To my surprise, those moments in this silly, busy blockbuster moved me. That’s what’s so great about Sam Raimi; it’s not just that he believes in these characters, he makes you believe in them too.

Director Evan Katz’s follow-up to 2013’s Cheap Thrills is a lean, mean neo-noir that addresses an age-old question: Do people ever really change?

So maybe Lightyear isn’t the kind of movie that Hollywood would have made in 1995. As a 2022 movie, it works just fine.

As a piece of moral commentary cloaked in a sci-fi gimmick, Overlord is uninspired. As an action thriller, it’s just aggressively boring. Maybe because it exhaustively recycles imagery from any number of genre films that came before it...or because the action sequences are bizarrely monotonous, save for the occasional bit of gory VFX.

What a pleasant surprise that the movie is far funnier and more perceptive about this brutal, hilarious time in a child’s life than I anticipated.

There may be plenty of charming, classic Pooh-isms sprinkled throughout Christopher Robin, but the film just can’t manage to bring the same level of poignance and wisdom to its own story.

Pretty much everything in Wonder Woman 1984 that’s not an excuse for a Gadot and Pine reunion flops. That includes both of its villains.

Lots of mystery hangs in the air of the El Royale, but when all is said and done there aren’t a ton of surprises in Bad Times at the El Royale’s story, or the way that story is told. Even with a bunch of twists, things progress largely how you expect, only slower.

Rules Don’t Apply could have been an insightful look at a tragic, troubled figure. Instead Beatty made a conventional romance with lead characters we hardly care about.

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.

Hobbs & Shaw is the movie version of a replacement-level player. It is adequate, but not exceptional. It’s the baseline version of what one of these movies should be, now that they’re not about undercover cops chasing thieves anymore.

The new sequel/prequel, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again – which has perhaps the best sequel subtitle of all time – is only half as fun as the first movie, replacing familiar faces with lesser known ones in a story we already know. But thanks to the returning cast and a showstopping Cher performance, there’s enough zany delights to forgive the snoozier bits.

Mom and Dad gives Cage his most plausible in-story excuse to unleash his total Cageosity since Face/Off. Given a juicy part and the freedom to do whatever he wants, he embraces Brent’s madness with obvious glee.

Surrounded by so many bloated, unsatisfying movies, The Shallows is as refreshing as a quick dip on a hot summer day — preferably in a pool, not the ocean. They tend to be safer and less shark-infested.

As an entertainment, Godzilla vs. Kong is as hollow as the Earth upon which its set. Here, the human characters’ irrational decisions do not feel like part of a cohesive statement about our species’ self-absorption, but rather the byproduct of a superficial screenplay that cares only about the excuses needed to get Godzilla and King Kong into several extended (and undeniably impressive) CGI scuffles.

Like HBO’s new Watchmen series, Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep doesn’t simply rehash its source material, and instead uses its characters, setting, and themes in smart and novel ways.

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

While this movie may not reach the heights of Pixar’s finest achievements, it certainly stands as not only the best Cars, but the most mature one as well.

Filipino exploitation virtuoso Eddie Romero threw together a guerrilla army, a tin-pot republic, a roving gang of cowboys, and one nasty-tempered pimp for this standout B-movie.

The themes introduced in the early scenes are explored in the second act, further expressed through the chases and fights, and resolved in the conclusion. This might sound like rudimentary stuff. But it’s sometimes shocking how few blockbusters successfully pull off the rudimentary stuff.

Good or bad, it’s undeniably one of the most depressing comic-book movies ever made. (It’s also got one of the most depressing comic-book movie scores, an endless dirge of droning strings by Hildur Guðnadóttir.) The calls from some corners to ban the film because it could incite violence give the movie too much credit. It’s not irresponsible. It’s just immature.

I suspect some may give Cruella a pass simply because it does have a genuinely quirky vibe, along with a slightly darker than your standard Disney fare. The gonzo period fashions are fun as well. Ultimately, though, the film feels less like a satisfying character drama than a work of corporate rebranding — for Disney as well as for Cruella herself.

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.

The parade of subplots and explanations keep sinking a story that previously floated along so effectively. I saw It Chapter Two a few nights ago and I think it just ended.

