Brian Tallerico

Great actors Ben Mendelsohn and Rooney Mara do their best to elevate the frustrating Una, but their director doesn’t seem to understand what he has in these two performers, constantly pulling back from their raw emotion and complex characters.

Its abundance of plot contrivances in the final act and overly scripted dialogue hold it back from greatness, but two excellent performers overcome all of this familiarity. I can't want to see them again.

A truly effective genre flick. It’s not perfect, but it’s damn closer than anyone would have predicted.

Vita & Virginia wastes the talents of four people — its two subjects and the two women that play them. It is a deeply frustrating movie, a film that not only can’t find the right tone from scene to scene but feels disjointed in individual moments too.

There’s a claustrophobic cause-and-effect in The Rental that keeps it humming, and feels fresh. The minute that two characters make a crucial decision, you know it’s all downhill from there.

There’s no cheating in The Monkey. It’s coming for you. And it’s gonna be messy.

Not unlike “Mandy,” some of both halves feel self-indulgent, and I’m not sure Apostle quite justifies its 130-minute running time, but you have to say this about it: It’s like nothing else you could include in your annual Halloween horror marathon this year.

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

Night Moves eschews traditional tension-building through plot twists and betrayals to focus on its characters, as Reichardt uses her increasingly impressive sense of composition and intuitive pacing to slow burn the audience into a state of anxiety instead of manipulatively pushing them there.

Ansari struggles as a writer when he tries to make the movie into a commentary on the widening economic rift of the 2020s, and he truly rushes the ending in a way that feels a bit unearned, but there’s so much to like about the four stars of this movie that it’s a really tough flick to hate.

Even as the vast landscape around them seems to recall the insignificance of one person against the beauty of Mother Nature, Land suggests that isolation isn’t the answer and connection is what matters. It’s a smart, moving piece of work, hampered a bit by a rushed final act that feels somewhat manipulative but confidently acted throughout.

Every time it feels like Komasa and Pacewicz edge too close to sympathy for their modern monster, Tomasz does something that reveals those feelings to be unearned and undesired by the filmmakers. And it’s that give and take that makes The Hater interesting.

Sadly, “Dreams” never figures out what it wants to say, and what it does convey is done with so little affect or pulse that it almost feels like an intentional choice to tell a “hot” story in as “cool” a way as possible.

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

The disposable, summer diversion that many families will be looking for as temperatures rise and the start of school seems so far away, but most won’t be able to remember after they see it.

It’s ultimately one of those pieces that waffles in tone a bit too much—trying to be a few too many movies at once will do that—and almost feels like it missed its window of ultra-relevancy thanks to a 2.5-year pandemic delay (and a few recuts). However, Feste’s overall ambition and craftsmanship, along with a fantastic central performance from Ella Balinska, hold things together even over the film’s rocky patches.

A great score, a talented ensemble, and expert cinematography—all are undeniable here. And yet there are narrative elements of Babylon that feel hollow from the very beginning and only get more so as Chazelle tries to inject some manipulative lessons into the final scenes.

Oculus eventually becomes little more than a series of ghostly figures and twisted visions on its way to a cop-out of an ending that you'll see coming an hour away.

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 a tick too long and has a section that’s far too expository for a film that’s at its best when it leans into surreal nightmare logic, but this weird movie works its fear factor in unexpected, creative ways.

Witty, goofy, and glorious, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is Terry Gilliam’s best film in two decades.

The words that keep ringing in my head regarding Adam McKay’s Vice are courtesy of the bard: “Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

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.

Immaculate feels like both a throwback to another era of Italian horror and a timely commentary on woman’s bodily autonomy, but it can’t match the flair of the former and lacks the thematic thrust to convey anything resonant about the latter.

The most significant and bizarre problem with Muppets Most Wanted is a lack of a protagonist.

It sometimes feels Scrooge-like to come down on a sweet and simple film like this one, but kids can get bored too. And they will here.

It is daring, riveting, and the first great movie of 2019.

Some of our heroine’s choices as the film raises the stakes feel a bit unbelievable, but that can be forgiven given the single-setting, single-performer restrictions of the piece. In the end, the goal was clearly to trap us in the increasingly fractured mind of a single person who increasingly believes what is beyond believable. Mission accomplished.