Inkoo Kang

Pilgrimage travels quite far on the momentum provided by a series of reveals. Each shifts the film’s stakes significantly enough that we look forward to the next divulgence as much as the succeeding battle scene. It ultimately stumbles when it reaches for depth, arriving at a hollow conclusion that mistakes cynicism for profundity.

The 144-minute running time showcases Jackson's worst tendencies: eons-long battle scenes, sloppy and abrupt resolutions, portentous romances, off-rhythm comic timing, and, newly in this case, patience-testing fan service.

Unflinching yet unburdened, Miss You Already is like the best kind of hug: warm, reassuring, cathartic, and a fleeting but vital reminder that there’s at least as much good in the world as there is bad.

Writer-director Terry Miles' revisionist homage is a thoughtful thesis on the melodrama but a letdown in its attempt to serve as an affecting example of that genre.

Superior feels like Diet David Lynch: an unsatisfying substitute.

The whole thing just works; the film gets pretty close to the Platonic ideal of accessible but still meaningful edutainment. And in a movie landscape that's aggressively dumbed down and cynical, a little integrity goes a long way.

Regrettably, Storm Over Brooklyn is only a rudimentary primer on the case, rather than a particularly comprehensive or insightful one. Many of its shortfalls have to do with director Muta'Ali's (Life's Essentials With Ruby Dee) narrow focus on the Hawkins family, especially since the film is most compelling when it evokes the pressure cooker of racial hostilities that New York City had become by the late '80s.

Kieran Turner's Jobriath A.D. is an exceptional example of this subgenre, a cubist portrait of an unknowable man and a dramatic whodunit about an artist-victim who died by a thousand cuts.

For the first hour, the plot is stultifyingly aimless, while the satire of Disney's oppressive optimism is as stale as any theme-park snack. But like a roller coaster, a queasily rollicking and dizzyingly loopy climax... ultimately makes the long wait worthwhile.

I was tempted to remark that Benson doesn't know how to write women, until I noticed that he doesn't know how to write men, either.

A waxen falseness suffuses the stilted, stubbornly generic picture, from the casting to the humor to the lesbian-friendly milieu. Like the fast-food mozzarella sticks one of the characters devours in moments of existential woe, it feels like a calculated imitation rather than the real thing.

Despite the production’s team of scientist consultants, the physics in The Wandering Earth is probably a lot of hooey. But the film’s world building, which takes up much of its first third, is undeniably novel and fascinating. Rarely does a film brag such a technocratic heart.

The emotional moments never land.

As nauseating as the film's inventive sadisms can be, Frank succeeds far more in the details than in the larger picture that tries to relate this world to ours.

Whatever Proxy lacks in narrative cohesion and psychological realism, it makes up for in its compelling fever-dream quality and its probing questions about the darker side of parenting.

Despite stilted camerawork often locked in the medium shot, Salvation Army is a touching ode to the freedom to finally be who we want to be — if we can ever find where we belong.

La Maison de la Radio is the kind of film that divides its audience into two camps: those happy to observe and those impatient to be told a story.

Maybe this dream team would be better showcased by a "Tea With the Dames" situation, in which they were allowed to toss out the script and booze it up as their own funny selves. Anyone else up for Chardonnay With the Comedians?

The Jesse Owens to cheer on here is, sure, the fastest man in the world, but also the canny would-be celebrity who knew exactly how to bet on himself in a world that had little use for his dignity and intellect. If that’s not an inspirational story, I don’t know what is.

There’s no doubt that The DUFF is clever, funny and quotable enough to become this decade’s “Mean Girls.” Watch your back, Regina George — there’s a new queen bee in town.

The writer-director never finds a coherent point of view (or a way out of Strindberg’s three-wall play structure), and Miss Julie ends up merely a whirlwind of moods without a center, as changeable and as random as a TV flipping channels.

In the end, the only transgression The Misandrists really commits is self-satisfied solipsism.

Chen's excessive propriety veers treacherously close to barely disguised repulsion.

Timely but dreary and dramatically inept.

Drunktown’s Finest shouldn’t be viewed simply as an anthropological curiosity, though, but as the promising debut of a gifted filmmaker who wants to show the beating and hurting hearts of the people behind the headlines.

