Andrew Crump

Wolf Man grasps the sobriety of how easily men are acculturated to violence by other men, but loosens its hold around the start of its final act: the insularity of its world becomes a crutch rather than an asset, and the plot reassigns the task of solving male abandon to its female characters.

Gray and his leads ably demonstrate how quotidian encounters and minute actions speak volumes. What’s missing is space for those little details to fully speak.

Baghead is moody and atmospheric enough (if low on scares) for about the first hour.

Films like these can hew toward positivity without scrubbing the script of risk, but Glitter & Doom risks next to nothing, except perhaps the Indigo Girls’ dignity.

The film’s observations, as filtered through the duo, feel utterly simplistic, and gain gravity only by the enthusiasm in Goode and Hopkins’ performances.

In place of new, at least, we get to see Butler in his element as a man of compassion first and blazing guns second.

Unfortunately, The Tank’s take on the “creature” component of “creature feature” is so muscular in execution and performance that Walker’s slow-burn approach does his team’s efforts an unintended disservice.

Mustache does its job. It gives Ilyas catalysts for growth other than the cookie duster hanging out under his nose, and the writing invites us to laugh with him, not at him because it’s one thing to laugh and another thing to sneer.

There’s a way to find the humor in life with mental illness. The Year Between, with exceptions, isn’t it.

A remarkable real-life, low-artifice spy thriller becomes unremarkable fiction.

Life Upside Down is a clunky, graceless movie, but it’s utterly engrossing as a stage for letting Odenkirk, Mitchell, Huston and the rest vent their own stir craziness. If you think of the film as more of an outlet than a functioning narrative, it gains value. But that reflective detail isn’t enough to hold our attention, no matter how likable and gifted its authors.

A movie like this shouldn’t be so ambivalent, much less so harsh on the eye.

It’s impossible to watch Bruckner’s adaptation without comparing it to Barker’s. Barker tapped into the darkest locus of human desire and expressed it on screen as shocking carnal violence. Bruckner sands down that perverted, forbidden lust into an accessible blueprint: Setup, kill, exposition, repeat.

Ostensibly, this is a movie about best friends and the exorcism that comes between them. Only the second part of the title lands.

Farrelly’s too busy making a Big Important Movie instead of making a movie that matters.

Instead of exercising artistic liberties over the written word, Louhimies goes all-in on putting those words on screen, a task too great even for nearly two hours of runtime; maybe Attack on Finland would work better if fashioned into a miniseries. Even then, though, it wouldn’t work as the entertainment it aspires toward.

The film should read like an epic. Instead, it reads like a boilerplate sports doc; the kind kept on constant rotation in ski resort taverns where they might catch diners’ attention for a minute or two while they wait on chili and beers.

Huda’s Salon uses strong thread to sew its dual narratives together, but “together” is all they are. They don’t cohere or complement each other save for providing two distinct paths into Abu-Assad’s exploration of Palestinian identity and life, contextualized in women’s experiences as members of a patriarchal society.

No one can top Hooper or “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” or even match them. Garcia is smart enough not to put on airs. He just lets Leathersaw rip.

Edwin declines to make a choice between idiosyncrasy and action, and his work winds up feeling like a loosely related assembly of material instead of a finished film.

Headey’s in her element. Gillan is capable. But Papushado’s excesses hold them back from performing at their best.

Ultimately it’s very little about football. It’s about class. This is a theme worthy of a spotlight, too — but 12 Mighty Orphans isn’t the place for it, or it shouldn’t be.

Noyer needs to go back to the drawing board. Even Alexis’ disability comes in a distant second to buckets of guts. His talent for making a mess is obvious. The rest leaves a few too many notes to be desired.

The Killing of Two Lovers is remarkable to behold, but all the technique in the world can’t distract from the holes littering the production beyond cinematographer Oscar Ignacio Jiminez’s lens.

As an arrival, Undergods impresses, but what’s under the surface needs finessing.

Ultimately the film resembles cosplay with an expansive budget. It took 20 years and change for a new Mortal Kombat movie to get a green light. Maybe they should’ve waited a few years longer.

Chaos Walking feels like a condensement of Ness’ trilogy of books instead of a straightforward translation of the first, and consequently there’s too much that needs to happen in too slim a running time, which leaves little space for making the movie’s conflicts matter.

Frankly, Earwig and the Witch looks ghastly enough that storytelling merit doesn’t even matter. It’s a movie almost too ugly to consider beyond the surface.

With In the Earth, Wheatley hits a brick wall, but he hits it hard enough that whether one sees the film as successful or not, the effort remains admirable.

For a movie about the inequities inherent in both parent/surrogate relationships and expecting father/expecting mother relationships, the stakes hover surprisingly low in the plot stratosphere.

There’s texture here, unnerving ambience as proof of Glass’ budding talents. But less isn’t always more, and while Saint Maud doesn’t need much, it simply doesn’t have enough to make an impression lasting beyond one second of terror.

It’s the thought put into the writing that leads Promising Young Woman astray: The movie knows what it’s about, but waffles over how to be about it. The ferocity Mulligan funnels into her performance hints at the story that could’ve been—merciless, cool and vividly stylized. But her ruthlessness, her “no fucks to give” demeanor, isn’t matched by the picture surrounding her. She realizes her promise as Fennell struggles with her own.

