Chase Hutchinson

Where a lesser film could fall into feeling like it is just hitting issues without exploring them, Young Mothers always grounds the bigger issues in real characters. It finds genuine emotion in capturing how this is not something abstract, but a reality with which they’ll have to contend.

In the Blink of an Eye is a disaster of its own making, living in the shadow of far better sci-fi films of old, and never doing anything interesting with any of the ideas it throws out.

It takes a group that bumped up against the boundaries and instead just operates within them.

It’s the exact type of film that you could see a new generation of kids finding and causing them to fall in love with movies.

Credit where credit is due to Wicker, it’s not every day you get to see an Oscar-winning actress mount a Hollywood heartthrob made into a literal wicker man. Alas, despite the novelty of seeing icon Olivia Colman climb a towering Alexander Skarsgård like a tree, the magical fable within which this happens is not only regrettably far less fun than this description sounds, but an oddly wearisome affair.

Though possibly well-intentioned, the execution of The Covenant ensures its narrative and thematic potential is drowned out in the roar of gunfire it becomes far too enamored by.

After pushing up against the confines of a conventional musical biopic, it does end up mostly operating within them, hitting all the notes you’d expect it to hit, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t ring mostly true when it counts.

A sporadically interesting though ultimately superficial exploration of online connection, video games, and modern alienation, writer-director Flora Lau’s Luz is a film in search of something greater than it is never quite able to grab hold of.

There is a cacophony of sound and color which provides some spark to it all. It just is burdened by unshakably tiresome plotting that is made all the more meaningless when it decides to walk back much of what already felt far too small in its creative and emotional scope.

Even with some perfectly fine comedic gags, Power Ballad can never overcome the emptiness of its characters and the equally flat, overlit visuals that make the entire thing look more like a bad TV episode than an actual film.

Indy is a delight who can do no wrong. Though the film around him is not always as assured, he is a star who has earned all the pets and treats a dog could dream of. After all the nightmares he had to endure this film, he more than deserves it.

It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley doesn’t do much of anything new with the documentary form, though still excavates plenty of interesting details within a familiar package.

For all the promise of its main cast and sturdy thriller premise, The Menu is a work that seems destined to slip from your mind.

As a complete portrait of youth on the cusp of the rest of their lives, it never manages to be authentically sharp enough to transcend the more tiresome narrative trappings it falls into and a grating over reliance on musical cues as punchlines.

There is a good film in The Harbinger that we catch glimpses of in moments of horror and the conversations we do get to see play out. It just is struggling to break through the uncertain confines of the story it is trapped in.

There are plenty of silly recurring jokes and a collection of quirky characters, but it all exists to cover up just how empty the film itself is at its core.

It is a work that is so caught up in the noise that it drowns out the moments of the profound silence that could have spoken to something more.

The texture that gives vibrancy to these types of understated stories just isn’t there, ensuring that what little there is to grasp onto soon slips away as well.

Out of Darkness is an often jaw-dropping horror debut that arrives at a more substantive conclusion that makes everything more interesting in retrospect.

Despite a strong performance from Nick Offerman, Sovereign is a film that’s inescapably slight and with little to say with its painfully relevant story of modern extremism.

It’s just that while you can’t see any of the strings being used on the effects, you can see the story being manipulated. You may fall in love with Ochi all the same, but you can only wish you’d gone on a richer journey together.

Though it assembles some of the right ingredients before laying them out before you, it never proceeds to arrange them in any particularly interesting or entertaining way.

An engaging enough dramatization of the true story of a man who became known for spending months hiding out in a Toys “R” Us to escape capture after robbing businesses by coming in through their roofs, Derek Cianfrance’s “Roofman” is also a regrettably safe film defined by missed opportunities that ultimately steals any deeper resonances it could find right out from under you.

The film does pull out all the stops for the finale but, for nearly every moment it stands tall in this conclusion, it also stumbles and falls in the getting there.

That there is a genuinely clever current running through it about the cinematic history of sharks and the fear they hold in our imagination is just a little added bonus that offers a bit more to chew on.

While Landon has made fun genre outings before with “Happy Death Day,” “Happy Death Day 2U,” and “Freaky,” Drop is, at its best, never more than just down the middle. At its worst, it’s an oddly clunky experience that strands its performers with little to work with.

Each time you think you’re seeing the daylight of something potentially better to explore on the horizon, “Buddy” keeps dragging you back into the banal darkness. Like the kids, you deserve far better than whatever this lackluster production amounts to.

There is just enough magic that it discovers by the end to give it a closing spark, but there is a mighty long road to get there, ensuring it all just remains merely okay as opposed to comprehensively good.