Gregory Nussen

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

She Dances seems almost scared of its own premise.

In between nonchalant murders, Beers, Bacon, and Sedgwick aim for grounded heart-to-heart conversations of a kind that don't exactly feel at home in the movie's otherwise topsy-turvy world. But being that this is a real family that has worked together for decades, their chemistry elevates the somewhat lackluster writing to deliver a pleasurable, if tame experience.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

This is classic B-movie creature-feature stuff.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

This Little Mermaid feels more or less like two-hour-plus cosplay with the texture and gravitas of a Disneyland sideshow.

Being as this is the first of a possibly three-part finale, Fast X’s sense of fun is constantly deflated by all the table-setting.

The film bangs the drum loudly on behalf of American exceptionalism.

The film isn’t interested in anything that would detract from providing audiences with the sustained pleasure of watching a clock-ticking thriller.

The film doesn’t have a clear opinion on its main subject and the scourge of misogyny in media.

The Line isn’t without its moments of genuine beauty, but it’s difficult to shake that its distinct lack of a clear story hasn’t given enough space to the characters.

Thomas Salvador frustratingly never offers a concrete sense of what his character feels that he’s lost, and so we’re tasked with loading meaning onto the character’s journey of apparent self-reclamation.

With Nuremberg, James Vanderbilt is less interested in showing Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe) as "normal," as he is in accentuating Hitler's right-hand man as a charming charlatan. But this intentionality is miscalculated, and the film, bloated as it is with jarring tonal changes and thickly laid-on sentimentality, tilts so far into humanizing Nazis that it seems, at times, to apologize for the behavior of the high command.

Sykes brings what she can to the proceedings, but there's only so much she can do to make Undercard even slightly distinctive.

Bigelow's film, disconnected as it is from the very people this type of situation would actually harm, is a futile salute towards hope, which unfairly assumes powerful people's positive intentions, underscored here by largely cookie-cutter characters and a lack of complexity.

Scream 7 injects nostalgia and self-referentiality like a weak drug, a stash of weed purchased so long ago it has gone so stale it crumbles to the touch.

Petsch and Scipio are both extremely attractive and breezy performers, but, the film is as sputtery as an old car on the fritz, failing to update its cinematic lineage in any conceivably positive way.

Nearly everything Ritchson and James do in the name of comedy is forced and untethered from reality. Then again, so is the movie, so at least it's consistent.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Peas and Carrots is amateur on almost every front, and whatever it has to say about finding one's proper role in society is hidden inside some utterly confounding plot devices.

None of it works. I'll cut to the quick: The Moment is an unmitigated disaster.

The chamber drama of a rich family in collapse is only successful as much as the context within which it exists, and, because that context is as slippery as it is, Anniversary just feels toothless.

In the end, The Miracle Club is splintered at the seams between its desire to tell an uplifting story of forgiveness and a cheeky tale of patriarchal floundering, all the while doing both a tremendous disservice.

There’s an elegiac beauty to many of Night Swim’s pool scenes, but everything that surrounds them is leaden, from Wyatt Russell’s comatose performance to the baseball metaphors that have been unsubtly shoehorned into the impossibly routine narrative.

Unlike the comedy, Ungar does know how to shoot action decently well, and it's in those scenes when the film momentarily comes alive.

In the end, Waltzing with Brando will leave you with more questions about the man than you probably had going into it, which would be interesting enough if Fishman leaned harder into the murky waters of this particular celebrity's mythology. But, like the land upon which Judge tries to build an island escape, the film is in a constant state of drowning under its own ambition.

The revelations of the film, once they come, are admittedly disturbing. But the route to get there is paved with blandness and awkward acting.

Perhaps the lesson of the film is that regret is a waste of emotional bandwidth, but regret is easy to feel when the story is a fumbled as this.

The twist is sufficiently tragic, but it is also mawkish. The structure is misguided.

Bull Run is so devoid of substance that much of it is taped together with ironic usage of stock photos and archival footage, as if to constantly point at the vapidity of its own enterprise.

Throughout, the filmmakers’ sympathies are lost in a confusing haze of cynicism.

It's rare that a film is this devoid of characterization, rarer still that a serial killer horror is this lacking in tension.

The only thing Harlin has done here is to remove the element of surprise. Without that, the film is nothing, nothing at all.

The film is woeful from top to bottom.