Brian Tallerico

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.

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.

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.

What makes The Highwaymen particularly disappointing is that two solid pieces of character work get buried in the filmmaking.

There are elements here, most of them embedded in another great physical performance from Garret Hedlund, that keep Burden from completely sinking into the Carolina mud.

Genndy Tartakovsky brings back all the fan favorites from the previous two films and sets them all on an overcrowded, doomed cruise, but the thin plot feels less engaging than the previous films and the jokes less inspired.

From a filmmaking standpoint, Life’s a Breeze is something of a jumble. There’s a whimsical score that sounds like a Mumford & Sons bridge on repeat that underlines the quirky tone in rather annoying ways.

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.

As much as I wanted to be transported to the world of Miss Hokusai, it felt more like an analytical examination of a period and one of its most artistic voices, and I could never quite engage with that aspect of it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Demoustier is a charming young actress. And there are clearly interesting ideas taking flight here. It’s the execution of the flight plan that keeps them from reaching their destination.

A movie that veers off the track of slow burn into turgid pacing a few too many times to be entirely effective.

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.

As Cannibal progresses it becomes both more traditional in its narrative and frustrating in its lack of depth.

As is often the case with Berg’s films, it’s technically accomplished, but it’s lacking the depth of a project that comes from a creative spark. Everything here feels routine—more like an inevitability than a work of art or even a piece of entertainment.

This is a flat, boring affair.

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

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.

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.

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.

Green and McBride are playing with some interesting themes and there’s a female empowerment story of trauma here that’s interesting (but underdeveloped), but do you know the biggest sin of the new “Halloween”? It’s just not scary. And that’s one thing you could never say about the original.

The problem with this frustrating, formless movie is that Davidson’s leading man simply isn’t that interesting, and the film that should chart his trajectory ends up stolen by the people around him. Marisa Tomei, Bill Burr, Pamela Adlon, Bel Powley, Steve Buscemi — I wanted to follow each of them to their own movies and leave this disappointing one behind.

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.

Joan Jett deserves a great rock doc. This isn't it.

It’s a remarkably straightforward origin flick, lacking in true satire of its genre, carried almost entirely by its lead. Deadpool is a fun character, but he’s still in search of a fun movie to match his larger-than-life personality.