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.

While a reunion between Greengrass and Damon should feel like a refreshing extension of the franchise, Jason Bourne is just another replica, and an unnecessary one. The familiar pieces are in place, but it adds nothing that Greengrass hadn’t already accomplished. Maybe its best we let Jason Bourne retire for good.

While Flamin’ Hot’s choice of subject might separate it slightly from the larger canon of great-man biographies, it’s otherwise a very familiar recipe coated with a little new seasoning.

There are good things in American Pickle, like two convincing (and occasionally moving) performances from Rogen. But they’re the equivalent of a couple cucumber scraps in a giant vat of salt water.

Snowden has some entertaining sequences, many of which explain the whistleblower’s story in an easily digestible narrative that doesn’t insult the audience’s intelligence or think too highly of itself. But the final moments are a mess; Stone isn’t interested in showing us the real version of the man, only his glorified version.

Without the musical heart or stirring adventure of the first movie, Moana 2 relies on a surprising amount of gross-out humor and meta jokes to keep audiences engaged.

If The Finest Hours is light on surprises it’s still heavy on suspense, as the script by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, and Eric Johnson treats each new obstacle in Bernie and Ray’s paths as a new brainteasing puzzle with an impossible solution.

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.

The stronger element (sorry) of this story is the relationship between Bernie and Ember, and how it underscores the way the expectations of every generation winds up resting heavily on the shoulders of the next. I’m not sure using different elements as a metaphor for the immigrant experience quite works beyond its broadest strokes, but it does at least add some heft to Elemental’s scenes between father and daughter, which do build to an affecting if extremely predictable conclusion.

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.

For all its failings (of which there are many), Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is still a rather enjoyable and mostly pleasant viewing experience, the kind of movie that’s easy to watch and digest when taken at its glossy face value.

Instant Family didn’t just exceed my low expectations; it obliterated them. It’s the kind of honest, human comedy that’s so rare from Hollywood these days that when one finally comes along, you sit there in the theater in slack-jawed amazement and wonder: How does a movie like this happen?

The cast was the original’s greatest asset, and every single character of note is back, along with the original film’s mordant sense of humor and surprisingly charming sentimentality. Best of all, 2U weaponizes your knowledge of the original — your confidence that you have seen this all before and you know what’s going to happen — and uses it against you.

If this were a better, more entertaining film, Miss Peregrine’s could have been a thoughtful and bold metatextual thesis on Burton’s entire career. Instead, like its partially-formed villainous apparitions, it comes frustratingly close to achieving substance.

A lot of Love and Thunder’s individual parts are sharp, and the film is full of likable performers like Hemsworth, Portman, and Thompson. It’s not a terrible time at the theater. If you enjoyed the last Thor movie, you’ll probably enjoy this one. Just not as much.

I’ve never enjoyed any of Roth’s grisly R-rated movies, but at least those had a distinct vision and style. If only his kid-friendly haunted house movie was as original, it could’ve been a surprising treat.

Like Saturday Night Live itself, there are too many great comedians involved for it not to be at least occasionally funny. But it’s surely not among Neville’s most insightful films. Michaels guards his secrets like someone in the Witness Protection Program.

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.

Superficially, the movie looks a lot like past Phillips comedies about men behaving badly, with dirty jokes and wacky hijinks galore. But War Dogs is more critical of its protagonists’ behavior, and there’s plenty of sad commentary about the state of modern America.

Extraction might outdo Children of Men in some minor technical ways, but it can’t hold a candle to it as a whole. The movie comes alive around the 34-minute mark; it’s a bit of a slog until that point — one I confess I might have turned off long before its bravura centerpiece if not for professional commitments.

Turning Mufasa’s rise to power into its own movie makes sense, although doing it in this style, and with so much prequelitis about less-essential elements of The Lion King mythos, still seems like a strange choice to me.

The film never figures out how to merge Jeannette’s younger and older perspectives into one cohesive voice.

Hocus Pocus 2 doesn’t necessarily demand Kubrickian levels of visual splendor, but it’s still a film, and film is a visual medium. If there was anything even remotely interesting to look at on the screen, that would be nice.

