Jessica Kiang

Half enjoyable, half frustrating.

Braun and Yanagimoto go for comprehensiveness over comprehension, bringing in many more commentators — writers, lawyers, reporters, eyewitnesses — each to peel back one further, fascinating fold in the infinite origami of the Aum story.

With Under the Silver Lake Mitchell saw all the lights on the long highway to success turn green, and in the full flush of all that indulged freedom, put the top down, turned up the radio and roared off into the LA evening, forgetting that he didn’t have anywhere to go.

It looks pretty, and is visually often a creditable recreation of times past, but it gives no substance to Stock and Dean's relationship, just circumstances. It lacks life.

A missed opportunity that squanders the talents of a pretty stacked cast and jeopardizes the audience’s patience and care for its spoiled characters for too long.

Lê Bảo’s rich film reaches further back too, beyond the politics of globalization and migration, beyond even culture, into a pre-ethnographic past, to see us as trapped animals, paradoxically dehumanized by the sunless concrete ugliness of human civilization.

Lemon is too in love with being oddball to really have any connection to the real, non-quirky world. And so while scene-by scene its absurdism can be drolly amusing, it never coheres into anything more than a series of sketches.

Mektoub titillates without ever delivering the up-to-your-eyes immersion that the filmmaker’s best work deals in, and after three long hours, nobody’s changed, nobody’s learned anything and no one’s grown any older, except the audience.

Though the intentions are pure, the combination of social-realist austerity and cinematic exuberance never coheres.

Despite Crampton and Fessenden’s game playing, and a few nicely icky practical effects, “Jakob’s Wife” feels strangely anemic, which, as we all know is more fatal to the already iron-deficient movie vampire than garlic, holy water and sunshine combined.

Her (Delpy) risk-taking is admirable, and given the excellent craft, never less than engaging to watch, but it does not always pay off.

Gould and Zwann’s film runs along perhaps too familiar formal lines to have many tricks up its sleeve.... Yet that does not rob the inevitable meeting of its simple, sweet power, and the gentle revelations, mellowed with time, that punctuate the excited chatter are truly moving.

An enjoyable, absorbing, characterful testament to shuffling the whole deck of genre conventions, and then politely setting it on fire.

It has warmth, it has flashes of insight, it even has moments of wit, all it really lacks is edge — which it lacks in large, whopping, huge amounts.

In amongst Joker’s fire and blood and chaos and its blackest of blackhearted laughter, there is the sense of a grotesque, green-haired genie being let out of a bottle, and whether it wreaks havoc or not, we’re not going to be able to put it back in.

Jodorowsky throws everything and several kitchen sinks into the film, yet it all has its place, and the overall effect is not of the headachey mess it would be in anyone else’s hands, but of a kind of joyous, absurdist melange of highbrow concepts, personal memoir and potty humor.

Superior feels like a John Dahl movie given a “Twin Peaks” vibe on a Hal Hartley budget, with just the odd dash of Old Hollywood thrown in for good measure, like the deliberately “Rear Window”-aping, flashbulb-popping finale.

Love After Love goes through the motions of classic, rousing melodrama but not the emotions.

Really a two-hander overall, Disorder is part home-invasion film, part bodyguard romance and part PTSD drama that delivers solidly on the first two fronts and and partially on the third.

The downbeat, disenfranchised “dark side of the American dream” thing has been done to death in a thousand noirs, but Stray Dolls elbows just enough room for itself in that crowded category, especially for how it honors the American cinematic tradition of the last-chance motel: a place designed for passing through that somehow never lets you leave.

One is caught between appreciating Jenkins’s soulful, empathetic performance, and just thinking “fuck that guy,” and wishing the unexpected swerve The Last Shift made was to turn to McGhie’s Jevon, to make Stan an incident in his life, rather than the other way around.

It’s a testament to Kitano’s effortlessly sleek, inherently watchable filmmaking (he reteams with regular DP Katsumi Yanagijima and uses the atonal descending motif of composer Keiichi Suzuki’s score to good effect) that you’re just about kept in your seat throughout all the speechifying.

13 Minutes is an elegant, expensive-looking, respectful history lesson that finds just enough interesting texture in terms of the religious, social, moral, and personal circumstances that led to the creation of this rogue ideologue, to save it from becoming dry.

It is certainly too long and too messy, too indulgent in some parts and too starved in others to be an unqualified success. But the surprise of it is that there are times, like the inspired first act, when it really does work, when it seems to have a kind of manic energy, a sheer joy at existing, which certainly makes it a far more engaging picture than Gilliam’s last.

It’s not like “The Artist” was gritty, but Populaire is so cotton-candy breezy it makes the Best Picture-winner look like “The Panic in Needle Park.”

An abundance of earnestness is hardly a fatal flaw in a story as innately complex and moving as this one, especially once it moves beyond its most obvious crescendo, and instead of bowing out in a note of relief and resolution, dares to re-complicate the situation.

