It would be easy to write off 'Sneaks' as a hack job, a sole-less riff on a tired premise, but there’s more afoot here.

It’s just that while you can’t see any of the strings being used on the effects, you can see the story being manipulated. You may fall in love with Ochi all the same, but you can only wish you’d gone on a richer journey together.

Cooley’s movie feels like what the Transformers films always should have been — adventure films the whole family can enjoy regardless of any pre-existing affection for the world of Transformers.

While I wish the film got more into the weeds of where Williams and his work exists in comparison to those who preceded and those who followed him, this is still the kind of inoffensive celebratory piece that will have you eager to revisit his most beloved scores while gaining a bit more insight into their creation.

If anything, “Don’t Die” may work better as a cautionary tale of what happens when you give your entire identity, thinking, and online persona to playing an avatar of fitness. It’s a shame that Smith seems to see such radical actions as mostly harmless.

There’s nothing particularly unexpected in Lawrence Lamont’s buddy comedy, but when it has no issue providing laughs thanks to stars Keke Palmer and SZA and their supporting cast, you can escape to the theater and have a good time rather than laughing by yourself in front of your TV.

It’s impossible to watch a film in which Jesus Christ says it’s wrong to profit from religion and then watch the filmmakers panhandle for profit at the end. At least, not without imagining the screen getting struck by lightning.

It’s a sweaty, intoxicating, all-nighter of a movie, and its allure cannot be denied.

It’s impossible not to root for President Viola Davis as she takes down incompetent, mediocre white guys who want to crash the world economy. She stares down this generic production and walks away with another victory under her belt.

Its baseline competence is perfectly watchable. It’s just hard to imagine anyone signing onto this project with the explicitly stated goal of only making it watchable.

For all it throws at you, it’s neither consistently funny nor scary enough to leave a mark.

The most accurate summation of A Minecraft Movie is probably “It is what it is.” It’s what it’s supposed to be. It probably won’t dig up many new converts to the game, but should strike box-office silver, at least. (And fans, be sure to stick around for two credits scenes – especially the second one.)

Screamboat' is not a great movie by any stretch but if Ricky Jay was editing this footage in a scene from 'Boogie Nights,' he’d have to turn to Burt Reynolds and admit: 'It’s a real film.'

The filmmakers have managed to make a bracing, scattered and somewhat revelatory look at a period that’ll go down as a misstep in which the Smart Beatle was fumbling to figure out what to do and intermittently coming up with a satisfactory answer.

If audiences expecting a cute penguin movie are forced to engage with the fact that any government which abducts people for having different political views is evil, and that everyone must do everything in their power to stop that miscarriage of justice, then nobody can say 'The Penguin Lessons' isn’t at the very least well-timed.

The word Competent! rarely makes it into a movie’s marketing materials no matter how accurate it is.

A rock musical like 'O’Dessa' only works if it sufficiently rocks, and 'O’Dessa' somewhat rocks.

There’s nothing wrong with Disney’s live-action remake of 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' that couldn’t be fixed by making it 26 minutes shorter, 88 years ago and in hand-drawn animation.

So let me be absolutely, 100% clear: “The Alto Knights” is indeed a bad movie, but not the good kind. It doesn’t make you feel alive, it makes you feel dead. It’s a tedious, directionless, bumbling chore of a gangster picture, incoherently written and edited, featuring two of the limpest performances of Robert De Niro’s career.

Opus is a Cheeto without the Cheeto dust, so of course we feel cheeted.

Everything in The Electric State feels done for convenience, so there’s no tension in the storytelling or the emotional stakes. It glides on a smooth track from point to point without ever considering how narrative friction would deepen the characters and the story.

Trying to do right by Hutchins is what stops “Last Take” from playing like just another salacious true crime doc. Its focus may be scattershot, and it may not change a single mind when it comes to placing blame, but like with grief, working through the pain is never clean and tidy.

We watch The Parenting in blasé curiosity, as we engage in the purely intellectual exercise of sussing out what’s gone wrong.

A captivating portrait of a man who can’t seem to remember who he is and may not ever be able to, Duke Johnson’s live-action feature debut is an enrapturing film that speaks in this language of half-remembered dreams before descending into something closer to a nightmare.

While Landon has made fun genre outings before with “Happy Death Day,” “Happy Death Day 2U,” and “Freaky,” Drop is, at its best, never more than just down the middle. At its worst, it’s an oddly clunky experience that strands its performers with little to work with.

It is her performance that ensures every tonal shift lands as it goes from playfully comedic to delightfully dark and back again. Despite how overstuffed and unwieldy it gets, seeing Kidman work her magic at every turn will never not be a joy to see.

Jack Quaid was born for a role like this. The actor’s unassuming cheerfulness provides the perfect comedic counterpoint to the film’s increasingly absurd gross-out action gags.

May very well be [Lithgow's] creepiest performance since Brian De Palma’s “Raising Cain” — and that’s saying something.

