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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I’m happy to see a major-studio teen film wrestle with homosexuality and life in the closet as more than a comical subplot, even though I wish there had been a more engaging character to build that progress around.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Branagh’s retelling of the classic Agatha Christie tale is visually sumptuous yet otherwise inert, a series of what are essentially cameos by performers far too gifted to waste their time like this.

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.