Clint Worthington

In fits and spurts, it casts quite the campy, thrilling spell.

It’s a testament to .Paak’s own journey, and the seemingly healthy relationship with both this genre of music and his child, that this movie eschews so many of those struggle-bus tropes. I just wish it translated to something with a bit more oomph, rather than another blandly sincere family film.

If you’re a Herzog diehard, “Theater of Thought” offers plenty of new material to chew on, just as ol’ Werner does his consonants. But for most, the questions regarding the nature of reality and the ways our brain interprets it may not be the most insightful, save for how it affects Herzog’s understanding of his artistry.

It won’t exactly hold you under its spell, but it might charm just enough for the sparse 90 minutes of attention it requests.

At the end of the day, “Atropia” feels like Gates gesturing vaguely at a few really interesting notions about the military-entertainment complex, and how it can bleed through into the people waging the actual war.

Oftentimes, that didacticism gets in the way of the picture’s aims, with clunky metaphors and treacly microbudget indie quirks. But a couple of scenes, and some strong performances, make it ultimately worth the sit.

Lousy Carter, at its best, feels like a cruel joke on its own protagonist, the kind of guy so convinced of his own genius he doesn’t want to mess it up by actually putting himself out there.

There’s a lot unexplored about fandom, queerness, and the ’90s indie movie scene in “Chasing Chasing Amy,” focused as it is on one filmmaker’s adoration of the subject at hand. But what’s left out of “Chasing”—and what the filmmaker decides to do, or not do, when faced with moments of clarity—can inform our own relationships with the art we love.

Párvulos remains a largely successful, if sometimes too idiosyncratic, take on the zombie story. The creature prosthetics remain grisly fun, and even among the washed-out cinematography, the blood thrums with crimson terror in one gory sequence after another.

Roper, who came up directing music videos, shapes a post-heist getaway between four unscrupulous criminals, all strangers until they get to know each other far too well, with surprising style and panache. It’s a shame, then, that all that table-setting (and a quartet of riveting performances) gives way to agonizingly cheap turns by the end.

It’s a film whose tranquility and humility sometimes work against it, even in those moments where it overcorrects with didacticism.

It's your standard warm, fuzzy tale of Christian love that plays to the church set in ways that are hardly objectionable, even as it plays those notes straight down the middle with little finesse.

The doc struggles to land on whether MoviePass was a predetermined failure or something that was failed, and the lack of participation in many of the key players for the latter hurts its ability to probe deeper.

It’s frustrating, then, to see such high-concept potential, some decent production design, and a couple of game leads fall victim to a mystery that unfolds with thudding obviousness.

Carell, Chalamet and their supporting players can only spit-shine a relatively rote addiction story so much; by the time the thrill of their work passes, it’s easy to find oneself waiting for more.

It’s genuinely funny at times, but at two hours, it drags on for far too long, and Chastain suffers from having to hold up too much of the film’s weight on her thickly padded shoulders. It’s a killer performance looking for a movie to support it, and it’s just not here.

The performances are strong, and the film excels in isolated setpieces. It’s just a shame to see a neat idea largely go to waste.

It’s great to see Arnie and Linda Hamilton in the saddle again, and Davis and Reyes are welcome additions to the cast, but it’s probably time to terminate this franchise for good, and be thankful they went out on this serviceable note.

For its unconventional structure and occasional flights of fancy, The Glorias all too often reads as a bog-standard biopic more interested in recounting history than telling a story.

Murray and Wever are as attuned to their roles as Smith is awkward and miscast in his. But perhaps that’s an appropriate fit for Harron and Turner’s divisive-yet-gripping take on this story: at the end of the day, the Manson women are deeper, more fascinating, and more worthy of exploration than the insecure man that connected them.

It’s handsomely made, and Erivo carries the film on her shoulders, but its movements are too clumsy to give Tubman the actualization she deserves.

It’s the awkward tween of gay coming-of-age movies: earnest and confident, but more than a little clumsy.

The question is whether its lol-random approach will appeal to you, or whether its giddy need to throw everything at the wall just flattens into an obnoxious desire to please. Prisoners of the Ghostland knows exactly what it is, but that may not necessarily be a good thing.

Houston’s magic as a performer was in her unpredictability; her voluminous range, the trailing vocal journey her famous runs took us on from note to note, measure to measure. When she (and Ackie) come alive on stage, Lemmons’ biopic soars with vibrating energy. It’s all the moments in between that grow ever more frustrating — the thin characterization, the flattening of her story into Behind the Music story beats, rushing from milestone to milestone without taking a breath.

In turning Force Majeure from a sophisticated tale of broken masculinity into a thunderingly-obvious marital drama, Downhill unfortunately lives up to its title.

