Brian Tallerico

It’s a sporadically fun movie with obvious influences, but it also lacks in stakes and personality, getting repetitive long before it ends.

While it looks beautiful, and Thomas Newman’s score does a lot of heavy lifting given the lack of dialogue, there needed to be more actual storytelling beyond a few key beats of new life and tragic death.

It’s as if Bertino the director knows that Bertino the writer hasn’t done quite enough to engender audience interest in Polly’s plight so he seeks to pummel the audience into terror instead of drawing them in.

Take an ordinary family in the Hollywood Hills and throw both a wildfire and a menacing pack of killing machines at them and you have “Coyotes,” a movie that frustrates more than it thrills, never quite finding the right tone for the most harrowing night in the lives of its characters.

Shelby Oaks is a film that plays like a checklist of clichés, a movie that so aggressively employs techniques we’ve seen work better elsewhere that it becomes almost numbing. Horror fans don’t mind familiarity, but not if it feels like the echo is all there is to listen to.

Watching these two performers grapple with a text as rich as Mosley’s only leads one back to wishing the film around them trusted them enough to take more risks and to really go somewhere other than the first floor.

The problem with “Vice is Broke” is it never quite gets around to answering what went wrong with Vice, content to mimic its “quirky” form of filmmaking as interview subjects recall the toxic workplace atmosphere that undeniably produced some formative journalism.

The biggest problem with “Nobody 2” is that the surprise factor is gone, and nothing has taken its place. The wow of seeing a generally comedic actor like Bob Odenkirk go John Wick in the fun 2021 sleeper hit isn’t there anymore.

The Occupant is a strangely frustrating movie. It stays engaging through the sheer force of a committed performance that anchors every single scene of the film, but it’s also so hard to get your arms around narratively (or even thematically) that it pushes you away.

The problem is that the sociopolitical underpinnings of “Ick” feel relatively shallow and borderline sadistic, leaving viewers with a hollow “Blob” riff with too little to hold onto regarding character, setting, or even horror.

Despite some solid low-budget make-up work and decent central performances, “Monster Island” doesn’t have enough meat on its bones, somehow feeling narratively inert even at just 83 minutes.

It’s a film that’s constantly painting in the lines. If you’re going to remake a film, especially one as recently beloved as this one, it requires something new in the tracing.

It could be funnier. It could be a lot smarter. It could look better. But it also could have been significantly worse, working as much as it does because it knows that you don’t need to be great if you’re this Goofy.

The truth is that pacing often trumps realism, and The Accountant 2 just doesn’t build enough momentum.

The always-engaging Renate Reinsve delivers yet again (as does talented co-star Ellen Dorrit Petersen). However, “Armand” is a frustrating, over-long movie that starts with an intriguing premise and then starts fighting it almost immediately.

It has so little to inspire conversation that I joked at the end that it was a cautionary tale about the mental and physical toll of being an unemployed writer. There’s something primal in all of us. Just not in this movie.

It looks gorgeous, which may be enough for some viewers, but it's a remarkably thin piece of storytelling, an adventure tale with very little actual adventure, and a musical with very few memorable songs.

Leone continues to grow as a filmmaker—and there’s something interesting about watching that unfold throughout the franchise. But his screenwriting continues to let him down, jumbling his concepts with shallow mythology, atrocious dialogue, and ridiculous padding, leading to another film in this series that pushes over two hours. I’m still rooting for Leone to figure it out, but it’s not in this one.

It’s anchored by a typically strong Sarah Paulson performance, to be sure. But “Hold Your Breath” is nonetheless a frustrating work, a sequence of powerful scenes that aren’t tied together with enough tension to make us care. It’s a film filled with moments but no momentum.

It’s no exaggeration to say there are scene transitions in “Salem’s Lot” in which it honestly feels like maybe you accidentally fast-forwarded a few minutes and missed the connective tissue.

Is this a satire of the American Dream? A horror movie about how it became a nightmare? Or a comedy about a buffoon who basically stumbled into the men’s room on the right day? It seems unwilling to really answer these questions, content to substitute easy shots for difficult conversations about capitalism, politics, family, and marriage.

Just as you wrap your arms around what “Never Let Go” is saying or thematically symbolizes, it slips through your fingers. A hodgepodge of mental illness, trauma, overprotection, the existence of evil, and what feels like COVID allegories, “Never Let Go” fails by virtue of its competing ideas. It leaves too little to hold on to.

