A.A. Dowd

By its nature, the film is uneven—Estrada shares screenwriting duty with a whopping 25 poets, and as with any poetry slam, some performances are better than others, both in terms of the words themselves and in the highly variable acting abilities of these mostly first-time stars.

It’s every bit as human-scaled as the filmmaker’s other work — but also, in its noble restraint, a little less involving.

Blair Witch will make popcorn fly. But it won’t make anyone believe.

For most of its brisk 90 minutes, The Guilty is just Gyllenhaal, in tight close-up, constructing a movie out of sweat and tears alone: a glorified radio play of a thriller whose thrills are generated almost entirely through his reactions.

The Woman Who Ran is ultimately a minor doodle, even by Hong’s standards; it lacks the games of nonlinear structure, cognitive dissonance, or lightly surrealist Groundhog Day cycles that mark his best work. But the film has its moments, too, most of them concerned with the way social propriety affects communication.

What saves the movie is its actors: Exploiting audience’s memories of their previous collaborations, Hader and Wiig really do seem related. And both actors handle the balance between drama and comedy with aplomb.

Lo And Behold approaches the internet with the same mixture of wonder and dread that the director previously applied to pitiless nature, but the subject matter is inherently less cinematic.

While the act of gracefully condensing this big book into a coherent movie is indeed impressive, the truth is that said movie does end up feeling a bit like glorified cliff’s notes, albeit ones enlivened by Iannucci’s gift for volleying banter.

Agreeably straightforward, Those Who Wish Me Dead is also thin as kindling: It threatens to disperse into embers as you watch it. And there are limits to its ruthless economy. For as unsentimental as Sheridan’s approach looks from a distance, everything with Jolie’s anguished Hannah feels hoary and even a touch maudlin.

The generous read on Luca is that it has the sweet simplicity of a fairy tale, something that tired kids and the exhausted parents reading to them could follow even while on the verge of slumber. Less euphemistically, this is an exceptionally mild addition to the Pixar canon, pleasant but nearly as shallow as a bathtub.

What keeps Kelly honest is the wealth of authentic detail he sprinkles throughout.

Wringing genre thrills from headline atrocities, The First Purge is at once crass and provocative in its timeliness—in Blumhouse’s toolshed, it’s the sledgehammer to Get Out’s scalpel.

The only real gravitas comes from the reliably excellent Zem, here doing minor wonders with the clichéd role of the good-hearted, unwaveringly calm human lie detector.

Along the way, The Railway Man accumulates some power and insight, but it’s also hard to shake the feeling that a complicated first-person account has been given the Weinstein treatment.

Proxy’s greatest attribute is its deliberate dismantling of the audience’s assumptions.

The words “Arnold Schwarzenegger zombie movie” create certain expectations. Maggie, the glum new indie that technically fits that description, meets almost none of them.

At the end of the day, the pesky imperative to convey information is still a driving force; more than anything Wong has ever made, the movie chokes on exposition, its more poetic concerns stifled by its surfeit of plot.

This is actually a fairly conventional indie drama.

Atlantics is most successful as a look at a particular milieu, which makes one wonder if Diop might have been better off just making a longer nonfiction film on the subject.

What Spectre lacks is the sinister magnetic pull of Skyfall, a Bond movie with real stakes and attitude and distinctive flavor, not to mention more mesmeric images than one can usually expect from this workmanlike blockbuster franchise.

The film’s as clumsy yet earnest as a nervous first-timer, groping gracelessly in the dark for ecstasy and meaning.

As directed by Ecuadorian filmmaker Sebastián Cordero (Chronicles, Rage), Europa Report manages a few striking and intense sequences — most notably, a fatal drift into the endless vacuum of nothingness, filmed from the perspective of the disappearing spaceman.

At times, the movie seems to exist for no other purpose than to collide these two personalities together, privileging their antagonistic banter above all else. But isn’t that the basic point of all buddy comedies?

The meat of the movie is the behind-bars rendezvous between Finkel and Longo, whose interactions raise questions of journalistic responsibility and the banality of evil. But when a closing block of text announces that the two men still talk on a semi-regular basis — a surprise, given the finality of their last on-screen meeting — it’s hard to shake the feeling that a truly complex liaison has been reduced to an acting exercise for a couple of moonlighting funnymen.

For all the work this spinoff puts into generating a traumatic origin story for its moonlighting superhero, it would be a stretch to say that either Johansson or the filmmakers finally find the real Romanoff—or even that they much deepen the various versions of her we’ve met already.

The impression is of a provocative logline that Simien never quite figured out how to expand into a satisfying movie; once you get the thrust of the story, it’s mostly repetitions on a theme.

The Cable Guy works best as a movie about how damn hard it is tell someone that you’re really not interested in getting to know them better.

The pleasures are of a borrowed nature, the stuff of third-, fourth-, maybe fifth-generation noir homage, just gussied up in sci-fi formal wear: all archetypes spouting purple verbiage while navigating a twisty missing-person mystery that pulls together, in the classic private-dick tradition, seemingly unrelated cases.