It’s steamy and transgressive in a straightforward way, an in-your-face bacchanal of sex and violence of the kind Fennell so delights in depicting. But as the film barrels toward its bonkers but highly predictable twist, the shine on Saltburn begins to fade.

There’s a lot to sink your teeth into with Emily the Criminal, between its strong Plaza turn and a pitch-black moral core that refreshingly commits to the bit. But outside of those devilish comforts, a lot of Ford’s debut is frustratingly thin, more concerned with giving Plaza plenty of opportunities to bore through the screen with her eyes in extreme close-up than in really breaking down her psychology and the perverse romance at its center.

Get Me Roger Stone offers its audience an unblinking, if disappointingly straightforward, look at the infamous operator.

When Joy lets us peek in these tiny, intriguing corners of her speculative world, Reminiscence comes alive the most. Otherwise, the rest of it fades like a memory you’d just as soon forget.

In the end, King of the Monsters is too philosophical to be a good dumb movie, and too dumb to be that much fun.

Gringo’s obvious debt to the works of Tarantino and the Coen brothers give it a tone that’s too arch and haphazard to keep the audience rooted in its characters. The movie’s sense of humor is about twenty years too old, manifesting in glib jabs at other characters’ expense for being fat, or mentally challenged, or poorly-endowed.

Nerve is refreshing and frustrating in equal measures, mining a genuinely inventive concept for some memorable, Mean Girls-esque pathos about the ways in which the Internet is changing and magnifying social structures for young people today.

The experience of watching Ticket to Paradise is pleasant enough; it goes down easy, like a smooth sugary mai tai. And for a while, it’s nice to just luxuriate in the confident hands of Clooney and Roberts, two movie stars who can coast through any old crap and make it fun. But after the sugar high of the honest-to-goodness blooper reel in the opening credits wears off, the rest of it is liable to give you a hangover.

It’s a big, vulgar, Saturday morning cartoon of a film, to both its benefit and detriment.

Blonde is a maddening watch, a frustrating fumbling of the delicate tonal balance required to say what Dominik’s angling to say about his subject. It both condemns the conditions Marilyn suffered under while elevating it to the status of beautiful sacrifice. It’s demonstrably not a biopic, and yet its usage of a real-life figure, and the miseries she experienced, feels too cavalier to completely separate the two.

I can’t decide whether it’s the relative disposability of the narrative, the unremarkable animation, or the fact that this just feels like another spoonful of content thrown into Netflix’s trough, but “Sirens of the Deep” reads like so many empty calories.

Windfall has all the ingredients for an unusual crackerjack thriller: a game trio of actors putting in solid work (and, in Segel’s case, tapping into previously unseen layers of menace), some stylish direction, and a cheeky noir aesthetic from the credits to Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans’ brass-heavy score. But the whole thing never quite builds on its mercurial concept the way it ought to; the characters are meant to be mysterious, but instead come across as mere ciphers.

Unfortunately, what The Belko Experiment delivers in face-twisting gore and deliciously taut suspense, it lacks in insight.

Honestly, points go to Chaves and crew for trying something different with The Devil Made Me Do It: perhaps recognizing the formula was getting stale, they decided to try balancing it with some new procedural tricks. But all it ends up doing is scattering the film’s sense of identity even further; we still get the scares, but they don’t work as well, mostly because they deal with people we don’t care about.

Try as it might to blend the music-conscious idiosyncrasies of Portlandia with the varied persona of one of our weirdest, most valued artists, The Nowhere Inn ends up going, well, nowhere.

As a Big Message movie about the racism inherent in the criminal justice system, Crown Heights succeeds admirably enough. As an effective drama, however, the film is frustrating in its unwillingness to engage with its characters beyond its broader strokes.

This version of Lady and the Tramp actually lacks the thematic complexity of its ’50s inspiration.

For Yimou’s colors alone, and one particularly striking set piece set in a kaleidoscopic stained-glass tower, The Great Wall may be worth the price of admission.

As the saying goes, inside of me are two wolves: one wishes “Out Come the Wolves” dared to explore the wounded masculinity and murderous love triangle of its first half, while the other wonders if that’d be any better or more interesting than the bone-cracking, arrow-shooting carnage of its second.

However handsomely and efficiently staged, the actual action in this action movie feels immaterial. It’s a foregone conclusion that Mills is going to get his daughter back, no matter what obstacles are thrown in his way.

What the doc explores [is] the divide between the personal and business halves of Bob Ross, and which one should be allowed to occupy his legacy. Is he a face on a logo that sells increasingly kitschy merch of the man? Or is he the father of a son who loves him and wants to determine how he's remembered?

Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot is an incredibly mixed bag, a complicated story told with an approach that would have made more sense as a follow-up to Good Will Hunting in the ‘90s.

