For all its powerful elements, though, Hamnet rings a bit hollow at its core. Perhaps the grand tragedies are just too overwhelming for some viewers to see beyond. I cried, yes, but in the end, I felt no closer to the mysterious bard—let alone to the people he loved, all those hundreds of years ago.

The best I can say about For Good is that its two stars, Cynthia Erivo (as the green-skinned witch Elphaba) and Ariana Grande (her sickeningly sweet friend Glinda), are strong-enough performers to make the most bizarre turns feel functional. But even they can’t keep the film from collapsing under the lightest scrutiny.

For Frankenstein, Netflix handed him a massive budget to play with, and the money is all up on the big screen, if you can catch the movie on one. But just like del Toro’s previous reverent adaptations, all of that sumptuousness is hamstrung by his apparent desire to remain faithful to the original tale.

It’s another superficial, techno-futuristic tale that emphasizes its glossy look over its heady concept.

In Caught Stealing, Aronofsky drops the viewer into an older New York as another artistic exercise, but renders it as a playground for bloody and one-dimensional silliness. His skill as a cinematic storyteller is on display—I just missed the narrative depth and danger that used to come with the elegant shots.

As an effort to breathe new life into a particularly moribund title—there have been four prior takes on these characters, all of them bad—First Steps is essentially successful. What it somehow can’t manage to do is have much of a good time in the process.

Yes, visual-effects technology is up to the task of re-creating a cartoon on a larger scale and dotted with real actors, and yes, these redos tend to turn a profit for their makers. These shouldn’t be the only reasons for art to exist.

Ballerina ultimately succeeds as a piece of junky fun, however, because it attempts to expand the Wick canon rather than deepen its titular protagonist.

Bring Her Back is far more confident in its portrayal of Laura’s own story, building to a devastating and intense conclusion about the extent of her loss and her inability to deal with it. Hawkins is up to the challenge, and the rest of the ensemble is strong enough to keep pace. But many of those story beats feel perfunctory; the film comes to life in the nastier, grislier set pieces.

The Electric State is so transparently eager to satisfy as many demographics of viewers as possible that it proves its own message: that a world dependent on business interests and technological optimization dulls artistic potential and human ingenuity. All that’s left is a wasteland of half-baked ideas searching for a home.

Companion is at best a mean little confection, no matter how much you know going into it: amusing, occasionally thrilling, but not something with the capability to linger.

A generic and plodding revenge thriller that’s nowhere near bold enough to justify the franchise’s resurrection.

Feige’s mainstream instincts are easy to detect here. The prior Deadpool films were scuzzy and cobbled together, even as the budget grew; the cameos from other Marvel characters felt half-hearted and perfunctory, inclusions for Deadpool to roll his eyes at, not for fans to cheer over. Deadpool & Wolverine, on the other hand, has that bland MCU sheen that makes all of its movies look expensive but nonthreatening, happily accepting of mediocrity rather than attempting something artsy or daring.

Although it’s often charming and relatable, it’s a letdown when you consider the heights such a project could reach.

The result is a functional if unspectacular film that makes no outsize effort to speak to cultural conversations around the movie.

It’s all perfectly agreeable nonsense.

By making Nyad a narrative film, the movie succumbs to a lot of boring biopic-storytelling shorthand; Nyad sometimes states her goals and fears aloud in the middle of conversation. Much of the thuddingly expositional dialogue cannot escape the sense that it sprouted from an expanded Wikipedia page.

Dream Scenario morphs from a Charlie Kaufman–esque cringe comedy into a simmering nightmare thriller, staging some genuinely unsettling hallucinations but failing to knit them into any larger narrative.

Fair Play positions itself as a psychosexual thriller, but it’s neither truly provocative nor all that sexy.

It’s fun, in a depraved way, to see him trotted out for one more ride, but Jigsaw won’t be around to play games with us forever. Enjoy it while it lasts.

It seems some cheap frights were slipped into a narrative otherwise aiming for deeper emotional distress. That’s where everything gets a bit convoluted, and less enjoyable.

Though Ford invests his performance with as much longing and nuance as he can, underlining Indiana’s increasing disconnection from the modern world, the movie is too busy to really plumb those themes, instead zipping along to the next action sequence lest anyone get bored.