Because The Institute is largely framed as if the viewer were a co-player in Jejune's game, the film is an experience that's fun and frustrating in equal measure.

[An] eager-to-please but creaky and shambling movie.

Emma Stone couldn't be more charming, but her on-screen romance with Colin Firth couldn't be more contrived or ickiliy age-inappropriate.

Director Lone Scherfig’s stagings of these suspenseful set pieces are masterful, but the rest of the thriller is a fairly predictable manifesto against Britain’s de facto oligarchy.

A winsome mix of funny, harrowing, and smart, it's most commendable for making characters who are addicted to bad behavior—and who refuse to blame themselves for it—somehow exceedingly sympathetic.

Laxton’s measured pace appropriately parallels the slow stifling that Effie undergoes, but he extends his muted approach too far, depriving the film of the emotional crescendo it badly needs.

The Chris Hemsworth vehicle is is often hammy, but also wryly funny, breath-stoppingly tense, and uncommonly intelligent. Its January dump is a disservice to a promising debut feature.

Incomplete-feeling film, which inadvertently illustrates how empathy without balance can obscure truth.

It’s the kind of movie that needs a feather-light touch or plenty of humor to avoid feeling overly parental. Moxie has neither.

It’s a solid first film, with a firm grasp on its melancholy but romantic tone, which never gets in the way of its propulsive momentum.

The cast is just as game for the broad humor as it is for the emotional beats; the latter’s familiarity doesn’t detract from its poignancy.

A movie so lifeless you’d have more fun guessing the Netflix niche group that the production is supposed to satisfy.

A day can be mind-numbingly dull or fate-alteringly momentous. Person to Person expresses this duh statement with scarcely more wisdom, nuance, or emotional pull.

Phoenix’s transformation from a scotch-soaked pile of tweed into a homicidally self-righteous ubermensch is fun to watch, but Allen too frequently loses sight of the story he’s telling.

Regrettably, Men at Lunch obsesses over disappearing ghosts instead of the records we already have and the history we should know.

Unfortunately, Broken lives up to its mawkish title, and the slice-of-life tragedies of the film's first half devolve into manipulative melodrama in the latter part. When society breaks, the spell does, too.

Ritchie’s film still feels shackled by its dutiful allegiance to the source material. But when it gets to be its own thing, it’s a spirited romp that — setting aside the uncanny, off-putting look of Smith’s Genie — has no shortage of charms.

The commitment of its all-star cast — which includes Oscar Isaac, Annette Bening, Mandy Patinkin, Antonio Banderas, Olivia Wilde, Olivia Cooke, and Samuel L. Jackson — can’t divert from the fact that its quills droop and sag, where they haven’t fallen off altogether. Behold the other North American flightless turkey.

The unfunny, unmoving, and uninspired Penguins never persuades us of its need to exist. Sure, there's a muddled lesson at the end, as tacked on as a Post-It on a piece of week-old cake.

Director Gurinder Chadha (“It’s a Wonderful Afterlife,” “Bend It Like Beckham”) attempts to explore the cataclysmic human costs of the Partition without humanizing any of the Indian characters. And so we’re offered, on the 70th anniversary of the Partition (give or take a couple of weeks), another film about how brown suffering makes nice white people sad.

Where Charlie’s Angels really falters, though, is in the jokes, as Banks is the only actress on screen with any real comic chops. One can’t help wondering what might’ve been if she’d concerned herself more with being her weird self and less with trying to make every woman in the audience feel validated.

Sure, young star Trevor Jackson (“Grown-ish,” “American Crime”) can’t fill O’Neal’s effortlessly dapper, achingly world-weary shoes, and few movie soundtracks can rival Curtis Mayfield’s legendary album for the first “Super Fly.” But this is a remake worthy of its original.

Lines that should be funny are sacrificed to the breathless exigencies of the plot. The movie starts to feel like a slow suffocation.

Ultimately, the overstuffed, under-dramatized film fails to fully develop the stakes at hand, but it features more thoughtful world-building than most faith-based films, as well as a bracing honesty about the difficulty of reconciling idealistic credos with a harsh and unforgiving world.

Ironically, then, a designer renowned for his brilliantly precise lines and proportions — enough to make a dress out of a Mondrian painting — is paid tribute by a work with disappointingly sloppy structure. Saint Laurent might glitter like the real thing, but a careful look at the construction shows it’s really just a knockoff.

