Bilge Ebiri

Karia’s film is uneven, but, as with its aforementioned staging of “To be or not to be,” it tosses enough new ideas around to keep us watching.

I was never bored by Normal, but I’d also be lying if I said I was ever excited by it. Maybe it’ll help you forget your troubles for an hour or two, but there’s also a good chance you’ll forget the movie itself in even less time.

Nobody ever feels like a real person in this movie, but we’re pulling for them anyway. The same could be said for the film: It’s not particularly good, but I selfishly want it to be a hit anyway, just so we can bask in the genre for a little longer. The world was a better place when rom-coms roamed the land.

Palestine 36 offers an interesting and valuable perspective on a relatively unknown period in history, though I wish it wasn’t so thinly spread out. Jacir wants to show a cross section of people’s responses to these events, but the result often feels like scattershot scenes from a longer miniseries, flitting from one character to another with little narrative thrust or cohesion.

There are certainly some real laughs as well as some groaners, but at times you want the film to just get on with it. Mainly because once you get past the shtick, there’s an intriguing story there, fun and rousing in its own right without need of additional silliness.

It feels hurried, generalized, inattentive. There’s no specificity, no immersive sense of people actually living their lives. Again, that’s probably partly intentional. But it sure feels like a miscalculation for a movie about the survival of humanity to have so little humanity in it.

See You When I See You grapples with serious subjects, and everybody involved surely meant well. That’s just not enough.

The Invite is primarily a comedy, and it does have some solid laughs, though the character interactions can also feel so manufactured that our bullshit detectors start going off fairly early.

The Moment, directed by music-video wunderkind Aidan Zamiri, feels like a half-hearted hybrid of a real concert doc and a This Is Spinal Tap-like satire. It’s a little too afraid to go too far in either direction, and the end result is pure brand management.

What Primate lacks in terms of narrative complication, it makes up for with cinematic smarts, as director Roberts ably uses form to build suspense, conveying plot points via images instead of dialogue and refreshingly avoiding the usual jump-scare clichés.

Rental Family might be a modestly likable, often uneven movie about a fictional American actor in Japan, but it’s also a thoroughly fascinating movie about a very real actor in the midst of one of the strangest careers I’ve witnessed.

One of the pleasures of afterlife movies is the leaps taken visually, but Eternity looks hopelessly mundane. Still, the actors are game, and that’s half the battle.

Because it’s darker and a bit more intense, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is a slight improvement over the first film, which seemed to mistake family-friendly restraint for abject lifelessness.

There’s a perfectly good melodrama to be made from the plot of Regretting You, which on its surface isn’t so much a twisty-turny soap opera as it is a multicharacter wallow in uncontrolled emotions. It’s how this specific movie presents all the wallowing that made me feel like I was hallucinating.

Play Dirty wears its stupidity boldly, proudly, almost aggressively. It dares you to find anything remotely plausible or realistic or even insightful about it. You either get on its wavelength and ride with it, or you run screaming. I mostly rode with it.

It’s a transcendent performance, somehow both a miracle and the kiss of death. It is good enough to almost elevate the entire movie above its many awkward shortcomings. And yet it also crystallizes those shortcomings.

Him impresses as a stylistic exercise, a gonzo spectacle of macho phantasmagoria, but it’s hollow inside.

After the Hunt might be confused, and it might even be unsatisfying — but it also refuses to coddle anyone, and that feels like some sort of victory.

First Steps certainly has a few potentially provocative ideas rattling around in its tulip-chair-and-tiki-bar brain, but it’s too afraid to explore them in any depth.

There’s a debilitating cheapness that keeps this picture from reaching its true potential. I have no idea what the budget was — for all I know, it could have been bigger than the original film’s — but it feels at times like we’re watching a mock-up of what a movie called The Old Guard 2 might look like.

M3gan 2.0 is a baffling movie, relying less on the conceptual humor of its predecessor and more on occasional quips and a few genuinely silly gags.

