread of the franchise defining it, rather than the resuscitative breath it so desperately needs.

With stronger visuals than X, a phenomenal and ambitious performance from Mia Goth, but also an emptier and more meandering plot, Pearl loses the fun parts of Ti West’s pastiche. At the same time, it still delivers plenty of thrills and killer moments. It’s both a vividly painted nightmare and a showcase for its star.

From action director Le-Van Kiet, The Princess plays into well-worn genre subversions, but actually sees those subversions through for a satisfying effect.

It’s all extremely effective, mesmerizing stuff, undercut by Shyamalan’s habits as a blunt, obvious writer.

It’s hard to say if it’s comprehensible to someone who doesn’t love the series, but its bombastic action hardly lags during its hour-and-a-half run time. It’s a happy member of this new class of video game movies written with an obvious love of its lore, though possibly not able to stand up without a deep appreciation for the source material.

For all its virtues, Bros is a bit of a frustrating watch, a lovely Nora Ephron-esque charmer buried somewhere underneath the self-imposed burden of representing “5,000 years of queer love stories,” a tug-of-war between the micro and macro that nearly squanders its sunny central romance with an attempt (however noble) to be all things to all people.

Ride or Die strikes some strange tones, and features some questionable motives. But that just supports the world Rei and Nanae have crafted for themselves. It’s messy and imperfect, and in that way, it feels unnervingly real.

There is nothing particularly bold about The Batman. Its strength is in execution.

The ending doesn’t land, but there’s no denying the hilarious, poignant two-thirds that precede it.

Amid the paper-thin plot, stilted script, inartful editing, and imbalanced character development, Jolie stands unblemished. She isn’t the only good thing about the otherwise rote Those Who Wish Me Dead, but she doesn’t have much competition, either.

It’s a polished, entertaining film, but a lot of its meaning derives from how much the audience cares about a handful of TV characters they may or may not already know.

Saint Maud feels like a closed system, more designed than fully felt. Its moments of ecstasy are never as thrilling nor frightening as they should be.

Director Nia DaCosta, who previously helmed 2021’s Candyman remake, has inherited all the downsides of a project set in a shared universe, and few of the upsides. But the good stuff she has to work with? She makes it sing.

In spite of its roughly chronological timeline, The World’s A Little Blurry is formless, less a slickly crafted come-up story and more a long compilation of vignettes, many of which don’t linger long enough. It’s like scrolling through someone’s smartphone to get a sense of what their year was like: some of the discoveries are amazing, and the rest leaves questions behind.

It’s true that Lib smashing against the brick wall of blind faith is an essential part of the story, but at some point, The Wonder crosses a line between eerie ambiguity and aimless floundering.

For horror fans, it’s a rare treat and a fantastic exercise in taking a genre in the opposite direction that everyone else has tried.

At times, the movie feels like it’s having fun in spite of itself. So it’s perfect, in a way, that Edgar Allan Poe keeps turning up to jolt his own story back to life.

It’s what James and Thomas bring to the table that makes this new adaptation of Rebecca worth watching.

I admire Blue Beetle’s craft in portraying the rhythms of a day-to-day life I recognize, but I resent it for trapping that life in a snow globe, where it’s safe and removed from the lives of white folks who think of themselves as allies. In this movie, that life isn’t much more than a nice Latin corner of the DC Universe, a place to visit for good tacos while everyone waits to see what the next Superman movie looks like.

JUNG_E has plenty of spare parts, and occasionally janky green-screen effects. But both the robots and humans it assembles move with unexpected grace.

Campbell, Cox, and Arquette all have chances to shine, and Campbell’s rueful confidence even approaches something vaguely touching. But this is a crowded movie where the body count sometimes inspires relief rather than dread: Finally, some of these extra characters are being cleared out!

The bloat that makes this chapter unsuccessful has nothing to do with cartoon action — Lin gets it, and it’s often spectacular. It’s that, with Diesel’s Dom in the driver’s seat, F9 doesn’t choose a lane

Spider-Man: No Way Home brings Peter to his biggest screw-up yet, making for a fascinatingly messy film that tries to juggle fan service with a finale for Peter’s high school years.

Between the sincerity shared by Sandler and Hernangomez and the high-level craft, Hustle provides enough diversions to hoist our hearts high, even if we wind up craving more specificity from these characters and their travails.

