David Rooney

At times, the movie veers almost into spoof territory, but it never commits to the bit enough to be anything more than a mismatched genre hybrid, despite its atmospheric visuals and strong design elements.

A pileup of movie-ish improbabilities in the climactic act notwithsanding, the new film is a taut nail-biter with a strong cast.

Based on a well-regarded novel by Brenda Navarro, it’s a wafty character study so stripped down and elliptical that it lacks the connective tissue to hook us into its story or provide emotional access to its characters.

The Japanese director has no shortage of ideas — chief among them the potential for advanced robotics to bring closure to the bereaved. But too few of those ideas yield satisfying conclusions, resulting in a drama that becomes treacly and insubstantial, reaching for a profundity that remains elusive.

The problem is that all the various strands — the parallel tales — dilute our access to the characters, limiting their dimensions.

Balagov is indisputably a filmmaker with his own distinctive vision, ideally matched with Evgueni and Sacha Galperine’s glowering score and with Fray’s nimble shooting style, which often takes its cue to get in close from the knotted bodies on the wrestling mats. Story-wise, however, Butterfly Jam is too diffuse to measure up to the brutally transfixing Beanpole.

The actors are all likeable enough, especially the gamine Demoustier, but they are stuck with limp material that’s more twee than captivating.

That exciting crash sequence — from initial turbulence through to catastrophic Pacific Ocean landing — is where high-stakes action specialist Harlin is most firmly in his sweet spot.

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.

While it’s not without entertainment value, Motor City feels like it wants to be Don Siegel meets Michael Mann meets Walter Hill with a dash of John Woo, but ends up an ersatz version of all their work.

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

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.

The very capable ensemble, all of whom have done impressive work elsewhere, mostly gets smothered by the over-conceptualized, over-intellectualized approach to the material.

I wish I could say I found Hot Milk affecting, but it’s continually dragged down by inertia, by a writer-director whose approach is too intellectual to give space to emotion.

There’s no shortage of stylish craft here and much to enjoy in the performances, but ultimately, Rosebush Pruning is too glib to work, leaving only an acrid aftertaste.

Rather than recalling any specific existing property, Cold Storage just feels generically familiar, like under-seasoned comfort food.

The storytelling goes haywire, to the point where you’re unsure what the Australian writer-director wants to say, though her game lead, Midori Francis, keeps you watching.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die doesn’t quite deliver on the sardonic promise of its catchy title, but its appealing cast and Verbinski’s flair for kinetic action set pieces make it a reasonably entertaining entry in the canon of gonzo sci-fi comedies fueled by existential dread about the dystopian techno-dominant reality we’re already trapped in.

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.

No one enjoys beating up on a film in which the writer has invested so much of himself and his pain. But Cayton-Holland and Duplass have somehow made an authentic tragedy feel phony and unaffecting.

The movie is a one-joke premise, cute and colorful but unsatisfyingly fleshed out.

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.

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.

Yes, the movie offers gargantuan-scale spectacle, imposing technological wizardry and virtually nonstop action involving over-qualified and mostly unrecognizable actors in motion-capture suits. But it’s easily the most repetitious entry in the big-screen series, with a been-there, bought-the-T-shirt fatigue that’s hard to ignore.

Anyone nostalgic for the director’s more memorable work might get a kick out of seeing him reunite with past collaborators Kavner and Albert Brooks. But almost everyone here is trying way too hard, with the exception of Mackey, who’s appealing and natural even when stuck in a phony world full of phony characters.

Wright seems almost constrained by a film that ends up neither as compelling nor as deep nor as wildly entertaining as it seems to believe.

By the time questions are answered, not just regarding Polly but also the way in which her history intersects with Caitlin’s, the glacial pacing and lack of suspense have dulled the thriller’s hook.

Fluk doesn’t have a firm enough handle on the material to make that story interesting. And the uneven division of the Keith and Vera plotlines makes Köln 75 a movie without a narrative center.