Émond obviously has deep feeling for Arcan, and “Nelly” is a sincere and respectful attempt to do at least partial, fragmentary justice to a troubled woman able to self-create any persona except a happy one, but it can’t put her back together again.

If in terms of narrative there’s not much new here, there is a freshness and an inhabited vibrancy that makes this painful coming of age story feel exactly its own.

Comparisons to Adam McKay‘s “The Big Short” and “Vice” are unavoidable. But though The Laundromat is similarly breezy, unsubtle, and disposable—it is not, we’d wager, one of the Soderbergh films that will best stand the test of time—it is still a better movie.

A film which for the most part is enervatingly classic in format: stately, reverential despite the conflicting accounts the various narrators give of Hong's motivations, and often quite dull, despite its focus not on her work or talent but on the more salacious and controversial aspects of her personal life.

To watch young people fall into old patterns is still to watch those old patterns, and the film cannot escape the familiarity of its archetypal, rise-to-power, fall-from-grace narrative.

It’s a sequel that, over a tighter running time, kicks against the law of diminishing returns, and only succumbs to it after a fight.

Saint Jack is probably Bogdanovich’s loosest film, the one that feels most Cassavetian in execution, in which classical plotting, let alone the kind of manic screwballishness that characterizes the director’s comedies, is entirely absent in favor of a low-key, episodic character portrait embedded in a gritty, exotic, and relatively little-filmed locale.

The film Harron delivers is so ambivalent as to be frustratingly gun-shy about truly asserting a point of view, or adding anything meaningful to the already thriving cottage industry of Manson-adjacent storytelling.

A film that, while often beautiful to look at, feels oddly bloodless in execution.

“How It Ends” is not actually an end-of-the-world film at all; here, the Apocalypse is just a well-shucks excuse for a bunch of yak sessions between goofy (but attractive!) oddballs doing quirky shit and Speaking Their Truths on an accelerated timeframe. With all due apologies to the plants, animals, and 7.5bn other souls about to be incinerated in a doomsday fireball, #teammeteor.

This is a film that glories in juxtaposition, as exchanges of bestial ferocity hiss back and forth in an excruciatingly elegant destination restaurant, and as poisonously feral barbs are traded across a table laden with elaborately effete hors d’oeuvres.

Superbly crafted, utterly gripping.

Where Jacquot largely knows what he's doing on a micro-level within individual scenes, and the sets and costuming are pretty special, he seems unable to assemble the parts into a coherent, consistent whole. So the film meanders and hiccups.

This serious-minded, ambitious oddity shoots for the moon of a far-off planet, but it really only finds the grace it’s looking for in its magnificent supple camerawork.

Your mileage will vary on Genius, depending on where you place Law’s performance on the irritating/entertaining spectrum and your tolerance for somewhat formulaic tales of creative ego and “The Price of Fame.”

The story is bloated and episodic (the film's 2h 18m length doesn't help the pacing), and remarkably unengaging for what should be emotionally epic.

If the slender paradox at the heart of the film is that the thing that connects us most is the difficulty of connection, The Human Surge is a victim of its own effectiveness: It’s rigorous, rarefied, and utterly remote.

As a director, Colangelo has a firm if cautious grasp on the material, but as a writer her grip is less sure.

When it comes to capturing some of the gonzo, amoral, substance-fueled verve that Welsh’s novels can display, Filth can take the silver medal with its head held relatively high.

For filmmaker and actor, even on those occasions when Manglehorn’s risks do not pay off, we have to credit the courage and confidence it took to attempt them; but more often than not they pay dividends and the result gently dazzles.

Summerland is very pretty, and bursts with affection for its gently befuddled characters, but for all its eager charms, streaming like colored pennants from every turret, it’s a castle in the air.

There’s not a lot here that’s wholly new, and the film’s tone of melancholy, offbeat uplift signals from the outset that we shouldn’t expect any grand revelations. Instead its pleasures come in smaller packages.

Ambulance is not good, exactly. Still it is an enjoyable, oddly inspiring reminder of how many more flavors not-good used to come in, in the olden days, back when we had the luxury of regarding Michael Bay’s brand of adrenalized, lobotomized moviemaking as a menace to blockbuster cinema, rather than — gulp — one of its potential saviors.

Jackie & Ryan is supposedly all about learning how to git where ya gotta go, but none of the characters start or end in particularly interesting places.

Even if the onyx-dark humor and sardonic formal control go MIA eventually, “A Lot of Nothing” is really quite something.

In many ways, Ingeborg Bachmann – Journey into the Desert feels like the exact opposite of the project we ought to be attempting, which is to reclaim the work of women of genius who are in danger of falling into obscurity, without reducing their already threatened legacies to mere romantic biography

Too transitory and too undemanding to be termed a mindfuck, for Reality minditch seems about right, and it's one you even occasionally get the pleasure of scratching.

Vinterberg’s Kursk occasionally lands an emotive blow but only in its more fictionalized stretches, while it pulls its punches with the thorniest and most provocative elements of the real story, an instinct that unduly submerges much of the real horror and lasting consequence of this tragically, enragingly, heartbreakingly bungled incident.

