Chris Barsanti

Evan Twohy’s attempt to smuggle some sincerity into this largely absurdist tale shows that he isn’t especially committed to coherence.

Jia Zhang-ke’s film is a quietly reflective, intermittently rambling rumination on an explosively momentous period in Chinese history.

Amanda Peet finds layers of shading in what could have been a dull and simplistic role.

These are desperate times, but if Jon Stewart wants to tack toward a more Frank Capra vein, that’s just fine. We already have one Adam McKay.

The Lost Leonardo deals less with absolutes than fungible notions of perception and power.

It pulses with relevancy in a time when debates over authoritarianism, protests, and the necessity of radicalism are convulsing America.

The film breaks little new ground but is at least a notable improvement on, well, The Mousetrap.

The film is a resonant depiction of the gaping holes left by Jeff Buckley’s untimely death.

The artifice of There There certainly generates an added layer of frisson that might not have been there were the film shot under more conventional circumstances. But the root material has enough rich humanity and taut conflict to it that the result would have succeeded regardless.

The action choreography is as brutal as you expect, though the repetition in style from the first two films makes the effect less surprising.

The film takes occasional stabs at comic grotesquerie, but it’s brought back to earth by an insistent docudrama seriousness.

The main character’s condition feels like a dramatically dubious attempt to shroud the somewhat spindly nature of the film’s plot.

Ryan White’s documentary is cute to a fault and filled with a rapturously uncomplicated glee about the joys of exploration.

A dryly comedic bricolage of mid-century Americana and postwar anxieties with only the lightest dusting of plot, the 1950s-set Asteroid City finds Wes Anderson moving even closer to cultural curation and further from sustained storytelling.

The film lays out an impassioned case for the nearly unique greatness of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s body of work.

By shooting the fiction sequences with the same dreamy fish-eye unreality as the scenes showing O’Connor’s real life, the film blurs the line between the two until it’s almost nonexistent.

While some individuals are inevitably more compelling than others, as a whole the entire series, and “63 Up” in particular, is completely enveloping as it draws us into the latest happenings of these people we’ve followed for so long.

The film’s aesthetic approach is purposeful, echoing the us-or-them sentiment held by both groups aiming guns at the other.

The final product feels like more of an interesting and beautifully filmed anecdote than compelling political and human drama.

The film knots several strands of new-millennium despair into something that very nearly approximates greatness in its first half.

At its most engrossing, the film vibrantly sketches out the historical roots of the Negro baseball leagues.

It’s a testament to the skills of the cast and filmmakers that The Lesson’s mysteries, while easy to foretell, are worth unraveling.

Cat Person only succeeds when it stays in a space of mystery and unknowing.

Alex Gibney’s documentary tells a dramatic, if somewhat workmanlike, story of Silicon Valley hubris meeting old-fashioned scamming.

Abi Damaris Corbin’s quiet and unobtrusive style helps 892 build tension primarily from character instead of incident.

Jesse Eisenberg’s satire hits its targets dead on, but he flattens his mother-and-son narcissists to the point of caricature.

The film is so economical in its momentum, and its tone of comic wistfulness so uniform, that its string of tableaux rarely feels jerky.

Rithy Panh’s film is hard-hitting yet illusive, much like the story its characters are hunting.

The suggestion that Ted Hall’s actions were that of simple and pure heroism leaves Steve James’s documentary in tension with the more nuanced view that Hall seemed to have of himself.

The film functions as a handsomely mounted biopic that tells a little-known story with considerable passion.

The Outfit is a dapper, twist-filled crime story that relies more on dialogue than gunplay to move the action.

Many sections of Bird Box don’t hold up to a second’s scrutiny; the conceit’s silliness and convenient scare tactics make Shyamalan’s take on infectious-suicide horror seem downright subtle by comparison.

Enough of the individual moments pulled from the rag-and-bone shop of Donna Tartt’s sprawling mystery narrative make an emotional impact that the story’s structural issues fail to register as much at first.

Whether or not Vasilis Katsoupis’s film achieves escape velocity from genre limitations though overt sociopolitical commentary is questionable.

