There are an obscene number of funny people in this movie — though Mascots is not as obscenely funny as that Murderers’ Row of comedy talent would suggest.

Hoppers director and co-writer Daniel Chong throws a lot of ingredients in the pot here, but I’m not sure they all blend together into a coherent stew. The film has a couple fun gags, an uplifting theme, and a touching subplot about Mabel and her grandmother (Karen Huie). Still, as a story it’s a bit of a jumble, as if someone took a nature doc and hopped it into a mystery movie that was hopped into a broad comedy.

Novocaine belongs to the same cinemasochistic tradition as movies like Evil Dead II and Crank, where the audience is invited to derive twisted pleasure from watching a heroic leading man get the crap beaten out of him in inventive ways. It’s not as good as those movies. But on its own terms, it’s painless enough. Pleasurable even.

This is a much better comedy than it is an action movie.

Assassin’s Creed makes you actively work for its pleasures, and it’s heartening to see a film of this scale that’s strange and ambitious and doesn’t spoon-feed viewers every little detail.

Films like this about slow-burn conspiracies that take ages to unravel their cheeky premises rarely live up to all the work that goes into watching them get there, and Under the Silver Lake is no different. Its final resolution flops to the ground like an airless balloon after all the toil it took to find it.

What’s here isn’t necessarily boring or bad, but it represents a back-to-basics approach for Alien that feels like a betrayal of something central to the Xenomorph’s toxic DNA, which is forever mutating into another deadly creature.

Borg/McEnroe isn’t a complete misfire, just more of a missed opportunity. Metz’s artful direction, the taut final match and LaBeouf’s rage-fueled antics are worth the ticket price alone. But it leaves you wondering how fantastic a full-on LaBeouf-McEnroe biopic could’ve been.

For long stretches, Zack Snyder’s Justice League feels more like a rough assembly than a director’s cut. It appears to include every single shred of footage Snyder shot, no matter how superfluous to the story. It will absolutely delight the hardest of hardcore Snyder heads. I’m not sure how more casual viewers will react to a longer and bleaker version of the same movie they already saw and dislike.

Even as it takes Fast and Furious to literal new heights (and marks a significant improvement from The Fate of the Furious), F9 never tops the franchise’s best entries. It’s simply too complicated and too long to surpass something like Fast Five.

The Purge has become the new "Saw" franchise: What began with a simple, contained thriller has escalated to outrageous, bloody chaos. And while James Wan’s feature debut was a bit more effective than DeMonaco’s first Purge outing, the latter has Saw’s diminishing returns beat with a recognizable (and coherent) mythology and increasing entertainment value that doesn’t rely on torture porn for thrills. That doesn’t make it any less silly, however.

The lead performers bring a lot of energy to the material, and for a while Tetris hums along as part The Social Network and part Ocean’s 11, at least until a final act that collapses under the weight of an action sequence so ludicrous it feels like it belongs in a parody of bad Hollywood biopics.

Black Widow functions less as a showcase for the title character and more as a sneaky introduction for Pugh, who is drolly hilarious as the deeply cynical Yelena.

It takes way too long — nearly an hour of a 105-minute movie — for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’s actual story to emerge and for Keaton to take center stage again. Once he shows up, though, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice springs to life. Er, make that afterlife.

Conceptually, it’s an ambitious undertaking; but as fascinating and perplexing as it all is, I’m not sure McDowell’s film really achieves its goals.

It’s nice to see Reiner, McKean, Guest, and Shearer acknowledge their age and have some fun again, even if they never come close to matching the invention and creativity of the old Spinal Tap.

The best performance in the film actually comes from Gillian Anderson as Julian’s overbearing mother.

Apostle is a solid mystery-thriller, but save for predictably engaging performances from Stevens and Sheen, it’s largely unremarkable. Though it’s interesting to see Evans tackle something a little more conventional, this feels almost too conventional for the man who gave us The Raid and its sequel.

Murphy is really on his game; way more than I expected after 30 years. This is not Eddie Murphy in a Detroit Lions jacket sleepwalking his way through a big Netflix paycheck; it’s Axel Foley improvising his way through one crisis after another. And that’s fun.

With his mastery of composition, editing, and music, Scorsese has made some of the most engaging movies in history, experiences that express fascinating ideas through gripping stories, compelling characters, and unparalleled craft. Here, all of those elements seem sublimated to the larger points Scorsese wants to make.

Felix isn’t On the Rocks’ main character, but he is its most interesting one, the one who seems to have the most to say and the most to hide; the one that writer/director Sofia Coppola gives her strongest comedic material and saddest monologues; the one who’s played by Bill Murray in yet another performance that feels so tossed off and yet so finely tuned

The whole production just works. Steinfeld, Lendeborg, and Cena are extremely likable leads, and there’s a soul and an innocence to Bumblebee that was never present in any of the previous Transformers.

If Suicide Squad felt like Warner Bros.’ deliberate attempt to replicate the quirky fun of Guardians of the Galaxy, Birds of Prey is its stab — and there is a lot of stabbing in it — at making DC’s Deadpool.

If you think quarantine life is tough, just wait until you see what happens in a biosphere.

Even with Frozen II’s problems, the ending affected me. Because some things do change. Even if they always remain Frozen.

The real treasure of A United Kingdom is the tender chemistry between Oyelowo and Pike, whose scenes together offer the film’s best moments.

Ultimately, the best creative argument in favor of making two Wicked movies is that it let the audience spend even more time with the story’s characters and the two lead performers, who really are terrific together.

At a certain point, Deliver Me From Nowhere sort of loses the thread of its stripped-down, unadorned approach.