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This (re)animation kicks off with the Addams clan getting chased out of town by a pitchfork-wielding mob and looking for somewhere “horrible and corrupt” to settle. They opt for New Jersey. It’s one of the few decent gags in an animated comedy that’s hardly overflowing with the macabre wit that made Barry Sonnenfeld’s The Addams Family and Addams Family Values such ghoulish delights back in the ’90s. Despite the stellar voice cast, the film’s celebration of misunderstood outsiderdom is too generic to amount to much more than a bargain-basement Despicable Me, the franchise it’s trying to emulate. For Charles Addams purists, the characters’ looks—the pencil-thin Morticia (voiced by Charlize Theron), the roly-poly Gomez (Oscar Isaac), teardrop-faced Wednesday (Chloë Grace Moretz)—are dead faithful to his original New Yorker cartoons. But that nicely antique feel quickly gets washed away by the cheap-looking CG animation. The story isn’t much more sophisticated. It involves persecution from the nearby ultra-conformist town of Assimilation (geddit?), a scheming home-improvement TV star (Allison Janney) and, for Pugsley (Finn Wolfhard) at least, a folk-dancing rite of passage involving a sword. Co-directors Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon (Sausage Party) find a neat way to introduce the theme song and have some fun with the family’s haunted asylum-cum-mansion (Morticia feeds it morning coffee via the toilet). But by this iconic family’s standards, there’s a real shortage of snap.

Emma Stone, still with her post–La La Land and The Favourite glow yet palpably bored to be in a zombie sequel, isn’t the only thing that’s tired about this belated follow-up to 2009’s Zombieland. The redneck-liberal alliance of the first movie—embodied by Woody Harrelson’s strutting Tallahassee and Jesse Eisenberg’s neurotic Columbus (people assume the names of their hometowns in this post-apocalyptic universe)—once felt edgy. But in today’s political landscape, it’s less believable than reanimated corpses. Meanwhile, screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick have honed their R-rated snarksmanship in two Deadpool movies. What was left to be said here? Very little, and the film seems to realize as much. (Eisenberg even thanks the audience in a cringingly clever voiceover: “Everyone has choices when it comes to zombie entertainment.”) It’s extra infuriating that the new plot line does so little to justify its own existence. The gang now lives in a gone-to-seed White House—the front façade, overgrown with weeds and stray lumbering flesh-eaters, is a dreamy piece of CGI—but the new residents bicker just like they did the last time, and only Little Rock (a grown-up Abigail Breslin, underutilized) fantasizes about straying off the grounds. She does, triggering a rescue effort. Heroically, Double Tap’s new actors, rare though they are, save it from being completely brain-dead. Zoey Deutch (soulful and spunky in Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!) does what she can—a lot—w

The headline on this latest addition to the Terminator franchise—a Hollywood series that’s creaking like an aging T-800 with stiff joints—is that it reunites the people who made it great in the first place: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton and James Cameron (though not original co-producer Gale Anne Hurd). They’re back for Dark Fate, promising to straighten all those crooked timelines and deliver some honest-to-goodness shock and awe. On paper at least, that’s a tantalizing prospect. In reality, however, the involvement of James Cameron is limited to a story and producer credit—and it’s hard to imagine the story took him longer than an Avatar 2 lunch break to whip together. The set-up and structure is so similar to 1991’s landmark Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Dark Fate could almost be called a remake. It’s a watery facsimile of that movie, full of nods and winks to iconic moments long past. Deadpool director Tim Miller is the latest filmmaker to try to bring freshness to these reheated beats, and there are some promising flashes early on. That iconic shot of terminators skull-crunching their way across an apocalyptic landscape transforms into a tranquil beachside scene in one smooth edit. The tension at the heart of these Terminator movies was always between the clutch of terrified, clued-up survivors and the oblivious masses, and the moment captures it neatly. The setting, 27 years after Judgment Day, then shifts south of the U.S. border where a Mexican woman, Dani (N

An overstuffed follow-up to 2014’s Maleficent (a skillful Sleeping Beauty spin-off), Joachim Rønning’s sequel finds one worthy reason to exist in Michelle Pfeiffer’s wicked Queen Ingrith. As the nemesis to Angelina Jolie’s red-lipped siren, Pfeiffer gives us exactly what we want—the same hissing Catwoman attitude she heated up for Mother! Intimidating in Ellen Mirojnick’s pearl-encrusted costumes, Pfeiffer strides into character: Her Ingrith plots to overtake the realm, poisoning the familial bond between its young queen, Aurora (a graceful Elle Fanning), and her misunderstood godmother, Maleficent (Jolie, glamorous and imposing). Will Ingrith’s villainy destroy the duo’s love, which the first film so thoughtfully built? Even if you have an idea how that question gets answered, Pfeiffer’s deceitful empress (with flower allergies) keeps things entertaining. The rest of the package isn’t as inspired, despite Patrick Tatopoulos’s fanciful production design, which recalls a lesser Avatar, and all the cute, flickering things hovering around. A smitten Prince Phillip (Harris Dickinson), engaged to Aurora, sometimes downgrades the otherwise central Maleficent from feared potentate to anxious empty-nester. There’s also an underground clan of creatures that includes Chiwetel Ejiofor’s horned Conall, living in hiding from human threat. It all leads to a noisy finale that wears out its welcome. (You’ll crave for more of the quieter battle from an earlier dinner scene, when Pfeiffer an