April Wolfe

The best I can say about Buster Scruggs is that it seems as though the Coens picked their favorite actors and wrote them a part specifically tailored to their abilities.

An excellent, hilarious 15-minute verbal sparring match between Marcus and the school’s dean (Tracy Letts) is both an overindulgence — so many of the characters need fleshing out — but also a welcome burst of laughter in a self-serious picture.

The scenes that work just make me ache for more of them, signaling that if Craig finds her groove, she’ll be a force to reckon with.

The closest comparison for this film is 2017’s joyfully schlocky Beyond Skyline, though that boasted far more original set pieces. Bleeding Steel seems content to rehash old ones, cutting and pasting Chan into familiar scenes, with the welcome exception of one battle that takes place atop the Sydney Opera House — but I’ll be damned if I could figure out why or how they got there.

Those seeking out some titillating times would be better satisfied by Googling “feminist porn” and clicking randomly. But if you relish a mindless soap operatic story that leans into the silliness of the genre, Fifty Shades Freed might do the trick.

What Moors offers that’s new is a kind of unfolding mystery, as we come to find what really happened to Murphy in the war zone. Too bad that the pacing is botched and that the whole narrative becomes one long dirge of “and then, and then, and then.”

Both actors occasionally hit stumbling blocks with the wordy script and Tanne's direction, neither of which allows quite enough room for the characters to think and feel onscreen.

Stone and Carell ace both the warmth and the competitive camaraderie of that relationship. But when Billie and Bobby interact with anyone else in this story — love interests in particular — woo, boy, does Battle of the Sexes whiff the serve.

As with so many of his films, Haneke asks: Why? Why abide by the rules? Why go on? Here, he’s created two characters — Georges and Eve — I want to see exploring those questions and a handful I really don’t.

While the chemistry between Pinnick and Spence is sweet and familial, I couldn’t help but think so much of this film is just…nice. It’s that pretty feather you found in the grass. And maybe you’ll take it home, but will likely forget you did.

Strouse drops the ball with this meandering, flat film that shows few signs that he effectively coached his actors, as they rush to recite their dialogue.

Though the script by Chaganty and Sev Ohanian is taut and surprising, I’ve felt more absorbed in an episode of Murder, She Wrote than I did in this film, because, there, it’s story and performance that we’re invited to savor, not just tech and technique.

The scenario almost seems an apologia for the film’s own subject matter, crafted with the awareness that audiences have outgrown the May-December trope.

Aardman Animations (Chicken Run, Wallace & Gromit, and Shaun the Sheep) generally invests a great deal of care and precision into its storytelling, but this picture is somehow both simple and nonsensical. Early Man is the convoluted, caveman-populated skewering of FIFA that nobody asked for.

Every town possesses a history, culture, lineage and language all unto its own, but in the Nelms’s hands, we see none of that. Here’s a half-boiled mystery and boring bad guys, but the film does have a saving grace: Hawkes’s comic timing.

Monsters and Men seems as if it was made for the world that existed a few years ago. I honestly can’t tell if my dissatisfaction is with the movie or the era into which it is released.

Too often, in this version, Green doesn’t seem to know where to put the camera to elicit that sense of surveilling or being surveilled. Worse, that incompetence often works hand in hand with overwrought comic dialogue. But let’s get to what really works here: Curtis.

Vol. 2 aims to please with breathtaking set pieces that’ll convince you to delete all your old diatribes about CGI ruining the movies. But no matter how funny writer-director James Gunn wants this film to be — the one-liners move at lightspeed — too many of the punch lines are referential.

The Girl with All the Gifts is neither dead nor alive but somewhere in between.

Bad Reputation comes off more as a fanboy’s declaration of reverence to the queen rather than an interrogation of one of the most iconic women in music.

Unfortunately, as he performs the acting equivalent of triple backflips, Cranston isn't given much of a safety net from the script or direction.

Asante’s already proven she can world-build while wrangling a romance with her indie hit Belle, but she needs a jewel of a script, and this one is no diamond.

A slow approach requires careful atmosphere-building, and these days West is actually stronger at writing funny dialogue than he is at creating atmosphere.

Every character gets to learn a lesson, and while the humor is nothing new, the situations are.

The director builds to one big, beautiful revelation. But the story he tells in the lead-up doesn’t distract so much as it politely asks you to stand up so that it can place the trick card under your ass.

The first third of the story then presents her like a typical Hitchcock ingenue before branching out into a promisingly ambitious mystery. Too bad that story ultimately loses focus and its protagonist’s point of view.

The attention paid to images does not translate to character development, story, or dialogue, leaving little emotional resonance, while making me seriously wonder if the men telling these stories understand much at all about female sexuality.