The 2024 version of The Killer is obviously competently made–the Hong Kong director still knows how to stage an action sequence, well into his seventies—but the truth is that this version of the film does absolutely nothing better than the original. It’s a movie that’s generally watchable but almost instantly forgettable, which the best of Woo never is.

Mothers’ Instinct gets by on its pulpy potential more than anything else. There’s something intrinsically appealing about watching two phenomenal actresses go head-to-head in an old-fashioned melodrama.

It admittedly comes to life in spurts primarily through its hyperkinetic photography and editing. Still, it lacks enough spontaneity or ingenuity, completely content to go through the motions by taking as few risks as possible. It turns out that there was a third option: Ride, Die, or Tread Water.

A documentary should produce more than what would result from just listening to a band's collected discography. But you’d get nearly as much from a marathon of Beach Boys recordings as you would from watching this two-hour film.

Once we're able to see Harlin's new trilogy as a whole, “Chapter 1” might feel more essential to the 4.5-hour experience. Right now, it just feels overly familiar.

The scariest thing about “Humane” is how genuinely believable its nightmare vision ends up being. However, the film’s micro approach to a macro crisis never connects because we’re never given a reason to care about these specific people.

Bad River gains a cumulative power in the way it consistently counters these tragedies with moving interviews with the proud, vibrant people who have refused to leave, illustrating the courage of resistance that takes place across generations. If it's sometimes like a movie that’s trying to tell a few too many stories at once, it’s hard to blame it. There are so many stories that need to be heard.

More damaging than underwritten character dynamics is the overall tone of “Road House,” which needed to be far more tactile to be effective.

There’s a slack nature to the film that almost feels like it has to be an intentional experiment from a filmmaker who has been so precise and intricate with his work in the past. It’s as if Kim is testing himself to see if he could make a self-indulgent, unsubstantial lark of a comedy. He can. Sorta. Now let’s get back to the good stuff.

There’s a reason “John Wick” was just about a guy avenging his dog. Simple is often better, and “Mayhem!” too often clutters what works about it with exploitation or shallow characterizations.

When this well-cast dramedy allows its characters to breathe and simply exist, it highlights Levy’s future strengths as a filmmaker, making it a promising launch for the Emmy winner into the film world, even as I hope he trusts his actors (and his audience) more in future projects.

It's a PG-rated movie about a goofy genie and a dad who learns a life lesson, so the bar may be low for families looking for a bit of Hallmark-esque escapism this holiday season. But that doesn’t mean one can’t wish this was better.

This wish feels like it didn’t fall from the sky but was crafted by a producers' room with an eye for the highest profit margin. It leaves one wishing for something that feels human and true.

Say what you will about Scott’s most divisive movies—they’re usually big swings with big ideas. What’s so disheartening about “Napoleon” is how small it ultimately feels.

Del Toro always brings it, and this is actually one of his more intriguing performances in a long time, but one consistently wishes that it was in a movie that knew what to do with it.

The Dive feels routine, a soggy journey from point A to point B that doesn’t do anything interesting enough to make it stand out in the dog days of summer.

Aggressively mediocre, Netflix’s “The Monkey King” takes no risks and offers too little humor, heart, or action to entertain all but the youngest in the family.

It’s a film with select moments, largely because of the screen chemistry of its leads, but it never coheres into anything consistent. And then the film, which was shot in late 2021, rushes to an ending that feels like the product of messy post-production.

Outpost only succeeds if we are invested in Kate’s trajectory and ultimate fate, and I never was.

Even as it’s spinning through enjoyably goofy action set pieces, most of them enlivened greatly by a fun performance from Jason Momoa, there’s a desperate familiarity to the entirety of “Fast X” that makes it feel more like reheated leftovers than this series has before.

Ultimately, Quasi is a decent effort from talented dudes but a missed opportunity at something memorably hilarious. It's a few decent jokes in search of a better movie that needed a bit more improvisational effort in the comedy department and a lot more shaping in the editing room.

It's so repetitive that it will make you want to pick up your phone while it’s playing on Apple TV. You should play Tetris.

The truth is that manufactured spontaneity is almost impossible, and too much of “Honor Among Thieves” feels like it’s unfolding with a wink and a nod instead of being legitimately rough around the edges, in-the-moment, and fresh.

The problem is that the Mamet brand of tough-talking puzzle movie is harder to pull off than it looks, and writers Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka just don’t have the gift of dialogue needed to elevate this thriller beyond its foundation.

