Charles Bramesco

The by-any-means-necessary bit barrage crams sight gags into the corners of frames, the credits, the infinitesimal space within edits. In a film that nobly aspires to everything being funny at all times, anything can be, the chief benefit of director Akiva Schaffer’s attention to and appreciation for the elements of cinematic form. You’ve got to be smart to be this stupid.

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 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.

Its entwined torrents of pain and pleasure chart the boundaries of sensation in a buttoned-up age, and allow us back in the present to be scandalized by its raw, visceral (in the definitional, from-the-guts sense) hungers as if for the very first time.

There’s something curious and pure about the way Leone disassembles bodies, like a child breaking open an old VCR not to see how it works, but to survey and play with the complicated stuff inside.

A brilliant and tense allegory on the human paradoxes of violent conflict.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In film-making as in gift-giving, it’s the thought that counts, and there’s not much to go around in here.

Roth thinks in hooks and punchlines, which keeps the copious slayings inventive and gratifying while also enlivening the connective tissue between them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Too well-schooled in the social physics of the internet to come off as a scold against it, writer-director Kristoffer Borgli dexterously skewers a callous culture that cultivates, digests, and disposes of its novelty acts with the blazing-fast speed of a good WiFi connection.

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.

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.

For all the dicks of varying turgidity on proud display, it’s the intimations of true insecurities that leave these characters most nakedly exposed.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Just because something’s make-believe, whether a creative rendering or the quotidian detail of a marriage, that doesn’t mean it’s any less real. With his masterly manipulation of tone and perspective, Haynes ensures that we can feel that much even as the characters can’t bear to accept it.

We’re implored to never forget through a format that makes particulars prohibitively hard to remember.

Wigon’s sleek, seductive drama — as contained and actor-driven as a stage play, though shot so expressively that it could only be cinema — breaks down this pairing just to build it back up from scratch, testing the viability of a connection rooted in guarded performance as it crawls on all fours toward a more open, authentic intimacy.

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.

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.

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.

Everyone’s reaching for a system of support. In most cases, allowed by Koreeda with admirable generosity, they can latch on to one another.

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.

Ultimately, it’s Sweeney’s show, and she excels in locating small crannies of tacit detail within these offhanded lines.

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.

Adroit casting, writing, editing, performing and costuming shade the outline of an affair to a finely sharpened emotional realism, the cycles of fighting and reconciling we’ve all seen before regaining in rawness as if we’re now the ones living through it.

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.

Williams and Uzeyman work in a mode of rich ideas and vibes, both so plentiful that the narrative obliqueness feels less alienating and more like an inviting challenge. It earns the attention it demands.

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.

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.

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.

A mite repetitive at nearly two hours, it’s still an edifying intermediate-level study compressing academic insight into personal reflection, and vice versa.

Slipping into insanity right alongside its protagonist, Smile is an uncommonly sharp movie deviously disguising itself as more of the same. Lowering our defences with the appearance of the commonplace may be its most wicked move of all.

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.

The double character piece excels most when Neugebauer does her thing and facilitates her actors. Together, they build a pair of utterly real people, nonetheless confined to a dramatic universe more prone to contrivance. But the pleasures of the former generally outweigh the irksomeness of the latter, with Lawrence and costar Brian Tyree Henry joined in as a super-generator of onscreen magnetism.

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.

This whoopie cushion of a film raises the concept of the lowest common denominator up to the highest highs of esoteric tastes and in doing so, gets closer to the essence of artistry than all of its self-important, straight-faced forebears.

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.

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.

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.

A consistently funny yet narratively undercooked coming-of-age story.

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.

Just as [Cronenberg’s] characters can live in a suspended state of rot, he can thrive within a world and culture in its death throes. In his reenergized perspectives on degeneration, he’s created one last safe haven for his fellow degenerates.

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.

The cumulative merits on display in Miller’s museum of amazement, from the whiz-bang recreations of freakified old-world grandeur to the humbler miracles shared between two wayward souls, we hang on every word of the narration — as sure a sign of a well-spun yarn as any.

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.

In the carelessness of its slapdash construction, the off-putting flatness of its style, its brazen resistance to basic foundations of logic, and its hostility toward conventional humor that borders on the avant-garde, the new film (a term generously applied to this haphazard sequence of moving images) has far more in common with the hectic, ugly delirium of online obscurities than the newspaper’s funny pages.