28 Years Later is choppy, muddled, strange, and not always convincing. But I’m not sure I’ll ever forget it.

What was once a lazy, crazy, charming afternoon daydream of a movie is now a frantic, insistent, often unfunny sci-fi comedy. It might distract young children with its hyper, family-forward story line, but most of the magic has vanished.

Preminger, an old noir hand, perhaps understood something fundamental about Sagan’s story: It is not one well served by subtlety or realism. Chew-Bose’s effort is nevertheless a noble one. She wants to make this world immersive, convincing, and compelling. She’s good enough to get part of the way there, but I don’t know if the destination was ever in sight.

The picture is dedicated to Hutchins, and its brooding elegance, its rich shadows and evocative close-ups, demonstrates her achievement: Visually, Rust is often astonishing — which of course reminds us all over again of the dark specter hanging over the film.

The Alto Knights is a movie whose ambition has passed. It feels like the husk of something that might have been great once.

Unfortunately, the script and the performances for Cleaner falter before the mayhem starts.

It’s one of the best, most alive and inventive performances [Cumberbatch] has given. Unfortunately, the film is even more confused than the character.

Director Chaney clearly has a lot of skill and talent. But for all of Rabbit Trap’s technical accomplishments, it’s very hard to be frightened or moved by something that never stops feeling like an exercise in style.

Love Me, despite having two incredibly expressive actors at its center, remains furiously literal-minded in its questioning. And unfortunately, the more questions this picture asks, the more maudlin and shallow it becomes.

Aside from the ingenious creation of Moretti and his occasionally unpredictable behavior, the film fails at creating interesting characters, deploying suspense, and even delivering some cheap thrills.

This Kiss of the Spider Woman might be wildly uneven, but it’s hard not to be moved by the sight of a great new talent emerging into the world.

For all the visual vividness, we have very little actual sense of this land, or the people who live there. Yes, The Legend of Ochi looks amazingly, impressively real, but it’s populated by non-characters pursuing a nothing story.

Wolf Man is a blunt movie, but it also feels like only half a movie.

All the technological marvels of the world can’t breathe life into a film that doesn’t know what it wants to be.

The Return works neither as a CliffsNotes version of The Odyssey nor as its own stand-alone tale. But it does remind us that Ralph Fiennes is an immortal.

Wicked is as enchanting as it is exhausting.

Clapin has made a film that leaves us puzzled but also curious. Where he stumbles is in evoking the emotional charge he’s clearly aiming for. Meanwhile on Earth is beautiful, but alienating.

Your Monster has some chucklesome moments, none of it enough to paper over the film’s many contrivances. And some late-breaking gruesome bits can’t retroactively redeem the lazy writing. But the movie does have Barrera, and maybe that’s enough.

The whole film feels a bit too careful: composed but also more than a little academic.

As Skye becomes increasingly unable to tell what’s actually happening and what’s a waking nightmare, we should feel more for her, and we should feel more with her. Instead, we lose interest, as the whole thing becomes pointless and even a little cynical and cruel. The movie ultimately scuttles its own ambitions.

The End is a bold swing, and I’m glad it exists. But for all the stuff it throws at us, the film is frustratingly, wearingly one-note.

When it succeeds, it’s impressive. But it also can’t hold a candle to Wilson’s original, and it can’t reconcile the fundamental tension between theater and film.

The movie goes in circles, constantly expounding on the same things. It has lots of insight, but little momentum. Then again, maybe that’s the idea.

I never really bought the onscreen relationship in We Live in Time, in part because I could constantly feel the movie trying too hard. The love story is syrupy, and the tragedy even more syrupy.

The Apprentice is a hodgepodge of scenes from the life of Trump and Cohn with little emotional fluidity.

Ortiz’s film does have its charms.

Alien: Romulus is diverting enough, but it’s also instantly forgettable — something I don’t think I’ve ever said about any other Alien film, good or bad.

Deadpool & Wolverine isn’t a particularly good movie — I’m not even sure it is a movie — but it’s so determined to beat you down with its incessant irreverence that you might find yourself submitting to it.

Their story seems genuine, but the filmmaking can make it all feel premeditated, in part because directors Jeff Zimbalist and Maria Bukhonina are determined to hit every plot turn at the most obvious points.

