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The Film Verdict

The Film Verdict is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer® when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): Alonso Duralde, Boyd van Hoeij, Deborah Young, Jay Weissberg, Kristen Lopez, Stephen Dalton, William Bibbiani.

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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
Send Help (2026) Alonso Duralde Continually toys with audience expectation; viewers might initially sympathize with poor Linda’s plight while finding Bradley to be an irredeemable corporate monster, but those initial impressions don’t necessarily last.
Posted Jan 26, 2026  Edit critic review
Mercy (2026) Alonso Duralde Purports to be a cautionary tale about putting legal justice into the hands of AI, but the movie’s real agenda is promoting the surveillance state as a way of fighting crime.
Posted Jan 21, 2026  Edit critic review
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026) Alonso Duralde DaCosta’s vision includes both hope and horror, the bleakness of solitude and the joy of music.
Posted Jan 13, 2026  Edit critic review
Greenland 2: Migration (2026) Alonso Duralde Seems more interested in contemplating mankind’s destiny than in crafting coherent action sequences. Whether or not that was the intent of director Ric Roman Waugh (Angel Has Fallen) is anyone’s guess.
Posted Jan 09, 2026  Edit critic review
Primate (2025) Alonso Duralde Doesn’t necessarily hold up to a lot of scrutiny, but for sheer horror pleasure and monster-movie squirms, this silly monkey movie delivers the goods.
Posted Jan 08, 2026  Edit critic review
Song Sung Blue (2025) Alonso Duralde Is Song Sung Blue shameless in its assault on audiences’ tear ducts and heart strings? Absolutely. Will those qualities make it a whipping boy for reviews like this one while also turning it into a classic in years to come? It’s entirely possible.
Posted Dec 22, 2025  Edit critic review
The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants (2025) Alonso Duralde SpongeBob SquarePants learns there’s more than derring-do involved in becoming a "big guy," and while that’s a wonderful idea in the era of toxic masculinity, the messaging never overwhelms the wacky comedy.
Posted Dec 19, 2025  Edit critic review
The Housemaid (2025) Alonso Duralde Feig isn’t afraid of glossy camp, and he knows that the old Hollywood masters, George Cukor included, knew how to use camp and excess to uncover truths about human behavior and systemic oppression.
Posted Dec 17, 2025  Edit critic review
Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025) Alonso Duralde As a sizzle reel for the next wave in CG-animation technology, Avatar: Fire and Ash delivers; as the third chapter of a story that is meant to be moving, or even engaging, this latest chapter once again falls short.
Posted Dec 16, 2025  Edit critic review
Five Nights at Freddy's 2 (2025) Alonso Duralde Viewers who aren’t thrilled by recognizing new characters from an old game, and who expect more from a movie than a handful of PG-13 jump scares, are advised to spend their night anywhere that Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 isn’t screening.
Posted Dec 05, 2025  Edit critic review
Zootopia 2 (2025) Alonso Duralde Finds ways to amuse adults — including a brilliant Stanley Kubrick shout-out — while tickling kids without, miraculously, resorting to fart jokes.
Posted Nov 26, 2025  Edit critic review
Wicked: For Good (2025) Alonso Duralde Wicked fans can delight in one final visit to Oz, while those of us less enamored can hope that the yellow brick road ends here. For good.
Posted Nov 18, 2025  Edit critic review
The Running Man (2025) Alonso Duralde For all the targets that director and co-writer Edgar Wright hits with the story’s political and media satire, he allows the pacing to go slack, turning what should feel like an escalating set of stakes into an episodic series of vignettes.
Posted Nov 11, 2025  Edit critic review
Predator: Badlands (2025) Alonso Duralde Between the wise-cracking sidekick, the adorable non-verbal pet, and the protagonist who undergoes personal growth, Predator: Badlands often resembles the pilot of a vintage Saturday-morning cartoon — but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Posted Nov 04, 2025  Edit critic review
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (2025) Alonso Duralde A heavy-handed saga burdened with the dogged earnestness that rarely surfaces in the musician’s work but is the cornerstone of the cinematic output of writer-director Scott Cooper.
Posted Oct 23, 2025  Edit critic review
Black Phone 2 (2025) Alonso Duralde It’s got fresh ideas, bold visuals, and resonant performances, but once it turns the first movie’s chilling villain, the Grabber (played indelibly by Ethan Hawke), into a rehashed Freddy Krueger, the thrill is very much gone.