Though it's impressive in many technical and surface ways, The Croods lets us down on the essentials of character and story, and no amount of late-stage father/daughter bonding or vertiginous 3D cliffside tumbling can make up for that.

Sergio Vieira de Mello was, by all accounts, not a man who let fear of making the wrong decision stop him from acting decisively, and it’s a shame that the soft-edged romantic prevarications of Sergio prevent the film from embodying that same dynamism.

Levitas’ unusually even-handed approach works to balance the film’s inspirational true story with its tragic real-world context, by refusing to overstate Smith’s personal heroics, while sensitively outlining the everyday heroism of the ordinary men and women most grievously affected.

It's quite difficult to hate 5 Flights Up as much as a project this pointless and trite deserves, because of the attractive playing of the central pair. Keaton and Freeman share absolutely zero sexual chemistry, but watching them twinkle at each other and ruefully indulge each other's tiny mood swings is an experience so aggressively engineered for adorability it becomes hypnotic.

Gondry’s film is really a huge Rube Goldberg machine, full of lights and buzzers and levers that ping and whistle endearingly but are connected to nothing and serve no greater function in the larger apparatus.

Michael Almereyda’s Cymbeline works best as a cautionary tale concerning the dangers of of believing that everything written by The Bard is “timeless.”

[A] grandiloquently incoherent misfire

The more chaos descends, the more meticulous Park’s filmmaking becomes, as he finds giddy new ways to exploit pre-established quirks of terrain and architecture.

The real learning here ought to be that if you cast two such charismatic performers as Louis Gossett Jr. and Shohreh Aghdashloo in your movie, it would be better to clear all the Life Lesson clutter away and just let them get on with it.

Like any weird internet rabbit hole you might fall down when you know you should be reading a book or brewing kombucha or going to sleep, this thriller is almost annoyingly slick and moreish.

As a traditional, accessible, familiarly-structured crowdpleaser, Boogie, in its modest, far-from-flawless way, challenges them to enjoy one as well.

Despite fun trappings . . . the actual conflict in the film boils down to a series of very simplistic binaries: good and evil, sacred and secular, female and male, one and zero, being and nothingness.

A Single Shot does not add up to anywhere near the sum of its parts.

It’s not very good except sometimes when it’s fantastic.

Formally, it is even more abstract than previous Malick efforts, with on-camera dialogue kept to the barest minimum and the cast instead contributing poetic, banal or philosophical voiceover to the soundtrack, lines which overlap, fade up and fade down into music and silence, contributing to the sense of the film as a philosophical fugue state.

It's not funny enough to be a comedy, not well plotted enough to be a thriller but it's also not smart enough to be an actual exploration of all or even any of the many philosophies it, and Abe Lucas, espouses.

It is sentimental and sprawling, which are not necessarily bad things, but also manipulative and contrived, which very much are.

Even within Schrader’s own back catalogue, Dog Eat Dog feels like a lukewarm retread of elements he has achieved, as a writer and director, much better before. It’s just that here they’re mashed together gracelessly, with a kind of bullying undercurrent, as though designed to get a rise out of you, just so it can deliver two for flinching.

Closeness is a tough-minded, rigorously composed, quite brilliantly acted story of the challenges of everyday religious prejudice and ethnic divides in the bleak heart of Russia’s North Caucasus, and in many ways Balagov’s uncompromising but stylized social realism rewards as much as it punishes.

Scrupulously sincere in its approach and well-meaning to a fault in intention, the film aims for inspirational true story, but is sadly uninspired, and its relationship to real history is obscured by the schematic way it is fictionalized.

The pathos of this situation is clear, the stakes, which obviously involve genocide, justice and actual Nazis, are sky high and Plummer is completely extraordinary. So why on earth isn't Remember a better film?

A film containing another film; a filmmaker referring to the trials of a filmmaker: it’s a movie of many layers, all of them garish and goofy, none of them great.

Less designed to provoke than to soothe, perhaps the very familiarity of much of the movie is a virtue, letting us enjoy its sleek surfaces safe in the knowledge that there’s nothing much lurking in the depths to alarm us.

Not wondrous enough to be likened to a ghost, "Journey to the Shore" is the corpse of a film: lifeless, bloodless, insensate.

What it lacks in thematic newness, Run Rabbit Run makes up for in the sophistication of its moment-to-moment scarifying and its performances from Sarah Snook and outstanding newcomer Lily LaTorre.

The thin stereotypes in Silent Night are weirdly uninteresting to observe in this ultimate pressure situation.

There is always something of value in the sincere recreation of ordinary heroism. And Perez’ film does sincere if ordinary justice to the idea that where there is a will for it, resistance can find a way, be it so small as to be postcard-sized.

While Winter Flies might not tell us anything new, it relates its old story with a vivid specificity and a beguiling sense of mischief that makes it feel fresh.

For a film in which John David Washington lurches, staggers, stumbles, shambles, flounders, falters, wobbles, scrabbles and totters across an entire Greek province . . . Beckett sure is dull.