Greenland isn’t some self-insistently timely movie and it probably isn’t the movie we “need” right now. But it’s the movie we have, and its honest to goodness but unintended genre resonance makes it easy to embrace.

As it stands, Gibson and Goggins carry the show and the Nelms stick to their stern tone without wavering. Whatever other marks the film misses, at least it has conviction.

The film only gets as far as the beach, and James’ breathy line readings, and Scott Thomas’ icy supporting performance. It never bothers undressing.

Garai’s array of filmmaking techniques are impressive and haunting, breathing an unsettling melancholy into her script.

As Greed’s concentration vacillates, it dilutes both Coogan’s portrait of McCreadie and the impact of its own contempt.

The Roads Not Taken works when Bardem and Fanning are on screen together, where Potter’s experiences caring for her sibling rise to the writing’s surface and give the narrative a punch of honesty.

Maybe the film will squeeze a tear or two from your eye. What it won’t do is give you a reason to remember when, or why.

Avnet likely means well, just as Rokeach meant well. Three Christs needs more than a deep focus on the Christs themselves, and on the system that so utterly failed them. It needs to focus on Stone, and on the collision between ego and benevolence that led to The Three Christs of Ypsilanti’s birth. That should be the story.

While the director clearly has a few tricks up his sleeve for hitting his viewers with the heebie jeebies, what he doesn’t have, at least for The Sonata, is a sense of how to weave those tricks into a unified, cohesive narrative.

Slowly, agonizingly, over the course of two-and-a-half hours, the house collapses in a stream of Star Wars free association. At best, The Rise of Skywalker solidifies Ridley and Driver as movie stars. At worst, it ends this narrative not with a bang but with a recycled image from a better movie. If that isn’t proof that Disney considers this property more product than art, nothing is.

Charlie’s Angels talks a good talk, but struggles to back up the talk with the drama necessary to make it worthwhile. At least Stewart, Scott, and Balinska are having a good time, but they’re so switched on, and Charlie’s Angels is so switched off, that it sometimes feels like they’re in a totally different movie than the one Banks is making. You may end up wishing that you were in that movie with them.

The movie doesn’t drag, but it’s a major drag all the same.

Under the Eiffel Tower is a functionally enjoyable film bookended by an opening and a conclusion both dogged by distrust in the audience’s reading comprehension.

Labaki’s filmmaking suggests uncertainty at best and lack of confidence at worst. She layers on the suffering too thick.

Layton’s failure is frustrating. American Animals is a rare thing, truth that’s legitimately stranger than fiction. Bereft of a cohesive structure, the movie loses purpose, and that rare, strange truth is lost in workaday heist tropes blended with workaday documentary portraiture.

Godard Mon Amour captures the complications and the controversy, but Hazanavicius struggles to drum up meaningful insights into what makes Godard Godard.

As Wildling’s center, Powley keeps our attention in her orbit, and Böhm constructs a universe around her that’s worthy of her talent (if at times too murkily filmed for its own good). But the movie loses its thread 15 minutes or so into its running time.

It’s well-intended, it’s heartfelt and in its small-scale fashion it’s surprisingly ambitious, but it’s also content to cheat its own premise and withhold its genre pleasures, which effectively undermines Barbara’s journey.

Anonymously directed by Mark Pellington, puzzlingly scripted by Alex Ross Perry and handsomely acted by its ensemble—though none of its participants are ever given enough space to fully feel out their characters—Nostalgia is a poor man’s version of other great movies built upon complexly interwoven narratives.

Mute is in desperate need of a firmer hand. Once upon a time, that hand might have been Jones’. Now he’s invisible in his own pastiche.

Coming from a first-timer, Golden Exits might suggest promise. Coming from Perry, it nearly reads as self-satire, the epitome of overly dry and thoroughly hubristic indie filmmaking. Don’t let the indulgent chatter fool you. Here, Perry has nothing to say that’s worth listening to.

Before We Vanish is almost too much of a stretch for Kurosawa, veering from gory sci-fi horror to screwball comedy to marital drama to alien conspiracy potboiler without the necessary connective tissue to give his genre cocktail equilibrium.

A movie that delights with spectacle as much as it repels with revisionism. Part of you will enjoy it. Another part of you will hate the part of you that enjoys it.

The film’s cute, zingy, candy-coated tone is seductive enough, and both Hildebrand and Shipp are compelling in their roles. You will, in short, be entertained. But if Tragedy Girls’ subject matter is odious, its tacit, but perhaps accidental, endorsement of the very thing it means to send up is jaw-dropping.

Maybe if the film gave us the relief of a satisfying ending, the grimness, the ickiness, wouldn’t be so pronounced. But it doesn’t.

If nothing else, think of it as a hilariously repugnant curio, the kind of transgressive art you’ll be unable to unpack because you’ll be too busy chugging ginger ale to bother.

The first third of Alien: Covenant is suitably gripping. The final third is wreathed in tension reminiscent of the film’s 1979 progenitor, Alien. The second third sandwiched in between these bookends is equally interminable and dumb, a garbage-level studio-prompted exercise in origin narrative, built to demystify intellectual property where mystification is a key factor in its success.

It’s a ponderous work in every meaning of the term.

The Lost Arcade suffers not because it lacks an egalitarian heart, but because Vincent makes his arguments through a myopic lens.