Christian Gallichio

You Can Call Me Bill isn’t a travesty; hearing Shatner discuss his life is always fascinating. But instead, the film’s a missed opportunity to unpack one of the more enigmatic figures in our public consciousness.

Paint is a truly strange film that is never the full-on comedy that one might expect, but it also never commits to the despair that seems to be lingering right under the surface. Despite a truly unhinged final twist that almost makes the entire film worth it, “Paint” is more amusing than laugh-out-loud funny.

The Russos are obviously ambitious in their treatment, cramming what amounts to half-a-dozen features into this nearly 2.5-hour film. Overt stylization does not stifle a compassionate performance by Holland and breakthrough from Bravo, but Cherry is seemingly at war with itself, never able to synthesize form and content in a meaningful way.

The Secrets We Keep is a film in search of a more coherent message.

Only time will tell if The Beanie Bubble represents the final dying gasp or merely the end of first-wave product-driven narratives. But, like Beanie Babies themselves, one hopes that this bubble will burst sooner rather than later.

The exploration of a survivor and their child navigating post-Soviet Poland is, on the surface, compelling, but Treasure doesn’t seem capable of threading the needle between a micro portrait of generational trauma and macro, collective trauma that is omnipresent throughout Poland in this era.

The Ice Road is a serviceable, if incredibly convoluted, addition to a recent run of bland action movies that ask the actor to do the bare minimum— scowling as things explode around him.

America: The Motion Picture only works in fits and starts, more a series of discrete parodies than coherent film. While some of these moments are amusing, and occasionally laugh out loud funny, most are only mildly entertaining.

While always visually interesting, the plot fails to live up to the sheer detail of costume and set design. Waddington proves herself to be a stylish director. If only next time she can find a better script.

Marionette is a bit less than the sum of its individual parts. Still, for the first half of its runtime, the film is sufficiently compelling.

While riffing off almost every film about androids that came before it — “A.I.,” “Ex Machina,” etc. — Baird’s film fails to add anything new to the sub-genre, creating a derivative pastiche of better works that often looks visually compelling but collapses under an underwritten script.

Flight Risk is never as campy as it should be.

Marlowe isn’t the catastrophe that others may make it out to be, but it’s instead just inert, forgettable immediately after the credits roll. Jordan feels like he’s going through the motions, uninterested in bringing any personality to the genre.

While the first hour or so is compelling, the problem with The Policeman’s Lineage isn’t so much the fact that it’s an amalgamation of various genres and tropes, but more that there is little coherency when the film transitions between them, creating a feeling of whiplash.

In the end, Hillbilly Elegy is shameless Oscar bait only redeemed by Close and Bennett’s restrained work.

She is Love feels incomplete; it’s a series of scenes searching for a narrative and a trio of talented actors searching for believable characters.

Despite featuring an intriguing set-up and good cast, The Night Clerk offers nothing new to the genre, predictably hitting the same beats, without variation.

The biographical and fictional afterlives of Monroe are particularly interesting, and probably tell us more about the authors who choose to dedicate their lives to researching her than anything new about Monroe, herself. One wishes that Cooper, and Summers, would’ve realized this.

We never get a full sense of what these people went through after finding out that Cline was their biological father, mainly because Jourdan doesn’t seem particularly interested in unpacking these issues, or giving enough narrative space to explore the psychological toll.