Director Peggy Holmes' glittery romp offers plenty of pretty spectacles, but true flights of fancy... are far too rare.

A repetitive, sluggishly paced nocturnal rumination on why we bother reuniting with old friends we purposefully left behind.

The careless diminishment of every other character that isn't Chávez — including wife Helen, played by an utterly wasted America Ferrera in a grape-sized role — might be worth overlooking if the film provided any insights into its subject.

Love feels deeply, but not complexly. Both Murphy and Noé’s sustained sex scenes understand want and need, but there’s little to invest in emotionally.

Unlike the first half, which felt like a fresh look at Biblical events from an unfamiliar POV, the latter section simply recreates the end of the Gospel of Matthew with little of the urgency or humanity that fueled it before.

Bolivar is eye-rollingly romanticized as a wonderful lover and an even better fighter in Alberto Arvelo's lushly produced, dully reverential The Liberator.

The self-serious meditations on fate and responsibility — as well as the uneven but ever-charged flare-ups between Izzy and whoever she’s talking to — recall exercises in an acting class. By the end, we understand her motivations and recent biography, but precious little about who she is as a person.

The film largely squanders Woodley's considerable talents by having her talking about (but never showing us) the numb but open wound that is Kat's relationship with her mother. More disappointingly, the film never figures out how to translate Kat's lack of emotion into something that makes us feel anything other than distant pity.

It contains more praise than insights, and, chopped into several sections, the documentary could easily become a series of featurettes in the "Extras" section of an American Idiot DVD. Yet Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong still commands the screen.

Ambo's argument is frayed by her arbitrary recommendations of meditation as a panacea for unrelated psychological difficulties. Even more baffling, the director neglects to define this culturally and geographically variable practice with any exactitude.

This switching-places comedy warmly and trenchantly sends up the telenovela genre’s swooning melodrama and oversexed-but-prudish contradictions.

Crowe’s beauty-seeking, but exoticizing camera is slightly outmatched by his performance, which anchors the film with regret tinged with hope. But what continues to haunt after the credits finish rolling are the film’s explorations of the trauma of life after war: The brutally quick political shifts, the lingering shame of committing vicious and dishonorable acts, and the bitter knowledge that there’s no such thing as lasting peace.

Those who believe weddings to be exorbitant, empty spectacles have a fair-weather friend in writer-director Victor Quinaz, whose inventive debut, Breakup at a Wedding, attempts an aloof, smirking pose but surrenders to sentimentality in the end.

Ultimately, “Anarchy” is too cartoonish in its politics to gain the allegorical resonance it clearly strives for — and worse yet, it's just no fun.

A high-concept comedy about the domestication of a work-obsessed woman that nonetheless managed to win me over.

The key, according to the film, is dialogue and altruism — namely, black overtures to white hate. The onus is as misplaced as the movie’s sympathies.

Silicon Valley is built on various inequalities, and, frustratingly, CodeGirl isn’t interested enough in delving into those issues — or the girls determined to overcome them.

A thoughtful and frequently moving drama that insightfully illuminates what it’s like to live with illness and agony at least as well as last year’s other Best Actress vehicles like “Wild,” “Still Alice,” and “Two Days, One Night” do.

In terms of anything that has to do with characterization, Chuck Hogan‘s script is punishingly rote. But as bombastic, shoot-‘em-up spectacle, 13 Hours is a visceral, well-paced and often beautiful action-thriller.

The Judge is tailor-made for Downey's gift for delivering a quippy, arrogant put-down like he's doing his target a favor. Hank's anti-heroism is a refreshing splash of lemon juice with an occasional spritz of sour vinegar. But much of director David Dobkin‘s cynically cloying legal and family drama goes down like a lump of aspartame.

So many phrases out of characters' mouths are as overused and flavorless as a thrice-steeped tea bag, and yet a sturdy narrative structure, increasing thematic complexity and finely detailed performances from Aidan Quinn and Taylor Schilling make writer-director Wiebke von Carolsfeld's sophomore effort an agreeably pensive experience.

An obligatory setup for a sequel slows down the final moments, but until then, Tomb Raider feels like a perfectly paced trio of espresso shots, with a shot of adrenaline to the heart as a chaser.