Throughout its slim but slow 83 minutes, Umma piles up missed-opportunity scenes that cry out for a ghoulish sense of humor or an audience-rattling jump.

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.

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

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.

Day Shift’s peculiar blend of action, comedy, and horror doesn’t feel like a choice made with the intention of bringing in the widest possible audience. This film’s mixing of cinematic flavors harkens back to a time when big releases could have highly specific, off-kilter vibes, most likely aimed at a niche audience.

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

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.

The movie isn’t the most comedic or innovative addition to the romantic comedy genre, but it is sweet romantic fluff. Occasionally, it falls into the pitfalls of the genre by introducing fabricated tension that the rest of the film doesn’t really justify. But ultimately, it still checks off all the boxes it should.

Mermaid challenges our expectations about relationships and what they can mean for different people, picking up where Del Toro left off and taking the concept even further. This unlikely romance, brought to life by Pemberton and Larson, proves there is love and community to be found, even between two people (or creatures) from very different backgrounds.

The new sequel on Disney Plus has some fun moments, but it can’t capture the first movie’s originality and magic.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The movie’s mock-jaundiced attitude toward social media is itself satirical, and there’s a germ of a funny idea about how principled liberals can get entangled in pointless social media battles and infighting. But it’s eclipsed by an unavoidably moneyed perspective that presumes privileged people are inherently liberal, rather than attacking the hypocrisy of rich liberals in particular.

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

Director David Dobkin doesn’t land every single beat, but he taps into that well of carefree exultation so potently that the movie’s stumbles hardly register.

Jungle Cruise packs in everything satisfying about an adventure movie, with some of its own twists.

Unfortunately, the film’s most compelling questions don’t ever get answered.

Neither cheap fast food nor the greatest meal you will ever taste, the Statham Special maintains standards that are a cut above. Helmed by stuntman-turned-director Ric Roman Waugh (Angel Has Fallen), Shelter is sharply paced, violent as heck, palpably shot on location, and laced with Surrogate Dad Pathos.

Any insta-doc could have found folks who profited from the short squeeze, and shown the material goods or comfortable lifestyle their profiteering bought. Rise of the Players instead puts viewers in the investors’ seat at the poker table, making real their tension, self-doubt, and anxiety over holding onto a stock the experienced players say is worthless.

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.

For the most part, Black Christmas is a breath of fresh air. Unlike their 1974 counterparts, these sisters are more than just bodies to be dismembered; they’re forcefully bonding together to fight back against an oppressive system.

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.

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

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.

Cartoonish as it is, Bullet Train is committed to letting its core cast make as big an impression as they can through quirks and fights, as Olkewicz’s knotty script ping-pongs between past and present.

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.

Look Both Ways has nothing meaningful to say about any of the subjects it’s supposedly addressing. Even when the filmmakers get little details right (Natalie’s animation references are spot-on and very convincing), the movie is playing the supportive friend to its audience, patting viewers on the back and talking about how everything happens for a reason, and it’ll all turn out great.

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

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.

Schweighöfer’s prequel fails to offer the same level of excitement or gore as Snyder’s film. The heists are all snoozing affairs, and ultimately, the film succumbs to the script’s franchise ambitions.

The sequel abandons clever mysteries in favor of more straightforward action-horror, losing some of what made the original special in the process.

Disney Plus’ Lady and the Tramp flattens the original movie’s dreamy love story by trading genuine emotion for artificiality and a past that never existed.

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.

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.

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.

It doesn’t capture the full horror potential of climate change, rising floodwaters, or even bloodthirsty sharks. But the filmmakers sure throw themselves into the fray with enthusiasm.

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.

This kind of aggrieved posturing isn’t a good look in 2023. Geek culture won. Mardenborough’s story is real, and has a much more significant dimension than victory in some imagined gaming culture war.

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.

Nothing comes of anything either man says. It’s all noise — all passionless anger going in circles, captured by a camera that seems averse to lingering on the tremendous talents of Hopkins and Goode, who try their best to rescue Freud’s Last Session from itself.

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.

A B-movie designed by people who knew exactly what kind of enjoyable trash they were making, Jolt is unabashedly silly, sloppily written, and overly reliant on the likability of Beckinsale and fellow cast members Stanley Tucci and Jai Courtney. But it’s also a breezily entertaining reminder of how delightful it is to watch Beckinsale get pissed off.

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.

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

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.

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.