There’s certainly a lot to enjoy in The Fate of the Furious, but even the strongest moments are less spectacular this time around.

Walker’s presence in the Fast movies was the sweet, underplayed counterbalance to Vin Diesel’s ultra-sincere, ultra-sleeveless bombast, and the franchise still hasn’t found a way to fill the void he left behind. In hindsight, the series probably should have stopped after Furious 7, which not only marked the franchise’s farewell to Walker’s character but also to any semblance of logic or cohesion in its ongoing mega-narrative. Since then, Fast & Furious has basically been running on fumes.

Joy has none of the energy or precision of any of Russell’s recent efforts. Not even Joy Mangano could invent a mop good enough to clean up this mess.

It’s the very definition of a film with its heart in the right place. And also a prime example of how good intentions don’t automatically make great movies.

Between the two, I greatly prefer Wuthering Heights, which looks and sounds fantastic, peppers its torrid love story with a few moments of absurd humor — did I mention the veiny, fleshy wallpaper? — and carries itself with the assured confidence of its Byronic hero. (I’m a philistine, but I’m not a dummy.)

Clooney and Roberts are both good fits for their roles, and they do what they can with the material they’re provided. It’s just that the material they’re provided is so crummy.

Bay is a dynamic visual storyteller, but he’s much better at the visual component than the actual storytelling.

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.

There are some legitimate criticisms you can level against Aquaman. You could never say, however, that this movie doesn’t go for it. It goes for everything — maybe too much, when all is said and done.

The good barely outweighs the bad here, at least enough for me to give The Flash a marginal recommendation. A lot of the reviews of The Flash from early screenings called it one of the greatest DC Comics movies ever made. Maybe in another universe that’s true. In this one, I thought it stumbled across the finish line.

There are some highlights — mostly the lead performances.

Let’s face it: The LEGO Movies were always better than they had any right to be. At their core, even with their clever writing, colorful visuals, and memorable voice casts, they were still feature-length toy commercials. The LEGO Ninjago Movie is just the first installment in the series that actually feels like one.

As a purely technical achievement, the new CGI cast of The Lion King is impressive. As a means to tell its fictional story, it is deeply misguided.

The writing as well as the sprightly character animation captures the spirit of these creatures at their absolute best and hilarious worst in a way every dog owner can recognize and relate to. When the film sticks to that, it works.

Malick has found a way to translate how a familiar song has the ability to transport you back to a particular time and conjure a specific set of emotions. Whatever he’s been exploring over the past few years pays off here. Song to Song is far from his strongest film, but it’s his best and most exciting work since The Tree of Life.

This movie is not entirely worthless. Reynolds and Scobell have amusing chemistry together that evokes a lot of ’80s buddy comedies in a fresh way; here is a movie about the tired trope of mismatched partners where the mismatched partners are actually the same person.

Life jolts audiences with relentless ferocity, but it’s not interesting.

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.

Bad Boys was written off for good after Bad Boys II, and yet here we are more than 20 years later, with two solid sequels in four years. Somehow, these guys really have become Bad Boys for life. And perhaps even beyond that.

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.

The film is a bit of a mess; a heartfelt, scattershot, mostly unfunny, intermittently moving polemic about our country and its people.

The group...make a fine crew. But the rest of the movie doesn’t find enough interesting wrinkles on the old formula to merit a reboot.

Some of The Little Things’ little things, like the nuances of Washington’s performance, are outstanding. This film is a reminder that the big things are important, too.

I can (and have) defended each of the later Terminator sequels, but there’s no question Dark Fate is the best of the bunch.

The’re not a lot of momentum to Hotel Transylvania 3; this is a children’s film after all. But the character and location designs are inventive and appealing, and there are several memorable set pieces, including a wordless scuba diving sequence that draws heavy inspiration from classic Warner Bros. cartoons.

It’s honestly a little baffling how so many good choices could produce something so frustrating.

Alita barely considers any of the existential questions about humanity that are typically central to this kind of sci-fi film. It’s just a slick action film. That is one way, at least, it does feel like a Robert Rodriguez movie.

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.