It could be because of deviations from the source, the bland visual style of the film that’s just unambitious enough to be annoying, or the unengaging story, but The Amazing Maurice is, well, less-than-amazing. Only a game voice cast keeps it from total disaster.

In the end, Jung_E feels like a movie made by an undeniably talented director who just didn’t have quite enough ideas here even to fill a 99-minute runtime.

There's not much wrong with this film on paper—there's just something wrong with the execution.

Hunt has some excellent bang-bang escapism, but it's ultimately too shallow to recommend.

There’s a lot of potential in the ideas that King plays with in “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone.” If only they had been given to a filmmaker willing to answer the call.

In the end, Raymond & Ray doesn’t really get to know anyone, merely pushing them toward the inevitable finish line, where they can start their new life chapters with the father who defined them for decades in the rearview mirror.

It’s fun to watch a character like Fletch escape hot water, but it’s never even lukewarm here, and so every time that the movie gets back to its plotting, it just sags like a bad episode of a cable TV mystery-of-the-week show.

I like these actors. I just wish they were in a better movie.

There are opportunities wasted here to dig into family roles and class commentary, but that’s often overcome by how much fun Furhman and Stiles seem to be having in the film's second half.

Sadly, the concept only takes “Fall” so high, and the execution, including some ineffective acting, editing, and other technical choices, makes this a misfire. It doesn’t exactly crash to Earth as much as drift off into the forgettable air of film history.

It’s a silly piece of popcorn entertainment that too often forgets that this kind of venture needs to be fun.

The Deer King looks great (and has a lovely score) but it’s repetitive, predictable, and downright dull.

The action here, directed by Le-Van Kiet, is reasonably entertaining, but everything that’s hung on that skeleton feels remarkably thin.

There’s a version of Jerry & Marge Go Large that’s more like an early Tom McCarthy film, a movie that takes itself seriously as a character study instead of resorting to the simplicity of a generic comedy.

There have been complaints about MCU properties that feel like they exist merely to get people interested in the next movie or TV show, but it’s never felt so much like a snake eating its own tail as it does here. Or at least the spell has worn off for me.

The problem is that writer J.P. Davis and director Tarik Saleh seem afraid to do anything interesting or unexpected once they have their pieces in place.

How is a movie based on a video game more soulless than the game itself? The knock against the world of gaming has long been that they lack a human element, but Ruben Fleischer’s Uncharted feels emptier than the award-winning franchise on which it’s based.

Leading man Johnny Depp is up to the challenge, and he gives a finely tuned performance here that kind of feels like his first "old man" turn, and he’s matched by a charming piece of work from Minami, but Minamata is weighed down by self-important direction that loses the human beings in this story by prioritizing the headlines.

It’s a film that is too often trying to be a serious study of politics, warfare, and pacifism until it slaps you in the face with a reminder that this is all set-up to one of the broader, goofier action franchises of the modern era.

The problem here is a recurring one with recent family entertainment and it's how little there is below the repetitive surface. Jokes are recycled with alarming regularity, and most of the supporting characters outside of Maddie fall flat.

In the end, I was left feeling like The Scary of Sixty-First was all set-up and no follow-through. Sure, it gets bloody and crazy in ways that will probably turn off some viewers, but it doesn't feel feel like it has something to say about our conspiracy theory culture.

It's depressingly easy to chart where this film is going to go and who's going to make it to the inevitable sequel. There’s one thing a great horror game can never be (and something one couldn’t really accuse the Anderson movies of being either): predictable.

It’s an easy watch in a B-movie marathon but you’ll have forgotten it by the time you’re done with the Thanksgiving leftovers.

Let’s hope the upcoming projects in this fully-formed franchise learn a lesson from this gang of thieves and steal some ideas from better movies.

It’s a film with echoes of recent horror movies about obsession like Berberian Sound Studio and Censor but those movies, despite their flaws, felt far more legitimately dangerous and fearless than BSI, which is content to maintain a slow buzz of paranoia for longer than it should.

This film muddies its entire concept with a bizarre, unrefined commentary on mob mentality that is quite simply some of the worst material in either Green’s career and the history of this rocky franchise (which is saying something if you’ve seen, say, Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers).

The film works when Barraza and Brake are allowed to go all-in but comes up just short of being called a winner when it takes itself a bit too seriously.