An incredibly direct motion picture, and sometimes the limitations of its budget put a strain on the ambitious multi-decade narrative, but it’s a film — and a cast — that demands thunderous applause anyway.

Human weakness is 'Black Bag’s' greatest strength. It’s an insidiously great spy movie, mature and satisfying.

It’s a grim slog through the wastelands of human civilization, which makes a big deal about the generic parts and glosses over all the thrilling weirdness.

My Dead Friend Zoe' is a noble film, seemingly honest and open. It’s not a terribly exciting one, and it struggles to justify its modest length, but plot isn’t everything.

I’ve spent over two paragraphs now talking about the various movie trivia Cleaner reminded me of, since Cleaner doesn’t provide much other food for thought.

A sick and twisted work of comic genius where the punchlines punch so hard you’ll explode.

Without ever leaving the bar, Blue Moon offers a snapshot of wartime America expressed wholly through shifting public tastes (and the attending egos left shattered.)

The film, in short, exhilarates and exhausts in equal measure, abundant in ambition and arduous, at points, in execution. And after six long years of waiting, one can hardly fault a bit of excess generosity – even if the feast leaves you stuffed if not quite satisfied.

It’s a film whose magnificence sneaks up on you, delighting in plenty of clever silliness before hitting you with a succession of somber scenes that lay you flat.

It isn’t always a pretty picture, but it is a truthful one, proving to be a loving tribute to those lost.

A welcome new patch in the sprawling 'Bridget Jones' tapestry. It’s got all the humor and romance we’ve come to enjoy and all the caring and maturity we’ve come to depend on.

An unexpectedly romantic movie coming from the 'Sinister' and 'The Black Phone' director, but it’s also a gnarly monster flick with memorable beasties galore.

There’s nothing brave about this movie. There’s nothing new either. And sure, it technically takes place in the world, but one out of three is bad.

It’s a compassionately constructed film — it never looks away from the agony before us, and the subject is of the utmost importance.

Heart Eyes seems destined to become a Valentine’s Day favorite, that rare horror movie with a great and charming love story, and that even rarer romantic comedy with a great and savage serial killer.

If this is just one bullet point in your Valentine’s Day to-do list, an excuse to hold hands or neck in a darkened theater, or maybe as a litmus test for your date’s artistic tastes, it’s a harmless, mostly generic action rom-com.

For thousands of years it’s been believed that laughter is the best medicine. Unfortunately, it appears that the laughs in the new Netflix comedy 'Kinda Pregnant' have been recalled.

Rabbit Trap finds some occasionally effective moments of atmospheric dread and sadness, only to leave those moments stranded.

The kids will love it. And actually, you might, too.

Last Days is a film that is so contrived, superficial and misconceived, it does a disservice to the story with every choice it makes.

More a forced, one-note farce than the sharp satire it’s trying to be, Atropia is almost impressive in how it manages to allude to so many complicated subjects surrounding U.S. militarism without authentically skewering or even poking at any of them.

It’s a deeply painful, necessary watch that confronts the way cruelty and repression leaves deep, lasting wounds over lifetimes. But some blunt narrative decisions and a rushed conclusion ultimately keep “All That’s Left of You” from greatness.

Some B-movies, of course, are highly entertaining. This one, though, seems like it was as much of a slog to make as it is to watch.

If the end result is less a comprehensive biography than a long overdue and entirely deserved tribute, it is, nevertheless, truly terrific.

A gorgeous meditation on girlhood

The actors are so committed, and the script so heartfelt, you’d have to be a villain to resist this group’s superpowered sincerity.

Delpy’s balancing act is an admirable and often effective one.

There’s no rule that every criminal has to be charismatic, or all their heists have to be heart-pounding. They just can’t commit the one sin that’s truly unforgivable: leaving us bored.

A sex comedy lacking in sex, silliness or subversion, when just one would do.

It’s a testament to both Matlin and the movie that we leave already anticipating the chapters still to come.

Even as Lau's intentions are to nudge us back into real life, the images flickering on screen continue to hold us rapt.

Brooklyn has never looked lovelier than in Holder's soulful debut.

Does great justice to an extraordinary astronaut and reluctant icon, but also repeats the error made so often by media of Ride's era, in centering other people’s perspectives over her own.

While Stoller’s script does boast a few solid laughs, everyone involved deserves and can do better.

The result is a film that’s not just funny, skewering so much of the lazy yet still effective tropes of so much of true crime, but also a wake-up call for the genre.

Lacking anything resembling a remotely conventional narrative, it just lets the conversation flow naturally and thus, Peter Hujar’s Day lives and dies based on its performances. Luckily, both Whishaw and Hall are outstanding, disappearing completely into their conversing characters.

Thankfully, even when sudden exposition about past trauma lands clunkily, the rest of the film remains light on its feet and properly fun as we observe the couple being tormented by whatever is drawing their corporeal forms together.

