David Rooney

With less than five minutes of screen time but with more humor and sassy attitude than the remaining cast combined, Missy Elliott separates hip-hop royalty from riff raff in the otherwise lackluster Honey.

For much of its running time, Zama is merely remote and enervating, too accurately reflecting its protagonist’s predicament.

Clearly, all this is designed to provoke adverse reactions. But what if instead of outrage and indignation, the response was a numb shrug? Don't get me wrong — The House That Jack Built is definitely something to see. But what's most surprising is that it's just as often inane as unsettling.

For all its brawn and atmosphere and robustly choreographed combat, this is a distended historical tapestry too sprawling to remain compelling, particularly when its focus veers away from the central couple.

As bloody, dumb shark thrillers go, it stays afloat, gaining some credibility from the natural disaster element.

The film goes more and more off-kilter, with its jumble of black comedy and bloodshed and its mild-mannered protagonist embroiled in violent crime making it an unsophisticated foray into Coen brothers territory.

Cronenberg’s new film is less formally inventive and icy than Possessor, more narratively straightforward if no less disturbingly weird and grisly. But the go-for-broke extremity lacks the substance to make it more than an aggressive but shallow provocation.

Its simplistic observation of romantic love in its purest form colliding with political, religious, familial and societal intolerance seems designed to speak clearly to teenage audiences experiencing similar struggles between identity and oppression. Those well-meaning intentions only take the film so far, however, and mature audiences will be left wishing for greater narrative complexity.

Moonage Daydream is short on insight, and ends up feeling more enervating than enlightening.

Shot in a woozy handheld style and laced with fussy visual affectations, the story mixes ripe sensuality with brooding menace in a tranquil pastoral setting. It’s not uninteresting but too self-consciously arty to rank Decker as a mature filmmaking voice.

The real defeat in this ambling fairy tale of hardship, abandonment and resilience is that two potentially winning central characters -- and the tender young actors who play them -- are let down by a programmed screenplay that’s short on narrative muscle.

While Second Best is mildly engaging thanks largely to an appealingly self-effacing turn from Joe Pantoliano, writer-director Eric Weber's script could have used an extra polish or two.

Nothing if not true to its title, this frenetically plotted serve of stoner heaven is insanely imaginative and often a lot of fun. But at two hours-plus, it becomes unrelenting and wearisome.

Anya Taylor-Joy is a fierce presence in the title role and Chris Hemsworth is clearly having fun as a gonzo Wasteland warlord, but the mythmaking lacks muscle, just as the action mostly lacks the visual poetry of its predecessor.

In an era where there's no shortage of clever animated features that appeal to kids while still tickling the grownups, the laughs here are about as fresh as the short-lived 1960s sci-fi comedy, It's About Time.

Ultimately, this is an original adventure that feels stitched together out of a hundred familiar film plots, often freely acknowledging its pop-cultural plundering, as in the family's obligatory slo-mo power strut away from a building exploding in flames. But for audiences content with rapid-fire juvenilia, the busy patchwork of prefab elements will be entertaining enough.

This puzzler with neo-Gothic trappings, while it gets off to a promising, very funny start, becomes too clever and convoluted for its own good. That becomes apparent almost as soon as the investigation gets underway and the movie starts losing its fizz.

It was a given that this meeting of two iconoclastic directors would yield something far more unfettered and instinctive than conventional bio-drama. But the result borders on incoherence, providing few startling insights for aficionados and minimal illumination for the uninitiated.

Bart Freundlich's American remake of the Bier film flips the gender of the main characters, yielding predictably strong performances from Julianne Moore and Michelle Williams but otherwise removing the teeth from a melodrama that grows increasingly preposterous as it crawls toward its weepy conclusion.

The unapologetically derivative sci-fi outing doesn’t have the scripting muscle to deliver on its early promise. But the solid cast keeps it reasonably gripping nonetheless.

Whatever valid points are being explored are hopelessly clouded by the film's unwavering earnestness as it descends into silliness and excess.

Working from a diligently researched screenplay by his late father, Jack Fincher, the director has made a high-style piece of cinematic nostalgia that's a constant pleasure to look at but only intermittently finds a heartbeat.

If you must make another entirely predictable comedy about an unapologetic old white curmudgeon who steamrolls all opposition, you can't do better than draft the redoubtable Shirley MacLaine to keep audiences in her barbed corner while we wait for her inevitable bittersweet humanization.

