In a movie that feels constricted in close-ups and boxed-in set pieces, the group’s music gives Moana 2 a much-needed epic quality. There are… devastating clunkers.

Bolstered by a (mostly) stellar cast, who make the iconic characters their own and show off their spectacular singing voices, Mean Girls is a fun little update, though it never transcends the experience of the original movie.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s a laugh riot, with the potential to go down as one of the decade’s smartest and funniest comedies.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s a pleasant enough hangout movie, and someday it may be held up as a slanted portrait of what mid-2020 felt like for people privileged enough to ignore politics. But it still feels like a minor movie in the face of a major catastrophe.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Alpha is more of a horror-inflected drama than an outright genre piece, which allowed plenty of critics to fixate, not unfairly, on its failings as an AIDS metaphor. Yet the movie has resonance beyond simply recalling the years of its creator’s youth.

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

The series may actually be subject to a bizarre formula: The looser and more disparate the parts of a Sonic movie are, the better the whole somehow holds together. At least that would explain why Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is, improbably, the best of the lot so far.

It is remarkable that his three-hour Wandering Earth prequel is simultaneously stranger and more emotionally grounded than the earlier film. Yet even at this length, even with eye-popping moments and believable characters, some crucial humanity feels missing.

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

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.

DC League of Super-Pets isn’t groundbreaking, but it’s a perfect way for DC Comics fans to introduce their kids to their favorite characters and their adorable and surprisingly competent sidekicks.

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

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.

While Let Us In has a promising horror sci-fi premise, it squanders its potential by never finding any depth, nuance, or resonance in a legend kids actually find authentically creepy.

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.

It’s mostly a movie with designs on over-the-top action that are undercut by the actual action.

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.

Edgar Wright has built his reputation on steering his movies into unlikely, exciting places. In The Running Man, it rarely feels like anyone’s hand is on the wheel.

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.

The movie’s strongest moments come when the action gets so ridiculous that the audience almost has to laugh, even as they’re wondering who’s going to die next.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Barker’s obvious care and respect for his subject makes Sergio stirring to watch. But as Craig Borten’s script leans more and more on romance, the film flounders.

The film’s ultimate admiration of celebrity is only vaguely tolerable because its concurrent message of inclusivity is theoretically admirable — but must it be delivered by the likes of a thoroughly exhausting, irredeemably self-satisfied James Corden?

Come for the fun gadgets and the kids saving the world, and stay for a message about recovery and kindness, delivered so earnestly that it isn’t saccharine at all.

Camera movements in perfect concert with the action plus fluid, grounded choreography performed by a former national champion kickboxer combine for a mesmerizing experience that easily would have been the best action movie of 2023 if it had come out just a week earlier.

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.

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.

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.

This movie is its own kind of Frankenstein’s monster, stitched together from a thousand different parts and lurching into disturbing life. The Bride! seems like it was meant to be discussed, analyzed, and unpacked at length, with different fans seizing on different elements as the key to the whole shambling creature. But like so many of the Frankensteinian creatures that preceded it onto the screen, it’s a bit of an unwieldy monster.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This cut isn’t going to win anyone over — it’s a self-serious sermon to the converted that isn’t terribly concerned with getting the audience to like its characters — but it all goes down much smoother than the theatrical cut, which feels garish and jagged by comparison.

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.

Ostrowski and Benjamin make a few key changes to Sapkowski’s story, mostly for the better. The stakes feel higher, the scope feels fit for the medium, and the twists feel right for the times. The ending will likely be debated, and joining in on that conversation is a great excuse to read Sapkowski’s original story.

This attention to detail and reproduction is the movie’s greatest strength — The War of the Rohirrim looks and feels like Jackson’s LotR in the best way. It’s packed full of sword-swinging adventure, kingly drama and riveting monster mayhem. Unfortunately, it also reproduces the aspect of the Jackson movies that has aged most poorly.

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.

In The Craft: Legacy, the witches have no evil intent, only giddy desires and confident decision-making. This suggests witchcraft doesn’t invite trouble, regardless of how it’s used — it’s just power that can vanquish problems. The Craft portrays witchcraft as alluring, complex and consequential: in The Craft: Legacy, witchcraft is fashionable, quick to master, and easily renounced.

Orphan: First Kill is a tremendously clever slasher that has fun with, and lives up to, its absurd premise.

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.

It’s a lean, smartly shot horror-thriller, and though most of the characters are thin, the performances lend them more depth.

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.

It’s a sharp, exciting movie — one that finally gives YA dystopias the ending that the genre trend deserves.

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.

The movie improves with distance. Days later, I mostly remember the good times The Beekeeper offers: Jason Statham beating on fools who deserve beating, bringing the pain in exciting and inventive ways, all while delivering bee-themed one-liners. Sometimes, that’s all you want from a bee movie.

It’s one of the director’s more mainstream efforts. What could easily devolve into a Crank-like exercise in hyperactivity is conducted with a steady hand and an appreciation for the details. Sono wants his audience to luxuriate in the brutal beauty of Boutella wielding a gatling gun.

Deep Water is more like the movie plenty of people probably assumed Deep Blue Sea would be like in the first place: watchable, forgettable shlock.

The film feels clumsy, hurried, and above all, like an admission of creative defeat.

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.

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.

Tyranny of tone and language aren’t the movie’s only problems. Its story is similarly half-baked, with allusions galore to overcoming demons and finding inner strength that are only ever lip-service, rather than being dramatically or even comedically expressed.

Ultimately, The Devil Made Me Do It’s attempt to shake the franchise up with a new director falls short, and like the young man at the heart of its supernatural horror, it risks losing its soul.

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

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

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.

Bruised generally lacks the kind of immersion that a story like this demands. It wants us to step alongside Jackie and stay with her, experiencing her pain and her triumph, but it makes the journey from locker room to octagon unfathomably long.

It’s a daringly weird debut, executed with real style and vision.

Practically everything about Wolf truly relies on MacKay, who has to be convincing enough in his at-odds identity to simultaneously draw viewers’ empathy and promote their unease. And he is, for every minute of this film’s 98-minute run time.

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

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.

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.

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.

Billie Holiday’s skills as a talented singer, vibrant performer, and intuitive improviser never come first. All the qualities that made her singular play second fiddle to her many relationships with awful men.

The strangeness of the material isn’t VHYES’ primary attraction; it’s the atypical mode of storytelling and sense of sincerity.

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 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.

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.

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.

This film, unfortunately, fails to live up to the quality of its influences. Filomarino’s Beckett lacks urgency, wit, and a lead actor capable of pulling together its underwritten themes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Director Michael Scott, working in a moody color palette that often makes the movie look like an extended episode of Riverdale, keeps the surprises coming at a pace that ensures no one will think too hard about the fact that there aren’t really any clues to follow. The pleasure of Dangerous Lies isn’t finding out whodunit, but simply yelling, “What?” at your screen as increasingly unbelievable twists play out.