Chris Barsanti

The film shows a preference for forgiveness over vengeance, which feels like an okay way to end this particular year.

An astute and fright-filled story, ‘Aum’ is limited by the unknowability of its subjects, registering as a spooky echo from a distant era.

Unfortunately, the tendency of Voyeur to tilt towards comedy undermines the weight of its story.

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

Shrouded in an elegiac reverie, The Midnight Sky is a frequently beautiful movie, from the mechanical ballet of the bird-like Aether to the brief glimpses of K-23, where Jupiter looms in a purplish night sky. But its inability to make a strong connection between the separated stories, and a tone that slips sometimes from poetic quietude to sentimentality, keep the movie from taking a long and honest look at the devastation its reticent mood only suggests.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.