Charles Bramesco

The new biopic Young Woman and the Sea presents Eberle’s life as a broadly inspiring parable of female striving and triumph, its plot points readily mapped onto any struggle to break into a boys’ club.

The eventual reveal of the who and the why provides satisfying resolution, though the reward feels petty in comparison to the film’s freestanding pleasures: the tremulous discovery of love, the crystalline peace of unsupervised play, and above all else, the transportive score from the late Ryuichi Sakamoto, a masterwork within a minor work.

With a mix of righteous anger and abiding serenity, Thornton terraforms the Wild West of his home nation into a spiritually parched landscape.

Zimny could have mined some more intimate profundity from Stallone’s determined political fence-sitting, the reluctance of a born entertainer to alienate any faction of his fandom with vocal partisanship.

Singer aims for the bleak, gritty texture standard to the genre, and winds up closer to the result of an anonymous recommendation generated by the algorithmic tags of “Bleak, Gritty.”

The evasive, guarded acting from the main players can only do so much to elevate the paltry material Nikou gives them to work with. A long, fitfully amusing walk down a short road.

Having set out to shock and ultimately shatter his audience, a film-maker unwilling or incapable of hitting the tonal brakes succeeds in his mission, only to compromise a deeper dramatic power along the way.

Ethan Hawke has good taste, and his past undertakings as director have affirmed that, but the biopic’s big built-in pitfall – the psychologically facile connect-the-dots between a figure’s life and works – swallows up his perceptible esteem for O’Connor.

Will success spoil Taika Waititi? The answer implied by “Next Goal Wins” isn’t encouraging for the future of an original comic voice still audible but slowly fading into the chorus.

Rejecting partisanship to affect the appearance of balance doesn’t make sense when dealing with situations defined by imbalance. Both Ly’s Hollywood bombast and impulse to undue generosity in his political convictions fight the vulcanized hardness of his bracing outrage, and ultimately prove little about today’s powder kegs.

Every second Mullally and Lane spend onscreen should be preserved in the library of Congress so that future generations of thespians might learn from their example.

Like McCall, [Washington] knows his tools, an arsenal not of guns and blades but of withering stares and crumpled smiles. It’s almost enough to outshine everything else.

If giving the public more of what they want is the real game here, that could certainly be accomplished without all the puffed-up verbiage. Peedom’s greatest asset is her treasure trove of eye-popping nature photography — true reverence for the sacred rivers means allowing them to speak for themselves.

Western media has trained us to brace for the worst in works engaging with the fanatical corners of Islam, and so the ground-level sobriety in Saleh’s treatment lands as a blessing all its own.

Those who appreciated the original for its brutal, sinewy agility have another thing coming: a lumbering, stultifying gargantua of a film willing to kill everything except its darlings.

This prodigal son’s reappearance ignites a rivalry a little Biblical and a little Shakespearean, though their macho melodrama hews most closely to the flavor of screenwriterly contrivance.

Good company is the name of the game here, both in the nourishing bond between these geriatric besties as well as the chance for us to spend another 100 minutes in the presence of showbiz royalty. But for all its congenial upbeatitude, this salute to blue-hair camaraderie has been molded into the shape of a movie without much finesse.

Not to be a Scrooge, but the occasional eye-gouge with a tree-topper star or string-light garotte only lends a frosty air of resourcefulness to a film with coal for brains.

Heineman’s thesis that because leaving has gone so poorly, staying would’ve necessarily been better is incorrect at best, and disingenuous at worst. He wants to think structurally, aware that America can and does flatten other nations beneath our clumsy footfalls. He just can’t — or won’t — see the whole structure out of apparent fear that it’ll be too unflattering for all involved, including him, the army’s useful launderer of their image-sanitizing talking points.

Allergic to the ponderous brand of overdetermined ‘metaphorror’ currently in vogue, Cregger possesses a showman’s instincts, his energies primarily invested in pound-for-pound entertainment value. Maybe that’s why the subject at hand feels so perfunctory, the broad feminist stance filling out the vacant space in otherwise unrelated macro- and micro-scaled tricks of structuring.

Training its crosshair on the ingrained prejudice of the military and the question of how well-meaning white allies can best support its undoing, the film compensates for relatively middling action set pieces with a stolid maturity.

