Derek Smith

There’s a certain pleasure in basking in the anarchic behavior of the SNL cast as depicted in Saturday Night, but it’s rendered hollow by the film’s often grating mythologizing of them, which includes trying to turn the 90 minutes before the first episode into a frenetic comedy of Safdie-esque proportions.

As the film goes on, it stretches its own internal logic and, following a genuinely shocking third-act twist, renders the world that it’s created virtually incoherent merely in a ploy to keep the audience on the edge of their seats.

The world of My Old Ass retains a lived-in quality, in large part due to the shrewd, sensitive way in which it treats the emotional struggles of its teenage characters.

The film’s treatment of its subject is belligerently hamfisted, disingenuous, and incurious.

The remake gets bogged down by a superfluous, hackneyed backstory and narrative threads that are conspicuous for their lack of emotional gravitas, causing the film to feel like a wheel-spinning exercise.

The importance of touch between a parent and child—and, in the case of this film, specifically between a father and daughter—is rarely discussed openly in Daughters, but it looms large over nearly every scene.

The film speaks unflinchingly to the unique anxieties and frustrations of early teenhood.

All of the time spent on Thomas Munro’s various campaigns for reconciliation and harmony between two Māori tribes hampers the film, which would have been better served had it expounded on the grander conflicts that it only superficially acknowledges.

The film is all table-setting, with the stories lacking in polish and dramatic momentum and the characters never developed beyond archetypes.

Ultimately, in trying to make Katherine both a historical girlboss and a near-martyr to a vaguely articulated cause, Firebrand’s meandering, under-baked screenplay manages to neither have its cake nor eat it too.

The film leaves no room for doubt about what Trudy Ederle will accomplish, and thus creates virtually no dramatic tension in her inevitable rise to the top ranks of women’s swimming.

Whenever its main characters are pulled apart, the movie magic, in every sense of the phrase, dissipates, leaving us with a bland, derivative action-comedy that’s never quite as funny or thrilling as it thinks it is.

Slow steadfastly remains a character-driven piece, homing in on the intricacies of its protagonists’ psychologies and engaging with their subtle emotional shifts as they become more intimate with one another.

To Ritchie’s credit, he keeps his film moving along at a consistently brisk clip, but that breeziness is also the cause of its weightlessness, rendering its vision of historical events as outright cartoonish, down to the often clownish portrayals of Nazis and the flawless execution of nearly every element of March-Phillips’s plans.

The film is held together by the universal strength of its performances, particularly James and Smollett, and the elegance with which it veers between dreamy interludes and poetic flourishes stemming from Malik’s imagination and the more quotidian presentation of the small world he lives in, warts and all.

The last 20 minutes live up to the promise of bludgeoning viewers with plenty of rock-‘em-sock-‘em combat and demolished human landscapes, but what any of it is actually for will be forgotten even before the dust begins to settle.

The film’s final act contains some of the most twisted, gory violence this particular subgenre of horror has seen in years, ultimately recalling nothing less than the films of the ultra-violent New French Extremity movement.

The film never thinks to lean into the blatant silliness that its premise invites.

This shaggy, disjointed film is less interested in the complexities of Marley’s personal or professional life than it is in presenting him as a hero and an inspiration.

Much of Rich Peppiatt’s film isn’t about respectability, but rather debasement, and sugar-coating Kneecap’s widespread antics isn’t on the menu.

Suncoast spends much of its runtime trafficking in tiresome coming-of-age tropes, until the resulting crowd-pleaser has snuffed out much of what’s so singular about its central story.

The film approaches a new tech frontier with an objective, responsibly apprehensive, eye.

It’s not unlike a partially completed sketch whose occasional flashes of color only serve to remind us how incomplete and lazily constructed the rest of it is.

Will Gluck’s rom-com doesn’t bother to create a compelling world around its charming leads.

Paul King again proves himself a masterful engineer of imaginary worlds, and it’s the meticulous attention to detail that makes Wonka so captivating.

Thanks to Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s unflappable performance, the theories that Isabel Wilkerson laid out in her book emerge with an emotional clarity that can be forceful, but the film’s often inelegant, choppy structure also works against that clarity.

More times than not, the film’s bursts of humor clash awkwardly with the far more frequent attempts at gravitas that the filmmakers strive for when our protagonist is in battle or engaged in political discussions.

The searing images of various gulags, public executions, and private beatings will not be easily forgotten.