Even if it wasn’t hot on the tail of Pixar’s Hoppers, Swapped would still be an overly familiar adventure towards empathy, one light on comedy and insight despite plenty of visual imagination in its world of flora-fauna hybrids.

Apex mistakes going bigger for going better when what it really needs is a little more cleverness, either in how Ben operates or how Sasha tries to survive her impossible scenario. For a movie with some pretty ridiculous plot swerves, everything winds up feeling oddly straightforward, which makes the survival genre’s requisite catharsis and comeuppance land anticlimactically.

Michael is an attempt to remind audiences why so many fans fell in love with him in the first place, but it doubles as a pretty clear bit of hagiography.

If Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is like any of the director’s previous work, it’s most like Evil Dead Rises, since it’s also programmatically upsetting yet narratively threadbare to the point of distraction. And while this movie’s relentless, reflex-testing shock scares suggest that the filmmaker has a sense of humor, the audience is never really encouraged to laugh along with them.

If, somehow, you’re just now getting into Saturday Night Live and haven’t already ingested endless lore about the most enduring of sketch shows, Lorne might be a meaningful primer. For everyone else, you’ve heard this joke before.

While Thrash resembles a general-audience survival horror drama, its forgettable protagonists also frequently stop to reassure viewers—mostly through profanity-laced dialogue and occasional bursts of gore—that it’s okay to scoff at whatever they’re looking at.

A talented animation team does its best to bail water from this sinking ship, but an overreliance on contrivances and slapstick leaves too many holes to plug.

It’s a straightforward slasher with a tech-savvy twist, ironically not outlandish enough to stand out from the formerly forbidden footage filling our feeds every single day.

There is room for vulgarity, horror, absurdity, and a whole lot of heart in Pizza Movie, though just barely, like attempting to host a rager in a 12′ x 14′ dorm room. The resulting stoner comedy is awkward, weird, and doesn’t quite work, but it just might become a core memory for those among the couchlocked who have yet to experience a proper house party.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie doesn’t really have the patience for character-based conflict, or plotting more complicated (or motivated) than groups of characters showing up to different planets on cue.

Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice practically warns the audience against taking it too seriously, even while talking out the other side of its mouth about its own heartfelt themes.

Pretty Lethal doesn’t even fully take flight once it finally escapes the realm of good taste, though it does feature a handful of standout moments and images. You might scratch your head a few times, but you also may enjoy yourself if you only want the filmmakers to embrace their unhinged high-concept premise

Over Your Dead Body is a gleeful, bloody romp masquerading as a dark marriage comedy, though unsurprisingly the two sides of its genre dynamic have a dysfunctional relationship.

By making the film about one woman (kind of) helping herself, with only vague connections to the world and the people around her, the filmmakers give up any worthwhile point about poverty, injustice, or community.

If you’re not immediately tickled by Normal‘s premise, which cements into the traditions of narrative conflict—man versus nature, man versus man, man versus self—the very literal concept of “man versus entire town,” this is the least of the Odenkickass movies. And if that idea makes you smile, Normal might be even more disappointing for how mechanically it goes through motions that used to be novel.

It’s both more and less than “Taken: Mom Edition,” another boneheaded poking of conservative’s self-inflicted wounds around human trafficking with a title just as deluded as its content.

The Immortal Man is not a good entry point into Peaky Blinders for the same reason it is not rewarding for existing fans: It traffics only in the late stages of Shelby’s arc, but offers nothing new to those who have already been there, done that.

The abusive push-pull between America and Mexico, the conflict between the exotic fantasy of a Latin lover and its xenophobic underbelly, crashes into two people too ill-defined to function as anything more than symbols.

More inarticulate than outright bad, I Can Only Imagine 2 re-packages a heap of barely legible dramatic and comedic shorthand as an uplifting testament to “the goodness of God.” It’s mostly inoffensive, but also doesn’t really have anything to say.

Indeed, The Bluff is a rollicking good time despite the fact (or maybe because of the fact) that the line between thrilling and ridiculous has never felt more razor thin than it does here.

A too-modern sensibility and a drastic change from the original folktale lead the movie dreadfully astray.

At the center of it all is Powell, making the same face for an hour and 45 minutes, too unflappable to root for, too smug to magnetize as an inhuman American Psycho. And How To Make A Killing needed to pick a side, either of clownish class comedy or of bitter sociopathic satire.

Overlong and undersexed, Fennell’s version of Wuthering Heights betrays her audience of edgelords and perverts. Even stranger, those who have fostered a distaste for the filmmaker’s sensibility will similarly find themselves disappointed. It’s one thing to make art that can be read as indulgent, ill-conceived, and tasteless—it’s another to turn around and make something that’s just boring in comparison.