With its tough-minded characters from divergent cultures finding a common bond despite their differences, the film doesn’t deliver much in the way of surprises, but it turns out to be a starker and more honest piece of work than it might initially seem.

The film pulls back the veil on Kurt Vonnegut to show how a gloomy dissatisfaction brooded underneath his quippy surface personality.

This is a movie that ripples with sublimated fury well before the bloody and shocking long take that ends everything without much of an answer. But it is also a movie that leaves too much unsaid and takes too long to end up nowhere.

It’s a sign of how quickly it feels like the world is being torn apart around us that even a ripped-from-the-headlines documentary, such as Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim’s The Great Hack, can feel almost dated.

Clumsy and erratic, though possessed of an undeniable bounding and puppy-like energy, How to Build a Girl is a star vehicle for Feldstein that, while it often does not do its star justice, also knows when to just stay out of her way.

Elton John: Never Too Late comes across as a safe and well-tooled piece of a carefully managed relationship with Disney.

As an experiment in format, “America Murder” is intriguing. Instead of bringing people in to give fresh commentary, we have only the artifacts left behind by a seemingly ordinary family in a seemingly ordinary suburb. But as a documentary, it makes for an incomplete picture, like trying to piece together the story of an ancient disaster based only on archaeological fragments.

Even though The Public ultimately doesn’t come together as a dramatic piece, particularly in the hammy climax, it does take some impressive chances. Just making a story about the invisible homeless is a brave move to start—audiences tend not to like stories about intractable issues, after all.

By the Time It Gets Dark jumps at first into an examination of Thailand’s repressed history of political violence and dictatorial control. But that initial pencil sketch of a thesis is soon shuffled away in favor of several other less-interesting story threads which add up to much less than the sum of their parts.

This isn’t a movie about despair in the face of seemingly implacable problems; it’s about the heavy lifting that constant hope requires. Disappointingly, that surging energy which animates the activists profiled here, in ways both intimate and caught-on-the-fly, never coalesces into the desired blueprint for reform.

In spite of the film’s troublingly naïve take on mental trauma, Riz Ahmed vividly and empathetically captures a man’s wounded soul.

During an amnesiac’s atmospheric nighttime ramble through Manhattan, the seeds of a narrative are sewn but never nurtured.

The film misses an opportunity to delve particularly deeply into the keenly relevant issues of inequality and social disconnection that so animate its protagonist.

The particulars of the central mystery are mundane, to the point where the film itself doesn’t spend too much time digging into them.

Windfall has a difficult time landing on the right tone or getting a bead on its characters.

For a musical so dedicated to celebrating and critiquing the transformative potential of cinematic fantasy, Bill Condon’s Kiss of the Spider Woman brings relatively little of the kind of overwhelming star power that can truly transport audiences.

Ultimately, the film’s most impactful terrors have nothing to do with things that go bump in the night.

In the end, the film suffers from the same issue as its moody androids: enervation borne out of repetition.

Birds of Prey feels at times less like its own story and more like a trailer for what’s coming next.

Many of the character actors occasionally elevate the film above some of the more clichéd family humor.

The film appears to be striving for humanistic understanding, but the end result is far too jumbled to have the proper impact.

Though it smartly prioritizes the bond of relationships over action, the film is in the end only somewhat convincing on both counts.

The film’s ambivalent perspective on the greed and glitz of its protagonist’s world makes it difficult to invest much care in what happens to him.

Disappointingly, despite the rich subject matter, Le Guillou lets “An Unknown Compelling Force” become more his story than that of the dead.

The film consistently fails to underline the risks and pressures faced by the women in an underground abortionist network in Chicago in the late ‘60s.

By setting up such a potentially cataclysmic scenario and not convincingly illustrating how it could be resolved or stopped from occurring in the first place, War Game undercuts the very reason it was made.

Phyllida Lloyd’s film cannot escape its own somewhat mundane self-set contours.

The film presents a world that too often feels as if it’s a product of the present day.

At some point before the truncated-seeming finale, the film is just chasing its own tail.

