Charles Bramesco

The technical diligence and conceptual novelty on display during the boost uphold a high standard of excellence, its most inspired sequence played like a nerve-shredding game of red-light-green-light. Believably portraying expertise requires some measure of the same behind the camera, and the attentive, inventive Gudegast can keep pace with his subjects.

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.

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.

Flanagan’s sister piece ensures that its underlying meaning is as close to the surface as the shallow grave discovered in the second act. Flanagan chose to make Doctor Sleep utterly banal. Through means straightforward and blunt, he’s turned a surreal simulation of succumbing to insanity into a plainly stated reminder to always be true to yourself.

They mix like Fireball and water, but the odd couple nonetheless shares a sensational chemistry, building on the base amusement of seeing Oh let her extension-laden hair down and Awkwafina crimp the straight-man character into weird new shapes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Taika Waititi’s self-proclaimed “anti-hate satire” “Jojo Rabbit” exists in service of a single idea, a notion so desperately idealistic that it lands somewhere between naïveté and disingenuousness.

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.

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

No matter what we might think of her, it’s clear that Tammy Faye was one of a kind. Chastain’s mannered plague of tics does right by her in that respect, but she’s been inserted into a template now worn from overuse.

The admiration for a woman who knew so much about so much clashes with the unspoken assumption that the audience knows absolutely nothing about anything.

A wild detour chock-a-block with wild detours, Drive-Away Dolls comes from an artist regaining his capacity to take pleasure in the process, no matter if that means slackening the laser-focused perfectionist streak evident even in his earlier comedies. Contrary to its easygoing casual gait, this is an essential work in the Coen corpus, an evolution more than a regression or sacrifice. It’s the rare case in which a preponderance of dick jokes heralds a newfound advance in maturity.

Historically, of course, making no earthly sense hasn’t been a major impediment in Jodorowsky’s work. In this instance, he commits a sin graver than charlatanism by just being boring.

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.

JT LeRoy may have been an elaborate fib, but Kelly finds a genuine pearl of wisdom in the web of deception.

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.

Taken as a bone-dry satirical comedy, this would be a cruelly glib treatment of material sensitive enough to merit a trigger warning in bright yellow prior to the opening credits. But this agonizing tour through private agony deserves to be taken more seriously than that.

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.

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.

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.

Mohan handles his audience with care, diligence, attentiveness, creativity, smoldering passion – the mind positively swims with sexual metaphors. That’s the headspace in which this film leaves us: a well-made gutter we haven’t had the chance to visit for far too long.

Though Keaton conveys the deterioration of Knox’s psychology with diligence as an actor, trying and failing to hide his glances of searching confusion, his narrow facilities as a director can’t keep pace with his performance.

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.

Between its distinctly modern intelligence and razor-sharp plotting, Anderson’s clever contraption matches the heights of Gothic grandeur that keep Poe held in esteem today.

This high-gloss take on Gordon Parks Jr’s funky vision of the hustle goes so far into sheer, unabashed rap-video excess that calling it gratuitous would miss the point. Until it suddenly, brutally isn’t.

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.

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.

Theory’s premise dares to interrogate what, if anything, the apparent randomness of life means. Brown and screenwriter Michael J. Kospiah haven’t the foggiest, but they’re willing to unload as many harebrained plot twists as it takes to obfuscate the question.

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.

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.

As escapist comfort-food cinema goes, this is a stick-to-your-ribs, tryptophan-coma-size helping.

Tonally pitched between a bloodbath and bath time, a boyish strain of immaturity is the dominant creative force for Sokolov, at times amusingly but more often in commonplace, enervating ways.

Pugh’s greatest tribulation of all is delivering the tin-eared dialogue torn between the emotional sadism it heaps onto its protagonist and the adulation it lavishes on the actress playing her.

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.

Cobweb might just fill you with the sadistic glee that you can only get from horror films that push the boundaries of the genre. It’s not perfect. Hell, it might not even be “good.” But Cobweb is an absolute delight and a blast to watch.

Clooney and Roberts remain masters of a dying art, mustering the flustered charisma that makes them appear both perfect and mortal, the same paradox we observe in our spouses and lovers. It’s a pity to see them settle like this, accepting less than they deserve, but it’s rough out there.

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

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.

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.

Like the hyper-aerodynamic train slipping through the night, the fight passages that should be the film’s saving grace come out textureless and frictionless.

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.

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.

An evident attempt to right the ship has turned into a calamitous case of mission drift, as a property with no identity travels in nonsensical circles, looking for a sustainable new direction.

Though the memory of Hooper’s picture haunts every frame of nü-Poltergeist, Kenan’s will fade unseen into the great beyond first.

Even if the combat choreography that made this vein of cinema so popular is up to snuff, and Winstead does handle her steps ably even as her character breaks down, this film should aspire to be more than a delivery system for a few solid shootouts.

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.

Cross gathers a lot of narrative strands and elegantly knots them during a big, farcical climax. But that’s the one aspect of the film that truly works as it should. Just about every other element of Hits, from its eagerness to snigger at the expense of small-town yokels to its sneering disdain for the common-rabble forum YouTube, leaves a sour taste.

