Andrew Crump

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

This is Van Sant’s Dog Day Afternoon moment. Judged solely by Skarsgård’s scenes, Dead Man’s Wire makes for an insightful and tense portrait of its subject. But judged by the limits of its perspective, the film is narrow to the story’s detriment.

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.

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

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.

The film has an identity problem. It’s uncertain what it wants to be. This is too damn bad because its first mode, a parody of male self-obsession, is perfectly satisfying; the comedy makes us shift in our seats, but the shifting is pleasurable, complemented by well-timed gags and a mesmerizingly selfish performance from its leading man, Yannis Drakopoulos.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.