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.

Glen Powell runs for his life to win a reality TV jackpot in a remake of a dystopian Stephen King thriller that comes on like gangbusters—until it loses steam.

Margot Robbie and Jacob Eloridi get steamy in Emerald Fennell’s overheated but undercooked take on Emily Brontë’s classic Gothic romance in which they suck each other’s faces with a wild, porny abandon that would shock Victorians. No complaints here.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Maika Monroe brings battered heart and soul to a Colleen Hoover soap opera that renders “big” emotions with the small details that make them count.

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.

In this sadly stunted comic thriller, a delightfully depraved Glen Powell must kill seven of his family members to inherit $28 billion. Would you? By the end, the film’s lockstep quality commits the worst crime of all by killing our interest.

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.

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.

See this romcom for the soft side of Kevin James as a jilted groom in Roma and Italian scenery that’s gorgeous in any language. That’s the only way to come out ahead.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

An inexcusable horror sequel that lowers the bar to zero in terms of fun and fright. The only thing that scares me is this turd’s inevitable box-office success.

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.

This animated tale of a grumpy fish is as bland as blueberries, yet some wonder if sad Mr. Fish can inspire suicidal thoughts. Nah. Positive messaging swims will all these fishes.