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.