Reviews

A person able to like a movie like this won’t especially mind the flaws, as they’ll be too busy swooning for a love story that taps into the essence of partnership.

Consider the lousy animation and awkward performances and highly questionable narrative (woman abandons ambitions for man, learns he’s plenty interested in her even without a voice, gets her voice back but still has no personality) and ask what, to the tune of “Under the Sea,” the hell is this?

For a story that half-heartedly attempts to advocate for the courage to take risks, “Your Place or Mine” is so incredibly safe and underwhelming by design.

Mostly just undemanding, amusing stupidity, which used to be taken as a mild compliment back when comedy was actually a genre of movie that got made.

Silly but too serious, kinda exciting and pretty familiar.

Wherever the line exists between breathless entertainment and strained contrivance, “Missing” spends a decent amount of time on both sides.

Doesn’t exactly work up a sweat in the ideas department.

Spins the head but ultimately doesn’t stimulate it.

Generates enormous tension from the gradual emergence of truth and the complicated question of what to do with it.

Comfortably cartoonish, funnier than expected and even kinda cute.

Drives into every plot hole and then unites them into a canyon.

Where many horror-adjacent movies can struggle with evoking much of anything in the viewer, “Clock” continually succeeds at creating a feeling of destabilization.

Unlike the similarly titled and painfully over-praised “C’mon C’mon,” “There There” pursues complicated truth instead of pointing at a simplified version of it.

A delicate balance of self-awareness and vulnerability, disbelief and discomfort.

Simply not enough in nearly every category.

A screen saver posing as a movie, with a dead-end plot merely killing time before, um, killing time.

Too often feels annoying and aimless instead of insightful and clever.

When a person’s career has been defined by surface-level sensationalism, you’d think that the goal here would be clarity.

The kind of just-OK movie for which the “rent it” designation was created.

Occasionally achieves the desired crackle.