Ben Kenigsberg

A case in which a production designer and prosthetics team showed up for work but the screenwriters might as well have crowdsourced their ideas from fanboys.

Like lovingly warmed leftovers, it has its satisfactions: a charismatic cast, evocative Los Angeles location work, the sort of granular details on diamond couriering and insurance valuation that might give impressionable viewers ideas.

When Dead Man’s Wire ends with footage of the real Kiritsis and Hall, it is hard not to conclude that a much crazier, livelier film could have been made.

We don’t need to hear about Herbert’s party years after his first marriage faltered. But he still had a cool idea, and his explanations of printing technology and color chemistry are almost enough to carry the film.

The movie favors an unflashy presentation that allows its themes to emerge organically. But the interlocking structure, which owes more to the early work of Alejandro González Iñárritu than “Rashomon,” undermines sustained tension, and the dramatic architecture is slightly wobbly.

Evidently, as this muddled movie tells it, the climactic lesson of the Nuremberg trials was that America had a friend, too.

Part of the accomplishment of Feinartz’s film, which at times comes across as too deferential, is that it fitfully succeeds in cracking his shell.

It would be easy to dismiss the movie’s perspective as limited and jingoistic, but “The Road Between Us” never pretends to offer more than an in-the-moment chronicle of a violent clash. The bigger problem is that its slickness cheapens the most harrowing recollections.

The Baltimorons aims for bittersweet rather than wacky. Didi is lonely; Cliff struggles with sobriety. And while the film has clear affection for its Baltimore locations (it’s dedicated to the workers killed when the Key Bridge collapsed in 2024), considerably less thought has gone into creating convincing situations for those backdrops.

A children’s film that fares better with its nimble special effects than its clunky dramatics.

The philosophical window dressing — would you rather your loved one live a better life if it meant living without you? — doesn’t play to Vigalondo’s strengths.

By turns heartfelt and, especially in the ghost tête-à-têtes, irksome, the movie is helped substantially by its cast, especially Cranston, who brings a welcome sincerity to a quixotic, potentially cloying character.

Because Slumlord Millionaire has assembled a dynamic and engaging group of activists, it seems churlish to complain that it hasn’t found a way to make the material cinematic.

This fans-only documentary gets bogged down with dull asides.

Some deviations are inevitable, but the expository dialogue — and the convention of having Russian characters speak English, with British accents — are distractions. Even so, Politkovskaya’s bravery, and Peake’s commitment to honoring it, is enough.

The film’s unusual backdrop, unresolved subplots and dream-sequence fakeouts are ultimately all distractions from a story that doesn’t make much sense.

Magazine Dreams bludgeons viewers to show off its sensitivity.

Whoever Opus is supposed to be sending up, its aim is a bit wide of the mark. But even if the movie’s only real goal is to frighten, it bets far too much on its eventual twists.

In short, Seven Veils offers plenty to think about. But fans who mourn that Egoyan’s dramatic instincts have slipped in recent years won’t quite be getting a return to form.

The storytelling economy (small cast, one main location) is welcome, but none of the four characters is the sharpest tool in the shed, and whatever insights Hodierne intends on the cutthroat world of crypto remain elusive.

The theft that inspired the movie has been called one of the biggest in Denmark’s history. It deserved a sleeker film.

Back in Action has a better cast than its (often mawkish) writing earns. Mostly, the familiarity takes its toll.

The much-in-vogue hybrid mode proves more cryptic than edifying this time around.

Beyond the videos, the movie takes a thorough, methodical approach to laying out the case against Netanyahu, even if few of its arguments are new.

It isn’t fair to say that “Spellbound” lacks musical or visual invention. Zegler can belt out a song, and the evil storm that transmogrified the royals is pleasingly lo-fi. (It looks like a scribble-scrabble twister.) But the magic feels distinctly, almost insultingly poached.

The director hasn’t found a rhythm or pace to lend momentum to this exploration of disparate material.

To the extent the film has appeal, it is of the tabloid variety.

Visually, The Critic is polished enough, despite some splashes of apparent digital lacquer. But Marber hasn’t supplied an incontrovertible motive to bind Nina to Jimmy. And there is something arguably troubling about the way McKellen’s character has been conceived.

As a drama, Mountains, whose characters move fluidly between English and Haitian Creole, is too low-key to leave much of an impression. But as a portrait of intergenerational tensions in an immigrant family, it is poignant, and it captures an area of Miami that is rarely seen onscreen.

The movie, written by Neil Forsyth, was surely intended as a tribute, but it plays more like an effort to reduce Beckett to easily comprehensible terms — the sort of terms he most likely would have resisted.

The filmmaker has a gift for disorientation — a chilling cut connects a scene of a pregnancy ultrasound to Ma Zhe flipping through slides of murder evidence — that partly compensates for the muddiness of the plot.