It’s handsome, stately and deathly dull.

Spectacular, gross and delicious (so unsavory it’s almost sweet), the film is more proof of Refn’s mastery of his trash aesthetic and more fun than anything this indulgent and empty-headed has any right to be.

Unremittingly, bludgeoningly bleak in its portrayal of his own degradation and humiliation, and displaying only a passing interest in his eventual rehabilitation, the film is remarkable for its lack of self-pity, but it makes the experience of “Farming” a merciless one for the audience too.

It’s a competent, unobjectionable history lesson but Cesar Chavez’ legacy needs a more inspired and inspiring telling if it's to get the exposure this crusading figure deserves.

While the sexuality is pushed far too far for mainstream audiences, it's also true that Noe's conception of sentiment and romance pulls the film back from being truly transgressive about its gender or sexuality politics.

For a movie that is all about accumulation, it adds up to very little, and for a story all about connectedness, 11 minutes, intermittently enjoyable though it may be, never connects.

Is it fair to make Woman in Gold representative of the failings of the whole historical-true-story-designed-to-remind-an-older-skewing-middle-class-white-audience-that-people-have-triumphed-over-adversity genre? Perhaps not, but as one of its most egregious and fallacious examples, it's as good a line to draw in the sand as any.

Over the twenty-odd years the film covers, Saint Laurent is scene-by-scene depicted as a genius, a manic-depressive, a polyamorist, a drug taker, a mercurial friend, a partier and a terribly, terribly sensitive soul. He undoubtedly was all of these things and more, it's just a pity he doesn't also come across as a person.

The various story currents move swiftly but don’t run particularly deep, so the film works better as a kind of best-foot-forward overview of modern urban Russia — “Moscow, I Love You” — than it does as a multi-stranded human drama.

Despite Seyfried’s gameness, we come away a little deadened from the experience and knowing precious little more than before about the person who inhabited the body, the life and the throat of Linda Lovelace.

Schematic and manipulative as it is, as a kind of team-effort between the New Zealand Tourist Board and whatever the Chinese equivalent of Hallmark is, Only Cloud Knows is, in the moment, undeniably effective at jerking tears.

It is slow and it is ambiguous but it is supremely sure of itself, as it moves, with singleminded grace from chilly to all-out chilling.

A sappy but enjoyable slice of family fun that has a nice horse doing wacky tricks for the younger viewers and for parents and older fans, is a gently meta, valedictory canter through the paddock of Chan’s previous achievements.

It’s kind of a blast, with fully enough plot to fill a two-hour feature crammed efficiently into less than half that time in a manner that demands nothing from you except that you enjoy the ride.

Entertaining though it is in parts, it can’t really be said to mark any particular growth for McDonagh as a filmmaker, being both less angry and more cynical that the brooding "Calvary" and consequently less memorable and relevant too.

Franco has finally delivered a side project that does at least some justice to his eclectic artistic ambitions.

Lolo features long stretches of perhaps her most accomplished and enjoyable character-comedy yet. But as often with filmmakers for whom a certain register comes almost too easily, Delpy seems impatient with herself and her facility for spiky, verbal sparring and pithy self-deprecating put-downs.

One of the most undersung and most potent pleasures of genre cinema is the excuse it has given us, time and again, to watch attractive people fall in love with each other, and if you’re in a romantic frame of mind, Racer and the Jailbird delivers so wholly on that front that it goes a fair way toward compensating for the film’s deficiencies elsewhere.

For all its salaciousness and scenery-chewing, it’s the dullness of Dreamland that provides further proof that dreams tend to be of fascination mainly — perhaps only — to the dreamer.

To reduce a titanic struggle for survival in one of the most inhospitable climes on earth to such by-the-numbers drama is in many ways akin to standing on a jagged frozen peak, gazing across blizzard-assailed permafrost plains to crumbling white cliffs and ice shelfs beyond and thinking “Snow.”

Strangely old-fashioned in its construction and requiring a Golden Gate-level feat of engineering to achieve the suspension of disbelief necessary to unironically enjoy it.

A film that boasts about as much edge as a digestive biscuit (translation: oatmeal cookie) too long dunked in milky tea.

Doubling down on the first chapter’s intermittent triumphs but also on its grievous structural issues, it is an exercise in contradictions: incident-packed yet oddly sedate; replete with characters new and returning, yet largely lacking in compelling characterization; and, running to over three hours, simply too long a film to be so jarringly abrupt.

A distinct air of staleness permeates the whole enterprise — even the palette is brown as an old biscuit, and Rodrigo Amarante’s minimal score is so politely low in the mix that it’s hardly even there.

Having recruited as fine a cast of French-speaking thesps as has ever been assembled, and marshalled a strong behind-the-camera team, Dolan’s usually exuberant egotism is here taken so seriously that what we’re left with is a shrieking bore, without a single character worth rooting for, least of all the puddle of maudlin self-pity at its center.

It’s to the film’s credit that it creates a sense of high-stakes peril despite us knowing the rough outcome from the get-go, and largely without simplifying its moral dilemmas into straightforward choices between heroism and villainy.

