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.