Jared Mobarak

Rushed and full of cinematic artifice, Gallenberger and Torsen Wenzel‘s script reveals itself to be devoid of the naturalism the leads are desperately trying to supply.

Watching bad people be bad gets tiring, especially when there’s someone like Oyelowo transcending the material to lend complexity and uncertainty.

That DiCamillo’s original was so funny, weird, and poignant should have been reason enough to hew closer to its brilliance instead of using it as a springboard towards something wholly different underneath its appropriated skin. I’d like to say those unfamiliar with the source will fare better, but the film’s homogenized narrative renders it inert regardless.

Honeyglue has a very good movie inside it, but decisions brought on by inexperience prevent it from sprouting its wings.

There’s so much happening that the whole gets boring for long stretches throughout.

The Ones Below needs some B-movie embellishment to set it apart from every other wannabe thriller, but it hopes it’s too serious for such things. So exacting and severe, we see the strings and grow bored of their inevitability.

While the whole thing meanders with no destination, I’m going to hold my position in the middle because it looks fantastic. If nothing else this exercise in nihilism has given Keating an excuse to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.

I bet another viewing would reveal missed details, but the threat of being wrong and finding myself enduring the slow, quiet madness again scares me.

No matter how effective Murphy (great in his first film role in four years) or Robertson is, the fact they are driven by external forces rather than internal can’t be ignored.

There’s too much going on. Maybe if Fogelman had a season of television to delve into these characters’ connections and inject the vigor of Will’s chaotic mind into the quieter passages that follow, Life Itself could be great.

Loving Pablo had the opportunity of making Virginia Vallejo its star. It should have pushed Escobar to the background so Bardem could shine as a villain-in-waiting instead being gifted the spotlight.

The Exception is merely a serviceable drama taking us on a competent if predictable journey.

If Walker has some interesting ideas and an eye for panache, the whole leaves much to be desired.

The stakes built from and acted upon Jack and Scarlet’s tenuous relationship are simply rendered empty once love seemingly erases their existence.

As soon as the tone moves from drama to comedy, all the work that was done showcasing Ken’s emotional fragility—e.g. a great pattern built by morning coffee and the fluctuating ratio between caffeine and milk revealing how frayed he’s become—is wiped clean.

It’s extremely saccharine and obvious in its progression, but I’m not sure you can truly say it isn’t real where the emotion is concerned.

Despite the underlying emotional complexity shared via triggered vignettes of memory, the film too often chooses to live in the present and thus within the love triangle it so desperately wants to subvert.

While it may do a better job at depicting the nihilistic depravity of living through social media at the detriment of “real life” than Ingrid Goes West, Robert Mockler’s Like Me still fails to capture the psychological prison this artificial life creates beyond its surface chaos.

There’s simply too much happening with little to no purpose besides distraction from the task-at-hand to fill out the run-time.

Your enjoyment is thus hinged on your ability to not care. Can you let the wild insanity be enough? I generally can and did for a large portion of Die in a Gunfight, but that still doesn’t make it more than a shallow lark to forget the minute you leave the theater.

This is a very slow-moving work that leans heavily on auditory scares rather than visual ones, the whole akin to sleep-deprivation torture.

I went in expecting a generic plot-based thriller with Max knocking on doors for a mystery that risks his life and mostly received an emotionally introspective character drama about mortality and grief instead.

Topics like sexual orientation, gentrification, feminism, rape culture, and adultery are introduced so superficially that the film would be doing better service to each by leaving them on the cutting room floor. It needs to either put more focus on Bobby or work harder at creating its ensemble. Existing in the middle as it does only leaves us wanting for more.

Perhaps that’s the point: selfish men do selfish things while the people they love pay the price. That’s a lesson. And it might have worked if not for the sunny, hopeful air of its surrounding package. South of Heaven isn’t dark enough to buy that as its intent.

Negri has a compelling tale to tell about life, death, and love — the execution is just too schizophrenic to earn our investment.

A film full of thought-provoking ideas that never quite gel into anything more than another example of missed potential.

Where the narrative’s bookends highlight the psychological and emotional toll of what happens (along with the whys), the bulk of the runtime is spent pretending as though the survival aspect of the journey is as captivating.

If this was Nic’s story from the start I wouldn’t know a better avenue existed. And if it remained David’s throughout I could continue seeing the teen as the tragic cautionary tale he should be rather than the selfish plot device he becomes. On a purely aesthetic level, however, Beautiful Boy succeeds.

It’s all over the place in tone, themes, and cringeworthy melodrama.

Add a surprisingly talkie ending that tries to walk back the no-holds-barred bloodshed for the revelation of a secret I honestly didn’t care about anymore and I found myself fatigued rather than excited.

Rather than let No Man’s Land solely focus on white Americans’ need to open their eyes to the vitriol they spew and hate they foster, the script asks their victims to shoulder the responsibility of their own oppression.

The Lodgers reveals itself to be a beautiful gothic horror with a captivating truth mishandled in a desire to surprise more than resonate.

There’s a way to let this new supernatural thriller co-exist with River’s emotional turmoil from start to finish as parallel interpretations of the same journey. Skye’s decision to segment them into two halves unfortunately prevents that marriage, leaving us to wonder if we’ve been led into a completely different movie as ambitions and motivations are turned on their head with zero regards towards where they originated.

Sheridan lends his role the necessary nuance it deserves and de Armas imbues hers with a wealth of unspoken pain, but neither effort receives its payoff. The film conversely squanders both instead.

It’s absolutely exhausting.

The film becomes so self-aware that it’s tough to discern whether we should take what’s happening seriously or not.

At the end of the day this is a hollowly reductive account of what happened with a weird subtextual rich punk against blue collar cop agenda falling woefully flat.