Not quite a history lesson and not quite a rom-com and certainly not an epic, the movie is a mild but pleasant mishmash of genres held together by the sheer charisma of Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson, two actors who seem unexpectedly well suited to each other’s energies.

There’s a lot jam-packed into this movie, but it’s in such a rush to get through it all and to not bore us that it … well, it bores us. We’re lost, and we’re clearly not supposed to be.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die serves as passable entertainment. But one does miss the gonzo action spectacles of yore, which this franchise once embodied.

Cronenberg is transmitting to us from the borders of death, behind the enemy lines of inconsolable grief. And the man’s mind is still so alive that it seems churlish to ding this movie for being so — God, this isn’t the word I want to use, but I must — lifeless. Sadly, the inertia eventually gets to us.

Horizon feels like the opening chapters of a grand novel patiently rolling into place, carefully delineating characters and offering telltale glimpses into their lives. It’s rich in period detail and filled with majestic vistas that seem to match the expanse of its story. But this can be a curse, too, at least while the film only exists as this one installment.

It’s a cheap-thrill movie, and on that score it mostly delivers.

The Planet of the Apes movies were built on rage and shame about the world as it exists. And whatever its many flaws, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes gets that largely right.

As an action flick, Monkey Man is often quite entertaining, but it keeps distracting you with images of the film it’s trying, and often failing, to be.

There’s style and skill to spare in Asphalt City, but the movie also feels like a victim of the very numbness and emotional emptiness it seeks to expose.

The cast makes Late Night With the Devil more than watchable, but they also raise our hopes for something better. While the talk-show approach makes perfect structural and narrative sense, it also drains the film of suspense, as we pretty much know where everything is going.

The jokes are witless, the emotions artless, and the film joyless. At the same time, there’s also little to repel or offend, which, after all the truly idiotic culture-war battles fought over the Ghostbusters franchise, probably counts as a win. Maybe one day we’ll get an actual movie.

The film presents Jakub’s memories in such fragmented fashion that we can’t really piece together any kind of emotional through-line; we’re told about it, but we can’t really feel it, which renders the movie didactic and tedious.

The more turns Jason Fuchs’s script takes, the more monotonous everything feels. And because Vaughn never drops his fantastical, cartoonish style, “reality” ceases to have any true meaning within the context of the film; he keeps trying to up the stakes even as what we’re watching becomes less and less consequential.

There are bits and pieces of Lift strewn throughout that hint at the better movie it could have been with some inspiration and discipline.

The Color Purple is not a particularly intimate or introspective musical; its numbers are big, very much meant to be sung to a big audience, maybe even to have the audience sing them back to the stage or the screen. For both movie and play, it feels as much like a trip to church as it is a trip to the theater.

Unfortunately, the film doesn’t demonstrate any kind of interest in, or affection for, its characters. They’re cardboard cutouts, there to represent postures rather than evoke our sympathy or humanity or even curiosity.

All in all, one walks away from Rustin enchanted with Domingo’s performance, while feeling that a character as larger than life and momentous as Bayard Rustin surely deserves a film less dutiful and more inspired.

Roth has a talent for anticipation, but not really for suspense. We don’t watch Thanksgiving wondering what’s going to happen next to these people. We watch because we know what’s going to happen next to these people.

Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario starts off with a rich, surreal premise, and for much of its running time, it mixes playful, cringe-comic energy with an undercurrent of existential anxiety. But it eventually manages to undo much of what made it so tantalizing by turning metaphor and subtext into a more narrow-minded satire.

As a movie, Sly is something of a mess. But as a portrait of a messy man, it can be quite moving.

Filled with expertly composed sequences undone by the protagonist’s relentless observations about the meaninglessness of existence, the movie feels like an attempt to highlight its own emptiness.

Dreamin’ Wild, as I’ve noted, has its issues: There are lines of dialogue so blunt that I actually found myself bursting out laughing during some pretty serious scenes. But great performances don’t happen in a vacuum, and credit should go to Pohlad for knowing exactly what to do with Goggins.

