Daniel Schindel

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

Tickled too often gets in its own way.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

The film can easily coast on sentimentality and nostalgia for emotion, and does so frequently and unabashed. Which is frustrating, since there are glimpses of a more complex human being throughout the film, one who would have made for a much better subject.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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