Richard Roeper

Unremarkable and disposable.

Rossi and Plaza make for a sizzling team; we believe every syllable of their dialogue, every development in their relationship. It’s almost criminal, how good these two are together.

With clever and assured direction filled with striking visuals by the Dutch actor-writer-filmmaker Halina Reijn (adapting Sarah DeLappe’s screenplay, which is based on a story by Kristen Roupenian) and a cast of talented and great-looking young actors throwing themselves into the wonderfully twisted material, “Bodies Bodies Bodies” plays like a slasher-film update of “And Then There Were None,” with a dash of the classic “Twilight Episode” episode titled “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” sprinkled in.

Sharp Stick is a rather sour and troublesome film—a strange hybrid that sometimes plays like a Fractured Fairy Tale and is populated by razor-thin characters who behave in an inconsistent manner and exist in a world that alternates between gritty reality and some kind of bizarro alternative world where things just don’t add up.

Occasionally creative but mostly distasteful and thuddingly unfunny, this is the kind of story that asks us to take wild leaps of faith at every turn—and then buy into a redemption story arc that is neither plausible nor earned.

With Midthunderr’s blazing screen presence in “Prey”—moving with athletic grace through the wild, delivering her lines with power and wit and style, there’s little doubt we are witnessing the ascension of a true star.

As a director, Logan knows how to put us through the horror genre paces, from jump scares and mysterious sounds in the woods, to the obligatory gruesome kills. Time and again, though, we’re reminded that real monster in “They/Them” is bigotry and intolerance.

Unlike so many of the cookie-cutter, wisecracking-assassin movies in recent memory, Bullet Train acknowledges its outlandishness from the beginning and yet also manages to connect so many dots in creative, gotcha fashion.

Writer-director-star Katie Holmes perfectly captures those early pandemic days in the occasionally heartbreaking and mostly sweet and lovely romantic drama Alone Together.

Ron Howard’s claustrophobically intense and captivating “Thirteen Lives” is one of those movies where you find yourself marveling at the daunting logistics involved in re-creating one of the most famed and complex rescue efforts in recent history—but with an excessive running time of 147 minutes, by the time the story wraps up, we’re almost too exhausted to fully appreciate what we’ve just experienced.

Not Okay isn’t exactly a swing and a miss. But it doesn’t quite connect in solid fashion.

In writer-director-star Novak’s scathing social satire “Vengeance,” he plays a character who isn’t all that different from Ryan—only this guy might be even more cynical, more immersed in his smart phone, more of an opportunistic narcissist. It’s a smart and insightful performance in a film that has a lot to say about the personal disconnect we feel in today’s Wi-Fi world; the stereotypes held by Blue Staters about Red Staters and vice versa, and the manner in which millions of us consider every waking moment as potential material, to be memorialized in a selfie or a tweet or a Tik-Tok video or a podcast.

The four main players are all excellent, with Amber Midthunder delivering particularly outstanding work that shows she is a young actor capable of great things.

You know all those sports documentaries about fallen heroes who had enormous talent but squandered it away through a combination of bad breaks and bad decisions, injuries and/or snorting enough cocaine to fill a first-base line? “Facing Nolan” is the antithesis of those cautionary tales, in that Ryan was a straight shooter on and off the field.

The darkly beautiful sci-fi film manages to feel bold and original while paying homage to countless great movies.

There’s just not enough gristle and gore on the bone of this story to make for a memorably haunting viewer experience.

Thanks in large part to the beautiful work by Daisy Edgar-Jones and the consistently stunning visuals, Where the Crawdads Sing provides just enough marshland entertainment to carry the day.

The bloated, bombastic and brain-dead Netflix actioner The Gray Man is a depressingly formulaic waste of the talents of the Russo Brothers and the A-list cast — and a complete waste of 2 hours and 2 minutes of your time, unless you’re content to hit the “Recline” button on your theater seat, soak in the exotic locations, jam your arm into a bucket o’ popcorn and laugh at the hackneyed, cartoonishly violent and utterly ridiculous idiocy of the entire exercise.

Does it come across as a bit precious at times? Yes. Is it particularly groundbreaking? No. Am I going to ask and answer one more question here and tell you if this is a light and breezy confection with delightful performances? You betcha.

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris is the very definition of a feel-good movie. It knows exactly how to press our buttons and we’re fine with that, because we’re just happy to witness this seemingly invisible woman have her well-deserved moment to shine.

Thor: Love and Thunder is one of the goofiest and least consequential sagas in MCU history — an allegedly wild and wacky but ultimately disappointing and disjointed chapter in the ongoing story of the God of Thunder, who seems to get more clueless with each passing movie.

Every character in the Netflix teenage rom-com “Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between” is just so nice that we wish them all well, but we’re not fully convinced there’s enough here for an actual movie.

An astonishing, horrific, fascinating and complex true-crime story that starts with a brutal act of murder in the late 20th century and winds its way well into the 2000s and 2010s.

The Forgiven holds us in its grips until the very last frame.

Mr. Malcolm’s List is a low-key, pleasant slice of escapism, with some lovely scenery and the attendant period-piece costumery and lavish estates, and a host of great-looking people bending themselves into all sorts of knots and doing their best to keep up with the quipping and the courtship rituals and the obligatory Misunderstandings, Deceptions and Betrayals before it all ends with … spoiler alert … declarations of true love!

This is the kind of movie that keeps the great Ellen Barkin literally in the shadows as a criminal mastermind, and relegates the wonderful Kaley Cuoco to an embarrassing supporting role as a man-hungry best girlfriend who might as well have stepped out of a cheesy 1970s rom-com. Is anybody even trying here?

Based on a short story from Joe Hill and directed with tone-perfect style by Scott Derrickson, who wrote the screen adaptation with his “Doctor Strange” writing partner C. Robert Cargill, The Black Phone is a hauntingly effective, perfectly paced, consistently chilling and wickedly warped horror gem.