Cute and comedic, but with a heavy dose of Lifetime Original energy (notably, source author Whelan cut her teeth as an actress in such vehicles), My Oxford Year may not be subversive, but it is serviceable.

What The Bad Guys 2 has to say about turning over a new leaf isn’t profound, but it’s effective nonetheless, especially when accentuated by so many goofy laughs and sticky-fingered thrills.

Harvest is a film about capitalism, at first quietly and then like a blunt object to the skull. Simmering beneath that ultimate disruption, though, is a sense of communal collapse that is already creeping under everything.

That stupid-smart mix of clunkers, wordplay, old-school set-ups, prop humor, and left-field ideas that the writers just couldn’t stop laughing at doesn’t inherently make for a comedy classic—especially as a late plot escalation draws attention to the dull sheen shining over much of the film—but it does prove how effective these films’ formula can be when followed properly.

Architecton acknowledges that everything we do is fleeting. There’s meaning in that. But it also posits that putting thought and respect into our temporary, tiny changes to Earth—laying fertile foundations that can roll with the punches that will always come—has a higher virtue.

The profound depth of feeling generated by Brie and Franco in the midst of this genre film, one perhaps unattainable if they weren’t also married in real life, gives Together a real shot as the greatest romance of the year.

More damningly prosaic than the overwhelming chaos of a war movie’s climactic assault, 2000 Meters To Andriivka marches through death by a thousand unknowns. There’s still heartstopping terror and momentary poetry in this toil.

The sequel is another indication that Sandler is still undertaking his longtime mission of making silly comfort-food comedies with the stealth seriousness of older age.

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.

For a lot of Marvel fans, it will be more than enough. For the more superhero skeptical, it offers a helpful example of how simply skipping the origin stuff on the fourth try doesn’t automatically confer a sense of dramatic urgency or comic-book wonder.

The Scout is as pretty-gloomy as an off day in New York, as winning as a good work anecdote, as defeating as another day on the job, and as listless as a generation starting to feel the shadow of their looming midlife crisis.

Unlike a recent franchise reimagination like 28 Years Later or even the pop culture savvy remix of 2022’s Scream (side note: both Wes Craven and Gillespie’s original films were written by Kevin Williamson), I Know What You Did Last Summer doesn’t successfully subvert its storyline nor glean anything remarkable by setting it in our current era.

In its quiet reflection on the limited choices of those backed into a corner, the drama elegantly conveys how a people’s continued persecution not only starves, shoots, and bombs individuals, but erodes the solidarity of their whole.

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

With plenty of moving testimonials and charming talking heads, Heightened Scrutiny draws damning lines between the “just asking questions” opinion pieces published in respected mainstream media publications like The Atlantic and the New York Times and the legal arguments made in our judicial system.

Gunn eventually finds his footing and Superman returns to the fray, delivering heat vision reprisals and truth and justice platitudes to Luthor’s hostile forces (he leads a sycophantic science outfit that resembles DOGE gone berserk).

Even when compared to the recent underwhelming crop of erotic thrillers, topped by the enjoyably escalating silliness of Deep Water, Pretty Thing is especially chaste, abstaining from both sexual titillation and the campy fallout that results from making a series of decisions driven solely by libido.

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.

Jurassic World Rebirth‘s attempt at rejuvenating its franchise mirrors the vitality of its once-extinct reptiles: This movie may have breathed life back where once it was thought lost, but this life is not pure or sustainable.

F1 feels, at times, like an underbaked episode of Netflix’s docuseries Drive To Survive—albeit one with Top Gun-style editing, incredible access, and enough drama to make someone bored of the racing become enthralled with the gladiatorial characters behind the wheel of these incredible machines.

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

Its fragmented literary structure and Victor’s captivating lead turn cohere theme, form, and content, melding the elliptical episodes into a canny representation of memory.

Bride Hard aims for the goofy joy of a drunken bachelorette party, but is more like the morning-after hangover.

A blistering adventure filled with dread and wonder, there’s a macabre classicism to the film—a sense that, even if life as we know it falls apart, some essential elements persevere.

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.