In The Trust, the stylish new heist film from Alex and Benjamin Brewer, we get a brief, satisfying, darkly comic peek at everyday Vegas life as lived by low-level LVPD officers. Then the film quickly loses focus and forgets the quirky characters that make the city — and the story — special.

Whether it’s the too-harried pacing or too many central people vying for attention, the film’s heart never quite coalesces. Seizing it is like trying to grab a cloud. Pearce seems to want this movie to be both a neon pulp plot-heavy piece and a character-driven drama, and there’s just not enough time in a single film for all of it to work.

Howell and Robinson go all-in on Claire’s measured mourning, and while it may be realistic, that detachment — along with a relentlessly clinical gray-tinged color palette — ultimately bogs down whatever momentum Claire in Motion might be working up to.

While the film is ambitious, with enough intrigue and uneasy moral quandaries to keep my attention rapt in the end it just doesn’t make the leap to the other side.

For all its inventive and impressive technique, the film lacks fun; a lot of folks, myself included, need very little reminding that the Internet is a threat and that terrible men are actively out there abducting and terrorizing girls and women for lulz.

Hoffman’s feature debut is hampered by well-worn tropes the writer-director seems at first to be aware of — and playing with — before he leans so hard into them that whatever originality the film at first displayed crashes right into a well of rom-com cliché.

Whether or not you connect with Refn's brand of over-the-top violence, you can't deny that his attention to color, texture, and music is nearly unmatched by other directors working today.

Where Feste best succeeds in Boundaries isn’t in the father-daughter relationship, which finds her straining for a tight resolution, but in the mother-son one, where the two actors vibe easily and persuasively off each other.

The film itself is often flat, akin to a very well-directed after-school special crafted exclusively to dramatize what it might be like to either live on the high-functioning end of the spectrum or care for someone who’s there.

Hugh Jackman is charming as ever, and two dance scenes are mildly inventive and well-executed, yet Jackman’s goodwill and a splash of inspired choreography are not enough to earn the greatest in the title.

While the horror director successfully distills Ghinsberg’s spare prose into a succession of terrifying images, McLean can’t seem to help straying into the tackier elements of horror.

Imagine The Trip meets Lost in Translation (Coppola’s daughter Sophia’s debut), but with stale dialogue and neither much romance nor comedy

If Charlie were just unlikable, it all might be palatable and even fun. But his behavior draws more of an eye-roll than a laugh or a snarl, despite Robinson's confident, believable performance.

With heart, humor and some breathtaking special effects, Ding Sheng’s Railroad Tigers charms and thrills.

The director conjures some chills with a cold plunge into an enchanting and frightful world — the imagery’s straight out of a Kubrick and Lynch nightmare — but the story unravels as he tries to overexplain his evil doctor’s devilish plot.

Beyond Skyline is pretty fun, even if it’s completely nonsensical.

The story necessitates ceaseless sadness, which can grind, but for the most part Aftermath glides just above the wreckage with its leads’ performances. Lester, however, can’t resist throwing in some easy, cheesy symbolism to slop it up.

As evocative as the production design and cinematography are, multiple cheesy scenes with one-dimensional characters undermine Howell’s efforts to spook, let alone redefine a genre.

Lyew kills the story with implausible twists, but he does craft some effective, original set pieces.

Despite worthy performances from the entire cast, this movie’s a prime example of a director admiring some great movies but only having a cursory, superficial understanding of what it was that made them work.

The comic drama Krystal, marking William H. Macy’s third time out as a feature director, is so baffling that it must be appreciated at least for its ability to defy all logic.

There might be a good story somewhere deep inside this tangled narrative, but Dekker seems more focused on creating a succession of "scary" images than he is on that.

God bless Kathy Bates, because she scalds with the darkest, mindfuckiest burns as the ultimate Mommy Dearest. And this script is in dire need of her.

What’s most disappointing is that Staub proves himself to be a formidable director of action and visual effects. Please, someone just give him a better story.

The sheer number of artisans creating great work on this film does become a disappointment, though. Without a proper story or dialogue, what good is skin-deep beauty?

It’s a sad day when the cinematographer carries the full burden of storytelling, but in this instance, it’s also at least a wonderful opportunity to marvel at Laustsen’s work.

It’s so gorgeous you can sometimes forget the train wreck of a story. But only sometimes.

Rather than a grand buildup, Colonia just gives the sense of one thing happening, and then another thing happening.

This film is in dire need of some atmosphere and a rewrite to make the twists work.

Echo Park doesn't circumvent expectations, but it's worth a watch for those small moments of two humans relating to each other on a realistic plane. Just don't expect to learn anything about Echo Park, its residents, or how people deal with gentrification.

I wish Morgan had put as much care into the script as he did into his inventive, illustrative style.