Daniel Schindel

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Watching The Book of Henry feels like being gaslit.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.