The Mule is a thinly characterized, clunkily realized showcase for its director, who may or may not be working out some personal issues on screen. Yes, there are some very funny moments, and Eastwood retains plenty of charm. But too often, the film feels slapped together, half-assed, and lacking some much-needed care. And nowhere is that more evident than in the way the characters themselves are written.

Roman J. Israel, Esq. is the most frustrating kind of movie there is: one that almost succeeds, and is more disappointing because it doesn’t.

The film is a little too sprightly to land any heavy punches — it’s more of a comedy with satirical elements than a true satirical tale. ... But hate can be both worthy of ridicule and deadly serious, and for the most part Jojo Rabbit manages to thread that needle.

Dial of Destiny is loaded with related ironies, though they’re mostly extratextual. On the screen, it’s fairly straightforward: a sentimental vehicle, one that hits familiar beats and tells familiar jokes, comfort food to make you feel like a kid again for a little while.

Elemental isn’t a full failure. It’s an original story, for one, and coming from Disney, that’s no small thing. The best thing about Elemental — and, since movies are a primarily visual medium, it’s a very good thing indeed — is that it looks incredible.

The Laundromat is unwieldy at times, and its final scene is truly befuddling. But it’s worth watching not just for its bitterly entertaining explanation of a densely confusing matter but also the way it illustrates a larger problem.

Wine Country is a pleasant enough comedy about friendships in middle age and learning to embrace change. It’s surprising, though, that the film isn’t more fun. The pacing feels oddly slow, which blunts the edges of some of the jokes. For a group of actresses with improv comedy chops, it feels labored at times.

For most of the movie’s runtime, it seems like a story about coming to grips with your complicated feelings about the past, but by the end, some of the complexity seems to have evaporated.

It’s not a great film, but it’s interesting one.

I’ll be pondering I Love You, Daddy more; for now, though, I’m not convinced it’s thoughtful, and suspect it’s nothing more than clever and funny provocation for provocation’s sake.

There is, indeed, an explanation — but I kind of wish there wasn’t. For most of Old, the sheer weirdness of the setup is what’s so compelling.

On a number of occasions, the film veers close to succeeding. At times it’s evocative and touching. But it’s also heaped high with ideas about the magic of stories and the importance of recapturing your sense of wonder, which don’t really add up to much in the end.

Aquaman’s greatest strength is its visual style. Even when it borders on bioluminescent whimsy, it’s so distinctly and ceaselessly its own, instead of mimicking its DC/Warner Bros. counterparts. You almost don’t mind that you’re watching comic book cheesiness or such a convoluted plot because, like Momoa’s hair, it’s just so fun to look at.

The Flash existing as a completed movie is an achievement in and of itself. That it’s kinda good and has fun moments is a feat.

As with most comedies, your mileage may vary wildly. It’s more of a celebration of its own existence than anything terribly fresh, but the jokes are solid and I laughed a lot, which I can’t say for most studio comedies of late.

So The Lion King now has its very own pristine cover album, rendered in intricate, realistic detail, a high-fidelity B-side for its many devoted fans. But it might, in the end, leave you wishing for the slightly scuffed-up vinyl original.

This exceptionally well-cast version of Tammy Faye’s story does manage to tap into a cultural moment with reverberations we continue to feel today.

As she was in To All the Boys, Condor is the beating heart of this movie, and her performance as Lara Jean is deceptively complex. Lara Jean has to be simultaneously a nerdy introvert and badass cool chick, but Condor makes both sides feel equally present and equally real.

The film isn’t without its pleasures; it’s fun to see Aquaman and Wonder Woman beat people up and smirk afterward. I didn’t realize that watching Superman blow on stuff and freeze it with this super breath was something that would bring me immense happiness. And I’ve sunk an afternoon or more into video games in the past. But it would’ve been nice to see Snyder knock this out of the park and supplement his eye for visuals and his unique style with a story that had a bit more soul, especially with his very rare $70 million second chance.

It knows what year it’s coming out — on July 4, no less — and it’s slamming on every hot button it can find. That might be cathartic. It might also be turning pain into entertainment. With The First Purge, your mileage may vary.

Remarkably, Songbirds & Snakes has found a way to make the Hunger Games feel new and sharp.

In the hands of Deadpool director Tim Miller, Dark Fate by and large pulls off recapturing the goofy fun of the original, though with a twist. It evokes the earliest Terminator films, but Dark Fate doesn’t want to just rewrite Terminator’s future — it wants to reevaluate its past, too.