Milburn does the right thing as far as keeping a nihilistic tone for his conclusion, but it lacks the teeth to get us holding our breath. We restlessly await our own escape instead since we already suffocated about forty minutes prior.

People who like this type of film will have a blast while those who don’t are caught glancing at their watches in hopes the end is finally near.

This should be an intense ride to oblivion or perhaps even a satirical romp chock full of self-indulgent camp, but it proves to be neither.

There’s little here to conjure any excitement.

You quickly discover that even Soisson’s best intentions are ultimately hampered by half-baked execution throughout. So intent on providing red herrings, he never allows us to know anyone other than through two-dimensional labels like “soon-to-be-victim” and “potential killer”—sometimes simultaneously.

Only when limbs literally start flying through the air did I truly find myself invested in what was onscreen. It’s too bad it came way too late.

There’s no subversion of machismo then — just reinforcement.

I wonder if the budget was perhaps too small to overcome since every moment The Djinn appears ready to transcend, it tragically deflates. Or perhaps its conceit deserved short film status instead. Going beyond twenty minutes simply isn’t viable.

Pearce and Barton set up this heavy emotional narrative dealing with mental illness, PTSD, and familial love only to undercut it with loud overtures of systemic violence devoid of textual basis.

Thankfully Bousman’s endgame does deliver the supernatural slaughterhouse of the title to great effect with inspired spectral victims looped in suspended animation. It’s so memorably jarring that you wonder if the whole was just sloppily reverse engineered from this massive undertaking.

It’s light, absurd, and very low-stakes.

Braun and Martin make some interesting choices and craft a gorgeous-looking film on an obviously shoestring budget, but none of that matters when my one wish was for these characters to never see each other again.

While Noyce and Watts try their best to ramp up tension, Sparling’s foundation proves too flimsy to comply.

Suspense moves to boredom, boredom to frustration, and frustration to ambivalence.

The script is sadly too shallow to bring everything together.

While the intent for gender equality is welcome, the execution subverts that goal.

Sometimes thrillers of the “youthful stalker hits the sexual jackpot” variety can at least be entertaining in an ironic way, but that’s unfortunately not the case here.

An off-putting drama full of red herrings meant to distract from a predictable end, despite those artificial performances being intentional, the sheer fact I wasn’t sure if I should be laughing renders the result less than successful.

There are countless openings for the plot to take wild left turns and embrace its overt severity as entertainment, but Proud Mary would rather stay the course of its one-note trajectory and remain earnest in its desire to be taken seriously.

Atmosphere is paramount as it should be, but sadly it’s created almost solely from jump scares the prologue quickly numbs us towards as soon as things get going.

Hirsch is good, albeit a bit over-the-top. As is Fox, especially when busting Willis’ balls for being too much of a “coward” to take the risks she’s only too willing to tackle. And Haas is probably the best of them all as the monster hiding in plain sight.

It becomes your basic genre thriller as a result with a straightforward race against the clock to escape before the time arrives for Christine to be sacrificed. But the script is anything but basic in that goal. On the contrary, Margolis, Morley, and Tish make it so convoluted that I wasn’t sure where relevance began and deflection ended.

Rather than showcase itself as a psychological puzzle, we’re left stumbling through a predictable shell game.

Thankfully the performances try to elevate the plot since each character seems catered to the actor cast.

It’s a shame because McDermott effectively toes the line between dorky and menacing (before the film explains which is real), Plummer is great playing with a loaded deck of anxieties and insecurities, and Beaty performs her role perfectly until the writing abandons what made her necessary.

Gossling populates this little town with so many horrible people that you assume the tornadoes are coming to purge them from society. It’s therefore somewhat jarring when she lets impending tragedy provide them redemption instead.

Chavez and Rodriguez deliver authentic performances in first-time roles that shine a light on harrowing circumstances, but the script they’re beholden to won’t let us embrace them outside the construct that all professionals are irrefutably out to prey upon the less fortunate.

The thing about withholding plot information is that you must generally divulge that which you’ve held back at some point. To simply ignore that your audience is in the dark as far as the big picture is concerned is a sure-fire way to lose interest.

Eventually you can’t help but unironically wonder if Sud intended to make a comedy because the mood swings and incredulity only become more and more unbelievable.

If we’re not supposed to pity Dahmer while watching the unfortunate progression of his sad life, why are we watching? Is it to reinforce the notion that he was always a monster? Or is it to forgive Derf (Alex Wolff) and his buds for assisting in his descent? In the end it really doesn’t matter because we don’t buy any of it.

What should be tender and whimsical feels repetitive and off-putting.

It’s empty horror barely skating by on recognizable IP.

The only way this play at “bringing a sense of joy and optimism during a time of great fear and loss” (as she states in her brief, platitude-heavy, 68-word director’s statement) could be more tone-deaf is if she waited to reveal it was set during the first few weeks of the pandemic in 2020 for a third-act rug pull.

Sadly The Bye Bye Man lacks both surprise and intrigue despite possessing some promise via a wild opening.

I’m sure Allen apologists will say that A Rainy Day in New York was built as a way of self-ridicule with Gatsby’s incredulity towards women always finding older men attractive and filmmakers preying upon ingénues, but nothing in the text suggests that it is.

These two couples are literally here to be targets and are thus more frustrating than not whenever they unsurprisingly escape the multiple harrowing moments of homicidal fun.

It’s one thing if The Dark Below sought campy implausibility, but it craves legitimacy instead.

I need to therefore believe Judy Greer selected it as her directorial debut because she thought she could somehow infuse a little satire and approach highlighting examples of masculine vulnerability — a goal that was sadly not achieved.