Gregory Nussen

Shuffle is a solid primer for a massive subject, and Flaherty's approach is a maddening introduction to a world that needs massive reform.

Its approach is so diffuse that its uncertain and purposefully ambiguous ending is misguided at best.

When Ma focuses on the grounded journey of Sara's fish-out-of-water story and the genuine chemistry between her and Sam, the film sings.

The film never really leans into the farcical possibilities of its premise nor its earnest appraisal of Augusto Pinochet’s legacy.

It's to the actors' credit that it works when it does, and what it ultimately posits about marriage is as grossly haunting as it is disturbingly poetic.

Dan Trachtenberg's third Predator entry is exciting, but also tonally askew in ways that prevent it from hitting its stride.

The film would've been better served had it stuck to either satire or tense drama, but whatever the case, the climax of Saleh's film is aces and as taut as can be.

The best parts of Mother of Flies are in the margins. At its most lucid, it tells us that life, death and healing are magic — both of the Western and witchy varieties.

The circumstances around Audrey and Eli's union (Moon Choi and Son Suk-ku, respectively) is tender, yet forceful, beautiful, yet pained; but the film is otherwise formless, uninspiring and moves like molasses.

After its more interesting first hour, the intimate access gets tiresome, and it's hard to say what is gained by being introduced to the personal lives of the members of a notorious hate group.

Thompson and Greer really are extraordinary, however, and their tête-à-tête nearly saves Kirk's enterprise from the doldrums.

This is a purposefully languid movie that proves real, genuine tension can be built without crash landing right on your head. In an era of fast cuts and escalating explosions — the kind that Hemsworth, Ruffalo and Halle Berry all know intimately from their time in Marvel's universe — it is refreshing to watch something this confident in its own particular DNA.

If American Pachuco leaves you wanting more, perhaps that's not a bad thing; Valdez deserves the last word, anyway, and he's not finished.

She Dances seems almost scared of its own premise.

The combination of crime film and romantic gothic horror never really gels. It is successful in its invocation of old Hollywood (including a very fun opening credits sequence), and its horror beats are effective, but it doesn't work in total.

As an anguished cry against colonialism, Pepe works best when illustrating the micro ways in which culture is erased by capital interests.

Perhaps it's fitting that a horror film set around a podcast flits in and out of being engaging, since that's more or less the experience of listening to one, but it doesn't exactly make for a cohesive viewing experience.

The film undermines its initial sense of intimacy and momentum with a stop-and-start story structure that by and large exists to make as much room as possible for its characters’ banter.

ALL YOU NEED IS KILL is not a film that'll have you scratching your head for meaning. It wears its empathy and its plea for life on its sleeve like a badge of honor. Admirable though that is, that directness does translate into threadbare writing.

Candy-colored and ebullient, I Want Your Sex is not a bad film, but its hard to think of it positively when we know just how much more effective Araki has been behind the camera. The film is just never sure of what it is.

No disrespect to Foy, who showed with The Crown just how capable she is of revealing entire histories through her open visage, but watching her go through the extremely repetitious (and, one supposes, accurate) steps of training a Eurasian Goshawk is exceptionally tiresome. H is for Hawk induces the same effect as taking a sedative.

In the end, any attempts that A Haunting in Venice makes at connecting post-war trauma to Halloween and the ability to commune with the dead are non-committal, and the script doesn’t do enough to communicate why any of that matters.

Even when removed from the implications of his prolific career, there isn't a ton here that gives us an unbridled look into the man's inner life.

Comedically, the film also falters . . . Nor is there much that is distinctive about the animation style.

Despite a series of beautiful gowns worn by Chastain, the film doesn't offer much intrigue nor sociopolitical interest, instead reducing itself to the lowest common denominator by the time it reaches its exceedingly cruel ending.

This is classic B-movie creature-feature stuff.

It simply picks up the baton from the previous film, relying on a series of increasingly nasty, and at times exciting, kills to thrill audiences, while leaving everything in between to feel as fake as its vision of the Big Apple.

