Ann Hornaday

Rust, Alec Baldwin and Joel Souza’s slow-moving, sepia-toned homage to the American western, is the kind of respectable if unremarkable genre exercise that would have come and gone without much notice were it not for the circumstances of its making.

As a straightforward biopic of a woman whose name is much better known than her story, “Cabrini” fulfills its mission with the same purposeful earnestness of its subject. It’s a movie even the most secular of humanists can love.

If Fennell doesn't quite stick the landing -- if her story of striving, sexual obsession, class resentment and revenge ultimately feels puny and predictable -- she certainly has fun getting there.

For all its feminist pretense as a parable of empowerment, Priscilla’s still caught in a trap, even when the heroine can — and does — walk out.

A Haunting in Venice isn’t exactly a barrel of laughs. But that’s no doubt as intended by Branagh, who seems intent on rescuing Poirot from the reassuring, too-cute world of “cozy” mysteries and grounding him in the real-life loss and emotional dislocation of the postwar eras from which he sprang.

With the exception of a few choice words from Haddish, Landscape With Invisible Hand lacks the kind of steady humor and energy that would otherwise keep the story afloat.

By turns giddily coy and disarmingly frank, the movie doesn’t know if it wants to be a kinder, gentler Apatow or go full Farrelly.

Lynch/Oz possesses undeniable value, if only to remind viewers that cinema is worth dissecting, thinking about, arguing over, mulling around.

Next to Momoa, the novelty of Fast X lies mostly in its cameos, which only a spoilsport would describe in more detail; suffice it to say that most work, and the most newsworthy come in the film’s final scenes, including the closing credits. Not surprisingly, Fast X brings new meaning to the term “cliffhanger.” There’s definitely more to come. There always is.

Even amid the corny jokes, awkward segues, forced conflicts and predictable resolutions, Bergen and Giannini manage to develop a low-simmer chemistry between the insults.

Overwrought and overthought, this Carmen somehow winds up being underbaked, as Millepied throws various ideas at the screen, with precious few taking hold with any conviction.

The sad truth is that, for all his ambition, cinematic prowess and hyper-confessional candor, Aster doesn’t stick the landing. Instead, he’s made a movie about unresolved ambivalence that itself goes confoundingly unresolved.

Cheesy, strident, ridiculous and sometimes disarmingly, stupidly funny, Renfield doesn’t go for the jugular as much as give it a playful and quickly forgotten love bite.

The action in “The Way of Water” is ultimately overwhelming, betraying an uncomfortable truth about Cameron: He might preach environmentalism and balance, calling on Indigenous peoples for their gentle worldviews and material culture. But at heart, he’s just as aggressive and all-commanding as the bad guys he portrays with such oorah swagger.

Directed by Antoine Fuqua with an occasionally puzzling combination of restraint and stylization, Emancipation turns a potent image into a pageant of spectacle and suffering.

Bardo seems to be Iñárritu’s deeply personal — if hermetic — attempt to make sense of the conflicting and unresolved impulses that have animated his life and art over the past two decades, during which he’s gone from promising emerging filmmaker to Oscar-winning superstar.

"Wakanda Forever” winds up feeling hopelessly stalled, covering up an inability to move on by resorting to repetitive, over-familiar action sequences, maudlin emotional beats and an uninvolving, occasionally incoherent story.

It’s possible to see why McDonagh’s fans love his quirks and clever structural feints (the war of wills in “Banshees” often plays out like variations on a theme), as well as his characters’ willingness not to be liked. But what they find at the end of the filmmaker’s rainbow is less likely to be a pot of philosophical gold than prosaic self-satisfaction.

It’s all diverting, if not ultimately sustained. Although the cast is thoroughly committed, as “Amsterdam” wends its way to its hysterically pitched climax, it sometimes feels like it’s two very different movies.

Based on a spare, exquisitely crafted novel by Graham Swift, this thoughtful but ultimately inert dramatization respects its source material and tries valiantly to give arresting visual expression to its finely layered themes.

The two actors have charisma to burn, finely tuned comic chops and the kind of smoldering physical star power that manages to look effortless and superhuman at the same time. But even gifts as prodigious as Bullock’s and Tatum’s can’t keep “The Lost City” afloat.

Master might be a horror film, but its scariest elements are off screen, in the form of the persistent social realities that inspired it.

After Yang again demonstrates Kogonada’s mastery of form, framing and composition. But audiences will be forgiven for wanting to reach through the screen to mess it up a little, if only to inject some recognizable warmth and spontaneity.

Wachowski seems to be at war with her audience, rewarding them with deep-cut callbacks one moment only to roll her eyes at the entire enterprise the next.

For all its beauty and poignancy, The Hand of God suffers from a strange paradox: It goes on too long but somehow doesn’t go far enough.

Zhao might have her eye on the nuances, but ultimately even a filmmaker with her sensitivity and vision can’t bend the Great Marvel Imperative to her will.

There’s attentive scrutiny here, and a surfeit of playful style, but precious little genuine curiosity or interest.

For its eventual lurid machinations and hyped-up emotionalism, the film winds up being a handsomely efficient one-man show. Like the man Gyllenhaal so convincingly embodies, it gets the job done, even if it inevitably goes over the top.