Too many power-ups, not enough story. Illumination's latest is more merchandise than movie: a forgettable corporate exercise that squanders its characters, its budget, and any semblance of creative vision.

A crowd-pleaser to be hailed Despite the success of Andy Weir's novel “ The Martian” on the big screen with the Ridley Scott and Matt Damon film of the same name, it has taken more than a decade for another of Weir's novels to be adapted. This one, again featuring a solitary and witty astronaut in space, is the crowd-pleaser Project Hail Mary (2026).   Project Hail Mary opens on Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), a man waking up from a coma with memory loss, who finds himself th

Almodovar Turns the Camera on Himself yet Again Pedro Almodovar has an incredibly distinct style, in both his narrative tone, which plays with the melodramatic, as well as with his visuals and sets, which are vibrant and alluring. While the Spaniard has been making films for over four decades with this consistent signature style, he’s undergone several evolutions. He started as part of the “Movida Madrileña” cultural movement, with an extroversion of the artistic and social f

Nature, Robots, and a Pixar Firing on All Cylinders Like much of the other Disney brands, Pixar's reputation was severely hurt by the insatiable quotas for "content" in the Streaming Wars, to populate Disney+. The result was that the once pristine animation studio began to turn to easy stories, choosing quantity over quality. The studio had already begun to show creative fatigue as it started to heavily focus on sequels in the mid-2010s, with  Finding Dory  (2016) and  Incred

More Snooze Than Scream No franchise is safe from Hollywood milking it for all that its worth. The Scream movies had remained a solid franchise that, despite entries of diminishing returns, had always delivered an enjoyable and meta take on its horror genre. Since being “revived” after an 11-year hiatus between Scream 4 (2011) and the fifth entry, confusingly titled Scream (2022), the franchise has been risking an overproduction that would dilute its reputation. Thus we arriv

A provocation that mistakes erotic excess for emotional depth Despite being one of the most iconic love stories ever written, Emily Brontë’s  Wuthering Heights  has never had a definitive screen adaptation, with many filmmakers and onscreen pairings failing to capture the complex push-pull relationship at its core. This is not for a lack of trying; the novel may be one of the most adapted books in cinema history, with the likes of William Wyler, Luis Buñuel, and Andrea Arnold