David Ehrlich

It’s almost as if Frank can’t fathom why anyone today should care about the incredible true story of how some enterprising immigrants without a nickel to their names formed a multi-billion-dollar racket that shaped a huge part of 20th century America. The tragedy of “The Alto Knights” is that Levinson can’t either.

Like so many of the faith-based biopics that have helped turn the genre into a flyover-state phenomenon, American Underdog is sustained by a vaguely fetishistic enthusiasm for its subject’s hardships.

The action scenes are so inexplicably painful — and the character work in “Snake Eyes” is so unexpectedly strong — that your heart sinks whenever the swords come out.

Horse Money is an ordeal, but you’ll be glad that Costa was there to help Ventura’s words find their way through the cracks.

Lee often seems unsure of whether he's directing a comedy or a civics lesson, and the film only finds its wings in the moments when he realizes that the two don't have to be mutually exclusive.

Wenders’s reverent enthusiasm for his subject is evident throughout the film, and he details every chapter of Salgado’s life with an acolyte’s inability to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Long on voiceovers, short on specificity, and so high on the generic-brand Scorsese of it all that it glosses right over the gray areas that make its characters so tragic, Yates’ film is more focused on being easy to swallow than it is on meaningfully addressing the source of the pain.

A generic and diverting sequel that corrects some of the original’s biggest mistakes while also highlighting some of its more eccentric charms, “Uprising” drops us into a world that’s much richer than what the previous film left behind.

There’s nowhere for the movie to go once it establishes that the safety love offers can also be the source of its undoing.

The King is so eager to be a mud-and-guts epic about inherited violence and the corruption of power that it loses sight of the rich coming-of-age story at its core.

Devotion can be stiff and hackneyed at the best of times — it’s nothing if not a war movie that has seen too many other war movies — but it lifts a few inches off the ground whenever it locks in on the loneliness that Brown must have felt as he flew towards an aircraft carrier whose landing signal officer may have wanted him to crash, or soared in formation with people who might have been happy to shoot him down.

The moral of this story is supposed to be shrugged off despite its overwhelming honesty, but Living downplays its drama to such an extent that it can feel as if Hermanus and Ishiguro lacked the nerve to attempt the same trick.

If the film’s story is steered by a hard-nosed focus on the large and small of what actually happened, the way Emmerich tells it feels more informed by WWII movies than it does by the war itself.

A legendary director’s unsullied cut of Dying Of The Light would almost certainly be more interesting than the version the studio is dumping into theaters, but it might have been a lot sadder, too.

No filmmaker is better equipped to capture the full sweep of this saga (which is why, despite being disappointed twice over, I still can’t help but look forward to “Dune: Messiah”), and — sometimes for better, but usually for worse — no filmmaker is so capable of reflecting how Paul might lose his perspective amid the power and the resources that have been placed at his disposal.

Henry Hobson’s zombie movie does for coping with terminal illness what "Dawn of the Dead" did for consumerism, the difference here being that Hobson isn’t interested in satire, only sadness. Oh, and he’s got Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Vivo grows increasingly generic and forgettable as the film goes on, and the closer its furry hero gets to finding a silver lining, the more viewers wish that he never went looking for one at all.

Kim Jee-woon will always gravitate towards the bleaker side of the things, but “The Age of Shadows” suggests that his stories might benefit from just a little bit more light.

It hurts that most of the jokes fall short of their potential, especially because Headland refuses to milk easy laughs by winking at genre clichés, but her decision to play things straight helps clarify a truth at the heart of movies like this.

A horror movie — even one as grounded and genre-adjacent as this — can’t hope to survive if it doesn’t even feel believable on its own fantastical terms.

Results is the work of an elusive talent who’s built his entire career on the strength of his curveball. This seriocomedy of self-improvement clarifies how all of Bujalski’s stories are unified by characters who are trying to camouflage their loneliness.

Sam Levinson’s exasperatingly gorgeous Malcolm & Marie is a lot like the two people who lend its title their names: confident and insecure in equal measure, stuffed to the gills with big ideas but convinced of nothing beyond its own frenzied existence, and reverent of Hollywood’s past at the same time it’s trying to stake a new claim for its future.

If superhero movies have unsurprisingly managed to outlive Stan Lee, a film as functional and flavorless as The Marksman suggests that Eastwoodism will die along with the man who inspired it.

Slight and discursive even by the filmmaker’s idiosyncratic standards, Introduction refuses to auto-correct for anyone who doesn’t already speak conversational Hong.

Everyone in Campbell’s movie — from the director all the way down to his supporting cast — deserves better than this.

It’s wonderful that Mendes spent the pandemic making a movie about the irreplaceable vitality of movie theaters — even going so far as to paint them as one of the final strings in what’s left of our social fabric. It would have been even better if he spent the pandemic making a movie worth seeing in one.

A somewhat funny, perversely family-friendly musical-comedy about all of the ways that modern parents are making their children insane with anxiety.

The romantic scenes are cute, but they feel at odds with the drama. The laughs land like chuckles, the love registers as mere fondness, and the salient observation that countries recast themselves during wartime is reduced to a fleeting detail.