Jason Bailey

It’s so fresh and so funny in its first hour or so, in fact, that it’s a real bummer to watch it all fall to pieces in the home stretch, with a pivot into drama that’s too much, too fast — and, more importantly, too much of things we’ve seen before.

It’s just uninspired, a by-the-books courtroom drama, full of big speeches about justice and equality and Doing What’s Right, moved along by montages and fake-outs.

The problem with Fahrenheit 11/9 is that it’s Trump’s Fahrenheit 9/11 rather than Trump’s Roger & Me.

What the newbies can’t recreate is the coked-up, jet-fueled delirium of Bay’s efforts, particularly the second “Bad Boys,” which may be as pure a peek into a narcissist’s id as has ever been captured in a summer studio picture. It’s a loathsome, ugly movie, but fess up, it’s one you’re still thinking about. Bad Boys For Life is, by most standards, a “better” movie. And you’ll forget it by next week.

[Nyong’o is] so good, in fact, that the pleasure of her performance makes “Little Monsters” worth seeing. But just barely.

Some promising ideas and characters are introduced, but the narrative is so superfluous, the connecting segments so fleeting, that little is fleshed out.

Herzog’s latest is one of his weakest. Part of the problem, shockingly, is in the filmmaking; there are basic, unfortunate amateur missteps throughout.

There’s a curious shortage of honest-to-goodness laughs in Finley’s script; the humor is strained, and it doesn’t really land as science-fiction either. ... “Landscape with Invisible Hand” is, at best, an ambitious failure.

In the Earth isn’t a complete washout; there are moments of bleak humor, genre fans will enjoy the striking imagery and gross-out shivers, and the director has an undeniable gift for setting and maintaining a mood (he gets a big assist on the latter from Clint Mansell’s synth score). But ultimately, it’s kind of a slog.

Hill’s basically remaking Larry Clark’s seminal 1995 film “Kids,” a picture inherently more authentic because it was a snapshot taken in that moment. And if you prefer the rose-colored lens of nostalgia, that’s been done too, in Jonathan Levine’s 2008 effort “The Wackness.”

All in all, Summering is a very nice movie – sweet, affectionate, nostalgic, harmless – so it’s tempting to give it a pass. But “nice” and “compelling,” sadly, are not the same thing.

You’ve gotta give Underwater this much, though: it’s not boring. It’s brief (95 minutes), knows exactly what it is, and Stewart and Cassell seem to be having a good time.

'Trouble in Mind' barely feels like a movie at all. ... Absent any contemporary reflections by either the subject or outside observers, we’re left with no real idea how anyone feels about Jerry Lee Lewis and his exploits on either side of the camera.

Tyrel boasts some fine performances and some compelling ideas, but ultimately, it plays like a version of Jordan Peele‘s “Get Out” where nothing happens.

This is not the return to form Leitch needs, and that’s mostly because the well-crafted fight scenes are surrounded by so much other nonsense. The picture wants to be a manic action-comedy freight train, but it has exactly three jokes.

Perhaps the pieces could have held together with the right leading man as glue. Elgort is, assuredly, not that.

“Walls” is more like a Wikipedia entry— the hyperlinked names appear, and the key events are noted, but there’s not much in the way of genuine insight.

Domont’s script just turns into a series of victories, defeats, increasingly distracting narrative leaps, and ultimately silly turns of tone that seem designed to provoke whoops and sneers and cheers.

The problem is Estes’ script. There are some real clunkers twisting around in the dialogue, and this viewer was way ahead of its big twists (and I never figure out big twists).

The longer There There goes, the more it meanders and never into the realm of anything particularly funny or compelling. Instead, it plays mostly like a series of exercises – in writing, acting, and covid-era production. It feels like a movie Bujalski made to make a movie. Which is fine for him but doesn’t offer much to the rest of us.

A bloodless, musty museum piece stuffed with stars but dull as toast.

Mary Harron is too good a director to make a drab, conventional biopic, so it’s disappointing to report that with Dalíland, she’s done just that. It’s not a complete waste, and she manages to insert a handful of distinctive flourishes and memorable characters. But the picture never escapes the box it’s been placed in or transcends a key, fundamental error in its conception.

There’s little in Respect that one couldn’t glean from a Wikipedia scan, and in terms of her work, time would be better-spent re-watching “Amazing Grace” or revisiting her albums.

Every time Dolan generates a head of steam, he’s betrayed by his script, by the self-conscious formality of the dialogue, or the clunkiness of the structure.

This notion, of the supervillain antihero and the gibberish-spouting minions who serve him, remains an awfully thin premise to hang a movie on – much less five of them.

Tatum and Carolin might have been capable of the light, personality-driven fluff the trailer promises, but not, ultimately, whatever the hell Dog is trying to deliver.

One of those movies that starts off so well, that shows such promise, that its slow unraveling feels less like a disappointment than a betrayal.