It’s both an accomplishment in introspective, transcendent filmmaking, and a puzzle as imbalanced as the knight at its center. We may not quite be able to understand it, but Knight of Cups certainly feels like a work of a great talent who’s still figuring out what he’s trying to say.

The burden of wrapping up a 40-year franchise weighs heavily on Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, an overstuffed chase film that barely lets up from its connect-the-dots MacGuffin-heavy plot for even a second or two.

The nicest thing I can say about 2019’s Aladdin is in its best moments it reminded me of a movie I liked a lot as a kid.

The last thing America needs is a historical movie correlating white people problems with those of people of color.

In 2022, films of this ilk are so rare, that I can almost forgive the Deep Water’s faults just for reminding me that these sorts of stories can be told onscreen. Almost.

Beneath the predictable story, Detective Pikachu isn’t about much, and if you need Wikipedia to explain who Mewtwo is, most of the jokes will go right over your head. The whole thing is a bit too childish for adults, and a bit too convoluted for kids. It absolutely deserves an Oscar nomination for Best Visual Effects however, even if the subject matter makes me think it’s unlikely to receive one.

The movie gives us fragments of characters and rich flashbacks, but they’re not supported by a fully-formed narrative. Lee has boldly introduced a new technology, but that technology was a bad fit for this project.

Unfortunately, Red Sparrow director Francis Lawrence is no Josef von Sternberg. Like most of his previous films (Constantine, I Am Legend, the final three Hunger Games), his choices are solid but rarely surprising, and despite a twisty storyline, a great cast, and two physically compatible leads, Red Sparrow never quite gets beyond being a merely okay thriller.

Back in the day, the endless comparisons between Shyamalan and Hitchcock felt like a bit of a trap themselves. With Trap, though, there’s no point trying to escape them.

Every scene is burdened by an uneven cast and a leaden script crammed with millennia of backstory that repeatedly kills the story’s momentum.

The person who makes the new Charlie’s Angels work when it works is Stewart, very much playing against every image of her audiences have built in their minds over the last decade or so.

The biggest problem is that Ghost in the Shell has nothing smart or interesting to say — it just thinks it does.

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

The first Fantastic Beasts was a bit of a mess. The second one is actively bad. The longer this spinoff franchise goes on, the more damage it does to the legacy of the Harry Potter series — which knew not to overstay its welcome. Fantastic Beasts 2 has plenty of spells, wands, and wizards — and absolutely no magic whatsoever.

Kate McKinnon deserves better. Until then, she’ll continue to be Hollywood’s most reliable comedy savior, a one-woman circus act on a tightrope, juggling and balancing on one foot, all while holding up lousy studio comedies with her bare hands.

13 years later, the X-Men are bigger, and the effects used to bring their powers to life are even more convincing. But what’s missing at this point is that sense of awe and wonder from those early days. For all the fighting and blasting and bamfing, we’ve seen it all before — sometimes literally.

This sort of ultra-dark crime picture is commonly described as “hard boiled,” but that adjective feels insufficient for Triple 9, which burns away any sense of hope until only misery and suffering remain.

This isn’t just a film you need to “turn off your brain” to enjoy; nothing less than surgically removing your brain from your body would do the trick.

Stoller cooked up a solid premise, assembled a funny cast, gave them some good scenes to play and lines to deliver, and let them do their thing.

Set to an electrifying score by frequent Refn collaborator Cliff Martinez (which may be his best yet), The Neon Demon is as deceptive as shattered glass, with a brilliant beauty so mesmerizing that you don’t notice its murderously sharp edges until you’re bleeding all over the floor.

The slasher-style kills are effective, and a couple of the tossed-off quips are good for some chuckles. (I liked when Leoni informed her guests that her butler was “making my famous moussaka” for dinner.) But a lot of the film lives up to its title. It’s just lifeless.

How to Be Single isn’t particularly hilarious, but it’s not particularly unpleasant either. The characters are likable. Their lives are fun to wander through for 100 minutes. Their small, daily battles are relatable, even to a 35-year-old dude.

The latest from the French filmmaker is a dazzling feast of spectacular visuals and exhilarating set pieces. It’s Besson’s most ambitious film to date, and the most original big-budget adventure you’ll see on screen this season. But such ambition doesn’t always come without flaws.