If you need to spot the narcissist lurking behind a friend or lover, this Maria Tomei bonbon may be just instructional romcom you’re looking for. Or maybe not.

There’s good reason to throw stones at Luca Gaudagnino’s teasing provocation about cancel culture. So have at its dawdling, blowhard, philosophical pretensions, but the film—riding on the power source that is Julia Roberts—stubbornly lingers in the memory.

In his final film, James Van der Beek raises the bar on a standard-issue thriller through the sheer force of his talent and magnetism.

Ethan Hawke brings back the mask that launched a thousand screams in a tricky treat of a horror sequel that’s perfect for Halloween

Keanu Reeves is an angel of fun in this bright but tonally broken Aziz Ansari comedy about the hell of living in a gig economy.

Sally Field mothers a talking octopus in a shameless tearjerker that doesn’t shy away from eye-rolling cliches but may just be the empathy booster we all need right now.

Jason Segel and Samara Weaving get laughs, but their murder comedy is total tonal chaos.

A sexy, snappy Eiza Gonzáles steals the show from costars Jake Gyllenhaal and Henry Cavill, but this Guy Ritchie mission impossible is not that bad, just generically, disposably ordinary, a good way to kill time while nodding off on a flyover.

Despite Christian Bale and a wow Jessie Buckley as Frankenstein and his missus, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s big swing at remaking a horror classic is a hot, unholy mess. One caveat: no one who still values artistic risk should dream of missing it.

Kate Winslet makes her directing debut with a script written by her 22-year-old son and acted by A-listers who, try as they might, can’t save it from dying-at-Christmas clichés.

A zowie Zazie Beetz takes a fiery axe to anyone who messes with her sister, but we’ve seen it all before and better. Boring is too small a word to hold the heaps of tedium that come with relentless repetition of kill scenes where no one dies

This intriguing fraction of a biopic rises above a clumsy script and stagnant direction on the strength of watching rock icon Bruce Springsteen, admirably played by Jeremy Allen White, show depression who’s the boss.

In this romcom that evaporates while you’re watching it, a mismatched Halle Bailey and Regé-Jean Page fight a losing battle to outshine the scenery.

Rushed off to Netflix when theaters are readily available, this fitfully competent “Jaws” ripoff will have to do until the real thing comes along. Condolences to leading lady Phoebe Dynevor who deserved better.

Peachy for fans and painful for newbies, this animated joyride is on the run for box-office glory. So what if doesn’t have an ending. It just stops as if totally exhausted. Now that I can relate to.

As killer ape movies go, this one’s a bloody wonder—it’s too bad no one bothered to add plot, character or a reason to care

Maika Monroe plays a drug dealer facing off with her rodeo champ dad Troy Kotsur in a by-the-numbers thriller minus any real thrills. It’s the hints of a better film—fiercer, funnier, more attuned to a woman’s point of view—that nag at you.

Forget anything new. Director Renny Harlin is merely spitpolishing his same old bag of shark tricks. But the dude knows how to deliver assembly line product like nobody’s business.

The sequel barely makes the grade as holiday fun, but wash it down with holiday cheer, put your brain on low power, let forgiveness into your heart and it’s—sound the trumpets—passable.

Jesse Eisenberg and his magician crew plan a diamond heist, but slinky, shady Rosamund Pike steals this zircon of a movie

Do Hollywood suits think we want nothing more from a Christmas movie than to feed on the dead carcass of an undeserving horror franchise? The scary part is they may be right.

Props to Charli xcx for grabbing her brat moment at Sundance. The dance-pop princess shows real acting potential, even though this misbegotten mockumentary gives her few chances to show her range.

Watching Lesley Manville and Ciarán Hinds is usually time well spent, but this woebegone wintery love story makes you want to jump into an Amsterdam canal.

Jokester Karl Urban leads a cast of battling gamer brawlers against a plot that doesn’t exist. No matter. All you need to love it is blind devotion

This sugarcoated and sanctified biopic sees Michael Jackson as a creative musical genius with a terminal case of arrested development. Except for the glorious music and star Jaafar Jackson, this is an insight-free gloss on a life minus anything raw, relatable and scandal adjacent.

The visuals dazzle, the plotting not so much in this gender-switched take on “Hamlet” as a warrior princess revenge epic from Japanese anime master Mamoru Hosoda.

The bloodsucking Count is back again, but this time in a strangely bloodless love story that even wickedly seductive fangboy Caleb Landry Jones can’t save from the cliché stockpile.

Jack Black and Paul Rudd can’t carry the unbearable weight of massive missteps in this comic remake of the 1997 snake movie that was always funnier when it tried to be serious.

Lee Cronin makes two hours of borrowed horror inspiration—The Exorcist should sue—feel like an eternity.

Director Jonah Hill’s satire of Hollywood cancel culture in the age of TMZ leaves out all the laughs that define character and sinks Keanu Reeves and an all-star cast in a muddle of jokes creaky enough to qualify for assisted living.

Oh, What. Crap. This lump of coal in our holiday stocking entraps Michelle Pfeiffer and is flat, stilted, lazy and so stretched out with Xmas clichés that you want to scream, bah-humbug.

Colin Farrell rolls the dice that maybe he can save this mess of an Edward Berger movie about a gambler’s addiction. Not this time

A numbingly dull follow-up to two “TRON” epics that even Jared Leto and a great score by Nine Inch Nails can’t make great again.

Ruth Ware’s murder-at-sea bestseller is star powered by Keira Knightley, but this water-logged whodunit sinks like a stone.

Everyone looks pretty and cries ugly in this glossy, grit-free tearjerker from the bestselling Colleen Hoover that traps the actors in marshmallow and gives soap opera a bad name.

Seven is not a lucky number for this amateurish return to the well of a once hella horror franchise that drops the ball on gore, giggles and a reason to care. Its disposable, defanged thrills feel like chatgpt prompts fed the wrong info about what constitutes scary.

Chris Pratt sits in a witness hair for most of this action movie while I sit in wonder about how a movie with such timely potential—an AI arbiter (Rebecca Ferguson) serving as judge, jury and executioner— manages to fall so hard on its fatuous pretentions.

George Orwell’s dystopian satire of aggression in the form of anthropomorphic farm animals becomes a cutsey, cardboard kiddie cartoon of staggering ineptitude and an endurance test for audiences of all ages.

A low point in the career of the legendary James L. Brooks, starring gifted actors who seem, all of a sudden in a fit of group amnesia, to have forgotten how to act.

This medieval borefest drags down the talents of Sophie Turner and Kit Harington, but can be commended for one thing: truth in advertising. It’s dreadful to the max.

Shallow, sycophantic and absent a single unguarded moment, Melania is a near-two-hour infomercial disguised as a documentary. What’s the movie actually worth as entertainment? I’ll start the bidding at two cents.