Ostensibly, it’s a vehicle for Michael Biehn, whom no one else but James Cameron seems to know how to use properly, but everything else about the movie is forgettable.

Winstead may be a bonafide action hero, but the world around her just isn't interesting enough.

While treating entrepreneurism like a classic Greek tragedy isn’t a bad idea in theory, Nguyen’s script is more than a little clunky, and the imagery nakedly self-serving. It’s a film about two people digging a hole so they can make ten more dollars per transaction, no matter how handsomely it’s presented.

At 90 minutes, one could hardly fault "Doctor Jekyll" for being languorous. But it's often too patient for its own good, content to slow-roll its inevitable outcome without giving us much to chew on besides Izzard and some cornflakes.

It may exhaust you, it may offend you; it may guide you through Hell into something more revelatory. And how you receive the film may depend greatly on how you feel about the man who made it.

There are some marginal but still noticeable stylistic improvements in the sequel. John M. Chu (a veteran of music videos and Justin Bieber: Never Say Never) brings a peppy energy that Louis Leterrier’s first film lacked, especially when showing off the flashy spectacle of the Horsemen’s almost-superheroic magic abilities.

MaXXXine can’t decide whether to be a showbiz parody or a giallo sendup or a cute ’80s throwback, and it stumbles when it tries to be all of the above.

Lyne’s return to the sweat-soaked stage trades bodice-ripping intrigue for repetitive boredom and psychosexual mind games with a straightforward descent into semi-madness.

Jimpa is a story that feels like it’s arrived about a decade too late for its intended audience: Queer people want more from their rep than being anthropologically observed from the sidelines, and straight people have watched enough “Drag Race” to already be familiar with the concepts this film treats as novel.

The Christmas Chronicles is a passable enough lark, and may well be on the upper end of the spectrum when it comes to modern cinematic Christmas fare.

There’s little to latch on here apart from its purpose as an actor’s showcase for Boyega, Beharie, and Williams, and its bittersweet status as a sendoff for the latter’s illustrious career.

Problem is, this doesn’t reinvent the formula as much as follows it by rote, which makes it an enormous step down.

It’s two solid hours of disposable, forgettable action-thriller filmmaking with a competent Cruise performance in the middle.

Old, for its part, is quintessential Shyamalan of The Happening mold, a slick, amped-up B movie that hardly ever gives away that it’s in on the joke.

For all its gorgeous visuals, comforting score, and strong non-verbal performances, there’s just not quite enough there at the script level to make Land‘s broader points, well, land.

Extremely Wicked is let down by a shaky mixture of tones, and a fairly hokey presentation of its time period.

There are plenty of fantastic films with Christian messages, but Miracles From Heaven is more interested in simplistic proselytizing to a heavily evangelical market that just wants their own existing beliefs confirmed. This is what makes the film so frustrating to watch; for the vast majority of its runtime, it’s essentially a good (if not great) family drama.

While there’s a lot to like about “Everything to Me” (Abigail Donaghy’s performance, in particular), Lacob’s heart-on-sleeve script and uncertain direction often leave the whole thing feeling a bit scattered.

For as well-intentioned as Jarecki may be, The King starts with a conclusion and works backward from there, and the results are more than a little tenuous.

Orphan: First Kill is an almost impossible film to put your finger on, walking that incredible tightrope between chintzy direct-to-video schlock and purposeful, delightful camp. It looks like a BBC production shot for $5, but that leans even harder into its Lifetime-movie-on-crack presentation (and lets you grade its moments of visual grace on a massive curve).

Despite the bait-and-switch of Chan’s limited presence in the film, The Foreigner is slightly better than it appears on paper. Chan and Brosnan offer believable, intense performances, and Campbell coaxes Chan’s style into an abrasive brutality with moments of occasional invention.

There’s a universe where Bullet Train works — lean harder into the gaudy, neon-pop anime aesthetic, ditch the too-clever character work, and add some honest-to-God jokes into the mix. Unfortunately, as it stands, Bullet Train feels like a lost spec script from the mid-2000s, given a fresh new coat of paint and a few script reworks by some Reddit teens.

The direction and editing are slick and workmanlike, letting the performers do the work without overplaying the limited setting in which most of the film takes place.

Inferno, much like its predecessors, simply can’t work its way out of the disappointing middle ground between a slick, technically competent thriller and tongue-in-cheek absurdity.

On top of trying to be a Big, Important Film, Jones is also meant to be a showcase for McConaughey’s post-Oscar relevance as a dramatic actor, and he turns in a solid but unmemorable lead performance.

It’s hard not to think of The Christmas Chronicles series as a series of wasted opportunities. Kurt Russell as Santa Claus, with Goldie Hawn his doting wife, is such an inspired casting choice that it’s a real bummer to see them do so little with it.

Just don’t expect it to rewrite the genre playbook.