Jim Vorel

Where The Pickup could have most easily have ideologically separated itself would have been on the comedic side, by leaning into the talents of its marquee names, but it instead represses the delivery of jokes more and more as it goes, becoming merely another tepid crime caper without a more distinct identity.

This is a showy exercise, Ponciroli purposefully hamstringing one dimension of his film and then expecting to be praised for rising above the very adversity he created, and not even the bloodthirsty action can salvage it from pretentiousness.

Old Guy is a rather careless take on the fusion of comedy and action genres, the kind of film that will throw around an acronym like “PSNI” in the middle of conversation and just assume an American sitting at home on their couch will deduce this stands for “Police Service of Northern Ireland.”

All in all, The Parenting is just a notably scattershot affair, from its poorly defined character relationships, to its questionable pacing (and eventual abrupt ending), to CGI that sometimes looks fine and other times is suddenly and shockingly inept, like what I’d expect to see in a feature from The Asylum or Troma.

Leave it to a new version of I Know What You Did Last Summer to highlight that there was never anything particularly interesting about I Know What You Did Last Summer in the first place.

In truth, the entirety of Halloween Ends is suffused in some kind of magic or witchcraft, a gauzy layer of unreality that prevents a single character in the film from behaving like an actual human being.

Despite an incredibly talented cast of top-tier comedy talent, the film fails to establish a cohesive comedic tone, becoming only more unmoored when it reaches for unearned emotional profundity later on.

Like an unstable particle of antimatter–which beyond all reason becomes a major plot point, if you can believe that–Time Cut begins to rapidly deteriorate in legibility in its third act, before spinning totally out of control.

The Electric State is one hell of an artistically neutered, sanitized boondoggle, awe-inspiring in its deployment of expensive visuals but largely bereft of any kind of genuine wit, humor, warmth or adaptational deftness.

For Zodiac Killer Project to work, it would have to be coming from a filmmaker who is fully ready to admit their own culpability in continuing to fuel the worst aspects of the genre they intended to exploit. That kind of brutal self-admission would have taken a great deal of courage, but Shackleton can’t quite get there, even if he comes close at times.

A confused mashup of psychological imprisonment thrillers, dystopian social satire and even something adjacent to zombie horror, it’s bereft of actual ideas despite its cement mixer of a premise, struggling to pad out its runtime with 10 minutes of limping credits at its conclusion, leaving 83 minutes as a remainder that feels like a short film or anthology entry dragged kicking and screaming to feature length.

Sadly, even a perfectly workable premise needs engaging writing, directing and performances to bring it to life, and in this capacity, Netflix’s new feature Brick is as utterly inert as its title–likewise reused from Rian Johnson’s far more interesting high school neo-noir from 2005.