Though the film starts and finishes with swaggering demonstrations of politicized revolt, the rest lapses into the conventions of a genre fatally attached to them.

[Farrelly's] latest commits itself to regurgitating every Vietnam cliche with the laziest possible visual diction, led by an emotionally overextended Zac Efron.

Both stars were evidently tempted by the promise of a “meaty role,” taking that concept to mean one that entails a lot of acting instead of complex acting. As the intrigue builds, both characters lose the multi-dimensionality that should be growing deeper and richer, reduced from individuals working within a system they must also oppose to a more basic cat-and-mouse dynamic.

Everything on the menu of The Menu looks good enough, but once its moldy tirade against the one percent has been fully dished out, it’s plain to see there’s not a whole lot of meat on the bone here.

The film would be in the general neighborhood of irresistible if not for the wonky mechanics of story and character that convey a conflicted impression of Hart’s onscreen persona.

When you’re this good, the weakest entry in your filmography can still be largely inoffensive, far from fiasco territory. Even so, there’s only one person doing it like Claire Denis, and now we must wait even longer to be taken once more to the heights of insight, emotion, and style only she can reach.

Luhrmann sees the chief utility of Elvis (or “Booby,” as his loved ones called him) as a pedestal for his everything-all-the-time maximalism, the King of Rock and Roll’s taste for excess in harmony with the Aussie auteur’s desire to shove shock-and-awe cinematic effect down his viewers’ throats until we choke to death on whip zooms.

In the past, Östlund has shown a deft facility in sending up meaty topics, applying granular attention to male ego in “Force Majeure” and art-world pretensions with “The Square.” Here, however, he stoops to the broadness ascribed to his work by its harshest critics, now more parody of himself than parodist.

However dazzling the vortexes this film shoots us through at supersonic speed may be, they still deposit us somewhere we’ve been before.

A pacifist parable taking a brave stand against nothing, totally removed from the sociocultural landscape of today’s Sweden, it sounds out like one of Caroline’s screams into the howling Scandinavian wind – impassioned, futile, heard by no one.

With its unabashed focus on bodies, luring us in with their nudity before hacking them into tiny pieces, the back-to-basics slasher X arrives as a bold rebuke to all things staid and dignified.

For all the amazement at Ball’s tireless hustle and explosive originality, there’s a terminal lack of both in this monument to her memory.

With his work now migrating online and his jerry-rigged methods increasingly outsourced to post-production effects, Jeunet can’t avoid the impending digitization of cinema, nor life. Still, he’s not going down without landing a few good fingers to the ribs first.

It’s all very stupid, if only sometimes in an amusing way.

In between the many high-gloss production numbers and a couple commendable bits of physical comedy putting the previous installment to shame, there’s a lot of treacle delivered with minimal conviction.

Alas, there’s no covert greatness to the just-plain-underwhelming Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City, a reboot totally bereft of the visual distinction or creative personality that often made its predecessors intriguing diamonds in the rough.

Considered as a star-text alone, the film is functionally enjoyable (and will inspire Halloween costumes for the next fifty years), but it’s hard to accept lowered expectations with Scott having delivered a more accomplished, fully-honed film a few brief weeks ago. Caught between the half-willingness to be in on its own joke and the aspiration to seriousness, Scott breaks the cardinal rule of fashion: however you dress, make sure everyone can see exactly what you were going for.

Never lacking in earnestness or vigor, she nonetheless teeters over the lines separating introspection from navel-gazing and the raw from the simply underdone.

If only they’d put fuller faith in the true nature of their premise, and leaned all the way into the kookier side of body horror. Instead of trying for the sophistication of Cronenberg and coming up short, they’d be better off embracing the near-absurdity of lower-rent cult objects like Basket Case from the start.

While Blomkamp does have one impressive CGI trick up his sleeve, he totally drops the ball on the narrative end of things.

In the leading role as the queen of soul, Jennifer Hudson comports herself as well as could be hoped considering the material she’s been given, which demands that she reinvigorate a rote character arc with her own passions.

The quality of the fight sequences, the main criterion by which we judge a Van Damme picture, tops out at competency; only a showdown incorporating a whipped wet towel recalls the inventive creativity of his strongest work.