Here, we can find a damning summary of modern Hollywood’s default mode – a nostalgia object, drained of personality and fitted into a dully palatable mold, custom-made for a fandom that worships everything and respects nothing.

The writing expends more effort on teasing out the logistics of seeing dead people than making the phenomenon frightening or emotionally resonant.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

For the impressively moronic dialogue, Oldman brings a lack of imagination so complete that he could plausibly explain this performance away as a high-concept ironic joke.

When not being used to grind dull culture-war axes, sputtering impotent anger is a comedy staple. It just needs to be funnier than this.

The film places a greater focus on the notion of unwilling complicity than most in the gangster genre, but still struggles to produce much original insight.

An attempt to revive the Hasbro franchise is a careless fumble put together without a hint of effort or interest.

Barbarash doesn’t do much to compensate for the misshapen script, either. Fumbling camerawork and incoherent editing rob the film’s generous fight sequences of their oomph, and amateurish green screen hobbles a car-chase sequence.

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

The saving grace here should be the win for the Filipino community, commanding a big-screen moment with a cast of undervalued Asian stars. But they’re all short-changed by a hypocritical sense of heritage and pride.

The unfocused script from outclassed first-timer Ross never really follows through on what should be its foundational idea, led astray by underdone subplots and vague relationships between its characters.

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

On film, this story’s foundation of cynical button-pushing is laid bare.

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

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.

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.

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

The core issues of the film – its numbing swirls of rainbow light popping out every which way, the excruciating pop-culture catchphrases passed off as humor, LeBron’s stilted, if game, acting, the half-assedness with which it delivers the dusty moral to be yourself, the fact that it is unaccountably one half-hour longer than its predecessor – all seem minor in comparison with the insidious ulterior intentions that power this fandom dynamo.

A film that could only succeed by sorting through gradually darkening shades of gray works exclusively in embarrassingly bold strokes.

Watching Jones passively bob in the deep end of his imagination, a viewer longs for the compulsory baseline competence of the big studios – anything but the blandness masquerading as future cult bait.

A film that takes so many below-the-belt jabs at the idiocy of Tinseltown blockbusters must, at the very least, be a few IQ points higher than the stuff it makes fun of for being stupid.

If this is all starting to sound like an ambitiously amusing fiasco, don’t be fooled: Scenes saunter by one after the other, their dialogue waterlogged with talk of “believing in the unbelievable” and other soggy turns of phrase.

Going mad with power should be at the very least fun, exhilarating in the indulgence of an artist’s most outlandish whims. Instead, Snyder’s would-be magnum opus is merely boring.

This shameless shilling comes packaged in an equally offensive story that foists Hollywood’s au courant fixation with intergenerational trauma on to a character heretofore occupied above all with napping and eating.

There’s nothing clever or subversive about Playing It Cool, which makes the film’s overt self-satisfaction exponentially more infuriating.

It’s by no means impossible to carve a challenging, meaningful story out of difficult interchanges between the east and west. To return to Scorsese, consider Silence, a fine film about European men slowly realizing just how little they understand of Japan. But neither Zandvliet, Baldwin, nor Leto care to look beyond themselves. They’re worse than the simple gaijin, or the over-affectionate weeaboo – they’re tourists who think they own the place.

As this narrative advances out of the YA-industrial complex and into the harsher environment of general scrutiny, however, a whole curriculum’s worth of faults become visible to an audience not so readily pandered to, who want for more than worn-out teen-lit tropes to fill some inner content maw.

Watching a foot-tall plaything flip over a dinner table would be either hilarious or terrifying, and either direction would be an improvement over the flavorless slurry Bell is dishing up.

A viewer may find themselves appreciating how the non-visual element of music allows figurative language to retain some wisp of mystery, whereas onscreen it’s made to wear its significance in blatant, artless ways.

The first-time feature director still has some growing up to do—the glaring genuflections to his influences betray his rookie status—but Patch Town has just enough laughs, imagination, and sincerity to follow through on its naked bids for cult adoration.

As with all overwhelmingly poor movies, it’s the delicate confluence of many varied factors that creates the critic’s familiar feeling of despairing hopelessness in the cinema.

Bound To Vengeance is not necessarily an evil film, or even a hateful one. It’s confused at best, though it’s more likely that the film’s misguided pseudo-feminist subtext is a result of simple thoughtlessness.

This is the most insidious type of knockoff: the one that sincerely expects you to believe that it’s the real thing. Leave it to Netflix to take the fun out of incompetence.

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.

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.

A sequel so wholly anodyne that it doesn’t even deserve its exclamation point.

What keeps Jersey Shore Massacre lively is that this mean-spirited, aggressively stupid film constantly finds new and shocking ways to be terrible.

Beyond its mere unfunniness and stupidity, Septic Man is criminally unimaginative.

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

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.

There’s a lot to ponder in Prototype, not least in the confounding coda that suggests a note of hope for rebirth, but the film’s powers are visceral as much as (if not more so than) they are cerebral.

We all share universals like hurt and hope, it’s just that their expression differs for McConnell. Like the act of childbirth itself, something that has happened trillions of times and yet always feels intimately personal, he’s one of us and one of a kind.