Lee knows exactly how it wants to look, yet it has little that’s new or interesting to say.

The new Slumber Party Massacre feels like the last thing a movie with this title should be: safe.

Comedy is all about timing, and the timing here is all off, so the laughs are disturbingly few. What a missed opportunity this is.

There’s not much here for anyone over 10 to focus on, aside from how strange it is that the puppy Clifford looks so much more fake than the giant one.

A fairly vapid and shallow affair, even by the low standards of the celebrity bio-doc subgenre, Wolfgang provides copious archival montages of “the first celebrity chef” (Julia Child apparently didn’t count), but precious little understanding of what actually makes him tick.

With no real thesis or through-line, the movie winds up being little more than a series of revue-style blackout sketches, lengthy digressions and dead ends.

I Love My Dad cannot overcome its off-putting premise. Nothing is out of bounds, of course (especially in comedy), but if there’s an approach to make the material palatable, either played straight or broad, it is left undiscovered here.

If nothing else, Babylon is a giant swing, a three-plus hour orgy (sometimes literally) of sex, drugs, and cinema, a respected young artist reaching for a profound statement about art and commerce and America. He misses it by a country mile, but hey, he sure does take that swing.

Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard is a marginally better movie than “The Hitman’s Bodyguard.” But that’s kind of like saying that getting stabbed in the gut is marginally better than getting stabbed in the neck.

Peter Farrelly’s “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” isn’t so much a bad movie — though it’s certainly that — as an inexplicable one, a comedy/drama set in the Vietnam War that somehow believes it’s saying anything that hasn’t been said a million times already about that conflict, and far more skillfully.

It’s cheap, and crass, and by the conclusion, downright infuriating.

It’s a mighty snoozy affair, in which we discover that Doremus’s cinematic style —intimate, personal, and improvisation — has not so much solidified as cauterized.

First Time Female Director is a tremendous disappointment because Peretti is such a gifted performer; it’s understandable to go in pulling for her (this viewer certainly did), but those layers of goodwill just peel away as scene after scene simply does not work. Too much of what she’s assembled is just half-hearted cringe comedy—much of it without the comedy half of the equation.

Hamm makes himself look bland, which is no small accomplishment. But he’s also smothering much of what makes him an exciting actor.

And the score, again by Carpenter, his son Cody Carpenter, and Daniel Davies, is another banger, often lapping the action onscreen for mood and dread. It almost becomes a provocation, forcing us to long for more active involvement by Carpenter, a filmmaker whose skill and restraint frankly puts Green to shame. Who knows if Halloween Ends will actually conclude the slasher series (let’s not forget that “Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter” was the fourth of twelve installments). But I’ll say this: even as a fan of the franchise, when the title came up at the end of Halloween Ends, I found myself hoping to God they weren’t kidding.

A wildly misbegotten mess, a goulash of incongruent tones and unclear motives.

The movie’s practical and special effects are a rogues’ gallery of gougings, stabbings, shavings, and scalpings; those who like to have their stomachs turned will find much to cheer about. But is it actually scary – suspenseful, tense, trafficking in more than the cheap shock of a jump scare or vivid effect? Not really, no.

Some early, halfhearted attempts at social relevance aside, Thriller is an act of quotation and little else. It’s less a movie than a mix tape.

The de rigueur slapstick scenes for the title characters don’t even play, as the integration of animation and live action is so clunky that it feels like we’re watching special effects demonstrations rather than gags.

It’s tempting to take it easy on Alone Together, because harsh criticism feels somewhat cruel – it’s just such a gosh-darned nice movie, about two nice people who meet up and are nice to each other. But this is one tepid piece of work, a story of bland people doing and saying bland things as the world burns around them.

A joyless, glacially paced compendium of interchangeable scenes of people floating around in their goofy masks and capes, tossing clichéd dialogue and CG lightning bolts, and punching each other into buildings.

Hillbilly Elegy has nothing to say about the circumstances that caused these addictions and resentments, and it certainly has noting useful to say about “economic anxiety.” There’s nothing remotely thoughtful or even provocative about it, which is a shame – at least that would’ve made it memorable.

The picture is hobbled by the bland, lifeless color palette of too much contemporary genre filmmaking, as well as a buffet of unintentionally hilarious dialogue, and when the big third act reveal arrives, it’s comically dopey. And once that turn is taken, well, you can pretty much predict every beat that follows.

All this movie has to say is that David Ayer enjoys creating misery, and sharing it. What a repugnant, hateful piece of work this is.

This is an excruciatingly stupid movie, and the nicest thing I can say about it is that, at 83 minutes, at least it’s over quickly.

Fantasy Island is even worse than you’d guess. Both artistically and intellectually, it’s an absolutely bankrupt enterprise.

The nicest thing I can say about it is that it’s short.