It’s a pleasurable enough watch — nicely acted and with a gentle rhythm tuned to the main characters’ searching paths as they drift in and out of each other’s lives over 30 years — though ultimately, it lacks weight.

While the filmmaking is raw, undisciplined and groaning under a cargo of self-conscious quirks, it scores points for originality and wacky creativity

While there's some novelty in using genre conventions to contemplate the sin of taming a wild frontier, the reverential film takes itself far too seriously; it ends up being neither sufficiently inventive nor revisionist to surmount its archetypal cliches.

With nary a likable character in sight until the late arrival of some unearned emotion in the closing scenes, this is a posey, abrasive drama, though one that's stylishly made and acted with more conviction than the script merits.

The movie — like the performances of its small ensemble — works best when the director gets out of her own way, forgetting her aversion to clean, conventional narrative and giving the material breathing space to resonate.

If The Nightingale doesn’t quite fulfill the high expectations for Kent’s sophomore feature, it still shows a director with a muscular handle on her craft, though in this case she could have used a script collaborator to address the weaknesses.

Tonal inconsistency, lethargic pacing and a shortage of fresh insight dilute the storytelling efficacy of this quartet of loosely interconnected episodes involving ordinary people pushed over the edge.

I’ll take this JLo as “nobody fucks with me or my daughter” killing machine, discovering her long-hidden maternal instincts, over those grimly generic rom-coms she cranks out once a year, which might as well be direct-to-inflight movies.

It’s hard to engage with characters and situations that feel so studied, so stuck in a script that rarely allows them any emotional development — especially when the director himself seems so removed from them.

Made with the same jewel-like meticulousness and very Gallic sense of style that set Tran’s debut so far apart from other Asian offerings, the new feature again boasts boldly creative craftsmanship in every frame. The film is disappointingly compromised, however, by needlessly convoluted, often pretentiously enigmatic plotting, placing a considerable blight on its commercial potential.

The thing about James Hawes’ film of the 1981 Robert Littell novel is that while it prompts raised eyebrows with the contrivances of its plotting and the seeming ease with which the underestimated protagonist outwits everyone, it at least looks and feels like a real movie.

While it’s a little low on scares, Hokum is pacey and involving enough to keep genre fiends watching once it hits streaming, just for production designer Til Frohlich’s creepy hotel set alone, a place that looks untouched by the passing years. But the writer-director smudges the lines separating an ancient evil from a sordid but disappointingly non-supernatural crime.

Taking two of the most magnetic actors on the planet, Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun, and transforming them into emotionally stunted virtual avatars for more than half the running time is the least of the miscalculations.

Dramatically pallid and unconvincing. Despite being written for her, the director's "Irma Vep" muse Maggie Cheung seems oddly miscast here and is ill-served by an emotionally underpowered screenplay that rarely gets beneath the surface of the character's problems.

In terms of sustaining a narrative using only FaceTime, Skype, Facebook, video downloads and various other web pages and social media platforms, Profile is quite impressive up to a point. In terms of coherent plotting and plausibility, not so much. That means that as the storytelling falls apart, the online framework devolves into a labored tech gimmick, and a visually tiresome one at that.

A bland road movie running on empty. It's depressing to see a deluxe cast wasted on such by-the-numbers material -- from predictable plot to fabricated Hallmark sentiment to strenuous milking of warm-and-fuzzy laughs from the irrepressible spirit of three women whose youth is behind them.

Even if some viewers might grow impatient with Simon’s passivity in the face of endless microaggressions, there’s enough tenderness, heart and ultimate self-realization in Solo to keep you watching.

The storytelling lacks the clean lines to make it consistently propulsive. Paradoxically, given its lofty position in the sci-fi canon, much of the narrative’s novelty has also been diluted, rendered stale by decades of imitation.

Suspended Time does provide some of the pleasures frequently associated with Assayas’ work. . . Mostly, however, the project feels like the result of a writer-director killing time, sketching impressions of a life put on hold by outside circumstances, without figuring out what he wants to say with it all.

It gets the job done and is sure to pull solid numbers. It doesn’t hurt that Gadot has appealing chemistry with co-star Jamie Dornan.

The movie is well acted and mostly absorbing, but it spells out everything so painstakingly that there's zero room for subtext.

There’s pleasure to be had from Sandler’s nuanced work and from the ensemble’s ridiculously deep bench of gifted supporting players. But the director’s fourth feature for Netflix is mid-tier Baumbach at best.

