Jordan Hoffman

The restrained performances and luscious location photography are enough to make this a film worth exploring, though it might not be a bad idea to down a few caffeine-rich drinks before settling in to watch.

Cronenberg’s map doesn’t lead to a satisfying destination in a typical story sense, but it is a remarkable quest. For a movie that has so many problems, it is one of the more watchable ones.

For flash and rumble, F1 doesn't have an equal this summer. Roll down the windows and enjoy the ride.

An Inconvenient Sequel is more a portrait of Gore than a call to arms. It ends with a sort of forced positivity, much of which is recycled directly from the first movie: political change is hard, but we can do it, morality demands it.

As with the others in the series, this is not an upbeat picture, but it is effective and unsettling without being too gory.

The movie is two hours of cheap jokes, culminating in the world’s biggest Family Guy episode. It tries so hard to be clever, it just ends up being cringe.

You’ll laugh if you’re young, you’ll laugh if you’re old.

Nothing about it makes a lick of sense, but there’s a surreal flow to it all that, in the moment, carries you from scene to scene.

Only a monster would begrudge Aronsohn for putting this all together. It doesn’t hurt that Magic Music really do have some chops.

Bluebird is undoubtedly a remarkable achievement, especially for a first-time filmmaker.

The Michelle Yeoh fronted spin-off movie Section 31 is 100 minutes of generic schlock containing only trace elements of Star Trek.

It is a rather sly affair, slipping in some genuine food for thought amongst its snickering.

What Meadowland refuses to do, to its great credit, is conform to expectations.

It’s unfortunate that Byrne’s offering such a tremendous performance in a film that is, to put it as bluntly as possible, so very dumb.

Jason Clarke is strong as the weak senator, and he wisely goes easy on replicating the unmistakable Massachusetts accent.

The whole picture is lifeless and without consequence.

While witnessing the physical act of love on screen can sometimes transcend into something with great depth, this is, sorry to say, not one of those cases. It’s just a lot of huffing and puffing.

It is a shaggy dog road movie, and a drug-hazy one at that, but beneath the silliness and character-based gags, Crystal Fairy is, I feel, an unusually insightful look at self-imposed false identities and group dynamics.

There are plenty of great moments, but they jump out amid a jumble of strangely flat scenes. This doesn’t feel like the work of a great master; it’s a discordant brew that just doesn’t blend right.

Somehow, The Final Reckoning is 170 minutes, but, like Tom Cruise running across Westminster Bridge, it zooms. Even the acres of baffling dialogue are delivered swiftly.

Howe’s film is drenched in empathy, where violent actions aren’t exactly excused, but at least framed with understanding.

Borgman‘s crafty, trickster-ish screenplay, always two steps ahead of you, keeps you rooting for clues, enough to put your ethics on temporary hold.

Seth Rogen’s naughty food cartoon Sausage Party is, like much of his best work, deceptive packaging.

Not many side-splitting jokes, but a goofy glee is smeared across it all.

This extremely homemade film, written and directed by Bridey Elliott and starring her own mostly-famous family, is extremely funny at times and nerve-wracking at others, but also pitch black to the point that many will find it unbearable. I say stick with it; if nothing else, the film is a work of great daring.

It’s a play shoehorned into a film. Sometimes that can work – LaBute’s managed it before – but it’s a steep hill to climb, and this one doesn’t quite make it.

Gitai has chosen stylistic cinema over propaganda, and he is a director who regularly gets bogged down a bit in form.

The prolific 76-year-old British creator of character-rich, social dramas steeped in natural realism (usually) has whiffed it and whiffed it hard with this one. It’s not that it’s just “lesser Loach.” It is, in my opinion at least, humiliating.

All the pieces are in place for a gripping indie horror flick, but this pointless, motivation-free film just goes around in circles.

The movie itself is a retread of indie story beats we’ve all seen time and again. Slate’s tornado of a central character doesn’t quite overcome the rote aspects of this production.

It isn’t just the bright colors and the costumes but every visual aspect of Byzantium that sings. Neil Jordan knows where to put the camera. It’s just a shame he wasn’t able to inject a little life inside that frame.

There are scenes that snap together nicely with some sharp and nuanced observations. But the film is saddled with uninteresting surface-level characters. There’s a phoniness exuding from the entire project, made all the more discouraging since the plot-light, shaggy dog story is trying to feel so real.

This is detached, flat film-making at its most bare. You figure out which lines of dialogue deserve to be underlined.

Life After Beth, a frustrating affair due to its waste of resources, feels rushed and under-rehearsed. It is a style of film-making that hopes it can glide its way into your good graces on ad-hoc performance flourishes, a wall-to-wall audio mix and editing patches. One soon recognizes this all a cover for one key issue: a lack of original ideas.

It’s the same low-budget horror flick you’ve seen many times before, but it’s nice to see some local variants on a familiar theme.

There’s really not much going on with Roar storywise. But then you take a step back and think about what it is that you’re watching. My viewing of Roar was set to a soundtrack of “Oh my God!” and “Holy crap!”, all of my own making.

It transcends the usual biopic limitations to tell a specific story about some well-known people with larger, universal implications.

