Brian Tallerico

This should be a haunting, claustrophobic nightmare, but Natali over-complicates the source material — just like his characters, our reasons for investing in what happens next get lost in the fields.

As easy as it is to like Hank and Asha, it’s impossible to look past the many screenwriting and filmmaking flaws of the film about them.

There is a sense at times that Johnston has over-compensated for Dahl’s cynicism with his wondrous children and their magical friends, and a bit too much of “The Twits” feels like it desperately wants us to love Beesha and Bubsy, even if they’re kind of shallowly conceived and designed.

Most of its strength emerges from a well-directed ensemble, one able to convey the high concept of a nightmarish situation without losing their relatable humanity.

And yet it's impossible to deny that what Special ID does well it does extremely well.

It’s a film that’s tempting to dismiss because of its bleak, misanthropic viewpoint on the world, but that would be discounting the quality of the filmmaking and the riveting performance at its center.

Can a film be too much and not enough at the same time? This is the conundrum of Ridley Scott's "Gladiator II," a movie bursting with just enough spectacle to keep it from being boring but, when you try to get anything out of it thematically, slips through your fingers like the sand in a warrior's hands.

It’s one of those films that may be overly reliant on jump scares when you tally them all up, but I’d by lying if I didn’t admit that a few of them legitimately made me jump.

Gorehounds need not worry that a movie called Deathgasm plays it safe. This is a defiantly, well, metal movie.

Both the source material and the man reading it are legendary. And that inherent cool factor in Extraordinary Tales carries the final product a very long way, although its shortcomings do sometimes force me to wonder if it could have been a masterpiece instead of a mere curiosity.

It’s a brutal slog of a film, admirable in its fearlessness in terms of dark subject matter, but the brutality doesn’t feel worth it in the end.

Armie Hammer’s Will is definitely hollow at the core. Like a lot of protagonists of horror films, it is his overall weakness as a human being that makes him so vulnerable to the nightmare that unfolds in his life.

There are enough interesting ideas and at least two confident performances holding A Quiet Place: Day One together, even if it sometimes feels like a first draft of a richer, more complex final film.

The resulting V/H/S/94 falls victim to the traditional unevenness that is common to anthology horror but with more hits than misses, and a general air of unhinged joy for the genre that these films often lack.

JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass is an exhaustive and sometimes exhausting documentary, a film that can sometimes feel like it’s so packed with information and detail that Stone has lost the path through this dense forest of conspiracy theories. At its best, it reminds one how tightly Stone can assemble a film like this one as he makes a convincing case that some things about the assassination of JFK don’t add up.

The first 25 minutes of Malcolm & Marie are a strong, standalone short film. They’re mostly sharply written and Zendaya and Washington add what feels like history between the lines. I was totally with it. But I'm not convinced we learn anything more in the following 80 minutes that we didn't in the first 25.

Producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller bring that non-stop energy of their other projects like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and The Mitchells vs. the Machines even if the writing sometimes feels bizarrely dated.

It doesn’t all make sense or add up to much, but there’s a consistency to its inconsistency that I admire. It’s something that works on a mood more than literally. Kind of like a great country song.

It’s far from the disaster it could have been given the tonal tightrope it walks, but it’s also closer to a misfire than we all hoped it would be. Believe it or not, the “Hitler Comedy” plays it too safe.

There are some disappointing choices in the film's directing, but Castillo's performance should make a lot of those easy to overlook for anyone who stumbles upon this one in their streaming algorithm.

Some of the choices strain credulity and the biggest name in the piece, Josh Hutcherson, feels miscast, but this is a film that kept me uncertain of what would happen next and affirms Gan as an interesting young filmmaker to watch.

Perhaps the highest compliment I can pay it is that I think George A. Romero himself would have liked it.

Great sequels don’t just repeat, they build. This one treads beautifully-rendered water.

The script by Hiroyoshi Koiwai doesn’t exactly hold together narratively or thematically, but there are Miike touches throughout “Lumberjack” that keep it entertaining, even if he's probably made a better movie while you’re reading this.

The best elements of the documentary Harmontown capture the unique raw energy of Harmon.

Murder Mystery 2 has no loftier goals than disposable entertainment for 90 minutes, and it gets the job done.

Ultimately, How to Talk to Girls at Parties is like a hyperactive kid at a punk rock show—full of great energy and ambition, but not too sure what to do with it.

While it meanders more often than it should with some pretty slack pacing, strong character work by Neeson and an excellent supporting cast hold it together.