Daniel Schindel

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.