It: Chapter Two movie review: it doesn’t float
A bigger misfire than its predecessor, and a waste of a great cast. Unsupportably overlong, with a feel-good self-care denouement that’s almost dangerous. The only terrifying thing here is the tedium.
James McAvoy
X-Men: Dark Phoenix movie review: dark matter, done way too light
A lazy treadmill of a sci-fi morality play that wastes a terrific cast. A numbingly dull game of mutant checkers that has no idea how to tell a woman’s story except filtered through the eyes of men.
Glass movie review: superhero ’splaining
Earnest and humorless, this is a faux-intellectual Comic Book Guy ponderously well-actually-ing us about shallow superhero tropes and clichés as if those are the most intriguing bits of these stories.
Sherlock Gnomes movie review: oh gnome they didn’t… (they did)
A flimsy treasure-hunt plot, a sexy song-and-dance number, and more of the same Elton John songs deployed with trite, lazy tedium. They mean to keep cranking out these dumb, dull movies, don’t they?
Atomic Blonde movie review: bland ambition
The living, breathing, bleeding life of the breathtaking fight scenes cannot overcome confusingly twisty spy intrigue and multiple male gazes on the story.
Split movie review: time for another round of “What the Hell Was M. Night Shyamalan Thinking?”
Lurid and squicky, Split treads water and keeps too many secrets on a dull path to the revelation of its self-satisfied cleverness.
X-Men: Apocalypse movie review: everyone knows the third movie is always the worst
About precisely nothing other than pure pulp comic-book soap-opera rigmarole, overshadowed by clichés, implausibilities, and missed opportunities.
Victor Frankenstein movie review: monster mush
A riff on the Hollywood conventions of a story we know very well already, with little new to say. James McAvoy’s mad scientist is fun to watch, though.
X-Men: Days of Future Past movie review: time for hope
With its time-twisting plot, sci-fi soapiness, powerful humanism, and to-die-for cast, this is the summer blockbuster done with elegance and heart.
Trance (review)
Deliciously preposterous, with misdirections and red herrings scattered about like enigmatic confetti…
