Alison Willmore

The artifice of the aesthetic premise overwhelms any of the film’s other intentions.

There is something magical about the simple fact that this movie exists, in all its obscene, absurd wonder, its terrible filmmaking choices and bursts of jaw-dropping talent. It doesn’t need to be timely to be an artifact of its time — a movie about nothing but song and dance and, most important of all, about cats.

You can occasionally see flashes of the better, sharper movie Bombshell could have been, and while there aren’t many of those moments, there are enough that it can’t be written off entirely.

The result is an underwhelming addiction story that feels not just familiar, but more focused on the bad-boy swagger of its main character than his actual recovery.

The Two Popes may be a fantasy about a closed institution flinging its doors open, but it’s also a compelling actor’s showcase. The combination is surprisingly potent.

It feels, exhilaratingly, like the throwing down of a gauntlet. Gerwig’s Little Women demands its viewers reconsider these familiar characters and what we’ve always assumed they stood for. It doesn’t just brim with life, it brims with ideas about happiness, economic realities, and what it means to push against or to hew to the expectations laid out for one’s gender.

It’s easier to think about Frozen II as a product than as a film because a (sometimes stunning-looking) product is all that it feels like.

They don’t feel like black characters grafted onto roles that were initially conceived of as white, but they don’t always feel entirely formed either, an impression that’s not helped by the choice to keep the siblings in largely separated narratives.

Where the last two Charlie’s Angels installments were sold on their trio of stars, this soft reboot has leads at various levels of recognizability, and they all seem to be acting in their own movie.

Sometimes you just have to let yourself be a sucker for the obvious — whether it’s for a holiday movie, a ridiculous romance, or an awkwardly grafted-on but very timely theme.

It’s a carefully crafted world of hyperfemininity intended to be as ominously smothering as it is pretty, and if the story that Paradise Hills, the directorial debut of Spanish filmmaker Alice Waddington, told were as sharp as its visuals, it’d have a guaranteed future as a cult classic. Instead, it’s a disappointingly half-baked riff on The Stepford Wives whose brand of feminism feels more 1970s than 2010s.

Nothing about the film is especially coherent, including its simultaneous status as a piece of art, a gesture of religious conviction, and a shameless act of commerce. It feels like notes from an artist who’s not sure if he wants to express himself as a worshiper or an object of worship — but who’s prepared to give it a try anyhow, on the biggest screen possible.

Frankie is a messy movie that spreads itself too thin over this sprawling cast of characters.

The Lighthouse is such an effective exercise in projecting claustrophobia, in both a physical and psychological sense, that it’d be unbearable to watch if it weren’t so funny. Thankfully, it’s a scream.

The sequel is a string of callbacks and remember-this moments that ask an awful lot of something whose charms and cultural impact were modest at best — a feature-length effort at congratulating the audience for having shown up for the original film a decade ago.

[Shyamalan] still knows how to manipulate an audience with an original story, and with “Split,” we don’t mind him pulling the strings again.

The film also comes across like a rough cut that was never looked at as a coherent whole, and some segments that start off as promising become interminable while others feel entirely unnecessary. There's no pressure on or expectation for Tarantino to please anyone other than himself, and the film feels overstuffed with ideas that should have been pruned.

Even at a generous running time that matches this season's other giant award candidates, Les Misérables seems like it's in a hurry, skittering from one number to the next without interlude. After Hathaway's early high point, it starts to feel numbing, an unending barrage of musical emoting carrying us through Valjean's adopting of Cosette, the latter's first encounter with Marius, the battle at the barricade and a last hour that can feel like it's a non-stop series of death arias.

Zero Dark Thirty makes you feel every step of Maya's journey, but it's her impressive achievement and that of the film itself that we're left contemplating, not her humanity - a stunningly well-realized whole with few soft spots to latch onto.