Jason Bailey

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.

Stargirl was published twenty years ago, and its age occasionally shows in this adaptation; some of the story beats and character qualities (particularly those of the rather precious title character) have congealed into cliché. But Hart (who wrote the screenplay with Kristin Hahn and Jordan Horowitz) is such an enchanting filmmaker, her storytelling style so warm and welcoming, that those concerns fade.

Barthes’ screenplay is clean; for the most part, it’s brainy but not didactic, and thoughtful but not dull.

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

[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.

There are moments in “My Zoe” that are hard to watch, unthinkable in their emotional brutality. That Delpy finds her way to the ending she does—and earns it is—no small accomplishment.

McDonagh is such a smart writer that one spends much of the movie waiting for his script to exhibit some awareness of the trope, and to comment on it, but that acknowledgment never arrives – and as a result, this is his thinnest screenplay to date, flimsy enough that, in a lesser actor’s hands, it could really fall apart.

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.

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.

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.

One can’t help coming away with the feeling that if the intelligence and originality of All My Puny Sorrows matched its earnestness, they could’ve really had something here.

It’s about as well-acted and enjoyable a version of this particular thing as you’re likely to find.

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.

Tom Hanks is such an avatar for optimism and goodness that the qualities of this character – his heartbreak and vulnerability and resignation to a certain kind of hopelessness – land with greater impact, and he’s so good that when the filmmakers go for the big emotional wallop at the end, they almost pull it off.

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.

It’s genuinely thrilling to watch a filmmaker with a specific voice and oddball style taking genuine risks, and the way she successfully navigates these tonal transitions, how she cuts the cynicism with sincerity and vice versa – well, it’s kind of miracle.

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.

Ambulance is absolutely ridiculous, and undeniably entertaining.

The picture’s biggest flaw is that it’s so mellow it occasionally veers into inertia.

A confidently crafted, well-acted three-hander ... But some viewers will find the hamster-wheel nature of “Jungleland” monotonous, and it’s hard to blame them.

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.

Its leads deliver, individually and especially together, and Teems somehow manages to sound a note of reserved hope at the picture’s conclusion, without sacrificing the inherent nihilism of the genre.

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

Ultimately, it’s hard to figure out exactly what movie Anvari was trying to make.

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.

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.

The pace drags in the home stretch a bit, and the laughs dry up considerably. None of this matters much. George and Julia spark and sparkle, which is what the trailers promise, and it’s what the movie delivers.

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).

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

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.

The value of Downhill comes from merging this story with these two distinct comic personas, and seeing what they do with it (and each other). That’s probably not enough of a reason for it to exist. But it’s not nothing, either.

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.

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.

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

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.

There are a handful of genuinely chilling compositions, copious buckets of blood, and while I know we’re all tired of throwback synth-heavy scores in horror, this is a pretty good throwback synth-heavy score. Unfortunately, There’s Someone Inside Your House otherwise rarely feels like this is more than a job for hire.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

The film that follows is, admittedly, a bit of a mess. It’s also compelling, energetic, and well-acted, finding one of our most intriguing filmmakers all but flinging herself outside of her comfort zone.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Each comic set piece decomposes on the screen, lifeless and hopeless.

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