Emily Yoshida

Like any conspiracy theorist, you sense that landing on an actually airtight unified theory would almost spoil the fun for Mitchell.

During the many scenes back home in Jamaica, blessed with the lively Jones clan as subjects, the director doesn’t have any idea what to do with her camera.

Wonderstruck gestures at a lot, especially between the two narratives, which Haynes flips between with such rapidity that the film isn’t able to find a tonal groove until well past its halfway point.

What Mary lacks in the resources to visually gobsmack, it partially makes up for with its unstoppable titular ginger, whose empathy, depressive streak, and enviably fierce eyebrows place her shoulder to shoulder with any Ghibli heroine.

Ultimately, in all its artifice and haphazard but enthusiastic invention, Hotel Artemis makes me a bit nostalgic for French ’90s genre fare of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro and, of course, Luc Besson, embracing their daffiness and dreaminess with an somewhat counterintuitive, almost naïve lack of vanity.

Five Foot Two distinguishes itself from similar projects from Justin Bieber and Katy Perry by not trying to be a 101 class in the subject and her personal history, but when it hits similar beats — heartbreak, the physical demands of performing, tearful scenes with family — anyone who doesn’t have a Little Monster’s encyclopedic knowledge might feel a little emotionally lost.

It feels like the self-admittedly emotionally bottled Talley is ready to talk about all of it. It’s too bad his biographer is less so.

Adrift is enough of a boilerplate piece of survival drama that you know to expect those beats more or less coming on schedule, but Woodley makes it more emotionally satisfying than it would be otherwise.

Here We Go Again ties up these two wackadoo films’ hijinks in a very sincere bow. After all, Mamma Mia is a mom movie, in every way imaginable.

Hostiles is a brutal if well-intentioned film that doesn’t help its cause with its lack of development of its Native characters.

Monsters and Men, then, functions more as a lightly fictionalized photo essay than a narrative film — which is okay, it just means that it feeds more off timeliness than character or art, and there are obvious limitations to that.

Even those of us willing to accept that there are many different shades at work here will likely feel the foundation of the film fall out from under us by its conclusion.

Ends with a sentimentality I didn’t buy — the Bellas don’t seem to particularly care about each other outside of a competitive setting, so why should we?

It’s not brash enough to measure up to the very-near-future dystopia of "The Purge" franchise; it’s also not studied enough as a character ensemble to work as a dialogue-driven bottle movie. The Oath lands in an unpleasant middle ground that is too close to reality to feel like escapism, and too antic to feel equipped at anything like incisiveness.

It’s neither a rigorous history lesson nor a particularly interesting work of drama and character, and it ends up doing the exact same things — pitting women against each other, fixating on fertility and virginity — it claims to find so oppressive for its heroine.

The action has become incoherent, largely past the point of enjoyability.

Amid all the important facts, I longed for something unnecessary from the filmmaker, some expressive flourish whose sole purpose isn’t just to convey information. Again I find myself typing the words, “It’s an unquestionably worthy story, I just wish it was told with more inventiveness.”

There’s something strangely uninvolving about White Boy Rick, despite all its claims to be a sensational true story.

It’s a gorgeous-looking, sensitively edited film to be sure, but never finds a dramatic foothold, no matter how many manic arguments and drug overdoses it throws our way.

There is a real chance that one might be too busy trying to piece it all together to notice the jump scares, the film’s prime mode of horror-stirring.

While 3 Generations certainly has some worthy explorations, it’s too vain not to sugarcoat itself, visually or otherwise.

I don’t hold Larsson’s novels in enough esteem to mind a theoretical sanding down of them into B-movie popcorn fare, but this isn’t the way to do it.

It gallops along quickly enough to keep us entertained, but not so quickly that we can’t see the seams of its creaky American Hero setup.

The film starts to feel like it’s more invested in selling the idea of the series rather than a film in and of itself.

Most Likely to Murder, a perfectly fine and forgettable story about a man who still has some growing up to do coming back to his childhood home, is not the worst or the best, merely the latest.

In Dark Web, the threat is wholly of this world, which makes the sequel feel as though it comes from another universe entirely. It is scary, but it isn’t much fun.

After a couple musical numbers, it occurs to you that the film you’re watching is every bit as animated as the original, but it’s somehow turned out less lifelike, despite its considerable technological advantage.