Although Elemental has moments of imaginative joy—watching a living cloud talk to an aquatic being, for one—the viewer is mostly subjected to a very mundane, clichéd domestic dramedy, not the kind of tale that can truly transport younger audiences.

Like a frustrated player speeding up the falling blocks to end the game, the film haphazardly stacks ideas atop one another until, well, it’s a relief when it’s over.

The intellectual property has become intimidating, too profitable to warrant risk-taking—so instead, audiences are served an appetizing confection. But kids do love candy, and I’m sure that around the world, they’ll have just one command for their ticket-buying parents: “Let’s-a go!”

This project does not skimp on its main attraction, but it does seem unsure of what to put around it, throwing a variety of hapless characters in the mix and arming them mostly with indifferent comedy in the face of some truly gnarly violence.

Anytime Quantumania allows itself to get a little silly, it’s in much better shape.

Yes, Gerard Johnstone’s M3GAN is pulled from January’s bucket of mostly low-budget pablum, but it’s cheeky and knowing enough to stand out from the slop.

Despite a committed cast and often stunning cinematography, the film’s script is too blunt and the direction too ham-fisted to make Emancipation anything more than another rote—albeit expensive—entry in the slavery-movie genre.

Even with the gore and the gorgeous visuals that typically accompany a Guadagnino project, Bones and All too often feels frustratingly tame.

The spectacle of a fantasy world can do only so much; a beautiful setting can’t compensate for a superficial story line. Raya loses sight of its heroine’s own connection to the cultures that the filmmakers had put so much care into depicting authentically.

Bullet Train is stupid fun—all neon-drenched style over substance. It’s the kind of late-summer flick that coasts on nonsense, violence, and actors trying out questionable accents. The film is a solid showcase for hand-to-hand combat up until it devolves into CGI drudgery.

If the film leaned all the way into its melodrama, it could have been something different: the rare mainstream, studio-produced summer romance made for female audiences, with rich imagery worthy of the big screen. But its source material’s blemishes were always going to be hard to avoid.

Love and Thunder offers the usual lightning-streaked action and tossed-off gags, but this time, there’s not enough heft behind the flashiness.

While all of the film’s visual excitement is handled with Pixar’s usual polish, the intrigue is only surface-level.

Deep Water is still a robust, well-acted thriller that lands most of its major twists gracefully; for that, all lesser sins can be forgiven.

A depressingly routine affair that fails to replicate the joys of its source material.

For all its cheesiness, the film is still entertaining—my entire row at the theater had fun cackling at clunky dialogue and absurd lunar lore. If you’re looking for a nice, empty-brained evening at the movies, Moonfall is the ticket to buy right now.

We’re in silly–rom-com territory, and you simply have to accept every ludicrous development with calm rationality. Marry Me is a revived artifact from a time when Hollywood regularly churned out syrupy nonsense about people kissing under the most unlikely of circumstances. The presence of Lopez, once a reigning queen of the genre, only helps underline what a throwback Marry Me is.

The acting is good, while the story fails to really hang together. The same is true for a lot of Clooney projects—perhaps unsurprisingly, he’s attentive to the subtleties of an actor’s performance, but the scripts he’s chosen of late have been short on narrative propulsion.

The satire of Don’t Look Up is anguished and clear to the point of feeling bludgeoning.

Spider-Man: No Way Home unfolds as though it were written by a room full of children who had just eaten a whole bag of sugar; it’s a hectic series of plot twists and deus ex machinas that overturns an entire bucket of action figures and smashes them all together with delight. The film might be a new nadir of cinema—but it’s also an undeniably watchable good time.

While Wright remains exceptionally gifted at mashing up genres to create moments of real cinematic lightning, by and large, Last Night in Soho is all flash, no impact.

A number of the observations about the strictures of gangland life that The Many Saints of Newark bumps up against are compelling, but the film is a victim of its own compression, telling a season’s worth of stories in two hours.

Venom may not have realized it was a so-bad-it’s-good cult classic, but Let There Be Carnage is striving to maintain that status from minute one.

By the end of this new Candyman, little personal investment remains for the audience, just a miasma of provocative thoughts failing to cohere into something greater. The film has enough visual panache to make it an involving watch, but it struggles to live up to the audaciousness of its deeper ideas.

Even the most mundane moments in The Little Things aren’t enough to stifle Washington’s star power. Almost nothing is.

