Jesse Hassenger

The cast is uniformly strong, and willing to go wherever Guadagnino takes them, in however little clothing he deems necessary; the ensemble-wide equal-opportunity nudity is almost frequent enough to qualify as confrontational.

Like The Prince of Egypt or Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas before it, The Sea Beast ditches talking animals and funny sidekicks, but it can’t fully shake off its Disney influences. It’s a whole lot of well-animated beasts and water, with nowhere to flow.

As-is, Scarlet is a beautiful loll, content with its self-made magic.

Even as Plaza’s character and presence nudges the movie out of its comfort zone, the youthful, romantic recklessness it tries to celebrate feels theoretical – a lesson, not a life.

More casual viewers’ mileage may vary on which stunts are laugh-out-loud funny and which are abjectly horrifying, and the rickety carnival rollercoaster ride works better when the other passengers—whether fellow audience members or the on-camera talent—are screaming and laughing along in equal measure.

The movie is too vividly realized to be boring, but it spends a lot of time scrambling out of the gap between pulpy fun and serious allegory. It’s also hobbled by the fact that it’s very much, as the opening credits say, Part 1; no real resolution is offered by the end of its 155 minutes. It’s just half a movie.

As is, Cheatin’ offers little narrative or emotional advantage over watching a series of the director’s more concise works. At 76 minutes, it should play like a short feature. Instead, it’s more like an extra-long short.

Gray’s many fans will probably love Armageddon Time, and it may even win over some more neutral viewers who respond to his decidedly non-nostalgic look at a pivotal (and not especially promising) moment in U.S. history. But anyone who has found his movies less articulate than the ideas behind them will only get occasional respite here.

The emotional impact is ultimately surprisingly muted; she dies too soon, and the movie ends. Then again, it’s hard to blame anyone for assuming that consistent access to Radner’s voice, in moments both public and candid, would be enough. She radiates such joy, all these years later, that it nearly is.

For all of its current touchstones, Hidden Figures feels far too late, both in the recognition these women deserve and the filmmakers’ goodhearted but dull approach to their stories.

Anchored by the filmmaker’s coming out as a trans man about a third of the way through the film, Chasing Chasing Amy has an undeniably sweet and well-intentioned story to tell about its maker, but Rodgers comes across as a little self-fascinated in a familiarly youthful way, like he’s taking an extended selfie at a fan convention.

There’s never a true early-check-out moment of the sort that arrives with such numbing frequency in so many bigger-scale blockbusters; the movie locks in and moves.

For all of its craft, 40 Acres feels fenced in.

It’s a movie that sometimes feels obsessed with music, and sometimes feels like an old man flipping back to his preferred, familiar playlist.

Schrader pushes the somber score and just-the-facts cinematography as close to pure explication as possible. There is visual storytelling, but little in the way of mood or evocation.

Final Destination Bloodlines does deliver. The elaborate opening set piece is one of the series’ best.

Even when Creed III treads familiar ground, this series feels like the ideal outlet for the on-screen persona Jordan is building: a resilient man who needs to better understand the power he’s fought so hard for.

Wicked makes the old Wizard Of Oz look even more like a vivid original, while the newer movie unfolding in front of us looks like a faded memory.

Writer/director Nicholas Colia builds out Griffin’s world slowly, and winds up with a quietly formidable ensemble.

While there’s plenty of familiarity in Pixar’s small-scale animated romp Hoppers, there’s also a smart, unruly variation at its center.

Kline’s movie works best when it blurs the lines between the people of a nerdy subculture and the style of their obsessions.

As it turns out, EDM is a mere soundtrack for what turns out to be a stalker thriller rife with the kind of details that the filmmakers might call “psychological” and that psychologists might call “insultingly stupid.”

Of course, a single documentary can’t cover everything, but this one’s slim but entertaining 80 minutes suggests that Nguyen erred on the side of brevity.

There are hints of The Life Aquatic, which Baumbach co-wrote with Wes Anderson, with its absentee father who may not be a great artist either, as well as Anderson’s train-set Darjeeling Limited. Gorgeous as Jay Kelly is, and as funny as it is in moments, it can’t help but feel a little minor by comparison – a little easy, even, on its man-who-wasn’t-there protagonist.

In pure plot mechanics and interpersonal dynamics, Splitsville resembles any number of Woody Allen movies, double-hinged on the capriciousness and endurance of love.

Ultimately, Appropriate Behavior works almost in spite of itself; so efficiently does the film explain why Shirin and Maxine split up that eventually it lags behind its own premise.

For better and worse, The Inspection seems like the movie Bratton had to make, a story so personal that some of its biggest emotional confrontations start to resemble a therapeutic exercise.

Zootopia 2 feels like it came out as the filmmakers intended, even if they set their own expectations at medium instead of high.