Jason Bailey

Mckenzie is a good match as an actor, countering Davis’s big emotions with a quieter turn and more introverted but no less affecting. She isn’t afraid of the difficult contradictions of the character, and by the film’s end, we’re struck by how much everyday horror this young woman shoulders and sucks up.

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.

With Emily, Frances O’Connor has crafted a first film that feels like the work of an accomplished master.

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.

The picture clangs clumsily for stretches, particularly in its second half; Selick is trying to merge the doomy darkness of “Coraline” with the high spirit and good humor of “Nightmare Before Christmas,” and they don’t always mix.

Confess, Fletch is an absolute pleasure – the mystery is a corker, and I giggled from beginning to end.

Catherine Called Birdy is delightfully witty, irrelevant, and modern-minded while carefully dodging the self-satisfaction and smugness that those descriptors can conjure up.

In “Glass Onion,” the filmmaker shows absolute mastery of his genre, and his craft. It’s pure, pop pleasure.

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

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.

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 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.

Some of Novak’s camera sense, particularly early on, betrays his sitcom roots, and he commits the classic rookie mistake of going on three or so scenes too long, tying up inconsequential loose ends. But he crafts a good mystery, consistently engaging and entertaining, and the thoughtful turns of the last confrontation are sly, smart, and knowing.

'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.

Ambulance is absolutely ridiculous, and undeniably entertaining.

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

Ryan Binaco’s screenplay is full of tiny, keenly observed touches, but its greatest virtue is its attitude towards her addictions, the way it occupies her space with her, looking on passively but not judgmentally. It’s a movie that understands the desperation of alcoholism.

Colin West’s Linoleum is the kind of movie that’s all but impossible to review with any specificity, because so much of its achievement lies in its surprises – how it seems to be doing one thing while slyly doing another, without deception, and then revealing its ultimate intentions with grace and style.

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.

With its shout-outs to horror classics and juicy pay-offs of its own, X feels like the movie West was born to make.

The jankiness of this structure is a bit much, at least on first viewing, drifting into memoir material for so long that it the picture feeling shapeless for a good long while. But then again, that’s our Linklater, and complaining about narrative aimlessness is kind of like coming out of a Scorsese movie bitching about all the voice-over. It’s a new Linklater, is the point, and that’s good news indeed.

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.

Soderbergh’s direction is, per usual, tight and efficient (as is his editing – it runs a lean, mean 89 minutes).

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

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.

"Nanny" feels less like a misfire than a missed opportunity. Those early scenes are so tightly wound and so beautifully played that by the time Jusu trots out the blood and knives and bathtubs, I wasn’t even sure what movie I was watching anymore.

You get a sense of Poehler’s energy in the fast pace and comic timing of film, which moves at a good, precise clip. There’s a lot of material to cover here, some of it overly familiar, but Poehler does it with pizzaz.

Their latest fusion of science fiction, character drama, dark comedy, and overwhelming paranoia, Something in the Dirt, feels like their most personal film – and not just because they wear so many hats, directing and writing and producing and editing and starring.