The movie is gentle, almost sluggish, and takes some weird left turns — in other words, it’s a Jarmusch film. Zombies suddenly turn up. People are dying. The world is ending. And by now, we’re more or less expecting it.

For as much as DuVernay’s film is a lovely and good-hearted movie that delivers lots of eye-popping, imaginative awe, its status as an adaptation necessarily raises the question: Was A Wrinkle in Time the right source material through which to tell this story?

When the central four women are played by Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen — and the rest of the cast is stuffed with ringers — well, it doesn’t matter if the camerawork isn’t especially vibrant.

It’s not a particularly fresh plot, and the movie’s screenplay feels a tad limp, devoid of some of the potential for comedy. But Dumplin’ still manages to be entertaining, and if it hammers on its message a little too often and a little too clumsily, it’s still a fun romp at heart.

The Rise of Skywalker falls somewhere between an overstuffed fan-service finale and a yawnfest. If The Force Awakens kicked off a new cycle in the franchise and The Last Jedi set it up to push beyond its familiar patterns, The Rise of Skywalker for the most part runs screaming in the other direction.

It is frequently quite charming, largely thanks to the efforts of Mena Massoud, who captures Aladdin’s irrepressible charisma every second he’s onscreen. Much of the new story material written for the film works, and it’s enjoyable, if pedestrian, family fare. But the terrible musical sequences, the lackluster CGI, and the strange creative and emotional restraint that permeates the film frequently flatten Disney’s original Aladdin into a cardboard version of itself.

The Journey is the rare hopeful political film rooted in both reality and very recent history.

For the most part, though, Deep Water has abandoned thought and logic for horny, unhinged vibes. It’s so much beautiful fun.

The movie is pretty to look at, and its stars are great. But here is the thing: It’s just really dull.

If Red Sparrow is a movie about the things it purports to be about, like the blurred lines around issues of consent in the espionage game, then it’s a misfire at best and horribly exploitative at worst. But as a movie about being Jennifer Lawrence, about having everyone think they understand you simply because they’re looking at you all the time, about trying to hide your real life behind ineffective filters, it’s much more compelling.

Extremely Wicked gives off the distinct impression that it finds Bundy far more fascinating than anyone who suffered at his hands.

Coming 2 America is really just a movie about how fun and great Coming to America was. It gives us another way to dance to the prior movie’s beat.

The movie is bad, but the chemistry: It’s good.

It’s a tonally strange movie from the get-go, masquerading as a typical holiday flick about long-lost friends getting together at the holidays but ending with mass extinction. Yay!

Fallen Kingdom understands the moral weight of the setup it’s been handed by the previous five movies. Even when it stumbles as a film, it has a definite point of view on what a humanity callous enough to revive a species for its own pleasure and inquiry ought to experience in return.

It’s entertaining enough to be worth watching for fans of the genre or of Bullock, who turns in a strong performance as a woman who has motherhood thrust onto her in a world loaded with peril.

The big difference between this kind of video game movie and an actual video game is that you’re not playing it — you’re just passively consuming it, and you know how it will end before it gets going. So any surprise or intrigue comes from just seeing how our mighty protagonist will get himself out of this scrape. That’s just enough for a couple hours of fairly mindless entertainment.

Dumbo isn’t entirely unpleasant to watch — on the whole, it’s probably Burton’s best since Big Fish, whatever that’s worth — and while the scenes in which the elephant takes flight around the circus tent aren’t exactly magical, they’re pretty fun.

Rough Night floats on the strength of its performances and its anything-for-a-laugh sensibility.

Bernadette is a soggy misfire, with sparks of possibility peppering a weirdly plodding tale.

In the end, I Think We’re Alone Now isn’t very interested in constructing a mythology or exploring the apocalypse itself. It’s more of a relationship drama, one that works as a showcase for two great performances against a post-apocalyptic backdrop that ups the stakes

Motion capture is a great way to achieve certain effects. But it turns out when you use it to graft human expressions onto animals, you end up with the first movie to star an all-Tuunbaq cast.

It’s not a perfect movie, but it certainly is good enough. Perhaps the most surprising thing about The Marvels is that it shows that the Marvel movie formula, an often-critiqued aspect of the studio, isn’t broken. In fact when it works, that formula is still capable of making magic.

The appeal of the Equalizer series is in watching the everyday — including Washington himself — turn deadly. And like its hero, The Equalizer 2 still has it where it counts.

For me, the bludgeoning tends to blunt the entertainment value.

If Bullet Train is a hit, this may be the cause; it’s pure escapism at its finest, with no message or lesson at its core.