Younger children will delight in the film's atmospheric wonder, but older children may be bored by the simple yet nonspecific comedy.

The witty repartee between Clooney and Pitt feels like the only thing holding the film together.

To put it simply: it's just not very stimulating to watch two people who have a hard time talking... have a hard time talking. Stella and Gerry's love may be stuck in the wintry cold, but so is the film, utterly unable to be thawed.

The film boasts a twee quirkiness in style, but in its narrative, that promise never really comes to fruition. It is, in other words, a much more normal affair than what is promised. In spite of many genuine laughs, that just translates into a disappointing experience.

The film's best attribute is the romance between Bruce and Faye. White and Young's chemistry is palpable, and Cooper solidly helps us understand why an artist on the verge of overwhelming fame might be interested in a working-class single mother, whose planted smile belies the pain of someone abandoned and bereft. There's a nuance here that the rest of the film sorely lacks and needs.

Overall, the pulpier and the dumber it gets, Primate provides a pretty good reason to get to the theater in January. And, it gets pretty pulpy and dumb indeed.

If Ready or Not was a chess match, Here I Come is tic-tac-toe.

What the film does exceedingly well is make us see the inherent irony of moderating online violence to the exclusion of the real-life violence in front of our faces.

At its best, Mr. K is like being immersed in Hieronymous Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. More often, however, it's like living inside a trash heap.

What they cannot ignore is that the film is otherwise still lacking. For all the epithets one could throw out about Wuthering Heights, the most surprising may be that it is an abject snooze, and that its nonchalance about color-specific casting reveals a filmmaker completely insensitive to the implications of race in the late 18th century.

Silent Night, Deadly Night, is at its best when Nelson remembers how schlocky this material is, and he falters when he tries too hard to take it seriously.

Ultimately, Over Your Dead Body is too messy for its own good. It is unable to settle into any one choice. The repeated motif of flashbacks and plot twists is fun, but not always useful in keeping the ball up.

It's a standard-bearer film, a real fastball down the middle, which hits all of its assumed itinerant emotional beats right on target, without ever really challenging us in any major way.

Even more than its two predecessors, the film relies on being condescension to sell its so-called magic.

As tantalizing as the film’s ambiguity can be in certain moments, there comes a point where it starts to feel at once half-baked and a transparent means of delaying the inevitable.

Waugh knows how to build an action sequence with the best of them, and Shelter is, ultimately, an electric actioner, so long as it is sticking to the action.

Sweet but narratively thin and didactic, the latest from DreamWorks Animation always seems as if it’s trying to find its footing.

A surprisingly bland film that somehow manages to dampen even Glen Powell's usual brand of effortless charm, How to Make a Killing is sketched together with thin characterizations, limp commentary and a sluggish pace.

The Gallerist is a tepid satire. Even calling it such feels generous, as the film is almost entirely devoid of genuine humor.

The film handily invokes the campiness of the iconic Disneyland attraction, if not its kinetics.

Anaconda aims to be Bowfinger for a new generation but ends up feeling as insipid as the film it is loosely based on. Its target audience is people nostalgic for the salad days of studio blockbusters, who are righteously frustrated with executives for cashing in on material they don't understand.

Heretical or not, it's a captivating story, even when it seems predicated solely on vibes. It's a shame, then, that the film is not as accessible as Jupe is as an actor. The first two acts move like molasses, brimming with allegory that never quite translates off the page.

The process of searching through all manner of cloud-based applications and information in a video-game-like manner is a tantalizing prospect, one just wishes it wasn't done for something so harebrained.

Ultimately, the film is far too placid and noncommittal to earn its more moving climax. It's hard to really care about these characters when their stream of decisions seems either improperly motivated or else frustratingly selfish.

In implicit ways, Deepfaking Sam Altman demonstrates just how out of touch from basic humanity these programs still are, which makes it all the more terrifying when we hear how they are being peddled as tools which can literally decide the fate of human lives.

Lang really goes for it here, and he sells the material as best as he can, but suffice it to say that Hellfire is only as entertaining as your bandwidth for bog-standard action fare.