As Sinners accelerates toward its climax, none of it feels wasted. Its action is explosive, and while Coogler’s vicious momentum can be visually disorienting at times, the adrenaline and the way he tethers each character to a distinctly spiritual question ensure that the movie’s strengths far outweigh its flaws.

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.

Good horror-comedy is hard to pull off, but Hsu finds his balance by steering hard into the comedy, while pouring on the fake blood.

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.

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

Perkins has made a film that’s both more horrifically violent than his contemporaries’ projects and also unapologetically funny.

It’s a lot to take in, but it’s joyously and creatively rendered, a fantasy epic brought to life in vivid color and with all the visual creativity a fantasy fan could want.

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.

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.

To the degree that Love Hurts feels like a movie at all, it’s because Quan puts so much heart into his work, and so much squeaky-voiced comedic talent, paired with the speed and flexibility that makes a fight scene thrilling.

Presence is more intellectual than visceral, more engaged with raising questions than pinning viewers to their seats.

By trying to make Star Trek: Section 31 everything regular Star Trek isn’t, Osunsanmi and Sweeney fulfill the show’s promise to boldly go where no one has gone before. But its one-and-done story concludes without the plot itself ending up anywhere particularly unexpected.

It’s a quiet, contemplative movie where most of the driving forces are subtle and understated, made evocative by the animation, which is mostly grounded save for an occasional, deliberate splash of color.

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.

Most musicals translate emotion into song. This one takes that a step further, translating emotion into a daring central gimmick. It’s experimental and explosive.

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.

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.

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.

Nothing in the movie seems to matter, from its internal lore to the extraneous sequel setups that appear out of nowhere to the characters’ own ethoses. Audiences have not cared much about Sony’s non-Spider-Man Spider-world movies. That’s no surprise when the filmmakers seem to be this indifferent as well.

Sleep feels like a major debut by a filmmaker who is ready to defy conventions and entertain audiences. It belongs alongside those great Korean horror films, even while standing apart.

If possible sequels can capture the magic and drama of this one, the Transformers cinematic universe will have changed for the better.

At a time when horror can feel like a studio executive’s dumping ground for cheap work and attempts at genre-bending may make less business sense, it’s a thrill to see a director like Kostanski go for broke on an absurd pitch and take the execution as seriously as Ridley Scott would on a historical epic.

Smile 2 is bigger, scarier, funnier, smarter, darker, and undeniably better than its predecessor.

Venom: The Last Dance is so buried under its moving parts that it can’t do justice to any of them, in spite of Marcel’s efforts.

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.

The animation really anchors the movie, which otherwise feels a bit uneven, especially in terms of Anzu and Karin’s relationship.

Director Jon M. Chu blows away all expectations and deftly avoids the movie adaptation pitfalls that could’ve worked against Wicked. The movie celebrates its musical-ness, instead of begrudgingly accepting it. It’s nothing short of wonderful.

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.