Daniel Schindel

The more you interrogate the premises underlying The Post’s themes, the more they disintegrate. The daunting fact is that only mass movements truly change society for the better. But that’s a messy process with a lot of depressing history built in, and not ideal for narratives catering to prim liberal sensibilities.

Pacific Rim Uprising is a mess, but when it gets to the business of robots beating up monsters (or sometimes other robots), it’s a blast.

Director Tim Wardle lays a lot on the strength of the events he’s covering, and they are indeed compelling enough on their own to hold your interest. The flipside of this is that the film has little power outside of a first viewing.

If I go on about how Gleason’s convention-bound filmmaking and drawn-out running time dampened my reaction to Steve Gleason’s journey, am I being a good critic, or just a dick?

Rather than intelligently grapple with the complexities, the filmmakers let various people have their say and then call the whole thing done.

In porn, everything besides the sex scenes are just setups for the sex scenes. Here, everything feels like it’s only there to set up lavish parties or high-class adventures.

The movie makes a game attempt to resonate as something stronger than a typical period romance, wringing its wartime setting for all the pathos it can manage. But even the horrors of the Blitz feel too gentle here.

It’s nice that Spa Night has a story with a different kind of protagonist than what we’re used to, but it tells that story with all the lackluster waffling of any other shaky indie drama.

Tickled too often gets in its own way.

Taylor-Joy and Cooke have a weird, comedic dynamic that could have put them in the canon of cinematic duos if the movie had been braver in pushing their relationship to darker territory. Ultimately, Thoroughbreds is a lot of potential with an anticlimactic payoff.

Hidden Figures is a nice movie. At its head is a trio of good performances from Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monae. But it is in essence a feature-length version of an inspiring social media image macro, or perhaps a Google Doodle. “Did you know that black women were important at NASA?” It has little else to offer.

The film insists upon its own relevance, but has none.

The love these characters have for their lifestyle is obvious, as is their reasons for rejecting mainstream society for it, but the joy they receive from it is not conveyed to the viewer. Without that, Kiki is a decent survey of its chosen topic, but rarely anything more.

Over two shapeless hours, it walks through sequences that announce their emotional gravitas while only sporadically earning it.

Despite the intriguing subject matter, this documentary can’t stay in the air.

The film is more of a clip show, awkwardly cutting together elements once presented in a drastically different manner. In doing so, it obfuscates the power of a manifesto, allegedly what it means to pay tribute to.

It’s always frustrating when a documentary is so intent on one story that it plainly misses a more interesting one that’s, just… right there.

Don’t Breathe makes for a very fun little thriller, though it also veers into being exceptionally stupid or eye-rollingly gross (although admittedly, it is sometimes more than one of these things simultaneously)

The Oslo Accords represent one of the most frustrating missed opportunities in recent world politics, though The Oslo Diaries is more frustrating for how it both simplifies the political complexities of the situation and dilutes the drama of the story.

The Cleaners ably raises questions around the issue without following through on tying them together, often seeming like it’s simply bouncing around to cover all the relevant topics until it’s time to wrap up. That’s a letdown, but it gives us some noteworthy moments along its way.

Roth interacts well with Michael Cristofer and Robin Bartlett, who play David’s two primary patients in the story. But outside of their performances and Franco’s ever-tasteful approach to the subject matter, Chronic is frustrated either by convention or its own coldness.

This is electric material for a story, but Fogel just gets shocked instead of channeling it into something great.

White and Arteta have a solid foundation but seemingly no idea of where it could go.

Hits a decent count of guffaws and chortles, enough to make for a solid rental or something you settle on while channel surfing on an idle afternoon.

It certainly is dramatic material, but The Founder presents it as a generic “rise to the top” story without even the decency to suggest Kroc lost his soul along the way.

[Schoenaerts] and Kruger can’t sell the low-key attraction that develops between their characters, which turns a lot of the stakes — and the story’s resolution — into absolute shrugs. This is what Disorder ultimately adds up to.

This is Marvel imitation at its most tedious. It’s particularly disappointing given how, in her original Harry Potter books, screenwriter J.K. Rowling demonstrated a deft ability to put in subtle foreshadowing and use characters and elements that would later take on new significance.

Sadly, as has consistently been the case with his recent film work, The Infiltrator gives Cranston basically nothing to do.

Action is Rogue One’s strongest suit, and what makes all the faffing about bearable.

While The Conjuring 2 smoothly goes through the motions of setup, building anticipation, and payoff in myriad ways, the slickness of the production interferes with any proper sense of dread.

Come Sunday makes an admirable effort to delve into religious conviction and changes in faith, but comes up feeling too normal and disconnected from those matters.

The most frustrating aspect of The Lovers and the Despot is its refusal to do more than simply recite its tale, ignoring the interesting concepts lurking within it.

Where it could do more to work inside its characters’ heads, it pulls back.

Despite its worthy plot and the wealth of great footage with which it had to work, Holy Hell is a mess.

It looks and feels less like a film and more like a feature-length pilot for a new TV series which happens to have a stacked cast.

The scenes of millions of things happening at once are skillfully made, to be sure, but they’re still visually busy to the point of numbness instead of energization. The action has verve but no soul.

Taking a straightforward approach isn’t necessarily a negative, but the sedate camerawork and editing make the movie’s progression staid. Even the musical moments are invigorating due to the music itself, and not by how it’s presented.

The Raid star Iko Uwais deserves to silat his way through a million hapless evil men, but here’s hoping that, going forward, he picks better cinematic vehicles for his frighteningly fast feet and fists.

Even if the conceit is faulty, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible for this film to rework this material into an intelligent riff on the play. Unfortunately, it still doesn’t.

As wartime thrillers go, Anthropoid is disappointingly limp.

As a thinkpiece generator, it is absolutely spectacular – by every other metric, it’s a failure.

Greenfield’s earlier documentaries, such as Thin and The Queen of Versailles, serve as better explorations of the topics this somewhat shapeless movie presents.

The 15:17 to Paris is a long stretch of boredom culminating in one jolt of interest.

Demolition might just be this year’s poster child for disaffected faux-indie insincerity.

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back is harmlessly generic.

It is an odd story, mixing haute couture, small-town gossipry, romance, dark secrets, an old murder mystery, and multiple random deaths. And yet it’s also not nearly odd enough, delivering all of this with a disappointingly straight-laced sensibility.

Like an extended episode of Black Mirror but without a dark sense of humor or bleak horror, The Circle wails about how technology is affecting society with little grace or flair.

The Boss can at least be appreciated for trying to lead its main character on an honest-to-god arc, which is more than many loosey-goosey movies of its ilk can say.

The Comedian might have been salvageable if the namesake character were, you know, funny. But not only is this not the case, the film makes Jackie’s stage presence even more grating by insisting with every frame that he’s brilliant.

It’s surprisingly enjoyable even if you aren’t already in the bag for the turtles.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 commits the perennial sequel mistake of indulging the breakout characters, letting them run rampant over everything in the process. Giving everyone the spotlight only diffuses the heart.

It’s not wretched; just boring. A faintly damned improvement, but an improvement nonetheless.

Despite all this, Independence Day: Resurgence still emerges as one of the better blockbusters of this summer, and that’s only halfway damning with faint praise. It’s a mess, but I grinned a good portion of the way through.

Watching The Book of Henry feels like being gaslit.

This film’s sense of action geography and tactics is atrocious.

I Love You Both perhaps would have been best imagined as a short, but it makes for a breezy watch.