A Western epic of breathtaking visual splendor and formidable lyrical cinematic poetry, it’s a work containing all the wondrous, devastating layers of an entire life, which it explores with a gentle grace without hiding from the agony that comes with it.

It’s a film that almost entirely takes place in a handful of locations, but it feels vast in scope as the first-time filmmaker taps into deep existential questions about how you carry on after experiencing cruelty that nobody seems to care about.

Just when you think you’ve got it all figured out in terms of where things are going, a new wrinkle will be introduced that delightfully sidesteps all of your expectations.

Rather than serve as a shallowly classical body swap story that provides a moral lesson about her growing to appreciate the life she had, the aftermath of this decision is more thematically complicated and engaging. It’s also sincere, tapping into anxieties about being not just liked or even loved, but truly seen.

It’s a cute premise that ultimately gets wrung so dry that you’re left waiting for it to finally stop. The majority of its jokes either land flat or are run into the ground. Even worse, it pulls on the heartstrings with such force and impatience that the audience manipulation is palpable in every painfully predictable scene.

It’s far from perfect and is at its brutal best in the final stretch, though it manages to get there in mostly one piece — even when its characters do not.

The film could be mistaken as cringe comedy, but it’s much more than that, and Sweeney never lets the film’s delightful twists overtake the emotion at the root of the movie.

The result is a film that’s not just incisive and compassionate, but fully attuned to the rhythms of this modern family.

An exercise in riveting restraint and painful poetry, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is an emotional knockout.

Although Omaha is powerful and ultimately depressing as all hell, there is a faint, faint, faint glimmer of hope. If not for the world around us, at least for the people in it.

Anyway, it’s also weird to find a mediocre straight-to-DVD action movie inside of a major movie theater, instead of in the bargain bin at a Big Lots in 2010.

The whole thing is freaky and funny as hell.

Even as Paulson is putting her all into the film and can firmly grab hold of you at some moments as her strong-willed matriarch comes undone, much like the dust that is floating around the confined setting, it all slips through her fingers.

Even with a more gleeful performance by Kate Hudson, Shell is merely a fine film that’s far too tame to completely pay off.

Seo excavates universal truths that transcend all generational and cultural divides. The many geographical, social and emotional pains these young people are grappling with are ones everyone faces down. As they find ways to fight this, coming to realize all the many ways they may not be so easily able to, there is something both genuinely heartfelt yet quietly haunting about it.

It’s a meandering experience defined by the broadest of narrative strokes, cardboard cutout characters and musical numbers that start fun before growing more oddly obligatory in nature.

It’s a movie about the forces that consume anything and everything to make them into something that is a part of a collective. The more it expands on this, the better it gets, sweeping you up in stunning visuals that swallow you whole.

This void of a movie has plenty of the right pieces to work with at hand, but continually arranges them in the most blunt, least interesting manner possible. It’s a film that bolds, underlines and then shouts at you what it’s about, though never authentically earns your emotional investment.

As Salles shows us, such a seismic loss spans many generations just as it does entire histories that are still being written. We must then always remember the people, their individual stories, and what it was that they endured so that others may never have to do so again.

If there is one disappointing element of this moving, amusing, sad and memorable film it’s that it isn’t five hours long.

It’s not so much a movie as it is multimillion dollar background noise while you stare at your phone.

The film is big, brutal and beautiful — over the top at times and stirring at others.

So it’s not an instant classic like The Invisible Man. I think we can all live with that. It’s still a scary and interesting movie about a wolf man, anchored by a haunting performance from Abbott, who understood the assignment and went for extra credit.

Gracey may film Better Man through a thick veneer of showbiz glitz but — thanks in large part to the fact that, again, the star is a CGI chimpanzee — the film’s heaviest scenes sneak up on you and pack a wallop.

It never quite kicks into high gear, and plays a lot more like a TV movie from the 1990s — a very good decade for historical TV movies — than a major feature in the 2020s.

It’s hard not to feel a bit scammed, like you just bought a brand-new AAA game and found out most of its content is still locked behind an additional paywall.

It’s in little danger of becoming a classic but it’s gratifying to know that Barry Jenkins made this film his own, telling a fine story with genuine emotion and visual aplomb.

It’s not consistently hilarious but it is consistently imaginative, sometimes even breathtaking.

Sadly, Kraven the Hunter feels like it’s constantly being held back by whatever or whoever was holding the reins of the production. Even the ribald elements afforded by its R rating, usually an indicator of a comic book movie being allowed to go nuts, feels muted.

There are about two minutes in 'Carry-On' that are as exciting as any other action movie this year, and about 100 minutes that are pretty fun too.

A superficial illustration of the artist’s allure, interspersed with endless, increasingly comical shots of people watching him perform and smiling beatifically.

The fourth best animated Lord of the Rings feature, which sounds pretty good until you remember there are only four of them.

This Count Orlock is a gruesome monstrosity, gnawed on and gnarled, as repulsive as movie monsters get. But he is now also that sexual creature, a hypermasculine 1970s porn star, as virile as he is virulent.