Daniel Schindel

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.

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.

Of Fathers and Sons is a vital addition to the cultural picture of the Syrian conflict.

When it works, the movie strongly evokes the feeling of sorting through a loved one’s possessions after their death.

Structurally, Hale County This Morning, This Evening does not do much to distinguish itself from other contemporary vérité documentaries which focus on quotidian details within a certain milieu. But even so, it still finds value in the unique incidents it captures.

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.

Bisbee ’17 collapses past and present into one another, and in doing so achieves a singularly strange and unsettling vision of apparently intractable American hatreds.

It’s an energetic, frequently hilarious, always visually riveting ride.

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.

Once again, Spike Lee has found an innovative theatrical production and brought it to blistering cinematic life.

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.

Beirut has zero character as a setting, reduced to a generic backdrop of rubble and sand. It’s not a real place with a distinct culture in a time and political situation which any writer worth their salt could cull mountains of rich material from – it’s Scarymuslimabad, capital of Clicheistan.

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.

Mary and the Witch’s Flower is safe, containing no assertion of Ponoc as an artistic force beyond its overall technical accomplishment.

Blade Runner 2049 marries its ideas to its narrative in a way that blockbusters too often fail to these days. More importantly, it puts these ideas to a poignant end, bringing its characters to tragic or bittersweet reckonings in a manner that would do any of the old sci-fi masters proud.

Vivid and mordant, Thirst Street imperfectly defines its lead, but makes her journey distinct.

The filmmakers behind Leap! seemingly can’t picture a children’s movie without a cavalcade of unnecessary action scenes and fart jokes—and not good fart jokes at that. The result is a movie allegedly about ballet with weirdly few scenes featuring actual dancing.

Against the backdrop of a coming-of-age ritual, The Wound finds its greatest insights in contrasts between tradition and modernity.

Despite these sharp moments, there’s a frustrating looseness to Lafosse’s narrative, feeling as though many of After Love’s scenes could be rearranged without changing the film’s flow. In turn, a slackness undercuts the tension the film is otherwise trying to build.

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.

Raising Bertie is a moving chronicle, and a potent treatise on institutional failings that knows to demonstrate said problems instead of merely preaching them.

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

It’s difficult to think of a biopic that so thoroughly embarrasses its subject in the process of attempting to honor them the way Churchill does.

With this raw animal rush, you can understand the appeal of the sport, and how one might deign to spend part of a fortune on vicariously experiencing it. But it also demonstrates the ultimate hollowness of extreme consumption.

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.

This iteration of Ghost in the Shell remixes elements from the various comics, films, and TV series that have come before, but offers nothing new or interesting in doing so.

Rat Film stalks between being repellent, riveting, and darkly humorous.

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.

Crucially, the emotional scenes are some of the ones in which the film lets off the throttle for a bit.

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.

Gold’s twist carries no weight because it comes from the movie being told from precisely the wrong point of view.

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.

The problem with its mystery setup is that, since we’re simply waiting for The Beast to show up, the revelations are less driving plot progression than they are filling time, and that “ticking clock” is arbitrary

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.

This is one of the better-directed CG films in the Disney canon. But next to all the solid noisy bits, Disney still demonstrates trouble in slowing down properly.

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.

Conceived out of Lowe’s own experiences with pregnancy and shot while she was herself seven months along, the movie is a distinct blend of black humor, viciousness, body horror, and pathos.

The documentary’s vision of history as tied to spaces is more difficult to dismiss than its apparent weaknesses would suggest.

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.

Into the Inferno is a memento mori aimed at the whole human race, and only Herzog could make one this non-pretentious, funny, curious, and respectful at the same time.

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back is harmlessly generic.

Make no mistake: Pott and Coleman’s stories are unquestionably worth sharing. But presenting them in a routine march of interviews spiced up solely with occasional animated reenactments does not do those stories justice.

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.

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.

The Edge of Seventeen isn’t John Hughes for a new generation – it’s much more honest than that.

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 connective tissue between the different shots is sometimes thin, and some images are of course far less interesting than the others. But those hiccups can’t degrade the unique, involving effect of the documentary as a whole.

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)

As wartime thrillers go, Anthropoid is disappointingly limp.

Florence Foster Jenkins is nice, but only in the way that any undeservedly wealthy person considers themselves “nice” when they give a pittance to charity while sheltering as much as possible from the IRS and spending extravagantly on themselves.

[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.

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.

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 rebooted Star Trek film series finally hits a fun median between big-budget bombast and classic Trek bigheartedness with Star Trek Beyond.

While Zexer might not yet have a directorial voice, her story sense is sharp.

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

Hooligan Sparrow struggles with the entrenchment of injustice both thematically and narratively, as it can’t quite find a way to cohere its story beyond sticking to the time Wang was with Ye. But that doesn’t diminish the courage of either filmmaker or subject.

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.

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.

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

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

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

This film is especially good at making courtroom scenes engaging, where many would hurry through the choicest soundbites before moving on to the next part.

Half of the best gags in The Nice Guys are of the physical variety. Some of the action scenes escalate into full-on live-action Looney Tunes madness.

Tickled too often gets in its own way.

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.

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

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.

Krisha showcases artistry that’s quite accomplished for a debut feature. That it’s all in service of a story that doesn’t seem to know what it really wants to do or say (other than dismantle its lead) is a shame, but there’s true promise here.

Where many historical films are concerned with the movers and shakers of well-known events, Men Go to Battle is all about the micro view. It tells a story that happens to be set against a volatile backdrop, but is more about what it was like to live day-to-day in such a time.

10 Cloverfield Lane is a fun one-location, three-person play, and each new twist it takes only makes it more exciting.

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

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

The special effects are worse than I thought modern studio filmmaking allowed for. Actors such as Robert Forster and Melissa Leo reprise their roles from the first film with maybe half-a-dozen lines apiece. Were it not for the presence of said actors, this could easily pass for a DTV spin-off.

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.

The movie shifts gears with each section.... This hodgepodge encourages some variety in the world-building, but, to the littlest detail, it’s derivative — and, worse, not scary.

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.

[Stillman's] dry sense and cutting sensibility are suited to the meaner edge this story has in comparison with the rest of Austen’s oeuvre.

Little Men could have been so much more if its perspective leaned towards the opposite direction.

As an exploration of identity as it is felt, projected, and interpreted, this is masterful.

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.

American Animals is a legitimately exciting, funny, suspenseful, and at one point deeply upsetting crime film, ably demonstrating a command of genre trappings in service of a narrative about people warped by those very clichés.

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