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.

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.

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.

It would be easier to be less cynical if No Time to Die convincingly delivered on its commitments to Bond’s humanity, rather than nudging it into a handful of scattered scenes, around a lumbering, half-baked drama spiked with explosions and car chases.

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

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.

Gyllenhaal is the whole show, and his irritable, driven, struggling character doesn’t exactly glorify his line of work. His unpleasantness gives the movie its edge, and perhaps also an unearned sense of gravitas.

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.

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.

One Gets Out Alive is a desperate attempt to explore the immigration crisis through a horror lens, à la Remi Weekes’ stunning film His House. But Menghini’s film is an underwritten hodgepodge of hollow scares.

I’m Your Man offers a perspective on humanity that’s equally whimsical and melancholy, and its intimacy is a welcome change of pace in science fiction, a genre that too often mistakes violence and colonialism as the only drivers of drama.

On film, this story’s foundation of cynical button-pushing is laid bare.

Weerasethakul’s Memoria doesn’t give too many answers. It moves at an interminable pace. But those are mostly strengths rather than faults, methods that force the audience to engage with the thoughts and collective memory buried deep within their psyches. In that sense, Memoria is a sensory explosion, and its dense, immersive shrapnel isn’t easily removable.

Spencer is an act of psychological horror, a kind of ghost story, and a survivalist picture carried by an uncannily immersive Kristen Stewart, in the best performance of her career.

The Power of the Dog doesn’t just mark Campion’s return — it’s the best movie of 2021 so far. This psychological Western’s themes of isolation and toxic masculinity are an ever-tightening lasso of seemingly innocuous events, and they import more horror and meaning on every closer inspection, corralling viewers under an unforgettable spell.

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.

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.

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.

The ways Zone 414 lifts from its predecessors, borrowing elements from character development to costuming to questions about the utilitarianism of our physical bodies, denies it identifiable or entertaining qualities of its own.

It’s frankly galling that a princess movie is this utterly lacking in grandeur. All Cannon has delivered is a cringe-worthy eyesore that’s deadly dull and intellectually shallow.

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

Helmed by Mark Waters (Mean Girls, 2003’s Freaky Friday) and with a script from R. Lee Fleming Jr., the screenwriter behind the original movie, He’s All That is one of the best high-school romantic comedies in recent history. It uses the old movie’s makeover template to carve out a romantic story that hits all the satisfying beats, turning turns them into something refreshing… and actually better than the original movie.

The film is missing out on a cohesive vision, to the point where the audience will spend the entire film waiting for the flashbacks and summaries to end, and for DaCosta’s movie to finally begin. But by the end, she’s only offered a visually stunning homage to the original film. For a director of her talent, that isn’t enough.

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.

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.

The film weaves a study of what it means to discover you’ve built your life over an abyss into the fabric of a multiplex-friendly horror movie, but it wouldn’t work without Hall’s deft, complex performance.

Demonic is a frustrating movie, because in spite of all the problems, the world Blomkamp sets up is exciting and original.

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.