An evident attempt to right the ship has turned into a calamitous case of mission drift, as a property with no identity travels in nonsensical circles, looking for a sustainable new direction.

When Secret Headquarters indulges the fun of kids with superpowered gadgets, it shines. When it narrows the focus to the conflict between Charlie and his dad, and the toll that being a masked vigilante takes on family life, the movie stands out from other entries in the “kids discover superpowers and/or super-gadgets” subgenre.

AGGRO DR1FT isn’t an enjoyable or particularly well-made movie, but it is the movie I’ve thought about most this year. For better or worse, that’s worth something.

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.

Even though this movie is sometimes haphazardly stitched together, like a dismembered hand added onto a corpse, Lisa Frankenstein is shocked back to life by magnetic visuals, engaging chemistry, and deliciously escalating motives.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s just enough entertainment to provide fodder for one diverting sleepover, but it’ll be forgotten as soon as the morning dawns.

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

It’s a franchise reduced to nothing more than a parade of hollow, familiar images, lightly repackaged in hopes that we’ll buy another ticket and try to revisit the emotions we felt when we encountered this world for the first time.

It’s depressing, in more ways than one, given its cynical take on what makes life worthwhile, and what we have to do to preserve it. But it’s also refreshing to see science fiction this aware of how actively we’re careening toward a terrible future, and how our response to it is likely to be specific, personal, and just as selfish as the behavior that gets us there in the first place.

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 first two movies are packed with “I can’t believe that just happened!” moments. The third one instead chains together a series of “Oh yeah, I’ve seen this before” scenes.

Brendan Walsh’s cold survivalist thriller, Centigrade, is a creatively crafted claustrophobic study of a fractured marriage. Strongly acted, the drama wallows in melancholy while presenting peaks of hope amid its simple icy setting.

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

Purists could well complain at how far Howl’s Moving Castle departs from Jones’ terrific story in order to wedge in Hayao Miyazaki’s longstanding personal obsessions, like flight, the destructive and horrific nature of war, and the way courage conquers evil and love saves lives. But at least the film has a point of view, and the benefit of its creator’s highly specific and recognizable voice. Earwig, by contrast, often feels generic.

In addition to the latent sexism, unmitigated by Sorvino’s nothing of a mom role, there’s something insidious about the movie’s incompetence, and the accompanying belief that it’s good enough to entertain audiences of any age. It aspires to harmlessness, and fails.

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.

The movie is so poorly staged that it manages to conceal the supposedly important hero/kid bonding elements, while telegraphing early on where the rest of the story is going.

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.

The Pope’s Exorcist doesn’t match the bone-deep terror or filmmaking heights of the original Exorcist, but sets itself apart by building the whole movie on an understanding that its whole premise is a little silly — and it’s never afraid to lean into that fact.

All that character development goes out the window when everyone’s just focused on surviving the grueling ordeal ahead, but the creators never find a way to vary the action enough to keep it from being grueling for the audience, as well.

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.

Folie à Deux’s messaging doesn’t come off as artfully ambiguous, just so mixed that it could support any interpretation. If Phillips has a message he’s trying to convey, it might be a repudiation of the fans who took Joker’s protagonist as a rousing nihilistic icon. But he undercuts himself there, too.

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

The Invitation never manages to be scary, and it hides its vampires behind a lifeless love story.

2014’s Goodnight Mommy is one of the best horror films of the last decade, but nearly every element that contributed to that quality has been ignored or reversed in this disappointment of a remake. Not all remakes are unequivocal failures, but this one is.

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.

With Afterlife’s endless string of callbacks, Jason Reitman lovingly pays homage to his father’s series, but the new characters are where Jason’s own intimate and personal style of filmmaking shines through.

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

Ultimately, everything in Cherry is a trope, and everything rings false.

Though the central idea is fun, everything that’s been built around it feels rote, if not totally outdated.

Carried by a typically strong Blunt performance, Pain Hustlers is both watchable and eye-opening, even though its dramatic impulses do kind of cancel each other out.

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.

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.

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.

Though The Old Guard 2 is only the second installment in this movie series, it’s already far weaker than its predecessor. It does just about everything worse.

For all of its limitations and points of departure from the previous series, though, Raccoon City maintains that lineage of B-movies made with skill.

That go-for-broke violence has always been a core component of Mortal Kombat, and this reboot succeeds because McQuoid and his team remember that, and have the self-awareness to acknowledge it. It isn’t a flawless victory, but it is lizard-brain fun.