Tear-jerkers are valuable to cinema; they can provide emotional catharsis as satisfying as any other kind of popcorn entertainment. It’s hard to get misty-eyed, however, over a film that never stops reassuring you that everyone’s going to get a happy ending. Let the audience feel bad for a while, so they can feel good after; failing that leaves everyone feeling nothing.
Ultimately, the film’s breezy attitude and calculated audience-pleasing wins out. Project Hail Mary offers plenty of laughs alongside of a dollop of sentiment, and it centers science in a tale where the apocalypse isn’t necessarily inevitable; it celebrates both humanity’s ability to save itself, and the idea that humanity might be worth saving.
Hoppers tells an effective story with wit and ingenuity, not to mention distinctive character design for every corner of the animal kingdom, from a kind-hearted shark (Vanessa Bayer) to a bratty caterpillar (Dave Franco).
Veers off in so many exhausting directions that it ultimately amounts to little more than sound and fury. She’s alive, alive, but she can’t maintain this pace.
The Scream series has become a horror version of That’s Entertainment!, where 21st century fans of a 1990s movie that paid homage to 1980s horror can get the kind of squishy, splattery, shocking homicides that A24 just isn’t going to deliver.
I Can Only Imagine 2 is a Marvel movie for Evangelicals, but not in a good way: it rehashes the emotional beats of its predecessor to sell audiences an exercise in diminished results. With its reliance on familiar tropes and story clichés, it’s a movie that, even if you haven’t seen it yet, you can probably imagine.
There’s a lot more sex in this Wuthering Heights, but the characters are flatter, the story is duller, and by the film’s climax, any dramatic momentum has been swept away by the winds on the moors.
Send Help becomes its own unique, mischievous, horrifying creation, thanks to director Sam Raimi and his singular gift for eliciting laughter that turns into screaming (and vice versa).
While Pratt has become the most stultifying of screen presences — he was a lot more fun to watch back when Bekmambetov cast him in a small role in 2008’s Wanted — Ferguson and Reis are both as electrifying as the material allows them to be.