There is some allure to Death on the Nile’s old-fashioned appeal, with its wide shots, its warm hues, and its utter confidence that its mystery is enough to keep the audience interested.

It’s a shame Maggie Q was so busy carrying The Protégé on her back that she couldn’t make time to kick the film’s embarrassing script into shape, too.

With The Old Guard, Prince-Bythewood is taking a lead of her own, showing that this old genre still has much more life left in it, if it’ll let outsiders take charge.

At times, Relic reaches something like lyricism, which lifts a bleak horror movie above hopeless wallowing. The movie isn’t so much doomy or depressing as it is clear-eyed and resolute about its own horrors.

The movie gets livelier every time Stewart appears, as if on a contact high from her intoxication. Crimes of the Future needs those extra jolts of weirded-out star power. In spite of its arresting imagery, it’s sometimes more engaging to think about than to actually watch.

Though it suffers from some of the first movie’s problems — mainly a shallow villain and underwhelming action — Hardy’s ownership of Let There Be Carnage has had a clear impact, with the movie recapturing the electric character dynamic from the original, and getting to the off-kilter odd couple stuff far earlier.

Some of it is sophisticated and more of it is silly, but Behemoth is jarringly effective more often than not.

It’s merely pleasant, a nice diversion that mostly suffers from the strong association with a much better film.

This would-be tale of female empowerment spends too much time worrying about visuals rather than the story it’s telling, and it loses any sense of catharsis as a result.

By channeling the gravitas of Western sci-fi movies, Kalki 2898 AD loses some of the range that makes Indian movies special. Its ambition is to be applauded. Its self-seriousness, not so much.

It’s a bright, breezy film that is overwhelmed by corporate hagiography, a pat on the back for a bunch of movies that never really worked out.

The result is a movie that interrogates Disney tropes but actually delivers on dismantling them.

The humor being volleyed around in Hubie Halloween isn’t malicious; Sandler, as Hubie, is almost always the butt of the joke, and the gags are mostly gross-outs rather than jabs at any specific people. Hubie Halloween may not be Uncut Gems, but it excels at being what it is: a comedy that’s easy to watch, and easy to forget about.

The textures and sounds littered throughout the film plug up the plot holes effectively enough to keep the film sailing for its 91-minute duration, but there’s no glue keeping that confetti in place, and those flaws open up again as soon as there’s enough breathing room to look at them properly.

That it ends up being more of a showcase for Pattinson than Chalamet is the film’s biggest irony, and nearly the only thing that keeps Michôd’s latest from being a total drag. Chalamet, who has proven himself worthy of the stan culture around him in his previous performances, is a black hole of charisma as Hal.

Allowing both love and money to complicate the primal enjoyment of watching muscular men in sweatpants gyrate ends up diluting the film’s once-simple pleasures. Maybe you can’t have it all.

The film is easy on the eyes, and its cast is strong, but that doesn’t make up for a thin story. The action keeps moving by necessity, given how many characters are in play, but stop to inspect the proceedings, and it becomes clear that that movement isn’t based on much.

Roar Uthaug is not a director who seems destined for greater, grander epics, and that’s one of his best qualities. He makes polished B-movies without the delusions of A-list grandeur.

The mash-up of tones is a tough one, as is the film’s central pairing, but it works just well enough.

Last Christmas does the job when it comes to creating a pleasant haze of warm feelings, offering a momentary respite from the cold, cynical world outside the movie theater.

Even when The Bad Guys resembles other movies, it’s stealing from them gracefully, with its own sensibility and energy.

There isn’t a lot of substance beneath that spectacle, but Rumble does monsters, wrestling, and monster–wrestling pretty damn well, and it makes young viewers’ possible first sports movie into something memorable.

In its creation of a hushed, lonely idyll at the end of the world, disturbed by techno-biblical visions of disaster, what it recalls more than anything else is Lost. And like Lost, it’s most assured when it isn’t explaining itself or looking for climax or resolution, neither of which it really finds.

Eggers has made a visually grand movie, with an impressively doomy atmosphere and one hell of a closing shot. As a finely wrought monument to the ultimate Gothic horror movie, it’s worth seeing. But as a new reading of one of the most resonant stories of the past 150 years, it rings hollow.