Posted Oct 16, 2025  Edit critic review
TRON: Ares (2025) Alonso Duralde Its main agenda is to be big, loud, fast, and eye-popping, and on that level — and only that level — it’s a complete success.
Posted Oct 07, 2025  Edit critic review
The Smashing Machine (2025) Alonso Duralde Midway through The Smashing Machine, Mark and Dawn argue heatedly, prompting her to yell, “You don’t know a thing about me!” And that line hits hard that far into the movie; I didn’t, in fact, know a single thing about her. Or about him.
Posted Oct 03, 2025  Edit critic review
One Battle After Another (2025) Alonso Duralde And if these ideas sound didactic, the film skillfully weaves them within car chases and satire and love stories, bolstered by searing performances and stunning VistaVision camerawork.
Posted Sep 17, 2025  Edit critic review
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (2025) Alonso Duralde Unpacks a great deal of style to say very little, but style quickly turns grating when there’s no substance to back it up. Beautiful it may be, but Bold? Hardly.
Posted Sep 16, 2025  Edit critic review
Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale (2025) Alonso Duralde Basically one giant victory lap that takes the Crawley family and their employees into 1930 and beyond — as Cole Porter once wrote, “it’s fun/it’s fresh/it’s post-/depresh.”
Posted Sep 03, 2025  Edit critic review
The Conjuring: Last Rites (2025) Alonso Duralde Cue the creepy attics and doom-filled cellars and horrific visions of ax-wielding maniacs, but these haunted-house trappings no longer carry the fright or the fun that the Conjuring movies once reliably provided.
Posted Sep 03, 2025  Edit critic review
Caught Stealing (2025) Alonso Duralde In an era when studio product feels focus-group–approved and run through a let’s-not-upset-anyone machine, Aronofsky’s knockabout character study comes off as a bold outlier.
Posted Aug 27, 2025  Edit critic review
KPop Demon Hunters (2025) Alonso Duralde Probably the year’s funniest animated feature, from the interactions between the three distinct personalities of our heroines to the portrayal of over-the-top fandom.
Posted Aug 26, 2025  Edit critic review
Nobody 2 (2025) Alonso Duralde Stripped of the twists and surprises that made the first one such a sleeper hit, this sequel nonetheless delivers breezy, bone-crushing entertainment for undemanding late-summer audiences.
Posted Aug 13, 2025  Edit critic review
Freakier Friday (2025) Alonso Duralde Between Lohan’s impressive return to the movies and Curtis’ defiance of the Best Supporting Oscar curse, Freakier Friday represents an all-too-rare opportunity for talented women on both sides of the camera to demonstrate their chops at big-screen comedy.
Posted Aug 05, 2025  Edit critic review
The Naked Gun (2025) Alonso Duralde Director Akiva Schaffer and his co-writers keep the energy high and the gags absurd in an 85-minute barrage of hilarity that never stops to take a breath.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025) Alonso Duralde What they’ve created is a toybox, a diorama that marries design styles and technology but that never feels like a place where actual people live.
Posted Jul 22, 2025  Edit critic review
Smurfs (2025) Alonso Duralde Every few scenes, there’s a chuckle-worthy bon mot or sight gag, or the animation style will alter radically for some plot-driven reason, but there’s far too much downtime between Smurfs’ sporadic delights.
Posted Jul 17, 2025  Edit critic review
Monk in Pieces (2025) Stephen Dalton "A fragmentary but engaging documentary portrait of Meredith Monk, trailblazing icon of New York City's experimental arts and music scene."
Posted Jul 13, 2025  Edit critic review
Superman (2025) Alonso Duralde Balances the right-now with the baked-in history that has made this character an icon for the better part of the last century.
Posted Jul 08, 2025  Edit critic review
Jurassic World Rebirth (2025) Alonso Duralde Doesn’t go anywhere particularly unexpected, but the cliffhangers are choice.
Posted Jun 30, 2025  Edit critic review
M3GAN 2.0 (2025) Alonso Duralde It’s a movie that coasts on audience expectation and goodwill but never kicks the wickedness up a notch, making the weak-tea ending even more of a disappointment.