As a bit of forgettable, low-stakes Valentine’s Day viewing for the religious set, one could do worse. But those who only date their rom-coms “intentionally” could definitely do better.

The Moment doesn’t meet the gold standard of self-pitying emptiness set by The Weeknd’s Hurry Up Tomorrow, but it does share with that movie the sense that the gorgeous surface is performing a kind of vamping at the behest of a music-video-thin story.

The pulp and action are sold by Statham with the resigned competence of a factory worker clocking in for a shift, and Breathnach’s over-eager performance is balanced out by her expressive face. They’re a decent team to watch go through the motions, running through underworld contacts and old pals who owe one last favor.

Cosmic Princess Kaguya! is blessed with talent—manifesting as impressive animation and a lovely rapport between its leads—but its rocky landing denies it a chance at true stardom.

Mercy takes a more bombastic approach with more speculative technology, only to chicken out of using that bombast to do anything other than jostle the audience through a series of contrived absurdities. If this is the future of crime thrillers, everyone needs their screentime severely curtailed.

As low-stakes viewing about two blandly likable people, People We Meet On Vacation at least looks better than the cheapest level of streaming rom-coms, and fans of the book will probably find something to like. Ironically, however, its place on Netflix means it’ll miss out on its truest calling as a film you half-watch on a plane.

This is Van Sant’s Dog Day Afternoon moment. Judged solely by Skarsgård’s scenes, Dead Man’s Wire makes for an insightful and tense portrait of its subject. But judged by the limits of its perspective, the film is narrow to the story’s detriment.

The fourth theatrical feature film in the SpongeBob SquarePants oeuvre—The SpongeBob Movie: Search For SquarePants—doesn’t give audiences a memorable outing, much less a best day ever. It’s a big downgrade, and a huge disappointment for long-time fans of the subversive and unapologetically silly character.

Without a tangible connection to the material—most notably to Iraq and its people—Gates’ viewpoint feels unguided, doomed to be influenced by the same pervasive prejudices that Atropia ostensibly attempts to combat.

It all adds up to a movie that isn’t screwy enough to be a screwball comedy nor deep enough to be a dramedy.

Stewart applies an admirably experimental vision to her adaptation, but she can’t translate whatever power she may have found in Yuknavitch’s text to the screen.

By sidestepping the sharper, tougher questions about matters of the heart, the film still plays it too safe. Freyne may love all three characters, but what he doesn’t do is make his audience care deeply enough about which of them will get their happy ending—and which one won’t.

The intimate highlights are too few and far between in this distended adaptation.

Learning about Gibson’s ‘roid rage from their treatment, and Falley’s acceptance of it, is a more moving example of their care for one another than much of what the film finds in their shared profession.

It takes dedication to make a dull movie where Nicolas Cage plays Joseph and Jesus gets into a fistfight with Satan, but The Carpenter’s Son sets to its task with devotion, if little else.

In Your Dreams has all the excitement of a low-anxiety, day-in-the-life nightmare stirred up by a case of the Sunday scaries. And, like those mundane nightmares, as soon as the film is over, you’re left momentarily wondering if it actually happened in the first place.

Dan Trachtenberg's latest Predator movie is a safe, frictionless, lore-centric franchise expansion.

Filmmaker Amber Fares assembles a ton of footage into a thorough portrait of a disillusioned activist-comedian, though that portrait and the one-woman show it revolves around are themselves limited messengers of a worthwhile call to action.

Berger’s skill with middlebrow crowdpleasers succumbs to empty spectacle; he can still frame a bluntly powerful shot, and he knocks off a few nice Ocean’s Eleven images, but most are just blunt.

The best that can be said about the film is that The Fault In Our Stars director Josh Boone, well-versed with the teen weepy, sometimes approaches the schlock with a bit of self-deflating slyness—something more attuned to the audience’s eyerolls and the cast’s barely-hidden smirks than to the serious source material.

Lacking distinctive social commentary, meaningful character development, or a salient environmental angle, the update feels all but incapable of speaking to the moment.

Unfortunately, the sharp point of view and creative risk-taking present in Ansari’s acclaimed series Master Of None (co-created with Alan Yang) are nowhere to be seen in this pedestrian comedy full of convoluted plot points.

Father Mother Sister Brother depicts with earnest melancholy the things taken for granted in life that don’t become real until after death, but its stiffness keeps it from being a work of true emotional significance.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is a slog, confused about the artist at its heart and stuck on unconvincing ideas about his art.