Brunner puts his ability to invest anything and everything with a malevolent charge to chillingly effective use.

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.

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.

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.

This is Strickland’s grand act of prestidigitation; he coaxes out something like poignancy from the peculiar, just as he conjures the visceral and unknowable from ordinary groceries.

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.

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.

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

With a firm handle on tone, Park skirts the pitfalls of bad taste one might expect from a film that uses mass violence as a narrative device for a coming-of-age plot.

We may never fully know who Brian Wilson is, but in his resistance of that knowing, we gain clarity on a crucial plank of his latter-day persona.

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.

Even if the dry wit and cherrypickable allusions may be absent, the technical virtuosity on display marks this as the work of a master. Visceral, haunted, and severe, Coen’s vision coaxes out not just the intensity in the play – every “gritty” take has done this, from Roman Polanski to Justin Kurzel – but in its older renderings.

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 tone never defines the stakes in such grave terms, but that’s the key to the potency of Mills’ cinema: life’s pivotal turns come in idle moments, from inconspicuous sources. All it takes is the willingness to listen.

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.

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.

There’s a system incompatibility error with the dominant bestie metaphor that leaves the film’s stance on Big Gizmo garbled.

Campbell’s fearlessness, in both her abrasion and the fragile humanity behind her chaos, helps strike this delicate balance.

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

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

Carnahan’s formal proficiency makes for a more sharpened and accomplished piece of work than many modern counterparts attempting to draw from the same well of cheap-o homage. That sense of precision doesn’t detract from the down-and-dirty fun, either; everyone on screen appears to be having the time of their lives gnawing on the rare slab of beef they’ve been thrown.

Frammartino handles the collision between a vanishing then and the encroaching now with a light touch, mournful yet not quite damning.

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.

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.

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 thread connecting the finest shorts — Panahi, Poitras, and Joe — is adaptation, the willingness to alter form to match the challenge at hand. Those able to refit their already-developed technique to a new set of standards don’t just get the best results. In their undaunted, humble determination to continue, they embody the present zeitgeist with more fidelity than a thousand post-mortems.

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.

David Lowery’s complex, visually sumptuous and uncommercial tale of Arthurian legend revels in upending expectations.

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.

He’s not quite deconstructing the gangster picture, but he succeeds in draining all its allure.

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.

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.

The overstuffed, better-keep-up narrative suits the film’s purposes, occupying audience attentions to leave them unprepared for the nimble writing’s assorted baits and switches.

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.

While Andersson has continued in his signature style for this coda, erecting pallid beige-and-grey backlot dioramas with a painterly eye for crowded composition, he repurposes the technique toward a newfound elegiac, gentle register.

Loeb mostly tamped down the lunacy endemic to an obscure corner of choir-preaching moviedom, and for what? No critical mind runs the risk of mistaking this partisan broadside for innocent edutainment.

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.

Business as usual has largely resumed in Wuhan, but Wang’s film contends that that’s just the problem. The same apparatuses of messaging and censorship are still in operation, ensuring that the full extent of the malfeasance may never be fully known

Rankin’s ambitious thesis on how idiocy, horny neuroses, and pure chance come to sculpt the geopolitical narrative never gets bogged down by the social-studies minutia. He throws one dazzling diversion after another at his audience.

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.

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.

It’s the kind of seemingly effortless success that makes producing a good superhero movie look easy: find a likable hero and a colorful villain, hire someone who knows how to write a punch line, and for Stan Lee’s sake, keep it fun.

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.

Polarizing yet undeniably fascinating, the bait-and-switch horror film lures its viewer into a false sense of terrified security before pouncing in an anything-goes frenzy, and Evans’s latest is a prime specimen.

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.

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

With an achievement of this calibre it’s hard to resist hyperbole: High Life contains the single greatest one-person sex scene in the history of cinema.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

After The Ball commits its most garish faux pas in rooting its plot in the thorny politics of high fashion, despite an apparent lack of any understanding of how the business works.

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

[A] solid, well-executed testament to the horrors of the great outdoors.

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.

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.

Old Fashioned fails in more banal ways, too. It’s a flatly predictable sort of romance; numerous leaves are turned over, both figuratively and literally. The film’s predilection for screamingly obvious symbols gets old fast.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 increasingly loud world may have made the quiet truths of "Mrs. Miniver" seem small - tune out the noise and hear what this film is saying. It's a roadmap for how dignity and freedom can survive.