There is not much “edge” here, but Clooney and team prove that sometimes, slow and steady — or should we say, pretty and pleasing — can still win some races.

Huppert seems to be enjoying herself fully leaning into Greta’s insanity, so perhaps this one can get a pass. She helps elevate the film from its self-consciously B-movie roots to be something that’s actually pretty good.

As it races to its cool supernatural climax — and then a coda that connects it to the first film — “The Craft: Legacy” is firing on all cylinders, looking back respectfully but also showing how the same story in different hands can soar.

The filmmakers are also clearly trying their hand at satire, but ham-fistedly. Set during the Reagan-era “Just Say No” period, “Cocaine Bear” hopes to remark on the demonization of drugs and it also seems to have something to say about how humans misunderstand the balance of nature. Neither work.

Whether The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is enough to relight those embers remains to be seen, but it is a reminder how good a platform they offered young actors. It’s a ritual worth returning to.

An almost sturdy, often gripping genre exercise that ultimately doesn’t find enough fresh material in the serial killer procedural to warrant its blast from a stylish and shlocky past.

It’s a little by-the-book — exactly, perhaps, what you might expect from elevated historical fiction aimed at young adults. Being a good-hearted, straightforward film that might even have you shedding a few tears is no crime against cinema.

Despite an A-list roster of talent, including people behind the scenes who theoretically should know how to resurrect this brand and move it forward, Terminator: Dark Fate is just another bad “Terminator” movie in a string of bad “Terminator” movies (although better than “Genisys”).

Empire of Light may be a love letter to the movies, but it’s a sad one in which one of the parties, the local, independent movie theater, is fading away and possibly already gone.

While it’s a nice way to spend just short of two hours, it seems he could have sucked a little more out of those dusty old graves.

From beginning to end, his new film is packed with shootings, brutality and violence _ like one long video war game...Rarely since "Heaven's Gate" has a major movie been so painfully bad, not only in dialogue. The battle scenes are neither dramatic nor convincing, merely brutal. [21 Aug 1984]

With handsome period craft, “Munich — Edge of War” makes for a watchable, engrossing historical thriller with fictional characters situated like spies around political leaders at a profoundly tense, and ultimately woefully misjudged, moment in time.

It’s also all over the map, in every way possible. It’s visually gorgeous at times but then boring to behold at others, emotionally poignant at times but stunningly cloying at others. It’s also confusing (though to be fair, many might call the book confusing, too.) Mostly, it’s just a frustrating whole comprised of some pretty promising parts.

It can be divertingly bonkers, but ends up a rather grim and slipshod “John Wick” ripoff.

But It Ends With Us doesn’t end quickly enough — more than two hours drag — with tangents and poor editing, like sudden scene cuts that leave viewers looking for clues to where they are.

Book Club has a script that’s often so heavy on the corn — make that corn syrup — that it strains credulity and leaves you groaning. But then, darn it, suddenly it makes you tearful, with an unexpectedly genuine moment, or laugh out loud. It’s a credit to the cast, and the cast only.

The first and most important thing to say about “Anemone,” a bleak, somber, absorbing but also sometimes frustratingly opaque collaboration with his director son Ronan, is that it’s brought Day-Lewis back.

The film crams in so many plot lines that it risks being overstuffed but somehow stays true to its mesmerizing vision and emerges as a sci-fi success, if not a triumph.

“Axel F” is not exactly Murphy’s finest hour, either. But Murphy just saying “Jesus!” is funny. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another 30 years for our next Axel Foley fix. God, we’ve missed him.

For a movie predicated on satisfying fans, The Rise of Skywalker is a distinctly unsatisfying conclusion to what had been an imperfect but mostly good few films.

What makes Annabelle Comes Home rise above its well-trod narrative are the actresses and Dauberman’s sensitive attention to each of them.

Luckily, The Mauritanian, directed by Kevin Macdonald, gets one thing very right: Tahar Rahim’s masterful central performance. The French actor achieves something his big-name costars — Jodie Foster, Benedict Cumberbatch and Shailene Woodley — do not, presenting a multi-layered, subtly shaded and deeply moving portrayal that proves hard to forget.

It’s pretty clear after watching the new live-action Aladdin that doubts about Will Smith’s casting as the Genie are overblown. It’s the guy behind the camera who should be doubted. And stuffed into a small lamp forever.

Here DeMonaco finds richness in flipping the script on traditional right-wing notions of the border and immigration.

Fuqua’s film is often harrowing and gripping but also less nuanced and too narrowly confined in genre conventions than its real-life protagonist deserves.

This very American fable has been blessed with three remarkable performances.

Compelling performances make Palmer watchable and fairly affecting despite the fact that we’ve seen this kind of thing so many times before.

Disney should have left the original alone.