Every moment of Jay Kelly lives between the textual (the internal conflict of the fictional actor) and the metatextual (what the story tells us about the real creative forces behind the film).

Safdie splits the difference, striving to replicate the gritty, in-the-moment documentary feel of the source movie he clearly admires, and coat it in the triple-A Hollywood sheen befitting this kind of serious star vehicle.

A potentially interesting-if-imperfect mash-up of contrasting sensibilities (Stark vs. Black) turns out to be just another one of the curiously fake-looking blockbusters that emerge every now and then from streaming’s abyssal money pit and immediately disappear from the public consciousness.

Though Steve is a capable conduit for the myriad familiar dramas of juvenile delinquent storytelling, there’s just not enough time in the day (or the film’s wishy-washy 24-hours-in-hell structure) to give anything the attention it deserves.

Despite some white-knuckle moments, Dynamite slackens with each runthrough of its perma-climactic 15 minutes. In the world of global catastrophes, Bigelow increasingly resembles an unwitting tourist, just like the rest of us.

This tonally tricky comedy-drama tackles aging, loss, the Holocaust, Jewishness, and the difficulty of determining the truth in a fake-news world. But Johansson’s well-meaning film couldn’t be more aggravating, and its biggest problem is its insistence that we find Eleanor so damn endearing, no matter what.

As the final moments of Him unfold, there’s an attempt to drastically course-correct. . . But it’s a desperate Hail Mary after a poorly played game, without a hope of bailing out the team behind it.

Is A Big Bold Beautiful Journey a piece of wannabe creativity with a yawning hollowness at its center, or an A-list romance with some welcome aesthetic sensitivity? Like the outcome of a first date, it will ultimately be determined by chemistry.

Void of righteousness, indignation, or even straight-up nihilism, Sacrifice won’t cause even the most malleable of worldviews to waver.

For as much as Huang tries to go for a more freewheeling approach, treating his interviews like off-the-cuff conversations taking place in bars and restaurants, Vice Is Broke isn’t that intimate or revealing.

Eenie Meanie largely coasts on clichés, every brief high point deflated by its worldview.

Rather than discovering anything novel or liberating about the hostile, modern battleground of America, Relay‘s compelling set-up becomes overly dependent on typical rug-pulls and action beats.

While The Map That Leads To You looks great—much of it clearly shot on location in Spain during golden hour—it’s too staid and calm to reflect the throw-caution-to-the-wind passion of its two young protagonists. Rather than getting swept up in Heather and Jack’s courtship, the film keeps them at a distance, like a slow-motion car crash you can’t look away from.

Prolific TV director Benjamin Caron‘s self-serious movie keeps digging itself into a hole, first with its narrative, then with its heroine’s increasingly lurid backstory, until, like that heroine, it can’t claw its way out.

The film’s intermittent charms come thanks to some of the voice actors.

Though the punches maintain their force in Nobody 2, the sole punchline they support has become a grating dad joke, one that you’ve heard so many times that it’s lost all meaning.

When this nearly two-hour movie enters its intentionally laughless final stretch, Freakier Friday feels more and more like the extended encore of a reunion concert—not least because that’s essentially where it takes place.

The Pickup is entertaining on that most basic of slack-jawed levels: It has likable stars doing movie stuff (car chases, elaborate deceptions) that the movie seems to bank on blurring into memories of other, better capers.

The truth is that crummy, un-scary horror movies are nothing new, and are more the norm than the exception. And while The Home doesn’t distinguish itself in terms of style or subtext (one can argue that it doesn’t have any of the latter), it at least throws out just enough gross-out imagery to keep a viewer awake.

Oh, Hi! is an ambitious, thought-provoking look at modern romance that starts with the terror of weekend getaways before dissecting the gender stereotypes that keep people from finding their happily-ever-after.

Though it aspires to be a thought-provoking take on the coming-of-age story, Grady and Ewing’s doc never overcomes its uninspiring filmmaking to meet the profundity of the experience it represents.

As this somewhat overlong film continues on, it becomes increasingly shapeless, finally succumbing to the sort of soupy sentimentality it’s trying to critique.

Though Offerman buoys the film with terrifying aplomb, Sovereign is a missed opportunity to examine the cascading fallout from living in a country that fails its people and breeds violence.

As an action-comedy, Heads Of State is more successful at the former than the latter. It’s a junky, diverting movie, one with major tonal issues and a completely predictable storyline, no matter how many twists and red herrings the filmmakers throw at us. Not sharp enough to be memorable but just well-crafted enough that you wish everyone involved had tried a little harder.

The Old Guard 2 is broader, zippier, and more caught up in explaining the rules of its immortal superheroes rather than simply living in their complex emotional reality.