Mulan delivers a straightforwardly heroic narrative of a capable woman battling her way to respect. It just doesn’t have much else to add.

All in all, the weaknesses and strengths of this remake boil down to the unavoidable fact that Force Majeure, a film I’ve seen multiple times and consider one of the best of its decade, isn’t a work that can be improved upon.

If the rest of Sonic the Hedgehog were pitched at Carrey’s energy level, it could at least be distracting. But for such a short movie (it runs 99 minutes with extensive credits), and especially for one about a super-speedy fellow, it never builds momentum.

Fiala and Franz can’t find a compelling purpose for the uncanny yarn they’ve spun. When all its ominous frights flame out in narrative chaos, The Lodge becomes a bore, more invested in the ghoulishness of its final reveal than in examining its unpleasant moral implications.

It’s a remarkable story, but a cinematically limited one, constantly in danger of seeming more like a news summary than a narrative work.

If not for the unusual setting and Stewart’s unique star presence, Underwater might feel completely anonymous. Fortunately, all that H2O suffices to give this goofy trifle a memorable sense of atmosphere.

There is no sense of real danger, because the mission has to continue, if only to keep this impressive long shot going. Any time there’s a larger, more cataclysmic set piece, our heroes look like tiny chess pieces on a much bigger board, bystanders who move around exploding mortars and whizzing bullets to produce the most stunning tableaux possible.

Whether you think the imagery is beautiful or nightmarish, this is a film that demands to be looked at. If nothing else, I can confirm it’s the most Jellicle experience I’ve had all year.

The Rise of Skywalker is a fitting epitaph for the thrills and limits of repetition; may it be the last episode of a saga that should’ve ended long ago.

The Aeronauts is as thin as the high-altitude air surrounding its heroes, a visually splendid thrill ride that somehow manages to feel entirely without dramatic stakes. But if it’s balloons you’re after, then this is the film to see.

The result is a convoluted, sporadically sensical, occasionally trippy film that can’t quite find a purpose amid all the manic world-building.

Over its 151-minute running time, Doctor Sleep floats between the bleak and mournful themes of King’s writing and the chilling, inimitable dread of Kubrick’s filmmaking. But it never quite figures out how to bring the two styles together.

Motherless Brooklyn has all the markers of a good Oscar-season movie: a talented cast, worthy source material, a script loaded with complex social issues. Even so, it doesn’t add up to much.

Dark Fate will likely feel like a blessing for Terminator diehards, a reboot that taps into what made the original films special and smooths out a timeline that’s grown more convoluted with every sequel. For newer fans, Hamilton’s and Schwarzenegger’s performances should be enough to keep things absorbing without the lure of nostalgia.

It reminded me that religion and pop and fascism each revels in uniforms and shared, shouted praise. But it didn’t make me feel all that much.

Jojo Rabbit’s script isn’t emotionally complex enough to address the cruel realism of its world, and as the bleakness continues, the jokes fall flatter and flatter.

This is a movie chock-full of heady imagery that it can’t get a handle on, and so the allegories at work don’t quite connect.

As Joker gets grimmer and descends further into bloody violence, it becomes little more than a horror show, bludgeoning its viewers out of any chance at insight.

The length of It Chapter Two is matched by the scale of Pennywise’s big scares, assisted by the slickest visual effects money can buy, but it means the story never manages to pick up any speed. This is a lumbering brute of a film, a creaky rollercoaster that inches a little too slowly toward every drop.

The cast is stacked, but the story is messy, and the pathos driving Bernadette’s disappearance (which, again, is easily solved) is underwritten.

Luce spends too much time presenting a puzzle for viewers to solve and, in doing so, neglects the human drama underneath.

If you’re looking for a throwback to simpler, sillier times (with a dash of self-awareness about the state of toxic masculinity in 2019), it should just about satisfy.

This is a film that could have been triumphantly weird, or soaringly corny; it tries to split the difference and ends up merely forgettable.

While the film tries to be a shocking window into another world, it plays more like an agog piece of tourism.

The Dead Don’t Die is the first horror film I’ve seen that seemed as likely to lull me to sleep as to give me nightmares.

It’s a garish, special-effects-laden extravaganza that still manages to feel tossed-off and half-hearted. The film is entirely devoted to the property it’s adapting, but its mimicry underlines just how pale an imitation it is.

