Brian Tallerico

The Godfather Coda does seem different, thanks largely to how he opens and closes the film. Overall, this version feels even more elegiac—a true coda instead of just another part of the same story.

It’s a wonderful film to experience as an acting and filmmaking exercise. Just take the trip.

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.

It’s a movie that doesn’t just allow for silence but thrives in it, with Ahmed’s eyes and body language charting the arc of his character. He doesn't miss a beat.

The result is a film that can be a bit dry when Oppenheimer leads the scientific discussion but that comes springing back to life when Herzog the filmmaker allows his awe to come through the camera.

At its best, it’s self-aware in a way that’s reminiscent of the ‘90s slasher renaissance in films like “Scream” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer.”

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.

Some of the writing gets a bit clunky, the ending is pretty horrible, and there’s a performance at the center that kind of sucks in everything around it like a black hole, but most of that won’t matter to viewers of The Witches: They’ll be too scared to care.

It has a reasonably strong lead performance for micro-budget horror, but writer/director Jeffrey Reddick can’t come through with the thrills, resorting to cheap jump scares to hide shoddy editing, low-grade cinematography, and the kind of clunky storytelling that’s more reminiscent of a Creepypasta tale than a feature film.

More than just your standard horror/comedy, The Wolf of Snow Hollow is a tonal balancing act, a movie that doesn’t go for laughs or horror as much as weave various tones and styles through its excellent script. I thought Cummings was a talent to watch after “Thunder Road,” and now I’m sure of it.

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.

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”.

That’s all you’ll get in Death of Me, a movie that takes a fresh idea and decides that the best way to present it is through tropes and clichés from better films.

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.

The result is a film that feels deeply personal, and not always in a good way. It’s a film that can’t help but feel a little like an invasion of privacy.

Nothing about this inert, dull project feels like a movie. It’s a half-idea, half-heartedly filmed. Yes, it’s a kids’ movie, but kids are smarter in 2020 about their action entertainment and putting this alongside all the Marvel movies on Disney Plus feels almost mean.

It looks and sounds great, but should it?

The various praiseworthy elements of The Devil All the Time ultimately override the feeling that they aren’t quite cohering into a great movie overall.

Textured in ways that family entertainment is rarely allowed to be and even more visually ambitious that the other Cartoon Saloon films, this is a special movie.

From the beginning of Ammonite, writer/director Francis Lee trusts his lead performer to convey an incredible amount without dialogue. And that trust pays off in one of the best performances of Kate Winslet’s career.

A movie that finds poetry in the story of a seemingly average woman. It is a gorgeous film that’s alternately dreamlike in the way it captures the beauty of this country and grounded in its story about the kind of person we don’t usually see in movies. I love everything about it.

No one expects The Babysitter: Killer Queen to be anything other than your basic escapist entertainment, but it fails even at this modest goal. It's a defiantly stupid movie, with references so bizarrely dated that it verges on fascinating.

David Byrne’s American Utopia is a joyous expression of art, empathy, and compassion.

The trip to a remote farmhouse is just the narrative skeleton on which Kaufman hangs arguably his most challenging film to date, a piece that verges on Lynchian in its surreal register, moving back and forth between reality and a dreamlike commentary on connection, although there may be even less of the former than it first appears.