Chris Barsanti

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.