Sifting the pieces of a broken lesbian relationship, the slender, seemingly autobiographical film has its share of neurotic charms and funny one-liners, but it’s too tentative about digging into its identity conflicts -- sexual or cultural.

Daniel Levy has made a first feature that’s a glossy drama of love and loss and the restorative power of friendship. But it’s more earnest than affecting.

The film sways awkwardly back and forth between prickly humor and pathos, rarely ringing true in either register.

As a glimpse of a distinctive world and what happens when a young man who thrives within it gets uprooted, the film will yield low-key charms for patient viewers.

Bong’s adventurous new film barrels forward with chaotic plotting, as is often the case with the director’s work. But thematic coherence remains frustratingly elusive.

The film lacks the accompanying media spotlight that boosted the Moore release and therefore appears unlikely to reach beyond a liberal audience with an already vehement aversion to Fox News' partisan coverage.

While staccato dialogue and edgy confrontations have always been the wordsmith's forte, the precision-tooled mechanics of an elaborate crime caper have not, and the physical direction here could use some muscle.

Had all those assets been funneled into a movie with some tonal consistency and a script that built credible relationships, the result might have been a nasty bit of fun. Instead, it wobbles awkwardly between creeping mob menace and scrappy sitcom, inching toward a violent climax that still doesn’t acquire cohesion.

Nutcrackers is not exactly robust as uplifting family comedies go, but for audiences willing to get in sync with Green’s free-flowing groove, the emotional payoff will be affecting.

As compelling as the life-and-death situation is, it becomes a bit of a drag in a movie pushing two-and-a-half hours that could definitely benefit from a tighter edit.

Despite a number of trenchant scenes and some startling depictions of sexual degradation, the film has little that's particularly original or enlightening to say about living with a chemical, genetic or emotional imbalance, making its primary function as a showcase for the lead actress to stretch her range.

Arctic is elegantly shot, crisp and unfussy, and seamless in its near-invisible use of digital effects, creating a persuasive you-are-there feeling that's rare in these days of flashy CG thrills. And it's the very old-fashioned movie magic of an expressive face that keeps you watching even as the storytelling ambles.

While Burdge's dogged commitment to the role commands admiration, Gina's obtuse, masochistic behavior keeps us from investing in her as a character spiraling out of control.

As the psychodrama of a lonely woman with a score to settle acquires seriousness it saps the misanthropic sense of mischief and madness, causing the movie to lose its way.

A work of self-conscious experimentalism that's too stilted and distancing to invite involvement, it gets some mileage out of the pulsating rhythms of reggaetón street dance but otherwise is so fragmented it lacks forward motion.

Not quite a documentary, it's more like a musical travelogue that doesn't quite sustain feature length and seems ideally suited to a shorter TV version for music webs.

It lacks infectious magic. Any promise of originality fueled early on by the amusing sight of unicorns sniffing through suburban trash quickly dissipates as the siblings' journey gets under way, their progress marked by slapstick gags, predictable close shaves, encounters with characters that often feel like plot padding and standard life lessons writ large.

Day mesmerizes even when Lee Daniels' unwieldy bio-drama careens all over the map with stylistic inconsistency and narrative dysfunction, settling for episodic electricity in the absence of a robust connective thread. It's a mess, albeit an absorbing one, driven by a raw central performance of blistering indignation, both tough and vulnerable.

Hoge shows no particular directorial style, bringing a bland, anonymous look to the generic Southern California suburban locations.

A bigscreen feature executed with a cookie-cutter small-screen sensibility, this often charming but untextured fact-based period piece is buoyed along by the redoubtable Judi Dench.

This is the first feature for Gordon and Lieberman and there’s little evidence of a visual sense, even if the rough edges are part of the appeal. But perhaps due to the elements of improvisation, the comic timing is uneven and the material tends to be more often cute than uproarious.

As a character study of a man with good reason to wean himself off the very basic human instinct of hope and teach himself, even at some personal cost, to care for no one and nothing, Sundown gains texture from its stark setting in a seaside playground stained with blood. But of all the director’s films to date, this might be the most airless.

The non-linear structure works extremely well, making the drama a bracing emotional roller coaster of feel-good/feel-bad turns.

Even if the immediacy of the director's approach gives the material an electric charge, 100 minutes of it becomes monotonous.

