The fight sequences aren’t as good as director David Leitch’s previous work like Atomic Blonde and the John Wick movies, but it’s better than the standard superhero fare, with enough clever touches to keep things interesting.

Clichés usually become clichés because they resonate with audiences, and all it takes to freshen one up are a couple of new twists. Proud Mary has just enough of them to make some satisfying out of very familiar material.

Edwards is very good at crafting images that straddle the uncomfortable line between beauty and horror, and at dwarfing people with giant monsters and machines with powers beyond mortal comprehension. It’s his comprehension of mortals that sometimes feels lacking.

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.

Fantastic Beasts is a good movie, and offers a fun and inventive return to Rowling’s wizarding world, but it could have been a better movie if didn’t waste so much time setting up a new franchise.

It isn’t the charged biopic that a story as fascinating as Seal’s deserves, but it has enough rambunctious delights to get by.

It’s about as unassuming as a movie about a man who can grow 65 feet tall could be, and in its relatively subdued scale, it is fairly refreshing and fun.

There are some scenes here as lively and as thoughtful as any in this great series’ history. But then that final sequence reminds viewers that this is a franchise still thinking about the way things were, and not with the way things are — or could be in the future.

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.

Parts recall the muscular intensity of Craig’s debut, Casino Royale. Others evoke painful memories (and specific story threads) from the bloated, digressive Spectre.

Power Rangers is fun when it leans into the original series’ campy sensibility.

Patel’s desire to make something more than a straightforward action film is admirable, especially since he had to juggle responsibilities in front of and behind the camera simultaneously to do so. Monkey Man suggests he’s got potential as a filmmaker in the future. In the present, his directorial debut is the sort of genre exercise that makes you realize creating a “straightforward” action movie is not so straightforward.

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.

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

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.

A solid, workmanlike melodrama with an attractive ensemble cast. What it lacks is the flair and substance that marked Paolo Virzi’s 2013 version of the same material.

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.

Chazelle seems so enamored with his simulacrum of this forgotten world that he loses sight of the people in it.

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 crime story, involving the hunt for the men who murdered this girl, is strictly by-the-numbers (and there are a few clue that still don’t fit together in my mind) but Sheridan proves himself a surprisingly effective director of action.

The movie cuts back and forth between the two, and their themes speak to one another in some ways, but the competing narratives barely intersect. At times, it seems as if director and co-writer George Clooney made a movie where separate but equal is not only the subtext but also the organizing principle.

Downsizing is all half-empty, big ideas that accomplish very little.

Whether its unique release strategy makes it a historical footnote or an important turning point in the history of an industry will only be clear in hindsight. For now, it’s just a colorful kids movie.

This whimper of a farewell somehow feels right. It also feels like a mess — if an endearing one at times— that has been heavily reworked in the editing room.

The most disappointing part of Reverse Panic Room is how little it exploits its high-concept premise after spending so much time establishing all the particulars of this fortified lake house.

Haunted Mansion does at least represent a small measure of progress for Hollywood. People always complain that studios remake beloved movies — which do not need improvement — when it would be wiser to remake a movie that contained the kernel of a good idea but failed in the execution. Haunted Mansion is absolutely a remake of a bad movie, and it does represent a slight improvement over the previous version.

The movie around Jordan is just like Kelly himself: Cold, detached, and brutal.

This derivative sequel might please devoted fans looking for a quick fix of nostalgia, but with nothing new to say, it seems not even Boyle and his cast are sure why T2 Trainspotting exists.