Charles Bramesco

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.

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.

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.

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.

Between the known metatext and Affleck’s bone-deep commitment, this moving central performance largely purges the film of its high potential for the maudlin.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Jackman shines, teasing us with suggestions of just how deep his performance runs.

Marder believes devoutly in the power of actors and acting, preferring to get out of the way and let them show their stuff. Ahmed returns the favor by delivering career-best work by a wide margin.

Stanley ratchets up the off-kilter humor while playing down the deep melancholy present in the short story’s original text. This observation could be seen as a knock on the director’s approach, but for audiences going in with zero expectations beyond a good time, the interlaced humor feels like nothing more than playing to Cage’s unique strengths.

Kurzel’s prismatic view of Kelly’s life and times goes to gnarlier and more vivid places than superficially similar period pieces.

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.

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.

The genre maestro has his audience in good hands, “good” in this instance meaning both “skilled, capable, expert” and “decent, ethically sound.” He’s assembled a dazzling contraption that, if twisted in just the right way, pops open to reveal a nugget of wisdom crystallized by the cathartic final shot: we only really own what we earn.

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.

Though Honeyland is also about what it’s about; in addition to underscoring another inconvenient truth with planetary stakes, the film offers tender, patient portraiture to a woman wholly dedicated to her calling. The melding of the political with the personal has seldom involved so many stingers to the face.

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.

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.

Hamer and Gault won the day in a hail of submachine fire, but even their hagiography can’t hide that they’re history’s losers.

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.