Posted Jun 27, 2025  Edit critic review
F1 The Movie (2025) Alonso Duralde The film equivalent of a Waymo, a ride that’s all car and no human being.
Posted Jun 26, 2025  Edit critic review
28 Years Later (2025) Alonso Duralde As these two modern masters of genre subversion have matured, they’ve also figured out a way to check off the boxes of thrills and gore and suspense while also finding something real to say about perseverance, hope, and love.
Posted Jun 18, 2025  Edit critic review
Elio (2025) Alonso Duralde But while the adventure is suitably wild and the sidekicks are at least visually appealing, Elio never quite clicks in the way that viewers have come to expect from the people behind Toy Story 3 and Finding Nemo.
Posted Jun 17, 2025  Edit critic review
How to Train Your Dragon (2025) William Bibbiani This new How to Train Your Dragon is like a microwaved White Castle hamburger: It addresses your craving, but it doesn’t satisfy like the real thing.
Posted Jun 10, 2025  Edit critic review
Ballerina (2025) Alonso Duralde The fight scenes are all Ballerina has going for it, but they’re frequent, varied, and clever enough to make watching the film a worthy summer pastime.
Posted Jun 04, 2025  Edit critic review
The Phoenician Scheme (2025) Alonso Duralde Some Wes Anderson movies address loneliness and love and ambition and regret; this is one that communicates the filmmaker’s sadness that he never got to travel First Class on the Orient Express in 1932, or on a TWA intercontinental flight in 1962.
Posted May 30, 2025  Edit critic review
Karate Kid: Legends (2025) Alonso Duralde It’s not hard to feel for Li when he’s getting knocked around because Wang so quickly establishes himself as a likable and empathetic screen presence.
Posted May 28, 2025  Edit critic review
Lilo & Stitch (2025) Alonso Duralde This remake doesn’t desecrate the memory of that modern classic, but neither does it ever transcend it.
Posted May 20, 2025  Edit critic review
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025) Alonso Duralde For those of us who come to these movies wondering what Tom Cruise will be climbing, clinging onto, or falling off of, this sequel delivers the goods.
Posted May 14, 2025  Edit critic review
Final Destination Bloodlines (2025) Alonso Duralde With its outlandish-homicide DNA popping up in The Monkey, it’s probably a good time to end this series. At the same time, Bloodlines reminds us of why these hilarious horrors have been such crowd-pleasers and why their creators might never call it quits.
Posted May 13, 2025  Edit critic review
Juliet & Romeo (2025) Alonso Duralde Director Bogart tends to drain the romance and the excitement from the source material: The camera is rarely where it needs to be to capture the choreography (either the dancing or the sword-fighting kind), and his soundstage Verona rarely comes to life.
Posted May 08, 2025  Edit critic review
Thunderbolts* (2025) Alonso Duralde If The Avengers was the movie 2012 America needed, reveling in Obama-era exuberance while reeling from 9/11, then Thunderbolts* fits 2025, presenting a world where everything kinda sucks, and powerful people seem intent on crafting your demise.
Posted Apr 29, 2025  Edit critic review
Disney's Snow White (2025) Alonso Duralde Like so much of contemporary fantasy cinema, Snow White exists in a weirdly artificial netherworld, and not just where the seven dudes are concerned.
Posted Mar 19, 2025  Edit critic review
The Alto Knights (2025) Alonso Duralde The difference between Barry Levinson’s The Alto Knights and Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas is the difference between a stack of wooden planks and a gazebo.
Posted Mar 19, 2025  Edit critic review
Novocaine (2025) Alonso Duralde Films like this work only when all bets are off; anything less than gonzo insanity won’t do justice to the nutty premise. Directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen clearly aspire to that level of outrageousness without ever fully committing.
Posted Mar 08, 2025  Edit critic review
Black Bag (2025) Alonso Duralde The who’s-zooming-who plot can be difficult when it comes to maintaining audience engagement. It’s a testament to David Koepp’s screenplay that it tosses out just enough red herrings and unspoken motivations to maintain a balance of enigma and empathy.
Posted Mar 06, 2025  Edit critic review
Last Breath (2025) Alonso Duralde Narrative remakes of documentaries are right up there with live-action remakes of animated features when it comes to cinema’s most pointless genre.
Posted Feb 28, 2025  Edit critic review
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