The frustration of Hollywoodgate is that it could only ever feel incomplete.

Whatever complexities might come across in the book don’t register in a film that has been fashioned, sometimes uneasily, into a sentimental father-daughter road movie.

Korine achieves what he set out to do, which is locate a strange liminal zone between avant-garde filmmaking and searing viewers’ faces with a frying pan.

Pallenberg is finally in focus. But the picture is tough to look at.

This sluggish, self-serious job-gone-wrong movie could itself stand to be jolted to life.

What Scoop offers is the modest pleasure — to which any journalist is susceptible — of rooting for a reporting team to get a story.

"You Can Call Me Bill" is fundamentally a case of an actor presenting himself as he wants to be seen.

Gets points for originality but quickly succumbs to terminal self-amusement.

In trying to capture this almost stoic modesty, the film, directed by James Hawes, falls into a dramaturgical trap.

Space: The Longest Goodbye leaves open the question of whether anyone could get to the red planet with his or her sanity intact.

This is a concept in search of a movie, and an academic exercise that doesn’t give observers much to work with.

Despite an oddball taste for wide-angle lenses, the director, Gonzalo López-Gallego, can sustain a solid slow burn. Still, neither McShane nor the scenery can take the rust off the basic scenario.

While the interviewees speak of Sherpa with sincerity and affection, “Pasang: In the Shadow of Everest” never locates a satisfying big-picture idea or formal approach that would make it more than a straightforward tribute.

The material is fundamentally gripping, and parts of it are tough to resist . . . But Society of the Snow is a perverse movie to watch the way most people will see it — on Netflix, in the comfort of their homes, with a refrigerator nearby.

The look of Freud’s Last Session could make one doubt the presence of a cinematographer.

The movie makes clear just how difficult it is for one person to take on a corporation that has vast resources, dexterity in countering evidence and — the film argues — unfairly easy access to regulators.

The movie is overfamiliar and earnest, but you can’t accuse it of not being heartfelt.

The Delinquents wants to live modestly. It’s less concerned with satisfying the expectations of its genre than in finding waggish ways to deviate from them. To the film’s thinking, narrative is only a construct.

To their great credit, the Irish stars, often loosely clothed and soaked in sweat from the lack of air conditioning, have such presence and chemistry that it’s possible to believe in their intimacy — the pull and tangle of their bodies, their paroxysms of anguish — and even to pretend in the moment that they have full-fledged characters to play.

Story Ave is marred by late revelations that appear designed, in a studio-notes sort of way, to clarify motivations. What’s unspoken — and what’s seen — does enough.

Penn scores a coup by getting an on-camera interview with Zelensky on the first day of Russia’s invasion, and he films him on two additional occasions, in a video interview and in person on a later visit.

An energetic, ingratiating dramatization of the GameStop stock craze of 2021.

Dahan, who also wrote the screenplay, provides a serviceable overview of Veil’s accomplishments and ethical sense (partly shaped by her experiences in the camps), and of the barriers she overcame in misogynistic civic spheres. But her biography deserved a more considered treatment — and a considerably less heavy hand.

It’s more a grief triangle than a love triangle, and a late revelation alters its symmetry, erasing hard-won sympathy for one character.

There’s little in “Underrated” that comes across as spontaneous. That may be because Nicks didn’t discover much that feels fresh. Or it may be that the project, like Curry today, doesn’t have anything to prove.

Calamy has by far the livelier part, and the energy dissipates whenever Magalie isn’t drawing attention to herself.

In the end, the movie far too easily waves away the potential interpersonal damage Millie has caused.

Sometimes wearying, sometimes pointlessly cryptic, Happer’s Comet nevertheless has a distinct way of viewing the world.

Squaring the Circle is slick and enjoyable enough, but it is also, like the company it chronicles, something of a boutique item, and the reminiscences grow faintly monotonous after a while.

Haguel builds this brief but densely structured film in an interestingly modular, rhythmic way, thanks to a percussive score by Zoe Polanski and occasional, abrupt cuts to black following key scenes.

Artistic values aren’t really the point, which is to meet Ukrainians and to see different corners of the bombarded country, where residents, Lévy suggests, have in many cases become inured to the sight of a bombed office building or to the sound of warning sirens.

Those Who Remained leaves much unsaid about their pasts, sometimes at the risk of seeming coy (the word “Jewish” is never spoken). But Hajduk and Szoke are strong performers.

Honorable Men: The Rise and Fall of Ehud Olmert is a rare instance of a two-hour documentary that should have been an eight- or 10-hour mini-series, because it would take that long to clarify all the issues it raises, then present persuasive evidence.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline is at its best when it functions as a kind of roughed-up caper movie; it has a degree of suspense and efficiency that are becoming all too rare in the mainstream.