This film feels like one you discover late at night and watch for ten minutes before remembering you've already seen it, and yet we still kinda loved it.

The shock feels less than shocking and the awe less than awesome in Rob Reiner’s righteously motivated but clunkily executed exposé of media manipulation in the run-up to the Iraq War.

Wirkola’s film is set apart by its almost heroic lack of self-awareness: Not only does it not realize how dumb it is, there’s a real sense that it thinks it’s smart. In fact it’s a whirlygig of inanely convoluted plotting, deeply dubious philosophy and shots of Noomi Rapace sliding glasses across tables to herself. You should probably watch it.

Here, no one seems capable of envisaging even the most immediate consequences of their increasingly vicious actions, and so where “Ida Red” wants us to thrill to the idea of criminality as almost a genetic inheritance, a trait carried down a bloodline like blue eyes or freckles, in fact, all it really suggests is that this family might be really dumb, and actually quite bad at crime.

Olympia for all its fondness, is just too cursory a portrait of a complex woman: depth presented as a series of glinting surfaces.

Not that this is the fault of an appealing young cast gamely doing their best to inject energy and personality into inert, exposition-heavy, joke-light dialogue that could not sound less like the way modern teenagers talk if every second word was “rad.”

The inescapably precious Still Life doesn’t deal in anything as truthful, complex and difficult as empathy; its only currency is pity, and that is the basest coin of all.

Maybe Dogman would be salvageable if Besson didn’t feel the need to thuddingly explain every single aspect of Doug’s quirk-laden personality, as though every last thing that a person is can be traced in a straight line back to a cause, because psychology is a long division sum that never leaves a remainder.

The spectacularly gruesome and grotesquely elaborate murder scenes do ample justice to even the most revered of its slasher forebears, but the procedural elements feel stilted, and despite a lead performance that oozes empathy as much as her hapless victims ooze blood, the emotional impact is barely discernible: an ebbing heartbeat.

With writing that’s nowhere near as sharp as the tailoring, and which adorns a trite Cinderella story that stuffs the fabulously unconventional De Palma into a stiflingly conventional corset, Madame is less a baroque masterpiece than a subpar reproduction in a gaudy frame.

In a way it’s a shame that film builds backwards, because while it adds layers of tricksy narrative intrigue, that trajectory somewhat simplifies the thematic texture as the movie wears on.

It’s always dangerous to wonder about what a film might have been rather than contending with what it is, but in this case what it is, is so bland, and so stolidly workmanlike in execution that even the most dedicated viewer might find her attention sliding off DP Zac Nicholson‘s ration-book-colored images and wandering to the what-ifs.

There are jokes that land, and every time Kathryn Hahn steps on screen the film threatens to tilt on its axis and point toward a truer north.

A ghastly concoction of razzle-dazzle circus maximalism, poorly CG’d supernatural whimsy and sentimentality so cloyingly sweet you can feel it in your fillings, “Freaks Out” is, however, almost admirably unaware that its over-egged, unironically “Springtime for Hitler” production design, and its lazy invocation of the Holocaust as a narrative shortcut to high emotional stakes, might be in questionable taste. Instead, this is a sincere, if deeply misguided attempt to fabricate weepy wonderment amid the ruination of World War II.

It’s a relief to report that Rifkin’s Festival is, to the ravenous captive, like finding an unexpected stash of dessert: not substantial and not nutritious, but sweet enough to remind you in passing of the good times you once had, despite all that’s happened in the interim.

[Bruni Tedeschi] fails to make much of a case for why any of it should resonate with anyone outside this tiny, hermetically enclosed community. ... [An] indulgent, histrionic personal history.

The story Sealey tells is slender, dissociative and inward-looking to the point of self-indulgence at times. But Brockis, with her stubborn jawline, two-tone shock of hair and striking heterochromatic eyes, is a powerful presence.

Whatever suspense it musters feels artificial, manufactured in the first half by withholding information all the characters already possess from the audience, and in the second by adding more curlicues and flourishes to the elaborate plot at the expense of nourishing the milquetoast characters.

Its few saving graces are some decent shot-making, a rather great score and the loveliness of its lead actors' faces.

As Vita & Virginia loses its girlishness, drawn like the tides to the solemn maturity of Debicki’s performance. With her as the lodestar, this is a stranger and more intriguing film than it really has a right to be, one that becomes less about a clandestine courtship between famous women, and more about Woolf’s relationship with her writing, and with the workings of her own beautiful, restless mind.

Although promising a deep-cut dash of contemporary topicality by reimagining the main character as an undocumented African immigrant, there is the sense that the unimpeachable craft and performances — especially from rivetingly charismatic lead Welket Bungué — ultimately add up to just too slick a package.

It’s maybe Franco’s best-crafted film to date, and also maybe his dullest.

This unintentionally hilarious take, on territory covered much more soberly and with far less reliance on prosthetic bellies in current Netflix hit “Narcos,” is so trashy it may even make you forget a few things you knew before.

