Jordan Mintzer

It’s a unique take on what could otherwise be a morbidly depressing tale of loss and grief, dishing out tons of energy and spats of devilish humor, though not always fitting its numerous parts into a succinct whole.

A handful of plot twists are not enough to compensate for an overtly heavy, often dreary affair that rides straight into the final standoff with little elegance and a wagon train of pathos.

Turning one of the darkest moments in modern French history into syrupy historical drama, writer-director Rose Bosch's The Round Up is a polished, pathos-driven re-creation of the Vichy regime's mass imprisonment and disposal of 13,000 Parisian Jews in summer 1942.

This semi-fictionalized account rings false whenever it eschews reality for a WWII cloak-and-dagger intrigue, trying too hard to dazzle us with plot instead of letting the music speak for itself.

It’s an if-it-ain’t-broke-then-don’t-fix-it approach that works just fine if you’re simply looking to take another ride on the rollercoaster.

While the other Predator films tried to remain dark and tense, tossing in a decent one-liner here or there, Black’s movie is so cleverly over-the-top that it’s easy and pleasurable enough to watch, though never exactly scary or suspenseful.

With all the recent controversy surrounding Depp, not to mention Maïwenn herself, the result of their collaboration is a handsome period piece that feels both flat and shallow, and certainly far from any scandale.

Going way, way back, at least to The Great Train Robbery in 1903, the western remains one of cinema’s oldest genres — and certainly the one where it feels like everything’s already been done. It’s therefore all-the-more disappointing when a brand new western, like Richard Gray’s gunslinging geezer flick The Unholy Trinity, brings nothing original to the table, rehashing movies we’ve seen before and doing it in a way that feels altogether generic.

What really helps Mountain overcome its far-fetched scenario is the pairing of Winslet and Elba, who know how to turn up the charm tenfold yet make Alex and Ben seem (mostly) like real people.

If Penn’s point in visiting Ukraine, meeting Zelensky and co-directing Superpower was to make himself heard, then it’s mission accomplished.

It’s not really a movie at all, but more like a cross between a movie, a video game and a flow of hallucinatory images that could play in the background of a live show by rapper Travis Scott — who co-stars here as a gun-toting, philosophizing killer surrounded by a swarm of twerking booties.

By the end, Black Flies leaves the viewer battered, bruised and bleeding out on the sidewalk, but never fully captivated

It’s unfortunate that Light feels both too traditional and too concerned with showcasing life behind the music, instead of trying to explain why Williams was one of the greatest American musicians of the last century.

Fanny is definitely a worthy companion to Marius, although it’s also more claustrophobic in terms of staging, confining the action to a handful of interior sequences that feel less like a movie than like filmed theater, albeit of a rather high order.

It’s a thought-provoking subject that probably plays better on paper than on screen, urging us to seek out the writer’s books once the movie is over.

Imagine the rise of the machines prophesy made popular by the Terminator franchise, but done as a freaky sitcom that’s part Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, part French sex farce, and you’ll get an idea of the bizarro concoction that is Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s new film, Big Bug.

What Loach adds to this scenario, as he’s done in most of his films, is a natural intimacy that goes beyond the issues to bring something human and emotional to the table. In its best moments, The Old Oak hits those powerful notes without pulling too hard on your heartstrings, with lived-in performances from a nonprofessional cast, including a few actors who were in the director’s most recent movies.

England steers his talented young cast in the right direction despite some snafus in his story, and the fine acting is what ultimately brings 1:54 to the finish line.

In some ways, Marcello Mio is the ultimate arthouse nepo baby flick, in which the child of cinema royalty embodies her legendary patriarch in order both to get closer to him and to purge herself of some of the demons that have haunted her own life and career — mainly, the fact that people have a tendency to compare her to her famous parents.

The pairing of Bryan Cranston and Kevin Hart in the lead roles pays off big time, with more laugh-out-loud moments than the original and some particularly hilarious work from Hart, who steps up his game after his fun if broad-minded performances in Get Hard and the Ride Along movies.

Dark Glasses is never all that scary, and some of it is just plain silly, but if you take it at face value it can be enjoyable enough to sit through — more of a reminder of what Argento used to do best than an example in its own right.

Black and White never panders too easily to sentiments, creating characters who are riddled with flaws but likeable all the same.

It’s a lot to handle and also a bit silly, but Besson often pulls it off — thanks in no small part to a commanding performance by the chameleon-like Caleb Landry Jones (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), who manages to be touching and slightly terrifying at the same time.

The structure feels fairly novel for such a B-grade fright-fest — call it Last Year at Amityville — but it’s soon outdone by the litany of torturous scenes that the director piles on one after the other.

Cheese and kitsch, with smatterings of blood and decapitated heads, are all on the menu in Dracula, which is a watchable if totally ludicrous version of the Stoker story. At best, the movie is another showcase for the always-interesting-to-watch Caleb Landry Jones.

A schmaltzy, mildly satisfying Anglo take on the BFFs-to-bedfellows subgenre that’s been seen recently in romantic comedies.

There’s definitely some gas in its tank in the opening sections, which are somewhat promising, but then the story takes a predictable route that fails to deliver enough suspense or interest to go the full distance.

An airy, lazy, though rather likable overseas rom-com served with a dose of melancholia and several large portions of cinematic nostalgia.

The first rule of a good werewolf flick, or any horror flick for that matter, is to keep the audience on the edge of their seats, whereas Farrell mostly keeps us guessing.