What’s key is that even though this is a movie about a scoundrel, it’s all very optimistic. Forbes and Wolodarsky keep the frame bright and the filmmaking calls attention to itself only when necessary.

A dopey splatterfest that features one-dimensional characters and a draggy first act that’s eventually won over by creatively immature gross-outs and absurd violence.

This is design work of the highest caliber and it is impossible to not enjoy simply watching these little buggers run around. It is unfortunate, however, that the creativity, originality and propulsive storytelling found in the original “Monsters Inc.” just didn’t matriculate with them.

If anyone other than Hawkins were in this film, it would be very hard to recommend. With her in virtually every scene, it is a lovely, tiny character study.

I spent the bulk of Paradise Love mimicking Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” It’s been a long time since I’ve seen such a disturbing film.

The on-stage moments of Entertainment are revelatory but, unfortunately, some of the in-between meat of the film doesn’t quite connect.

There's a ton of technobabble that you have to take on faith, but Jones and Powell do more than sell it; they make it compelling.

The good news is that Ejiofor is great even in the scenes that don’t go anywhere. Those who find heaven here on earth in the form of strong film performances ought to commune with Come Sunday. The rest can sleep in.

It’s one hell of a yarn, which makes The Lovers and the Despot’s strangely soporific style something of a disappointment.

A dark, dreary and dull “Mad Max in Neutral” from director David Michôd (“Animal Kingdom”) that tries to pass off its blunt narrative and repetitiveness as some sort of style.

It's got the thrills, it's got the creepy-crawlies, and it's got just enough plot to make you care about the characters. Alien: Romulus is a hell of a night out at the movies.

It’s coarse and it’s stupid, but it is, thanks mostly the two good performances and some stylish use of music and editing, a little bit moving.

Cheadle’s got the cred, and the period evocation is tremendous. It’s just that I’m not sure he has all that much to say

This is a gift to cinephiles everywhere from deep in the cellar and we’re all lucky to get a sip.

Finding Fela does an exemplary job of explaining, in musical terms, what made Fela standout, a simple enough step that most music documentaries ignore.

Nymphomaniac Vol. 1 is the worst thing Lars Von Trier has ever associated himself with.

Out of the Furnace is no disaster, but it doesn’t achieve what it hopes to achieve, and it has no one to blame but itself.

The first half of “The Congress,” while still fascinating, does suffer a bit from keeping its focus on the gripes and accusations between Hollywood actors and producers...Once the Philip K. Dick-meets-”Inception” second half kicks in, the implications grow more universal.

The remarkable storytelling that eventually emerges in Eden is something you should see, providing you feel that you can stomach it.

There are a lot of twists and turns in the plot, but not all of them are satisfying. What does work are the performances, specifically Cooke and the richly sympathetic character she creates.

It’s shallow, it’s boring, it’s poignant, it’s clever, it’s poorly acted, it’s intentionally poorly acted, it has no story, it has marvelous scenes, it is artful, it is hallucinatory, it is shoddily put together. All response is valid.

Split goes all-in on McAvoy slipping from persona to persona, and luckily he’s got the acting chops to sell it.

The scenes of artistic, scientific and communal triumph were significant. The isolated, solipsistic anger of each character, lost in their own identity loop, seemed like a perfect analogy for the conflicts in eastern Europe in the mid-1990s.

Directors Katie Graham and Andrew Matthews create a great framework for the epic nemesis battle, but also know when to pull back to keep the movie grounded in reality.

The movie starts with the volume cranked to 10, then never takes a breath. At three hours it is unbearable. Yes, this is meant to be a “bad trip” of a movie, taking you inside the experience of someone undergoing a crisis, but there’s a limit. And then it’s revealed that this grown man has mommy issues. For that you made me sit through all this noise?

Young kids will find the second, more action-heavy half of the film entertaining, but everyone else will want to crawl into their shell.

In this 75-minute straight shot of Discovery Channel cinema, no emotional crests are peaked, but viewers will come away informed.

First with the telephone, then early cinema, the magic of wireless radio and, finally, television, Dreams Rewired bombards the senses with a thorough and clever montage of found footage from the 1890s to the pre-war era.

The specifics of the journey get all the attention, while the fundamental conflicts remain not just unoriginal, but alarmingly nonexistent.

It isn’t just the sheer density of jokes that is impressive, but the diversity.

Certainly we care for Margaret and the way Walter has her trapped, but her character comes across as a cypher representing a great number of issues without being a real individual. This movie wants to be an oil painting, but ends up being more of a mass-produced, though good-quality print.

Ti West’s pointless new film The Sacrament, an exercise in talking loud and saying nothing, isn’t just bad, it’s infuriating.

Even on the couch, with the ability to hit pause, it reaches heights (ha!) of quintessential B-movie greatness, causing exactly the kind of discomfort that elicits verbal rebukes.

While Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F isn’t terrible, and it does have a few funny zings plus one decent chase scene, there’s not a molecule of originality on display. One can’t help but call it a missed opportunity.

If you buy a ticket for this one, just know there’s no First Class option. But with moderate expectations, you’ll still get to your destination.

While the topic of mass delusion is fascinating, this film is too unfocused to turn it into compelling drama.

The end of the movie goes completely off the rails, but in a way that is charming in its stupidity.