Overall “The Old Guard 2” is fine, a bit of a background movie that’s probably easy enough to tune in and out of (though Schoenaerts, a standout, gives it some real pathos). Its greatest sin is the non-ending, which might have moviegoers engaging in their own rants about wasted time.

There’s a stale emptiness to Living that doesn’t entirely dissipate in even its most moving scenes.

The significant and seemingly random changes, embellishments and omissions make you wonder why they even needed the tether of Nowak in the first place.

Shelter is everything you expect a Jason Statham movie to be, no more and no less.

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.

The talk is mostly in grunts and whoops, and the film sometimes reaches the brink of a Mel Brooks travesty, but never falls over. [18 Jan 1982]

These are interesting and fraught times that deserve an unflinching look at the perils of data rights and online privacy, but The Great Hack is a reminder that documentaries are not always journalism.

It’s not the quality of the acting that limits Eastwood’s film. It’s a threadbare script that fails to find much of a story to tell behind the headlines.

The bad news is that Pink Cadillac treads on old ground and never really takes off. [24 May 1989]

The real problem with I Feel Pretty, written and directed by Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein, is not in its message or conception, but in its ragtag execution.

Washington earns his audience’s tears with an unrushed, unshowy style, letting an adult and very human relationship evolve on camera, skipping back and forth through years as it goes from love, birth, death and acceptance.

In an extremely physical, committed, even exhausting performance, Pattinson takes what could have been an unwieldy mess and makes it much less, well, expendable.

At a certain point, it becomes clear that not only is The King’s Man a tonal mess, it’s also just a set-up for a movie with an even more enticing cast that’ll leave you feeling even more conflicted.

Raimi doesn’t take “Doctor Strange” to an entirely new tonal place, like, say Taika Waititi did with Thor. He mostly sticks to the framework established by Scott Derrickson.

Not all of it works, but it’s never uninteresting or uncreative — especially when it comes to finding inventively horrible (or horribly inventive) ways for people to die.

Someone Great has not exactly rewritten the rom-com rule book. Where it distinguishes itself is in the fresh faces of it cast (the rom-com is not known as the most diverse of genres) and in focusing on the hard realities of breakup rather than the fairytale of falling in love.

Neither the divers nor kids, government officials nor families and volunteers really come into focus, staying as murky as the miles of submerged cave.

Ultimately, Pain Hustlers feels like a retreading of the same ground covered in other recent works, bringing nothing especially new to the table and, in splitting the stylistic difference between slick/breezy and poignant/authentic, succeeding fully at neither.

Of course, it all comes down to a Shyamalan-style final twist — the most entertaining part of the film, but it comes way, way too late. Listen, we’re all up for some summer fun on the beach. But by the time we’re allowed in on the secret here, we’re feeling a bit tired.

The movie’s premise is one long Uber ad, but it’s a clever enough buddy comedy setup, and both Nanjiani and Bautista are good comic performers. So what’s missing here?

Maybe the movie will direct some eyes toward the existence of the Arthur Foundation, but while the movie goes down easy enough it is, on the whole, a bit unsatisfying.

A feminist recasting of the familiar story is welcome, of course, but the screenplay focuses so insistently on its female-empowering message that it feels at times like we’re just getting hit over the head with it.

It’s an intriguing premise that “I.S.S.” can’t translate into a coherent thriller.

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’s not plot deviations from King’s novel that hamper Pet Sematary. It’s that, from early on, Kölsch and Widmyer, rely less on the detailed accumulation of atmosphere that King built his tale on, than jump cuts and music cues to build suspense. It puts Pet Sematary on a more familiar genre track.

It’s a empty chamber for movie spectacle and nothing else, where the only option is to pile elements on top of each other until you have, you know, a giant evil ape swinging a vertebrae like a lasso while riding a kaiju controlled by a crystal.

At a certain point, the experience of watching this all unfold through Enzo’s eyes becomes the alienating element. You’re not experiencing the big moments yourself, you’re just experiencing Enzo experiencing them, leaving you to wonder if the story and performances alone are anything special without the dog’s metaphors and poeticisms.

It Lives Inside is still a welcome respite from the other long-in-the-tooth horror franchises populating theaters this time of year in that it’s just something new – new faces, new themes, a promising filmmaker to watch – but I wish it would have embraced more of the things that make it unique as opposed to trying to fit in with its genre brethren.