No bodily function goes untapped in Sasquatch Sunset, which happens to be a meditative communion with North America’s glorious woodland.

Elio is a big-swing movie, an attempt to push viewers out of their comfort zones and into a strange new setting. But while it successfully blasts off to a colorful new world of wonder, it doesn’t always land.

It’s very much in the tradition of another Spielberg summer creature movie: Like Jaws, Beast heightens basic human fears about a sharp-toothed predator into something impossible, even ridiculous, yet weirdly plausible for most people.

It’s the rare teen movie that doesn’t seem like it’s mostly a fantasy, that gets beyond the big, artificial beats of series like Glee and Riverdale.

The warmth and tenderness with which the film explores the relationship between Brian and his creation are real.

Ultimately, everything about Arlo the Alligator Boy feels like a setup for something yet to come. That isn’t an inherently bad thing, but it does shift the audience’s expectations for the movie.

If we have to wade through some silly, pandering nostalgia to get to this pleasingly vast dinosaur playground, so be it.

The film has fun lobbing snarky one-liners and outrageous bloodshed at the audience, but on the whole, Violent Night’s big red bag of self-aware tricks is overstuffed.

In Glass Onion, made amid the dissociation of COVID, [Johnson] just lashes out left and right at a series of easy targets: the utopian fantasies of Big Tech, the hypocrisy of liberal politics, the fatuousness of online image-making. It’s muddled stuff, embodied in a gaggle of callow caricatures that he struggles to establish a natural kinship between.

While Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice isn’t a bad movie, it’s not a very smart one. Constant plot recapping aside, this is a quick-moving comedy with plenty to enjoy.

It has its share of creepy moments, rising tension, and sudden-blast-of-music jump scares, but as a suspense story, it fizzles out surprisingly early.

Each half of the movie represents a different aspect of Spy x Family’s appeal, and each half is quite good for what it’s supposed to be. They just don’t gel together at feature length.

If anything, this version could have benefited from being weirder. Given that weird is territory Zemeckis seems to specialize in, The Witches’ relatively tame nature is a letdown.

On paper, the result is one of the more meaningful departures from convention that Disney has seen in recent years. In execution, though, it falls ever so slightly short, though not for lack of originality.

It’s equal parts modern fairy tale, time-travel movie that’s meant to make people understand and appreciate their own era, and Christmas magic movie, and the creators don’t do anything meaningful to refresh those genre trappings, or play with their conventions.

AKA is at its best when it showcases Alban Lenoir, Action Star, rather than its own status as a less stylish Man on Fire. It’s still worth watching if you’re interested in the new wave of French action cinema, and one of its most intriguing stars. But if you haven’t seen the Lost Bullet movies yet, definitely prioritize those for excellent Lenoir action.

Imagining space as an extension of earthly capitalism certainly isn’t new, but at least Space Sweepers’ cast has the collective charm to make the material feel like fresh, worthwhile viewing among the increasing detritus of streaming content

Part cheesy Hallmark movie, part community-theater production, part A Christmas Carol meets It’s a Wonderful Life, the special is a mosaic of holiday tropes — and that’s a good thing. The acting is over-the-top, and the plotline has as much subtlety as Dolly’s bedazzled platform boots, but its larger-than-life theatrical nature makes it even more enjoyable.

Murphy’s charm, his close chemistry with Hall, Snipes’ wily performance, and the resplendent costumes uplift this nostalgia trip.

Project Power’s burst of color comes from its central conceit and Joost and Schulman’s sense of style. It’s bright and attractive, but it fizzles out quickly. Tomlin’s idea is innovative, but the story he tells with it is tired.

Godzilla x Kong (yes, it’s styled like that, like a streetwear collab) is beyond “good” or “bad” or “movies.” It’s an arena show, a pro wrestler shouting in the squared circle, thumping their chest and raising the jumbotron hype meter before doing their signature move.

As Berg and Wahlberg (perfect partners, even in name) ascended inexorably toward a parodic level of Bostonian-ness in Spenser Confidential, I wondered if I wouldn’t be having a better time just getting a more concentrated dose of Arkin in The Kominsky Method.

Bubble is tender, even meditative. But its best ideas are sadly swept away amid a wave of half-formed ones.