For its faults as a movie, the story is still compelling as a bit of history, and more so in the midst of a presidential administration that at times seems to be taking all the wrong lessons from Nixon.

On its face, Venom 2 is a no-frills, rock-and-roll superhero flick that unashamedly swings for the fences when it comes to camp and cheese. Yet beneath those elements, it’s strangely about finding love and the intimacy of relationships, building on the rom-com core of the first movie.

Throughout, The Predator feels like it’s been cut to the bone, in a way that ultimately requires viewers to make tiny little leaps to keep up, and all those tiny little leaps eventually add up to a big, big gap between viewer and film.

The Greatest Showman is not, in any traditional sense of the phrase, a biographical motion picture about P.T. Barnum. It is a high-energy, breathless fantasy. Employing sleight of hand, some fast talking, and a lot of tall tales, it exaggerates the legend until the illusion takes on a life of its own, turning into the promised “fever dream” that, while admittedly stuffed with some truly excellent musical setpieces, has something sinister at its core.

Unfortunately, it’s not a great film. But it’s an enjoyable one, if you like fine wine, beautiful countrysides, and a little frisson of flirtation.

For all of Tomb Raider’s strengths, it would still be a stretch to call it a good movie. It’s diverting, a good way to spend a couple of hours, but it’s hamstrung by something that’s unavoidable: The whole central concept — raiding tombs — is just, well, not that interesting.

Noelle is Kendrick’s movie, and it’s a fitting reminder of why she’s such a potent star in projects that require some degree of cheerful borderline sociopathy. She smiles and sings and makes you believe in some truly unfortunate and fake-looking CGI reindeer in a story that keeps mutating and gobbling up other genres.

There’s a potentially funny movie in here somewhere. But it lumbers along, wasting some of its greatest assets and, in the end, overstaying its welcome.

As a professional film critic, I’m also obliged to tell you that The Mountain Between Us isn’t a very good film. But it’s not unwatchable, either, probably owing to the fact that its two leads are great actors in their own right, and they’re willing to take the whole thing quite seriously.

I appreciate the aim of Mary Magdalene, and the ways it reimagines a familiar story with modern implications, even when it falls flat.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard is strangely soulless, particularly for a movie that wants to be about murder, morality, and revenge. Those elements are there only to serve up the appearance of a smart film, when The Hitman’s Bodyguard would have been better served by sticking to pure action and stupid humor.

What you see — the bright, beautiful sweetness of it all — is what you get. Just like the video game. And it doesn’t yearn to be much more than that.

There are some moments early on when there are still shots of nature, or slow Ghibli-esque pans across landscapes. But these isolated shots don’t connect to a larger overall mood, characterization, or thematic idea. They feel like pale imitations from a director who knows what Ghibli films do, but not why.

In the hands of Jon Turteltaub (National Treasure), it’s just a shark movie, and a kind of inert one at that.

Justice League suffers from a mediocre, mismatched script that undercuts its characters. But Jason Momoa and Ezra Miller make it work for them.

It’s both a blindingly predictable pastiche of an action movie — absolutely nothing happens here that you haven’t seen in a movie before, with the possible exception of some crass sign-language humor from a giant gorilla — and weirdly charming.

Just like the first movie, the film’s politics are all over the place in a way that should be fun but ends up feeling distracting. Yet it’s hard to hate this movie too much. It has a weird generosity toward its audience. It keeps giving and giving and giving, until you’re overstuffed. It’s a Thanksgiving feast movie, where you’re vaguely impressed at all of the effort, even if the individual elements leave something to be desired.

What’s most interesting about Pacific Rim: Uprising isn’t the movie itself — it’s how the cause of the impending apocalypse has evolved from the first to the second film, and how that maps onto apocalyptic stories more generally.

Mortal Engines is visually spectacular, if a bit derivative. It’s a social allegory that goes for broke. And while it’s hardly a groundbreaking movie, it’s still pretty fun.

With all of its missteps and murky intentions, Back to Black might just be the tipping point in a prevalent conversation about the function of musical biopics and what we should demand from them.

It’s the worst of the bunch, a continuation of the franchise’s swan dive into joyless mediocrity, while managing to destroy any affection one might have for Marvel’s merry mutants.

It’s a movie ostensibly interested in how comic book stories work, but it has the same problems as a lot of the comic book movies hitting the big screen these days. The big twist: Shyamalan seems to have not learned very much at all from his own movies.

It’s hard to overstate just how bad Netflix’s Persuasion is, and in how many ways.