If you are in need of more reminders of the most extreme of the potential evils of internet interaction than you get every time you fire up an app, by all means, smash the like button on “Spree.” For the rest of us, the best advice might be to mute, block, vote down, unfollow or simply log off and go look at a tree.

Wolfe’s particular genius seems to have been for marketing. Maybe it’s appropriate that a movie about her plays like a marketing exercise: simplified, sanitized, suspect.

Speaking from personal experience as a fictional creature made of three-parts shamrock, two-parts rainbow, and one-part outdoor plumbing, I can tell you “Wild Mountain Thyme” is a very accurate portrait of modern Irish colleen/gombeen relationships. ‘Tis true, we none of us own a computer or a mobile phone (the air’s so thick with faeries and Catholicism that you can’t get decent Wifi anyway).

The more dramatic moments feel unanchored to the more farcical, and the humor ranges erratically from scatological to tender/heartwarming and back to cheap shots at slightly uncomfortable stereotypes. "Uneven" would be the kind way of putting it, but "messy" is probably nearer to the truth.

Perhaps The House That Jack Built is the kind of film you make when you fervently want someone to stop you, to save you from yourself and the demons of your worst nature. Perhaps, this time, we should oblige.

After a genuinely promising beginning, Halloween Kills, already somewhat robbed of potential suspense by the fact we all know that another go-round, “Halloween Ends,” is on its way, seemingly doubles the body count of the previous installment while roughly halving its IQ.

Uneven though it is, the film is peppered with enough cherishable dialogue tics and dummkopf punchlines to make it a enjoyable watch.

The problems run far deeper than craft — it is simply a film that has no reason to be made, a story without point or insight or drive.

For every moment of comedy that lands or drama that touches a nerve, there are ten of “why the bloody hell should I bloody care?” or “cry me a river, you had to sell your Brueghel.”

While Vitali is frank about the nature of his demanding and subservient relationship to the man, his warmhearted, dazzled, Everest-high respect for Kubrick’s talent remains undimmed even now. It is truly inspiring and touching just how little bitterness Vitali has in him, and it stems from his having no regrets over a life dedicated to something he believes in with utterly selfless purity.

Divided into seven quirkily titled chapters which are only useful as a kind of interminable countdown, “Story” falls into every trap of the over-reverential adaptation: individual scenes go on too long, there are far too many of them, and everyone sounds like they’re reading when they speak.

Of course, Cotillard is your first call if you want an actress to suffer exquisitely, but the issue is her character Gabrielle is essentially a nightmare of self-involvement, whose emotional torture is very difficult to get invested in since she herself has already bought all the shares.

It promises a minute character study, but Franny, though embodied by a game Gere who in all fairness does visit places in his performance we have rarely seen him even stop by before, is less a person than a collection of quirks.

Without the spiky irony of Flynn's first-person writing (the enjoyable Jim Thompson-esque noirisms that pepper the novel, like "I have a meanness in me, real as an organ" occur only rarely) Paquet-Brenner shears the text of any richness, to have it unfold instead in a relentlessly grim manner, less intriguing and evocative than straight-up dour.

It's such a disappointment when you consider the wild portraits of pioneers that Herzog has given us before, that he's so reverent here. Isn't he the director who can locate the madness in everything he sees? Where is Bell's madness?

The choking pictorialism of the sets and CG backgrounds, coupled with the barely-there performances, contribute to an inescapable sense of lifelessness and sterility.

Instead of the cleavage, hair-pulling and Jerry Springer antics it teases, Chick Fight serves up a blandly formulaic and scrupulously inoffensive tale of female empowerment.

Filmmaking craft is not the issue here, it’s the timidity of the storytelling that sits in sharp contrast to the boldness of some of the visual and sonic experimentation.

If ‘Dying’‘s main issue was a surfeit of ideas, ’Sound’ feels like it suffers from a paucity.

It is a retread of territory Allen has extensively covered before, but while the same can be said about almost all of his late-career work, seldom have the gears ground quite so loudly, and never before has the writing felt this chronically out-of-phase with the era it depicts.

Marfa Girl is not going to convince Clark’s detractors, nor will it disappoint his fans, as most of what people consider his trademarks are in place.

A hard film to hate, but an even harder one to defend, Joe Dante’s throwback zombie comedy Burying the Ex is a completely unreconstructed B-movie that is perfectly happy to breeze by on charm, nostalgia and the attractiveness of its leads.

Despite a tone that oscillates between quirkish and mawkish, it’s yet another warmed-over male midlife crisis movie, given supposedly higher stakes because the middle of life will be as far as this male will get.

Refn has consistently delivered films that have subverted our expectations, and has proven himself a master at stylistic self-reinvention, but this feels like the first time he’s gone back to any particular well.

A brittle, exasperated satire on social media celebrity, her sophomore film, like the tacky messiah it creates in Andrew Garfield’s YouTube sensation, soon becomes the very thing it sets out to expose: a glittery, jangly image machine that manufactures little of actual substance, except the conclusion that social media = bad.

