Barry Hertz

It’s not half-bad. I mean, don’t get too excited – this is still a bad movie. But it is the kind of better-than-it-should-be bad instead of merely bad-bad.

With a tongue-in-cheek title inviting audiences to immediately dismiss its supposedly intense fear factor, Damian McCarthy’s new horror film arrives ready to play with convention and expectation. The scary thing, though, is that the movie exhausts itself halfway through, revealing Hokum as something closer to hogwash.

Ultimately, Blue Heron is an epic exploring the power and fissures of memory. But there is no chance that audiences will ever forget what Romvari has accomplished here.

It is the kind of screenplay that erases itself with one minute of second thought.

What could have been a layered, insightful portrait of the most complicated, significant figure in pop-culture history has been reduced to a supersized music video slash concert documentary, the man in its mirror more of a faded reflection than anything else.

For all the behind-the-scenes footage and ostensible opportunities to grill Michaels about everything and anything, Neville’s film walks away with the impression and insight that anyone paying even half-attention to network television over the past few decades already knows.

Soderbergh, once again acting as his own cinematographer under the alias Peter Andrews (and editor, with the nom de plume Mary Ann Bernard), finds his own way of keeping the camera swirling and twirling, electrifying lengthy, densely composed monologues that require some visual energy to keep them from landing with a cinematic thud.

The concept might work for especially patient gamers, but rendered cinematically by director Genki Kawamura, the result is a frustrating and ultimately boring exercise in audience endurance.

In an era where studios are obsessed with reviving ostensibly comforting intellectual property, Goldhaber has twisted the end-goal of modern Hollywood radically and beautifully.

The resulting drama, while perhaps predictable in an American Movie meets Cocoon kind of way, is still awfully sweet and warmhearted.

Atkins, a multidisciplinary artist, proudly doesn’t obey the almost obligatory rhythms of documentary filmmaking. There are no talking heads, no manufactured narrative momentum.

The real trick of the film, though, is how it constantly steadies itself in the face of ever-mounting absurdity. This is a movie of such sexual outrageousness and stylized depravity that it should topple over every few minutes. And yet Glowicki and Petrie (who plays multiple roles) ride the razor’s edge of delirium to create something fantastical, even beautiful.

Rest assured that the story is as nonsensical as it is disposable, a cocktail-napkin of an idea brought to digital life with hundreds of millions of dollars of the emptiest-looking CG animation ever produced.

There is some drama here, all right. But the curtain can’t draw down soon enough.

While the new doc was spurred by Roher’s own existential anxiety about what kind of AI-dominated world he would be bringing his unborn son into, the resulting film feels so determined to walk the middle road between doom times and boom times (hence its cheeky title) that its message cannot help but land as something almost algorithmically mushy.

A nervy, eye-popping reimagining of the AIDS crisis as filtered through the lens of a frenzied domestic drama, Julia Ducournau’s new film is, like the very best Cave song, a profoundly upsetting creation to sink into, equal parts blood-pumping passion and skin-crawling menace.

A Canadian spin on Thelma & Louise, the ambitious new drama Nika & Madison has all the fiery spirit of its made-in-Hollywood inspiration, if not quite the narrative dynamism and endless resources.

In its bold aesthetic courage and rigid thematic spine, Khatami’s movie is a full-body experience that leaves you fully alive.

The film works best when it is only Evy and her headphones on the screen, the character’s head (and ours) becoming overwhelmed by some truly impressive, singularly creepy sound design.

At almost every turn, Project Hail Mary attempts to convince you that it is groundbreaking, innovative filmmaking. But in actuality, the movie lands as a grand act of cinematic recycling – the fusing together of familiar, comforting bits and pieces into something determined to please crowds and warm hearts.

It flails wildly from minute to minute, bursting with ideas and themes it barely has time to articulate, but the sheer unpredictability of its narrative and aesthetic gesticulations guarantee that your attention never threatens to drift, and that your nerves remain constantly on edge.

Shot entirely in the director’s home country with a largely amateur, untrained cast, the film blends a striking sense of street-level realism, political commentary and poetic nostalgia for the naive innocence of youth.

While Ed Harris, as the cruel patriarch of the Redfellows, is not so much phoning his role in as he is sending it by carrier pigeon, it is Margaret Qualley and Glen Powell who do the most unintentional damage.

An ambitious but ultimately sloppy time-travel epic, Good Luck wants to deliver an incendiary critique of artificial intelligence and our reliance on big tech. Yet it ends up being so exhausting and weirdly dull that it will force audiences to pull out their phones out of sheer restlessness.

Whereas Michael Mann gave Heat the perfect narrative offramp, Crime 101 tends to circle the block toward the end.

It’s all too silly to arouse, but too garish and annoying to be thoughtful. It feels as if Fennell is torn between having her cake and eating it out, too.

The evolution of Colin and Ray’s relationship is traced with a steamy kind of sensitivity. Lighton, in his feature directorial debut, never treats the BDSM scene as an object of fetishistic curiosity, but rather a culture rich with yearning, compassion, jealousy – the entire gamut of romantic life.

Ratner’s film commits too many cinematic sins to count.