While the director's penchant for extended silences and stagy character positioning make it all seem rather studied, the drama nonetheless is compellingly unsettling.

Philip Seymour Hoffman and John Hurt give compelling performances... But the coldly unrewarding drama is as distant and joyless as its protagonist, representing a disappointment for director Richard Kwietniowski.

David Frankel’s sequel hits familiar beats that fans will eat up and deftly reconfigures the core trio of women into new adversarial positions, even if it ultimately lapses into cozy sentimentality. The movie is best when it sticks to fluffy, fun nostalgia rather than shooting for substance.

It's pleasant enough, but lacks the vitality to be more than mildly funny as comedy as well as the insight to build emotional heft as drama.

Although The Weight is low on excitement, it ends on an affecting note that makes you wish the sluggish movie had been given more lucid storytelling, as well as more dramatic and emotional power.

Ambitiously structured in non-chronological fragments that form a fascinating puzzle, this raw drama about grief, guilt and redemption becomes ultimately overextended and overwrought in its final stretch.

Driven by a compellingly internalized performance from Teresa Palmer as the conflicted prey, this is a case of expert filmmaking craft applied to a familiar story that becomes unrelentingly grim and drawn out after its masterful setup.

While it's well acted and has strong moments on a scene-by-scene basis, the film lacks an emotional center, keeping the impact cool and diffuse where it should be affecting.

The film is shocking and upsetting, but never truly gets under the skin the way this kind of material often can. Whatever reservations are prompted by Haneke's approach, his direction is controlled and edgy. [20 May 1997, p.52]

This is designed to be a heartwarming comedy and debuting feature director Paxton is more assured with the outcome than he is about getting there.

Despite a nagging tendency to milk sentiment from wrenching subject matter that requires no manipulation, the film is notable for its admirably inclusive perspective.

While it's uneven, and at times seems almost artless in its craft, the story has an idiosyncratic charm that pays off in an unexpectedly touching ending.

It's been made with genuine feeling and smooth professional craftsmanship.

A stylishly made but unyielding drama.

Faltering storytelling and sloppy visual technique aside, the pas de deux of tenderness and violence, passivity and aggression between Stewart-Jarrett and MacKay keeps you watching, with both actors mostly overcoming the clichés in the way their characters are conceived. But Femme ends up being less subversive than it seems to think it is.

Problematically structured, overly protracted and lacking in narrative fluidity.

Nothing on either side comes close to the trenchancy or grim poetry of Jones' harrowing odyssey, which is as it should be. But there's also no reason for all the political obstructionism and journalistic frustration to be so windy.

This is in many ways a frustrating film, its commitment admirable but its execution chaotic.

Ambling drama shows an exasperating lack of economy and a weakness for diatribe dialogue, but becomes progressively more involving after a laborious start.

Rebecca Hall’s admirable refusal to soften the brittle edges of her recently widowed protagonist in The Night House makes her a compelling variation on the usual woman in ghostly peril.

While the intriguing setup pulls you in, this gentle American heartland story peters out into an unsatisfying payoff.

It may not rank up there with Skyfall, but it’s a moving valedictory salute to the actor who has left arguably the most indelible mark on the character since Connery.

I found this movie messy and overstuffed, but I laughed almost as often as I cringed from its obnoxiousness and can’t dispute that a vast audience will delight in every moment. Even if they spend much of the running time sticking blades through each other’s handily regenerating flesh, Reynolds and Jackman make sweet love and appear to be having a great time doing it.

The film offers up more mysteries than it solves. Still, riveting work from Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux as performance artists whose canvas is internal organ mutations will draw the curious.

What holds the film back is the familiarity of its elements.

Writer-director Maïmouna Doucouré's captivating but structurally shaky first feature is stronger on setup than development or payoff, becoming less controlled as its opposing forces of tradition and rebellion collide.

The customary warmth and gentleness of Kogonada’s approach and the corresponding delicacy of the three actors makes you keep wishing Zi would build more substance, more lingering poignancy instead of wafting along on its cloud of melancholy with characters that lack dimension. But it only acquires life intermittently.

Carax’s trademark bonkers magic elevates many of these scenes, to be sure. But there’s also a nagging naiveté, even a silliness to the storytelling that kept bumping me out of the sluggish drama.

Less time spent fetishizing his own image and more on building credible character dynamics and psychological complexity might have helped make this film the dramatic equal of its technical craftsmanship.