Unfortunately Things People Do scuppers its own chances by having people do things we just don't ever, ever believe they would.

Retreading "Prisoners" territory to an extent that at times makes you wonder if they’re two parts of some sort of Canadian auteur experiment that no one else is in on, what is lost in the transfer, however, is any of the Villeneuve film’s subtlety or shading, and we are left only with its most lurid, credulity-stretching highlights, with all other textures blasted out to snowy blankness.

This is a plot that feels lazily reverse-engineered from a collection of disparate, pre-existing scenes and elements, rather like one of those cooking shows where contestants are given a selection of random ingredients and forced to come up with a meal.

The film is awful, but it is not unwatchable.

Aloft and its icy landscapes and feel of gently dropping barometric pressure can only distract so far from what is essentially an overwrought melodrama that here and there tips over into heavy-handedness despite the restrained beauty of its images.

An irreproachably tasteful, easily digestible but an unsurprising, undemanding watch.

It’s unfortunate that the film itself is more like a bottom-shelf blend: easily drinkable, highly forgettable, bland. Worse still, it won’t get you even mildly buzzed.

Thunder Force is at least an equal-opportunities bummer: It doesn’t work as a superhero adventure or a midlife reclamation movie or a mismatched buddy comedy or a family entertainment unless your aim is to disappoint all members of the family equally.

The Bubble is so charmless, joyless and jokeless — and at more than two hours so endless — that by its close you have to check your smile muscles for signs of atrophy.

Very much to its detriment, Misra’s ambitious, overflowing soap opera of a debut is not content with being the character portrait that Byrne’s inherently interesting Donald deserves.

This is one slow-ass "novel," in which no one ever cracks a joke and potentially melodramatic moments (a fairground ride collapse, the initial accident, a suicide attempt) are so painstakingly crafted to avoid splashiness that any momentum is killed. A little splashiness would have been most welcome.

We might lament declining attention spans in general, but more chilling than anything in Friend Request is the idea that anyone’s whole attention could possibly be absorbed by so flimsy and forgettable a film, one that seems made with the sole aim of being perfectly adequate background noise for something else.

Bloodless, far too genteel, and perfectly content to continually tell where a little showing would be nice; Night Train to Lisbon ends up a deeply unadventurous adventure story.

It only ever connects in the small moments that fall through the cracks of the supposed formal and thematic experimentation—when the fine actors are allowed to walk and talk like real human beings, rather than a collection of tropes.

It starts out less not-good than it ends up, to be fair, and for the majority of its running time, it’s engaging enough. Its chief issue in these parts seems to be that the director isn’t super sure if he’s making an action thriller with apocalyptic overtones, a family drama, or a character portrait/performance showcase, so the tone is all over the place.

A film of surface pleasures, even joys, but those joys seem to be longing for a central idea around which to coalesce.

Clumsy, campy and kitsch, but also deadeningly dull for long stretches.

In execution (and there are precious few of those), Asking for It is too much like its cardboard heroines: edgy on the outside, empty within. It’s the “Charlie’s Angels” freeze-pose of rape-revenge movies.

“After” was merely awful. After We Collided is atrocious. Naturally, it’s proving an enormous pandemic-era hit.

At literally no point in this weirdly lumbering, sluggish movie’s narrative does its grotesque tastelessness ever appear to have occurred to anyone involved.

It’s piping hot trash.

As so often in biopics of famous, complex women, Dalida’s life is thus reduced to a parade of romantic intrigues and solipsistic heartbreak, with very little sense emerging of the real woman who lived it all, and less still of the talent that made her music and performances so meaningful to millions.

The unshakable perkiness of the whole endeavor, its blithe lack of topicality, edge or satirical intent (it’s not even a spoof, just a goof) would be irritating if it didn’t work so hard to remind us that you don’t have to be mean to be funny.

If you like your metaphors thuddingly literal (and literally thudding, with the whole final act unfolding to the grunting rhythm of a man bashing away at a cliff face with a mallet), the Iranian director’s “Monte” will prove a treat. The rest of us may find ourselves wondering, like the biblically unfortunate central character, just what we’ve done to deserve this. The film at least looks extraordinary.

Yeksan’s portrait of generational malaise and middle-class dissociation is deceptively loose in execution for a film so dense with allegorical potential. Yet, like the occasional sparkle of amusement in Selim’s eye, it is enlivened by a finely tuned sense of the ridiculous, and an ending that improbably offers up the oddest cocktail of optimism with which to toast the oncoming End Times.

Modest though her debut is, Metelius has achieved a fine, beguiling balance. The tone is kept light and bittersweet, so she’s hardly making any claim to great importance or originality in her narrative. But nor does she apologize for the story’s slightness, displaying a sincere and persuasive confidence that makes it worth telling nonetheless.

Haenel’s role is a mercurial one, full of opportunities for Clouseau-esque following sequences, mistaken identity mixups, and bumbling acts of well-meaning quirk. But there’s something resolutely un-ditzy about the actress, with her matter-of-fact sexiness and earthy intelligence grounding even the screenplay’s most contrived moments. It is a pleasure to watch her face as she works things out.