The script’s attempts at wisdom amount to little more than dime-store platitudes, and the internecine turmoil of the Arashikage clan never comes close to anything like emotional heft.

Scott and Poo have seized on one substantive idea in their portraiture of a singular personality reduced to a caricature of himself by posterity and duly reveal the sensitive artiste who always aspired to more than “Top Gun.” If only they did so with less straightforwardness and more authorial license.

Under Callaham’s inelegant pen, the characters all speak in this overexcited 13-year-old’s vernacular, prone to F-bombs and dick-talk.

Hart comports himself with a more dialed-back version of the jittery everyman affability he’s developed over decades in the comedy circuit, a schtick that reads as just that – a pose, a well-honed affectation. There is an immense and documentable falseness at the core of his performance that drags down the salvageable movie all around it, far from the redemption arc clincher his handlers may have had in mind.

A scattered but likable jumble, the film has a thoughtful manner more than it has actual thoughts, much like the trio of quasi-intellectuals joining forces with Markus.

Berman and Pulcini bank on suspense, despite a queasy inevitability being the strongest thing this retread of the familiar has going for it.

The difficult negotiations of childrearing might have been a fine subtext—something to occupy the attention of parents in the audience—for a comedy so unmistakably family-oriented in tone. But in Yes Day, that element of the story is less of a side dish served for a more mature palate than the whole entrée.

The lackluster Little Fish banks on the automatic pathos of its subject matter, unaware that such delicate material actually requires greater skill and finesse to pull off, now more than ever. Rather than imbuing this unintended commentary with a cathartic charge, its proximity to reality accentuates the air of inauthenticity.

All said, there are less educational ways to raise your blood pressure for two hours, and the masochistic Twitter-refreshers nourishing themselves with a steady drip of maddening headlines will have plenty to fume over. Starting with the sniggering title, this torturous rehashing of yesterday’s history all seems to be for them.

Like so many characters in this glum, shaggy ramble of a film, Campos gets lost in the woods. Most directors in his position fall victim to overreaching, as ideas overlap and confuse and weaken one another. He makes no such error, instead spreading a humbler film’s sum total of content across an unwieldy canvas.

For all its attempts to build itself into something more substantive, it’s still a day at the theme park.

The best bits come from the unexpected faces, however, as both Carrie Fisher and Anthony Bourdain return from beyond the veil to extol the upsides of mind-altering substances.

Aside from the singular brawn of its leading man, this would-be springboard has nothing much worth launching. It’s a stack of wormed-over action tropes, and to make matters worse, the movie knows it – and yet does not know enough to spare us its missteps in the first place.

The good news is that the director’s ambitions, no matter how inadvisable, have attracted a strong cast and occasioned some of their best work.

To fully understand Cohn, to see how the larger-than-life force shaping the latter half of the 20th century came to mold the 21st as well, requires a more penetrating approach than Tyrnauer’s easily digested, skin-deep survey.

This time, his journey doesn’t send him to the ends of experience. Instead, he goes on a smug odyssey of know-it-all-ism that yields a scant few factoids we didn’t already learn from his first film.

As an enchanted talisman housing a depraved mind, Chucky was born one-of-a-kind. As nothing more than a glitching machine, he lacks the sniggling spirit that made him special. He’s been mass-produced.

For cinephiles, this will be effective propaganda in service of a belief they already hold, a reaffirmation of their purist convictions from a simpatico mind. ... [But it] can sometimes slip into slightness, as Ferrara pads an already slim run time.

The cinema calendar is chockablock with faulty efforts built around perfectly serviceable ideas, but realized without a modicum of distinction. Serenity offers the less-common inverse: a magnificently terrible idea, executed to perfection.

An evolutionary marvel, Reeves has figured out how to adapt to the hostile environment of mediocrity, and here he takes to the gobbledygook and gaps in logic like a genetically altered fish to water. When the guy’s good, he’s great, and when he’s bad, he’s still serviceable.

It’s less heartwarming than heart-microwaving.