This flashy legal melodrama is fitfully stirring but too flabby to deliver the walloping blow that it needs.

The film is a pretty bauble of a thing that ticks off the story’s shock revelations in an efficient, if not particularly surprising, fashion.

The film doesn't pay nearly enough attention to Danvers’s crucial emotional metamorphosis from dual-identity self-doubter to fearless warrior battling to keep Earth safe.

Though the film touches on numerous hot-button topics and is packed with incident and humor, its self-aware style—from straight-to-camera narration to slow motion to visual tricks like the washing out of an entire background so a character will pop out in bright color—and simplistic characterizations deprive it of the chance to say much of anything.

The film looks for an emotional payoff by continually upping the stakes of its main character’s self-destructive short-term thinking.

False Positive threads classic horror-film tropes with a woozy, partially comic sensibility but doesn’t fully commit to this approach.

Marjane Satrapi’s film could have benefited from the tangy humor and cynicism of her graphic novels.

Like the fraught relationship between its two musician characters, the film never finds the right groove.

The film wants for deeper characterizations or a closer detailing of criminal procedure.

There is only so much a director can do to bring surprise to certain stock elements—it would be refreshing to just once see a convoy survive a movie without being ambushed—but Sollima knits together big, sweeping aerial shots and tight-in, juddering angles that work each nerve not already done to pieces by all the automatic weapons fire and exploding vehicles.

It’s strange that The Equalizer 2 is such a sluggish ride. Fuqua and Washington have developed a body of work over the years that is, if nothing else, reliably kinetic. But with Wenk’s pedestrian writing, there just isn’t much for Washington to work with here.

Try as the filmmakers do to conjure a restorative kind of magic in its searching, yearning storyline of renewal, they are not able to come up with much more than a limping comedy about a woman with all-too-easily-explained mental issues.

By refusing to illuminate the detainees’ stories or the humanitarian crisis—not widely reported enough for Brady to take the audience’s familiarity as a given—they are trapped inside, The Island of Hungry Ghosts relegates itself to being little more than a pretty but wispy curiosity that fails its beleaguered subjects.

By paring their story down so much, the filmmakers only end up highlighting just how little it contains.

Where Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married completely immersed viewers in the sometimes messy intimacies of family, My Mother’s Wedding feels more like a stage production that forgot to include its first act.

The deconstruction of corporatized play culture gets run through the sequelizer machine, with predictably acrid results.

This is a sleek-looking vehicle that’s eager to be scary but not comfortable being ugly.

Instead of delving into what lay behind John Allen Chau’s recklessness, the film scatters itself across multiple plot angles that confuse more than clarify.

Arnaud Desplechin’s film only flirts with questions about the sacrifices made for art.

Sharp Stick shows that Lena Dunham’s preference for solipsistic protagonists with boundary issues has its limitations.

The final product feels like it would have been most appropriate as a video presentation for the Democratic National Convention.

The excitement that the film tries to generate for its main characters is disturbingly glib.

Shane Black’s film plays like a misguided action extravaganza from the 1980s.

The end of the world may never have had less impact than it does in Miguel Sapochnik’s Finch.

A story that might have been benefited by being allowed to breathe over a six-episode arc instead feels rushed and schematic rather than lived-in.

The Gray Man is a noisy, flashy spectacle that piles clichés atop ludicrous plotting and sprinkles it all with half-funny quips, all in the hope of bulldozing the audience into submission.

The further Love Me develops its scenario, the less plausible it becomes, even by lovelorn sci-fi standards.

It’s only when River Runs Red gets to about the hour mark that a story begins to cohere. Up until that point, it had taken the most perfunctory of stabs at being a ripped-from-the-headlines drama about police shootings.

The direction by Ruben Fleischer (Zomebieland, Gangster Squad) is oddly slapdash, and hardly does justice to the skills of his cast or his own chops as a comedic filmmaker. Hardy squeezes some baffled comedy out of his schizoid shtick, but there just isn’t much here for him to work with.

Hillbilly Elegy feels like a bland feel-good story rather than one part of a longer tragedy with no clear end.