As Chalfant preens, jokes, and carries on throughout her character’s evolving mental landscape, she threads recognition and persistence into a performance defined by confusion. This approach contributes to the idea that our lives are not a single fading picture, but formed from a long series of imperfect snapshots—like how single frames, quickly played in succession, form the illusory whole of a film.

Fun as it is, Elio just goes for the montage, eager to speak a universal language.

Everything’s Going To Be Great tries to tackle ideas related to perceptions of success, acceptance, family, religion, love, homosexuality, and probably some other things thrown in there too. But there is no commitment to any of them.

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.

The film lacks the finesse for character and chemistry that the filmmaker showcased in her inaugural effort.

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.

There’s little to no fat to be found in this film; it’s a lean, mean action-thriller that threads the needle between speculative storytelling and brutal sci-fi carnage.

Yet none of this stuff, largely but not exclusively confined to a rote opening 30 minutes or so, works as well as the seemingly lower-stakes but far more evocatively handled saga of John Wick’s dog.

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.

A film so pure in its simplicity, relatable in its banality, quiet in its captivation, that it pulls off a nearly impossible feat: It’s a heist film that can’t be called a thriller.

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

It’s more that the specific combination of jidaigeki period piece, highland character study, and frontier justice that’s new, making Tornado a harrowing, blustery, violent amalgamation of an idiosyncratic spirit.

A wry smackdown of four insanely rich bros hanging out at a gaudy estate in the Utah mountains, the movie generates a decent amount of laughs, but it’s best when Armstrong puts satire aside for rage, seething at the tech kingpins destroying our society to increase their profits.

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.

Fear Street: Prom Queen doesn’t merely fall flat dramatically, but dashes any opportunity for visual intrigue in terms of cinematography, costume design, and, most vitally, its on-screen carnage.

Portman acquits herself charmingly, as she usually does in her occasional slumming blockbuster role; maybe she and Krasinski should have swapped parts. The erstwhile Jim Halpert isn’t even all that terrible here; at least he makes his character’s smarmy-doofus quality work for his non-relationship with Esme. The real star, though, is Ritchie’s unflagging spirit, as if chasing after bigger blockbusters in the 2010s led him to his own rejuvenating fountain.

Eddington is only a partly coherent mishmash of tones and ideas: sincere and satirical, astute and self-obfuscating. The only thing it is completely is ambitious.

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.

If repetition is the only goal, Lilo & Stitch paints by the numbers. But the Disney Channel Original aesthetic and a handful of wrongheaded decisions make this film just the latest in a string of soulless, cut-rate copies.

Ramsay lets her film, and her characters, exhale just a little. But there is a lot of earned wisdom and lived-in pain in that exhale, and in the entirety of Ramsay’s masterwork.

While chiefly serving as an engaging conversation piece for those already familiar with the man and his band, director Andrew Dominik’s film is also an artistic, effectively streamlined celebration of reflection.

Like a punk band turning four chords into pure angst, Bring Her Back turns familiar trauma-based horror into a traumatic experience. To sit through Bring Her Back is to endure it.

The movie is 105 minutes long and would feel stretched thin even if cut down to the cutscene bookends of a music video. It is a thing you can see, technically.

Sure, it gets repetitive, and as one of the most expensive productions in history (the reported budget was around $400 million), it inevitably smacks of an imperial industry in decadent decline. But somewhere into the nearly three-hour runtime, the movie passes that crucial point where a critic stops taking notes and decides to simply enjoy themselves. The end is nigh, and it’s mostly a good time.

Bloodlines honors a legacy of unrepentant silliness and gleeful gore with a knowing wink.

Deaf President Now! honors that struggle, even if the polished packaging doesn’t always possess a similar righteous fury.

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.

It goes without saying that much of it will feel familiar to those already well-versed in the Jia filmography: there’s a yearning, a search, and, finally, a return.

Although the film has a certain languidness—shaving the 100-minute runtime down would have amplified the tension—its commitment to dissecting the internal workings of analog keyboards and the USPS prove just as intriguing as the unstable killer who threatens professionals in both of these fields.

Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted does stray into some dark areas—death, anxiety attacks, suicidal ideaton—but the spirit of the documentary (and the music) is overwhelmingly joyful.