The film is genuinely clever at times in the way it explores the construction of illusions. But the process is deflating, because it also pushes the audience away, cutting them out of any investment or belief in the narrative.

It’s a curiously specific movie, a gag aimed at fans of joyously culty, messy nonsense like Guns Akimbo or Crank — at least, until that final fight suddenly starts taking the narrative seriously. Even then, though, it’s best to watch Boy Kills World with the same snarky detachment the rest of its run time encourages.

As a Captain America movie, Brave New World is batting strongly below average. The filmmakers try to dodge the political commentary that’s always marked the MCU’s Captain America movies, and focus on personal stakes instead, but those plotlines don’t land with any force or focus.

f not for the uptempo rhythm, The Water Man’s thin plotting would make it a slog. If not for Oyelowo’s handsomely mounted camera capturing the forest in supernatural blues and reds, the audience’s attention might wander to their phones. Thankfully, the well-executed components support the fairy tale when the tale itself runs short.

The artistry at work in The Wave isn’t enough to keep the film from caving in under its middling story.

Hancock, in what might be his best film, grazes with greatness by constructing an enthralling thriller that relies on the talent of its three leading men to mine regret for mystery. But the mawkish little habits, the slow start, and the timid finale just barely get Hancock caught. It’s the little things that tear The Little Things apart.

Though the plot beats of The One and Only Ivan are predictable, given that it’s a story about sad caged animals, there’s enough genuine emotion threaded through the formulaic story to make the movie enjoyable, surpassing some otherwise cheesy moments.

An overwhelming chunk of The Forever Purge’s brisk 103 minutes is devoted to the film’s Mexican immigrants saving the Tuckers’ lives, helping them survive, and furthering their moral development. It is, frankly, an insulting running thread that sours an otherwise deft horror-thriller.

It’s too pretty for a midnight showing, but far too gross and skin-crawling for when the sun’s up. It could have either been a wonderful gourmet action-movie meal, or a greasy joyful mess that cult audiences love more than they should. Instead, it’s somewhere in the middle — a pretty good meal that doesn’t measure up to its individual ingredients.

The film emerges as a perfectly agreeable action movie, one that’s both true to the concept of Charlie’s Angels, and probably unrecognizable to anyone time-traveling from the 1970s. That’s okay, though. Some concepts have to evolve to survive.

The satire is goofy and insightful. But unlike The Daily Show’s ripped-from-the-headlines comedy, or Stewart’s grim debut feature, the hostage biopic Rosewater, his second feature feels like it was broadcast from another galaxy, and is only now reaching our current Earthly conversation.

The parts of Snyder’s Army of the Dead are definitely stronger than the whole. But if you’re looking for a preposterous onslaught of blood and guts melded with sharp-tongued humor, then Army of the Dead is the big swinging zombie film of your fantasies.

The Creator is a fully realized future in the service of a rote story and flat characters that only gesture in compelling directions; I’d rather not bother with that story at all.

Needle in a Timestack lacks the interior worldbuilding necessary to pull off its heartstring-tugging intentions, and the result is a movie that unintentionally confirms how no good ever comes from men who obsessively refuse to leave women alone.

Handcuffed by the photorealistic animation, which emphasizes high-res fidelity over expressionism, and the ties to The Lion King, which constantly remind viewers of the original masterpiece, Mufasa can never quite escape the Shadowlands.

There’s Someone Inside Your House is intermittently effective, but ultimately unremarkable, and it feels like a product of its time in disappointing ways.

Old is a pretty lousy horror film about adults, but a pretty good one about children.

While this movie may feel like a Simpsons-esque case of a series failing to recapture lost grandeur, the result is still mile-a-minute fun if you can keep past expectations out of sight and out of mind. Or… you could just watch the first film again.

It’s got one terrifically creepy sequence, a genuinely fascinating family story, some solid jokes, and a thermal spring that’s also sort of an ancient god. And if that still isn’t enough for you, it’s also weirdly as much about baseball as it is about swimming at night.

A tonally bizarre film that’s half motion-capture Pinocchio story, half live-action adaptation of Futurama’s infamously melancholy “Jurassic Bark” episode, Finch relies on Hanks’ instant likeability and genuine warmth to drive home the devastation of a post-apocalyptic world.