Even as it’s closing character arcs that started years ago, it feels like a film with too little at stake, a movie produced by a machine that was fed the previous 24 flicks and programmed to spit out a greatest hits package.

An improvised thriller should feel dangerous and unpredictable, putting viewers in the shoes of a man operating on instinct, but My Son often feels the exact opposite, a thriller that’s as routine as they come.

As a performance piece, The Eyes of Tammy Faye connects. But is that enough?

It’s all the more disappointing when a techno-driven montage of dark imagery kicks in or some other choice that feels cheaper than this movie needed to be. No Man of God ultimately sinks into the shadows of so many similar and superior projects, and it feels cheap. It just doesn’t have enough to add to the conversation or a strong enough artistic POV to justify its shallowness.

Sonia Kennebeck’s Enemies of the State spirals and swirls in a way that’s meant to enhance the “isn’t this crazy” aspect of its true story, but its filmmaking tricks have become cliched in the era of True Crime obsession.

With a strong cast and an intriguing premise that basically transports a Western plot into outer space, Settlers should work, but it simply sags in the middle, only barely sparking to life again in a more suspenseful final act.

It’s a shame that the producers of Mortal Kombat movies are convinced that there needs to be long training/prep sections in the middle of their stories. No one wants to play a tutorial an hour after they’ve started the game.

Despite a few strong production values and performances, Smith’s film simply crosses the lane into incoherency and not the surreal David Lynch-esque kind of incoherency that sets a tone, but the this-needed-a-better-edit-or-rewrite kind of incoherency that gets people wondering what else is on Shudder.

The documentary's best material, other than the archival stuff, comes in how it flirts with an analysis of Wallace’s musical inspirations like his Jamaican background and what he took from a jazz musician who lived down the street. Sadly, there’s too little of that, and too many rhymes that we’ve heard before.

The Mauritanian fails to humanize the story it’s telling, never coming off as something more challenging or interesting than a superficial, manipulative accounting of true events.

It’s a movie that's constantly on the verge of developing into something as intense and haunting as writer/director John Lee Hancock wants it to be, but it never achieves its goals, especially in its final half-hour. Some of the major stuff here works, including a performance from Washington that’s better than the movie around it (yet again), some striking L.A. cinematography, and an effective score, but one could say that it’s the little things that hold it back. A few big things too.

There’s a better version of Hunted that either leans more into its surreal flights of fancy or settles into gritty, tense realism. Hunted gets caught in the middle.

He’s a welcome presence in his first on-screen performance since 2016, but Clooney’s direction is as cold as the landscape his character travels, never once finding anything that feels organic or character-driven. It looks good. It sounds great. It’s as hollow as can be.

By turning this narrative into a search for an identification that seems increasingly unlikely to ever happen, Dower loses focus, and we become just as lost as the hundreds of people convinced they know what happened to D.B. Cooper.

A decent first half and solid voice work throughout succumbs to total chaos for the second half and the realization that there’s almost no actual artistic intent here. No story, no character, no world-building, no design. It’s all bright colors and loud noises. You’d think we’d evolved beyond that by now.

With the exception of a few strong sequences in the scare department, it’s an inconsistent, flat film that is too often reliant on jump scares instead of atmosphere.

This is a film that so blatantly cribs from other popular works that it never develops a personality of its own.

While it may seem unfair to compare an adaptation to its excellent source, the creators here lay down that gauntlet right from the beginning, and then fail to meet their own standard.

Hubie Halloween is just generally entertaining enough to be harmless, while also being the kind of movie that people will have trouble remembering exists by the time he makes “Tommy Thanksgiving”.

The optimistic, twisting core of what 2067 is about will keep genre fans engaged even as the increasingly bad performances and frustrating writing pushes them away at the same time.

While it’s undeniably a sophomore slump in this franchise, Yeon’s skill with action keeps it from dipping too far that we should give up hope he can find the track again in another installment.

In terms of both actual storytelling and subtext, there’s so much that the creators of Project Power could have done, but they chose the path of least resistance, turning a story of reclaimed control and buried human strength into a dull action movie that only gets by on the charisma of its stars and speediness of its filmmaking. It’s almost like they were afraid to unleash the power within their own project.

Black Water: Abyss is one of those movies that isn’t particularly good but may not have to be if you’re in the right mood.

Greyhound starts to become numbing in its tactics, a film that’s simplicity feels more shallow than lean. And, yes, there is a difference.