Jesse Hassenger

Verity staves off resting boredom for most of its runtime; it’s too silly and starry to be a slog. But it also lacks the rigor of a genre workout, settling instead for mere exercise.

In the tradition of its emotionally involving predecessor, Godzilla Minus Zero grapples more directly with humans’ attempts to assert some control over forces that initially seem impossible to harness.

Good as Abrams is, alone and when playing opposite skeleton-crew supporting cast, he’s not exactly a one-man show, either; the guy behind the camera is his constant scene partner. Cregger, who has become a horror brand name on the strength of the similarly inventive Barbarian and Weapons, orchestrates the mayhem with expert command of pacing, comic-horrific timing, and even that old standby, the lowly jumpscare.

Don’t Look Back In Anger is overeager to get to the big-picture stuff.

Hope threatens to come unmoored in ways that few sci-fi spectacles do. Frankly, more of them probably should.

Onslaught is a consistent pleasure to actually look at, and there’s scarcely a moment where it fails to entertain.

Look, it’s not the actors’ fault. Lucas and Moore have a more comedy-forward core cast than their Bad Moms series, to which this feels like a more divorce-heavy companion piece, but their staging is so scattershot that the big comic set pieces all play like variations on the same weak Saturday Night Live sketch:

Insidious: Out Of The Further, despite its potentially dire combination of retreading familiar ground with new and largely uninteresting characters, still manages to feel like a robust reconstitution of the formula.

It’s not only better than any of the Hangover sequels, it beats the hell out of the two Meet The Parents follow-ups so far. Depending on the school of frat comedy, that might put the Broken Lizard boys in the running for valedictorian.

Unfortunately, rather than a companion piece to the blackly funny murder-mystery of Thanksgiving, which riffed on Scream as much as 80s slashers, Roth’s latest feels like a demo reel for someone vastly less talented.