This is a biopic so fearful that audiences won’t get the connections it’s drawing that it depicts a CGI dragon stalking the battlefields of the Somme. The result doesn’t rise above the insight of a Wikipedia page.

In the end, Long Shot is too fixated on the supposed absurdity of its romantic pair to spend much time considering them as people. Which is a shame, because the human moments are the only parts where the film really shines.

Someone Great is fizzy, frivolous, and probably easily forgotten, but for a weekend-friendly jolt of entertainment, rom-com fans could do far worse.

The script, by Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse, conveys little beyond the fact that Stephen and Rachael are both sad, nice to each other, and very attractive.

The 21st entry in Marvel’s galactic film empire, and the first focused on a female superhero (played by Brie Larson), is a perfectly fun time at the movies that deftly lays out the stakes of its new character for many future appearances. But more often than not, it feels a little routine.

Sheer force of personality is the main ingredient of any great sports movie, and Pugh has enough of it to pull the story along. But this is a star performance that deserved an equally dazzling script.

The narrative thrust of The Hidden World sputters any time humans are involved. Much of the plot exists only to stall the characters until the film winds its way to a touching conclusion.

The script has a wry sense of humor but is almost never laugh-out-loud funny, and the gory substance of the plot regularly overwhelms the delicate notes of parody.

With The Big Short, McKay threaded a needle by managing to be jokey while still serious, and angry while still entertaining. With Vice, he fails in both directions.

So much of The Front Runner feels like stenography, giving audiences the basics and then letting Hart or Bradlee monologue to the camera about how the norms of yesteryear are slipping away, perhaps forever.

Based on Garrard Conley’s 2016 memoir, Boy Erased is a methodical work that tries to account for the horrors of religious conversion camps as soberly as possible—but unfortunately to the point where soberness edges into blandness.

In its quietest scenes, Mid90s feels a little more authentic, and Hill may well turn out to have a growing talent for directing. But he needs to match his subtler insights to a script that feels less derivative.

Venom is, at its heart, a will-they-won’t-they story—a grisly meet-cute between a down-on-his-luck reporter and a grumpy, gloppy little extra-terrestrial with a really big appetite. That’s good, because the movie is barely competent as an action flick.

There are moments in Hold the Dark, none of them directly related to the plot, that are just as unsettling and searing as the best moments of Blue Ruin and Green Room. Still, the film never coheres outside of those flashes, ultimately delivering a disappointing, confusing, but undeniably fascinating experience.

It’s a disjointed, occasionally powerful, often grating grab bag of recent political events, a mess that’s forgivable only because it does reflect the messy state of the world.

The Predator is a confused, sloppy mess of a film, overstuffed with zingy one-liners and lacking in coherence.

Puzzle is often too prosaic for its own good.

Here We Go Again is a viewing experience best described as a long nap on the beach while staying at a chain resort. It’s extremely pleasant, if a little lacking in imagination, and every so often, a waiter comes by to refill your drink.

The jokes could be dirtier, the plot looser, the basketball action more gleefully ludicrous. Instead, everything feels very competent but safe.

As a studio comedy, Tag is just about diverting enough to avoid total disaster, but it lacks the self-awareness and depth that might’ve turned it into a genre classic.

Disobedience finishes on an annoyingly vague note, almost as if Lelio and Lenkiewicz had stumbled on a more interesting, expansive narrative in the final act but didn’t quite know how to pursue it. The result is a film that, from beginning to end, feels as hopelessly lost as its characters do.

The Devil and Father Amorth at times seems like it’s trying to set the record straight on exorcisms. Amorth is presented in the kindliest of lights, and the ritual seems to involve little more than intense prayer. But again and again, Friedkin can’t help but come off as an old showman dusting off his bag of tricks.

Pearson’s epiphany, and his subsequent battles with the church, were confusing for both parties, and Marston seeks to underscore that with nuance. Unfortunately, he ends up losing grasp of the compelling drama lying at the heart of that conflict.

Don’t call Gemini a neo-noir—call it a neon-noir, a moody little slice of pulp fiction that ends up satisfying the eyes more than the mind.

Once Pacific Rim Uprising reveals the means by which the kaiju might return, I was briefly delighted; there’s one strange twist that’s perfectly executed. But quickly enough it was time for 30 minutes of competent, clanging CGI action, and my brain turned right off again.