Close inspection reveals that The Christmas Chronicles suffers from the same acute condition as one of Freddy’s or Jason’s lesser vehicles. The film doesn’t know how to get out of its own way and foreground what’s working, namely the dynamo of screen presence placed more prominently in the advertising than the feature itself.

It’s a victory lap, which will probably be enough for fans content to share Q’s presence and nothing more. But this movie isa cataloguing of a man who lives in three dimensions. In sticking to recitation of well-known historical fact and flattery it has taken the easy way out.

If the historical epic exists as a delivery system for swords-and-shields clashes, panoramas of rolling natural vistas and gruff inspirational speeches to those about to die, then Mackenzie has done his job and then some. But his prior films have set the bar a bit higher than that, and this straightforward, unchallenged take on macho valour doesn’t quite reach it.

Bryan’s done his homework, mapping out an elaborate network of past wrongdoings with news clippings and TV footage. If the just deserts that this film demands ever come to pass, it will almost certainly be the most copiously photographed treason in a long and illustrious American tradition.

The debate over the utility of violence and the dignity owed prisoners of war has raged since time immemorial, and recent developments have only amplified the decibel level. Operation Finale zeroes in on these complex dynamics, only to erase their nuance.

Moselle is at her most astute when concentrating on the fragile social dynamics that govern the tribes adolescents divide themselves into for survival’s sake.

Yoon executes all the classic double-agent set pieces with finesse, and those enamoured of the genre will appreciate a change of setting.

The Equalizer pictures operate under a false moral imperative, using the mission of cleaning up the streets as a cover for the same pat hyper-stylized, near-pornographic brutality.

Whannell’s finite reserves of creativity have been meted out in an imbalance, going all in on world-building while giving the fight choreography and the cinematography listlessly documenting it the short shrift.

Hunnam and Malek both hold up their end of the deal. Noer, for his part, meets them halfway by conjuring golden-hued beauty for the jungle surroundings and a due griminess for the danker chambers of their holding compound. He doesn’t overcomplicate things for himself, keeping the clunky dialogue to a minimum and focusing on the guiding light of Papi’s indomitable willpower.

The character dynamics are still as rich as when Sherriff first realised them, and C Company’s supporting servicemen add a few complementary hues to this portrait of militarised despair.... And yet Dibb’s direction doesn’t leave the actors enough room to breathe.

While pretty consistently amusing, the film still suffers from a chronic case of Wikipediitis, recreating Kenney’s bullet-point moments as substitution for original wit or drama.

Hall’s marching in lockstep with a lengthy platoon of directors who have already blazed this same path through enemy territory. And though he’s got some upstanding troops at his disposal, his plan of attack lacks that crucial unexpected element that can take an opposing battalion – or an audience – off guard.

The film’s greatest virtue is Disney’s ability to poke fun at sports-flick tropes while simultaneously embracing them. No cliché goes untackled; Disney and his first-stringers leave it all on the field.

Silver threatens to tease out some compelling emotional dimensions from Robbie and Nina, but stops just short of profundity. Uncertain Terms has no problem amounting to the sum total of its markedly basic component parts.

100-Year-Old sometimes feels like a rote biopic of a famous figure who never was, congratulating viewers on whatever recognition has rolled over from grade-school history class, then moving on to what comes next.

This Bizarro-universe Coen brothers mash-up has the decency to be sporadically fun, even when it isn’t especially original or steady.

The trouble is in Williams’ execution: His characters convincingly strive and struggle with love, but then go ahead and express their angst in the most typical, banal ways imaginable.

The film’s unexpected nastiness has a way of livening up its otherwise tired story beats.

The fundamental predictability of Before I Disappear’s main plot is just one of the missteps that betray Christensen’s inexperience.

Too frequently, Monk With A Camera feels like a character study with no interest in studying its character.

There’s a worthy sequel to a better-than-average horror film in here somewhere, but it’s buried underneath a wild goose chase that ultimately goes nowhere.

The structural missteps do little to diminish the immense pleasure of seeing White in motion, however. When he assumes a combat pose, the generic script and personality-free visuals fall back.

Second Opinion doesn’t play like a revelatory exposé, so much as a conspiracy-minded chain email sent from a distant relative.

Farahani’s elegiac documentary takes far more interest in Mohassess the man than Mohassess the artist.