A Bad Moms Christmas is thin and silly, like an overlong Christmas episode of a sitcom you pair with some reheated lo mein when you can’t figure out what else to do on a stray weeknight.

It makes a run at cleverness, trying to be a dark screwball commentary on America’s race problem. But instead it’s just a spectacular flop.

It does just what it sets out to do: Give us a bit of fantasy, and then let us remember the joy of reality.

I think I’d rather re-read The Goldfinch than watch it again. Straughan’s screenplay strips out most of the novel’s heart in favor of plot fidelity, albeit with the pieces told out of order. No longer does it feel like we’re on a journey with Theo. Instead, we’re just observing what happened to him during his life, and there’s no reason to care about any of it.

Welcome to Marwen is a disastrously misconceived movie, but in such a boring way that it’s hard to imagine its target audience. Most of the time, big-screen disasters are hugely ambitious tales that completely miss the mark. This one hits the mark, but it’s probably not a target anybody should have been aiming at.

The new third entry in the series isn’t interested in character development or logical storylines or anything resembling innovation. It’s lazy and limp and profoundly weird, and not in any meaningful way a “good movie.”

As a film, it’s at best serviceable, stronger in its world-building than in its climactic exorcism and nowhere near as unnerving as the original. Yet Believer is a fascinating artifact of 2023. It highlights in myriad ways how much the world has changed since the original’s release. Hollywood isn’t the same, and neither is American religious culture.

Dead Men Tell No Tales tries to serve far too many masters with its story.

Gemini Man is a demo reel for some fancy new movie technology, an EPCOT attraction dressed up as an action flick.

Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth’s chemistry and rookie/vet dynamic is almost enough to make you forget about the missed opportunity and just relish in all the alien tomfoolery.

It’s not that Tulip Fever is incompetently made or unpleasant to look at or offensive in any way. It’s just that it is very, very boring.

Murder Mystery does feel like a very specific sort of direct-to-Netflix offering, designed to ape other movies you’ve already seen and enjoyed without straying too far from the formula or doing anything particularly innovative. But it does so cleverly enough to make watching it a pleasure.

Whatever your opinion of the book, the movie is a different animal, and a startlingly terrible one.

The Cloverfield Paradox has a great cast and an interesting setup, but it feels extremely — almost painfully — derivative of other science fiction films. It’s not nearly as good as its predecessors.

To be fair, it’s not all unpleasant. The joyride through the Warner Bros. IP universe is not quite as soul-busting as the trailer led me to believe it would be, though I suspect it benefited only in comparison to my expectations.

Lucy in the Sky, distracted by its own flashy filmmaking, can’t center its gaze on one goal long enough to convey any of its interests well.

With a lack of humor and deadly exposition, Morbius propels itself into an absolutely wild third act, perhaps the unintentionally silliest finish I’ve seen this year.

Wherever it falls on the quality spectrum, the bigger, more concerning story here is that Proud Mary’s journey into the movie marketplace is a good example of how Hollywood still fundamentally doesn’t understand what to do with many movies starring black actors.

Arcel’s film is fun, loving, scary, and often as genuinely compelling as it is wildly misguided. The Dark Tower may be a terrible, even baffling version of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, but it’s highly enjoyable as a cinematic King fanfic.

It’s literally incredible. I hope I never see it again.

While its nightmare visuals are stellar, the real villain of the movie is its rotten writing, which turns Hellboy into hanging action sequences loosely stitched together by two or three sentences and a vague suggestion of a narrative.

In the midst of what feels like a dark time, The House offers relief in its assertion that it’s okay to laugh at the lengths to which we must go to get by — up to and including an accidentally severed finger.

Bright pulls off the uncommon (and not at all admirable) hat trick of being confusing, boring, and vaguely insulting about the matters it wants to appear smart on. The movie is a case of reading the room very wrongly, then slapping a lot of violence and muddled mythology on top as a means of distraction.

Like all ghastly failures, The Happytime Murders is not “so bad it’s good.” It’s just bad: a boring flop, an unfunny comedy where nothing’s at stake.

There’s fun to be had in The Last Knight, if you can find it among the chaos — and if you can remember it after the fact.

Watching The Snowman keeps you so thoroughly occupied with trying to figure out why the movie itself exists that all other questions become irrelevant.

Even though no movie that lends itself to individually tailored special effects should be a royal snoozefest, it’s 2017 and everything is awful, and so, too, is Geostorm, a disaster movie without a disaster and an apocalypse flick lacking the apocalypse.