Creaky visual effects, slapdash plotting and a script drunk on cliché: There’s pretty much nothing but cheap parlor trickery here.

While the supernaturally-tinged plot may be outlandish, the commitment and confidence of the actors, and of Kienle in delivering what could be shallow twists with a surprising amount of emotional effect and psychological insight, give the film its melancholic, meditative texture.

As a film, Chicuarotes is intermittently impressive and as a director, García Bernal clearly has real heart — it’s just that here, he puts it in the wrong place.

A fever-pitch, adrenaline-soaked vortex of social issues drama, deconstruction of the male id, and hokey, hubristic descent into hell, this crazed howl of human brutality morphing inexorably into bestial savagery deserves, and feels destined to find, a willingly cultish following on the festival circuit.

Sandra Wollner’s The Trouble With Being Born inspires nothing but strange feelings, from unnerving horror to shocked admiration to visceral disgust to that specific type of disorienting nausea that comes from the fractional delay between your eye processing a well-composed image, and your brain comprehending the implications of the actions so coolly depicted.

A thoroughly terrible, politically objectionable, occasionally hilarious Polish humpathon currently gasping and writhing its way up the Netflix charts.

Reefa, based on an enraging, heartbreaking real-life event, paints over the colors, creativity and chaos of its true-life tragedy with layer of film-convention formula

Thanks to some truly original, very striking imagery and the vague sense that Sargsyan knows what he’s getting at, even if you don’t, if you’re willing to commit resources to the tense ground war between frustration and revelation, the latter just about wins out.

This is a film about a hole into which stuff gets sunk, yes, but it is also a film about a hole out of which new, unsinkable bonds of comradeship emerge.

The relationship between the two women is gorgeously drawn and so deeply felt in the performances of both actresses that the first in a string of gentle surprises is that it will not form the entire story of the film.

Hníková’s absorbing, intelligent, subtly provocative film resolutely avoids passing judgment on the wisdom of raising a boy in the bubble of his parents’ undivided attention; just see if you can do the same.

Without any modulation in the brazen, head-on-collision presentation, once the story takes a turn for the sappy, there is really nowhere for any subtlety or subtext to hide.

We are unusually invested in a middle-aged professional woman’s interior life, which is a refreshing place to be. But we are never sure of his heart the way we are of hers and so Le Prince feels entirely truthful to her story, and maybe just a little unfair to his.

The film is most effective when its narrow focus on a single, desperately poor Yakut couple allows it space to be fascinated by the straightforward ethnographic details of this little-seen time and place. But its value as human drama wanes as its allegorical impulses become more insistent and the characters are reduced to ciphers in the end, more important for what they represent than for who they are.

[An] aggravatingly wispy and precious film.

The portrait of Palestinian identity it finally presents is so superficial and regressive that its saving grace is that it’s also very difficult to believe.

When that final “to be continued…” title appears — and never has a girly, curly typeface looked more like a ransom note — it’s by far the most heart-clutching #Hessa moment so far, because we realize we’re still at least one whole movie away from release from our collective captivity to this absolute nonentity of a franchise.

[A] scorchingly smart, superbly crafted thriller, in which the morality is blurry with heat haze, but the real lines that divide society are starkly defined: Out here, you are either corrupt or complicit, or collateral for those who are.

Just because almost everyone’s exhausted by this crummy cash-cow franchise, doesn’t mean the franchise is exhausted in turn. The hope that The Next 365 Days will be the last “365 Days” merely because it’s based on the final book is a slim one, especially given how it ends.

It’s a deliciously pessimistic testament, for those on its deliberate, low-frequency wavelength, to the power of an unapologetically auteurist, art-house approach to genre.

By no means a classic in the Korean action-thriller pantheon, but a good enough stopgap for a rainy Sunday until the next one comes along.

The Catholic School is about a landmark event that stunned a society, changed Italian rape law, and apparently blighted the lives of all who knew the killers, but it’s strangely uninterested in the two people for whom truly, after that summer, nothing would be the same.

In images tinged with the blue of sadness, the green of decay and the bilious yellow of institutional hallways, Nacar makes remarkably suspenseful drama out of one hyper-committed woman’s refusal to curry sympathy, as she crosses Rubicon after ethical Rubicon in one 24-hour period.

The story of the stolen children was a secret way too long buried to be thus buried once more within a movie that is, simply, way too long.

The Roundup: Punishment minimizes unnecessary originality, while gloriously maximizing the opportunities for Lee to crack wise, or look aggrieved and a little bored, as though he’s just remembered he needs to do laundry, all while his meaty forearms land a flurry of sledgehammer punches so rapid their recipients, often quite literally, do not know what hit them. This, truly, is cinema.

Panopticon may not have quite the all-seeing eye its title implies, but its gaze is piercing and sharp and strange.

A funny, rueful valentine to the fine art of the farewell — the smaller ones that litter our lives and the big final one at the end.