Christopher Gray

The Nanfu Wang film's noble aims are mirrored in its more frustrating and conventional qualities.

The film's expected rehash of recent pop-culture totems is accompanied by a novel attention to millennial-centric debates about entitlement and identity politics.

As Zac Efront's Cole tiptoes away from his past, the film keenly observes a character who doesn't know how to secure his future, or his identity.

If it stumbles when it seeks our sympathy, it thrives when it's exploiting our fascination with the surface of things, and all that's unknowable underneath.

Matthieu Lucci deftly carries the weight of all the symptoms that The Workshop loads upon Antoine, a resonant character whose inscrutability is at once dangerous, sympathetic, and eerily apt.

Broadly, filmmaker Keith Maitland's treatment of the UT Tower shooting is both taut and humane.

Ryan Boden and Anna Fleck convey an engagingly low-key atmosphere, pervasive with wayward souls haunted by poor choices.

In Brad Bird's film, the way forward is backward, on a path that stumbles into misplaced nostalgia and dicey humanism.

No American film since Zodiac has exhibited such a love for the way information travels than The Post, but it's nonetheless steeped in self-congratulation.

Alice Winocour's film begins as a vivid portrait of a man warily eyeing the tumult of his homecoming.

The film’s habit of courting and then insulting the viewer is a conscious nod to the cycles of abuse that mark Tonya Harding’s story, but the filmmakers’ attempts to implicate their audience are I, Tonya's broken shoelace, too pat and glib to be convincing.

It can't develop themes because it's too busy disseminating information, and this extends to its main characters.

The filmmakers take few measures to engender sympathy for Olga, but their prismatic take on her life, while novel, precludes making any resonant statements about homosexuality, emotional health, or humankind’s capacity for evil.

The film has a streamlined efficiency, but it feels like the work of a master who wants to please rather than probe.

The Thomas Vinterberg film's sentimentality is suspect, laced with an intriguing but vague strain of bitterness.

Through its energy and inherent beauty, Brimstone & Glory hits concurrent notes of peril and bliss, but even at a scant 67 minutes it can seem a bit aimless and scattershot.

As sharply as it delineates an America of spotty, informal economies, the film avoids articulating most of the people who live and work in these spaces.

The film’s intimacy is as precise as its intellect is vague.

Battle of the Sexes sacrifices some of its innate appeal by making ham out of the supposed relics of a less enlightened era.

By merely transposing its generic high school clique drama onto an augmented reality platform, Nerve sacrifices most of its novelty, but the filmmakers demonstrate a marginal interest in how this mediated environment warps the perspectives of its characters.

It aims to foster a spirit of giddy anarchy in order to tie a ribbon around its shambolic script and rickety pacing.

Thanks to a strong performance by Nicholas Hoult, all reptilian sinew and heroin-chic vacuity, it keeps threatening to become more dynamic and self-critical than its final result.

This is a work of defiantly simplistic, classically structured Hollywood storytelling, and Mel Gibson takes to its hokey plot points with some gusto.

Argyris Papadimitropoulos struggles to lift his material out of a downbeat mode of cringe comedy.

A sequel that functions as origin story, apologia, and harbinger of a second expanded universe of overpopulated action bonanzas.

The film’s minimalism is rigorous, but its every moment of barebones craftsmanship is accompanied by plodding drama and an unsustainable heap of unanswered questions.

Like any crime saga without a more potent thematic hook, the film's relentlessly insular script dwells on themes of loyalty and fraternity.

Both Lola Dueñas and Laurent Lucas are impressively committed to their roles, but the film's script is elusive to a fault.