The problem is that 40 Acres simply sprinkles its few unique ideas atop a shambling post-apocalyptic template.

It seems that Johnstone and his collaborators learned the wrong lesson from M3GAN‘s shocking success.

The central conceit quickly feels like window dressing for a film that wants to be in a particular genre but hasn’t put in any real effort to fit there.

In telling a story that’s only being put to film in the first place because of how much schadenfreude online lookie-loos gained from it when it was happening live, the doc doesn’t say anything beyond the obvious.

Rather than trying to train something new, How To Train Your Dragon is riding an already proven beast; even its “first flight” has been done before. It can’t reach those old heights, let alone any new ones. And it doesn’t try to, nor does its audience really want it to. For live-action remakes, cruising altitude is the highest they can hope for.

To the extent Echo Valley sporadically connects or has some saving grace, it’s because of the efforts of its other players, behind but especially in front of the camera.

The Ritual just becomes a bad possession movie that’s not pulling off its hokey scares, rather than a bad possession movie unable to fulfill its more down-to-earth ambitions.

Han Ji-won’s sci-fi romance is caught between its genres.

From its opening moments, The History Of Sound feels like it’s going to be something grand. It’s this feeling that makes the warbling result that much more disappointing, a song soon to be forgotten.

The structure is episodic, somewhat elliptical, and occasionally clumsy. Even the widely imitated and parodied Anderson style, with its symmetries and whip pans, wavers toward the end, leading to an incoherent climax. (The fact that this is the first live-action feature Anderson has made without his longtime cinematographer, Robert Yeoman, is only a partial explanation.)

The filmmaker’s adoration for the people on-screen is never in doubt, but as consistently pleasant as his Godardian homage may be, it has limited use as an evocation or understanding of the late master’s work.

Summer Of 69 doesn’t flesh out its characters, themes, or jokes with enough finesse to even rank within the storied teen sex comedy canon.

Though it’s still thrilling to hear actors fire out Mamet’s heated arguments, when the dust clears from the film’s dense conversations, what remains is hollow.

Despite remaking much of that film (Taisei Iwasaki and Yuma Yamaguchi’s tense score being one of the most successful throwbacks), Bullet Train Explosion abandons the complicating human factors that gave the original its soul. It makes the same mistake as so many modern blockbusters: confusing bigger, louder, and simpler with better.

Magic Farm muddles the self-probing spirit of its predecessor, developing a reliance on cringe-inducing ketamine jokes and Brooklynite strawmen in lieu of engaging with the political misdeeds it casually refers to.

Relying too much on bombast and shaky effects that diminish the tension, the movie isn’t confident enough to see its premise all the way through. At its best, though, Drop updates the small-scale, high-concept suspense that Hollywood has had on airplane mode for too long.

If G20 barely registers as original, its star remains commanding. Even when Davis dutifully goes through the motions as stern government official Amanda Waller in the recent DC films, she seems incapable of phoning in a role or winking to the audience.

It’s not that The Amateur explores moral gray areas; it just swirls generic and weirdly apolitical spy-movie elements around until all that’s left is a watery blur, accidentally paying faithful tribute to studio mediocrities past.

There is certainly talent in front of and behind the camera, although it works more like a demonstration rather than reaching for something more compelling.

Though carried by a subtle and strenuous performance from Greer, Eric LaRue‘s intentionally unanswered questions do less to provoke than render the film a collage of well-meaning, half-finished sentiments.

A mix of blatant formula and complete oddity, the film is a failed recipe with plenty of seasoning.

The trouble is that The Life List too often struggles to reconfigure its well-known tropes into something that feels alive and human, which is what one comes to romantic melodramas for.

This boneheaded movie’s got a dull point, but at least a lot of rich jerks get murderized by fanged, stab-happy unicorns.

True to its inspirations, Ash offers up a formal mix between traditional sci-fi filmmaking and frequent first-person segments (either through pseudo-body cam footage or more explicitly video game-like bouts of point-of-view panic) that gives the familiarity a bit more energy than your average knock-off.

But as that film approaches 90 years old, Disney made a remake that looks 100 times worse—and, necessarily, has been updated in an attempt to tell a more human tale. Aside from coating the story in a sickly “live-action remake” sheen, like dipping a juicy red apple in a vat of poison, Snow White also pads out its plot so that the character at the center actually has a character, that her love interest is more than a randy stranger in the woods, and that her foe’s villainy is more political than mythic. But the extra half-hour is just as muddled as the misguided classic elements, all of which forge a tarnished tiara to which Rachel Zegler is the single crown jewel.

This one’s The Irishman for anyone in dire need of new glasses.