Jesse Hassenger

Though its actual storytelling is pretty arbitrary, The Black Phone has the emotional simplicity of a children’s film, wearing its grit like makeup.

If we have to wade through some silly, pandering nostalgia to get to this pleasingly vast dinosaur playground, so be it.

Its creepy unease lingers, and just as in It Follows and The Guest, Monroe is the face of that unease. That’s the power of a great scream queen.

By the end of this movie, its inventive genre cross-breeding feels as worn-out as any other.

If it’s no longer surprising that Sandler is a good, steady actor, it’s still fun to find out he can find new ways to play to the cheap seats.

The movie never turns into a full-tilt caper, even as the obligatory end-credits appendix hints at enough material to inspire one. It’s stuck, charmingly and a little wanly, in another era.

The movie gets livelier every time Stewart appears, as if on a contact high from her intoxication. Crimes of the Future needs those extra jolts of weirded-out star power. In spite of its arresting imagery, it’s sometimes more engaging to think about than to actually watch.

Men is a horror film operating largely under nightmare logic and allegorical rumbling, and in a broad sense can’t offer many true surprises.

If Senior Year had been willing to further develop its affectionate social satire, it might have been a surprise 2020s classic of the teen-movie genre. Instead, it’s dead set on proving it has heart, too, and in the process becomes as thirsty for likes as any teenager’s Insta.

Is it better for a Stephen King franchise to burn out or fade away? Firestarter manages to do both at once.

Even when The Bad Guys resembles other movies, it’s stealing from them gracefully, with its own sensibility and energy.

Ambulance tightens the story’s frequent ridiculousness into genuine tension; it’s just retro enough to feel like an old-fashioned thriller done up with some newfangled tech that doesn’t choke the images with overly obvious CG.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 has just enough laughs to make its shopworn lessons about the value of friendship and (brace yourself) teamwork feel like part of a harmlessly amusing kids’ movie, rather than an insidious way of training kids to expect and even demand franchise bloat.

Yet there’s some kind of invisible force here, hurrying things along in the hopes of a future team-up, making sure this feature film arrives more undead than alive.

With its crisply likable leads mixing it up with pleasingly chewy gangster stereotypes, it has the consistency of a good candy bar.

Throughout its slim but slow 83 minutes, Umma piles up missed-opportunity scenes that cry out for a ghoulish sense of humor or an audience-rattling jump.

As with Free Guy, Reynolds and Levy have made a movie aimed at the dead center of mainstream geek culture, designed to be described as having so much heart—even though it’s as smooth and featureless as a Funko Pop.

Asking for It is made with sloppy overconfidence, a stunning bluff of both style and substance.

Despite the sci-fi trimmings—or, really, in perfect sync with them—the anxiety After Yang generates has the gentle, humming pervasiveness of real life. It’s trying its best to tell us about the world.

As a whole, Dog is credible as a small-scale drama with some moments of light, puppyish comedy, from the man and the mutt. Like Clooney before him, Tatum hasn’t quite made his own Soderbergh movie. He has, however, made a surprisingly good one.

Uncharted spends a lot of time scraping up meager points for what it isn’t, rather than what it is. It isn’t a superhero movie, despite the budget. It isn’t CG’d within an inch of its life; there appears to be some location shooting in the mix.

There’s a sweetness to the movie’s multiple storylines about teenagers earnestly, supportively pining for each other—and a neutered prudishness, too, about how none of these 17-year-olds seem to think about sex for even a second.

More casual viewers’ mileage may vary on which stunts are laugh-out-loud funny and which are abjectly horrifying, and the rickety carnival rollercoaster ride works better when the other passengers—whether fellow audience members or the on-camera talent—are screaming and laughing along in equal measure.

It’s the extreme age-specificity and seeming low effort of Buck Wild that makes it more content than feature film.

It offers the bittersweet spectacle of a pretty loony movie trying its best to become a more conventional one. Maybe an outright boondoggle would have been more memorable.

Campbell, Cox, and Arquette all have chances to shine, and Campbell’s rueful confidence even approaches something vaguely touching. But this is a crowded movie where the body count sometimes inspires relief rather than dread: Finally, some of these extra characters are being cleared out!

The wistful feelings it generates about a world allowed to keep moving coexist alongside an uneasy evocation of brain fog, an easy stand-in for either a zombified endemic state or a specific long-COVID symptom—take your pick. Whatever the original motivation, Leon appears to sense, after a couple of sweet slice-of-life capers, that you can’t keep walking and talking forever.

It’s heartening to see a big-ticket cartoon franchise end with the animation as its true star.