April Wolfe

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.