Disney’s new Haunted Mansion is a hot mess, but it’s a sporadically entertaining one.

Writer-directors Àlex and David Pastor have come up with a tantalizingly evil idea, but they’re not cruel enough to see it through to its conclusion.

In order for the film’s stylistic conceit to work, the protagonists need to pop more. We need to want them to break free of their grief and find ways out of the darkness.

The problem with Peter Pan & Wendy is all too often one of subtraction, not reinvention. You can almost read the tsk-tsking studio notes as you watch the movie.

For much of its running time, director Ritchie’s war movie manages to be topical, suspenseful, and moving. But partly because the story is fiction, Ritchie takes a few genre liberties that threaten to undermine the sincerity of his tale.

It allows Crowe to have fun with the part of Father Amorth, but the film forgets to have fun along with him.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods isn’t unwatchable. It’s competent, uninspired swill, undone largely by the fact that it’s following up a superior first movie.

Scream 6 does distinguish itself in the horror set pieces. Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (who also made the previous entry) clearly grasp that these movies are, at their best, mean.

The pleasures of Bones and All wind up being incidental and, sadly, fleeting — an effectively grisly scene here, an arresting performance there. The film, as a whole, never quite hangs together, because even as it goes through the motions of both the road movie and the romance, it never really finds an animating energy to drive it along.

This fake Weird Al movie could have used some of the real Weird Al’s cleverness. Weird doesn’t feel like a parody; it feels like an impostor.

The film ultimately overloads us with so much amazing nonsense that we sort of give up and give in.

Whenever it’s operating on that edge of uncertainty, the picture works marvelously. But the freewheeling freewheeling-ness can get to you after a while. As it accumulates running time (and characters and plot points), Amsterdam starts to get exhausting when it should perhaps feel liberating or intoxicating.

Smile has such a visually powerful concept that it might take a while before you realize the movie is blowing it.

It’s hard to tell if The Greatest Beer Run Ever is a comedy that wants to be a drama or a drama that wants to be a comedy. Of course, a film can be both. This one, alas, is neither.

The picture’s surface austerity and simplicity have a crystallizing effect, drawing our attention to the coldhearted, transactional nature of this world.

The film is smooth, competent, (mostly) well-acted, and merely tedious.

Iñárritu has a flair for the cinematic, for bold and striking images, but he is not an experimental filmmaker. He doesn’t have that kind of deft touch, that willingness to throw ideas at the wall, see what sticks, and — most importantly — move on.

For all its efforts at wild humor, The Rise of Gru never quite builds up a comic head of steam. It’s filled with laugh lines, but they feel like placeholders — a lot of middling bits about the time period plus a tired assortment of anachronisms.

It’s a lot more like the movie we were worried the first one was going to be: baggy, bloated, and only sporadically engaging.

Part of the fun of movies like this is the opportunity for the audience to immerse themselves in the procedural minutiae of these worlds, but there’s precious little of that here. Everything is so empty, so incomplete. Blacklight feels like a synopsis waiting for a story.

This new Scream is so determined to be a Scream movie that it forgets the primary, unstated rule established by the original Scream: You can sell anything to us, so long as you make it scary.

While there aren’t any genuine belly laughs in the new movie, there are plenty of modestly likable, chucklesome ones. That ain’t nothing in this terrible, terrible world.

It’s not just the action and the magic that flop. Even the film’s more intimate moments fall flat.

In some ways, it encapsulates the director’s best and worst instincts. It might be his most personal film, a genuine effort to understand the connection between two of his key obsessions, spiritual faith and human impulse. It’s also hard to shake the feeling that the film wants to outrage us into a response, but its supposed transgressions often feel tired and pro forma.

Despite the ticking clock of Finch’s rapidly progressing illness, the movie doesn’t build up much urgency or excitement. The script is pretty thin, almost all premise and little incident. But director Miguel Sapochnik has the eye to make this world compellingly hostile and bleak, and that counts for something.

You have to admire the effort — even as you survey, mouth agape, the calamitous results.