Hartnett is the one element that makes the whole thing bearable. Yet he still isn’t enough to make it enjoyable, at least in any sustained way.

The crossdressing, androgynous heroine, whose internal struggle around binary gender roles still feels fresh, grounds the broad emotions and classic, over-the-top aesthetic permeating the film.

The Surfer slowly follows the threads of its hero’s unraveling neuroses, and Cage walks right up to the line of sanity as each strand comes undone. It is a marvelous pushback against expectations that he stays on the other side of that line.

Thunderbolts* is the first Marvel movie in a couple of years to make a good-faith effort to live in its characters’ heads, rather than just their Wiki pages.

Yet for all of its imaginative inspirations, The Legend Of Ochi feels under-conceptualized: It’s a fairytale without much stirring under the studiously designed surface.

Can 20 minutes or so of brutally inventive action really prop up a whole movie? In this case, yes. Havoc doesn’t reach the mayhem-as-characterization heights of John Wick or the Asian films that clearly inspire Evans, but it does turn its gnarly spectacle into a kind of absurd redemption for the flatness of its characters.

The terrible script so often steals the spotlight that the gory, by-the-numbers filmmaking putting it into action is almost besides the point. Sandberg, for his part, can stage an effective horror sequence.

The tension between Cheech & Chong is a tale as old as time. But their overwhelming respect and love for each other make Last Movie an amiable tour through an unlikely and historic career, arriving at an even more unlikely send-off.

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.

The sequel sticks Affleck and Jon Bernthal in a sitcom episode surrounded by a Sound Of Freedom-style macho fantasy—call it Gun Sheldon. It’s a terrible combination that buries the rapport of its leads in chaotic action, troubling worldviews, and increasingly generic plotting.

Sinners, which the filmmaker himself has been touting as his first wholly original feature (Fruitvale Station, his debut, was based on a real-life tragedy), is both Coogler’s most fantastical and most closely rooted in the history of American racism. It’s pulp from the heart and the gut.

The Wedding Banquet may not take its modern queer skepticism as far as its characters could naturally go, and its green card plot device may feel particularly tenuous in light of the alarmingly pressing fascism of border control, but it is an enjoyable, worthwhile 100 minutes spent laughing, groaning, and hoping.

Gunslingers drags on for a little over 100 minutes, and the best it can show for it is Cage yelling about Jesus in a funny voice.

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.

That the movie is “only” a silly romp makes it all the more charming to watch Boden and Fleck find a less mechanical, less programmatic way to have fun.

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.

Leave it to Collet-Serra to deliver a trim, serviceable product—something almost impressive when compared to some of Blumhouse’s other recent original efforts.

Warfare is impressive, efficiently tense filmmaking.

The beats become terribly repetitive even when the fight choreography is at times satisfying, and the R-rating at least allows for some CGI blood spurts. But in spite of the dreary tedium, there are moments of genuine levity that shine through the gloom, be they intentional or not.

Bynum scaffolds the film with a narrative about failure, not one about the challenges of navigating life on the spectrum. Killian’s cognitive differences are there to be exacerbated by the many problems the script piles on his shoulders, as if Bynum has a torture fetish and means to exercises it on his lead.

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

Gomes picks apart an imagined past by experiencing its present, at the same time sharply unpacking the screwball comedy by separating the running man and the pursuing woman.

This fable’s push to meet, then fix, your heroes can still sound as saccharine as a solo acoustic set, but it’s smart enough to undercut itself early and often.

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.

While it lacks the surrealistic and fairy-tale elements that distinguish many of Guiraudie’s films (among them Sunshine For The Poor, Time Has Come, and Staying Vertical), Misericordia is nonetheless pervaded by a casual dreaminess and a disregard for the strictures of realism that leads in some (intentionally) silly directions.

Sometimes it’s so bad it’s almost entertaining, but mostly you can hardly see the screen because each frame induces an eye-squeezing cringe.

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.

What stands out most about Tracie Laymon’s debut feature is how courageously, unapologetically earnest it is—that it was based on her own experiences only adds an extra level of vulnerability.