The dispiriting experience of watching Champions is slowly realizing that, notwithstanding an off-color line here or there (a player with Down syndrome introduces himself as “your homie with an extra chromie”), it’s exactly the sort of formulaic crowd-pleaser that just about anybody might have directed.

This nominal portrait of people isn’t interested in what they have to say.

The labored screen adaptation shows regrettably few signs of personal fire, and many signs of a work that has been sapped of the intimacy of live theater.

Barbaro and Boneta’s charm offensive never amounts to much, though. The eagerness this film has to please could never match how pleased Feingold clearly is to be making a movie like it.

If The Subtle Art of Not Giving a #@%! helps people, its deficiencies as a movie don’t matter much.

Berger has more tools at his disposal than Milestone did with the challenges of the early sound era, yet those advantages somehow make this update less impressive: The magnification in scale and dexterity lends itself to showing off. Still, the movie aims to pummel you with ceaseless brutality, and it’s hard not to be rattled by that.

While the animation gives the documentary some distinction, the narrative can’t entirely shake the sense that this momentous but brief episode is scaled more for a short than a feature.

InHospitable is a decent advocacy documentary that compellingly argues a couple of points that aren’t easy to make compelling onscreen.

A grim social-realist drama from New Zealand that labors to twist its narrative into a redemptive arc, The Justice of Bunny King has an unsteady tone to match its ungainly title.

Escape From Kabul is a short-term recap. A more robust movie, following these witnesses over several years, is still waiting to be made.

Many documentaries have dealt with real-life ambiguity by making it part of their structure and argument. This one treats it as an afterthought.

The story is invented, and not particularly exciting as such.

The Good Boss provides prime material for Bardem, who has to maintain a polished veneer even as his character’s mendacity and troubles mount. As satire, though, the movie is facile.

The sheer derangement of its plot and a bizarre casting gambit make it more interesting than standard straight-to-streaming schlock.

Free Chol Soo Lee is somewhat dry and, as criminal-justice documentaries go, sadly familiar when it strays from Lee’s unique and grim perspective, which includes details of his struggles with prison life and depression.

The past-present parallelism is provocative, but it also seems faintly superficial — a way of eliding distinctions and streamlining history.

The film is sharp at illustrating how Sara is never totally safe, and how survival requires improvising again and again.

Covered in isolation, any of these interview subjects, or any of the problems facing journalists raised — online harassment, police intimidation, hedge fund ownership of newspapers, news deserts — might have made for a more detailed and compelling film.

Kosinski can’t make the inane philosophizing about free will sound profound or new, and the hectic, hasty finale, lacking the nerve or chilly interiority of the original story, plays like something that blew up in the lab.

The secret is poised somewhere between triteness and disarming simplicity.

Mostly the film presents a banal rehash of established facts and well-circulated rumors about Monroe’s life.

While the movie provides encouraging evidence of how much societal sensibilities have changed, it is fundamentally dressing up well-worn material.

If any creativity went into Choose or Die, a by-turns creepy and hacky feature debut from Toby Meakins, it appears to have been directed solely toward nastiness.

While All the Old Knives keeps cleverly resetting the table it’s laid out, it can’t fundamentally alter the meal.

Elements that have the potential to become running gags . . . either languish or are dropped, as if Apatow simply cut together what he felt were inspired improvisations without regard for flow (or the uncharacteristically cheap-looking visuals).

Somewhat gratingly, King Otto treats its story as a tale of national stereotypes colliding head-to-head.

There are no real answers for anyone in The Last Mountain. If Terrill never finds a clear narrative or emotional through line for this account, it’s not entirely a surprise. The material resists attempts at uplift.

The movie gives a stimulating but standard-by-Herzog-standards treatment to a stellar subject.

In its first half-hour, the documentary The Jump brings a bracing immediacy to a 50-year-old Cold War incident.

The closing titles say Nelson “would not agree to be interviewed.” While others try to explain her perspective, her nonparticipation leaves an unavoidable hole. And the testaments to Hampshire’s distinctive academic culture aren’t especially germane.

A lot of the observations in “Breaking Bread” — the repeatedly offered notions that food is a common language or that politics has no place in the kitchen — seem trite and perhaps overly optimistic. The movie would ideally be shown with an accompanying tasting menu.

As filmmaking, The Conductor takes a fairly standard approach. The most engaging portions involve music-making itself.

Trying to get a read on the film — while admiring its palette and off-kilter character details (Lubicchi has an odd vampire overbite) — keeps “Poupelle” fun for a while. But the film ultimately shies away from its most disturbing ideas, falling back on a comforting sentimentality.