While De Angelis knows how to create visceral action and moments of intensity, he’s incapable of the slightest hint of subtlety.

A slick, occasionally hilarious but ultimately uneven appraisal of France’s favorite extramarital pastime.

Generic and, at its best, straining to be heartfelt.

This well-intentioned if somewhat heavy-handed historical affair is anchored by Coogan’s solid lead turn, with support from Andrea Riseborough as a hard-hitting state prosecutor and promising newcomer Garion Dowds as an executioner who could wind up facing the gallows.

It’s perhaps less flamboyantly enjoyable than Finley’s first feature, but it also digs deeper into the souls of its characters, asking how a few people meant to ensure the pedagogy of hundreds of children could flunk out so badly.

Like a beltway surrounding its hero’s bloviating ego trips and massive libido, the film keeps turning in circles around a subject that’s only truly interesting if you’re Philip himself.

This $50 million Ridley Scott production does benefit from strong performances and a few worthy scenes that director Daniel Espinosa (Safe House) pulls off with an effective amount of grit. Yet the movie doesn’t really captivate the way it should, and as the manhunt stretches on it actually diminishes in suspense, ultimately overstaying its two-plus-hour running time.

While Anderson excels in the film’s many moments of digital doom-and-gloom, he can’t deliver a single authentic emotion between the two star-crossed leads, leaving us with a sooty aftertaste of having sat through one very loud rendition of Titanic in togas.

Bonnin, who adapted the script with Dimitri Lucas from her César award-winning short, offers up a boilperlate coming-home scenario bolstered by a few keen observations and a fair amount of charm.

Once it’s evident that there’s hardly a point to all the random mischief — or that the point is precisely that there isn’t one — the idea of watching a pair of grown men inflect violence upon innocent bystanders feels awfully tedious

Euro-financed production throws large chunks of change at a corporate espionage saga spanning several continents, yet most of the money seems to have landed in locations, with too little allocated to the script and stunt departments.

By doubling down on a movie that yearns to be both introspective and bone-crunchingly cool, Wild Card overplays its hand.

This plot-heavy suspense flick loses some of the book’s originality in translation while failing to channel its sense of Midwestern malaise. But it keeps the guessing game going long enough to compensate for some otherwise shallow characterizations, while Theron offers up an earnest and downbeat turn that says a lot with little dialogue

For a film meant to champion the powers of three-dimensional art, Rodin winds up being awfully flat.

Whenever the camera settles down to record a simple conversation between two characters, things suddenly feel stilted, as if the filmmakers cannot build the drama without flinging a hundred different things in front of the lens at the same time.

This low budget effort from director John Erick Dowdle and writer-producer-brother Drew Dowdle provides a few late scares after plenty of eye-rolling setup, with said scares due more to the heavy sound design than the action itself.

Taking the inspirational sports movie template, then infusing it with so much weed and foul language that it deserves its own MPAA rating, The Underdoggs is a good example of what happens when Snoop Dogg steps into an otherwise familiar tween-age comedy to wreak havoc.

Jacquot has a hard time turning all of this into palpable drama, and Eva slides off the rails during a denouement that goes full on B-movie without much credibility.

It’s all a little zany and overcooked and childish, which is perhaps why the series has been so popular with French tykes and is probably better fitted for 22-minute episodes than feature-length treatment.

Merely a watchable rehashing of his preferential themes and plot points, set in a present-day Manhattan so nostalgic and unreal it might as well be a period piece.

While the portrait of domestic malaise is occasionally intriguing (and owes much to the original comics), things wind up all-too easily working themselves out in the long run.

The film feels at once incredulous and strangely inept, with the director resorting to facile plot twists or heavy-handed pathos whereas a little subtlety and sense would have went a long way

There’s a good story at the heart of The Out-Laws about Parker coming to terms with her family’s long criminal history. But that’s more or less tossed aside in favor of all the nonstop gags, in a film that starts off like Meet the Parents and ends like a goofier The Expendables, some excessive violence included.

Is it all poetry or just a put-on? Again, Baby Invasion is a bit of both, and viewers are likely to either vibe out or tune out.

It’s all rather trite if easygoing entertainment aimed at the 6-and-under set, with A Turtle’s Tale creator Ben Stassen (credited as producer) and director Vincent Kesteloot delivering a colorful 3D adventure that lacks the sophistication of a Zootopia or Kung Fu Panda, but thankfully avoids some of their snark as well.

Dialogue tends toward the eye-rolling variety and performances feel uneven across the board, with the actors using a menagerie of accents, including some dubious Deep South ones, as they shout above all the pounding rain and thunder.

Starts off promisingly but peters out as the story, told practically sans dialogue, heads nowhere consistent.

For a film that takes great pride in its heroine's nonconformism, pretty much everything in Allegiant feels conventional.

Colonia marks a truly misguided attempt to fabricate a Hollywood-style thriller out of the darkest quarters of Latin American history.

This treacly and overwrought piece of mishegoss from French novelist turned director Amanda Sthers is pretty much a chore from start to finish.

Equal parts solemn and sappy, Euphoria marks a well-performed if extremely heavy-handed foray into English-language filmmaking for Swedish director Lisa Langseth.

This offbeat indie chiller benefits from colorful cinematography and bits of satisfying butchery, even if a less than airtight scenario fails to make it run efficiently.

In terms of drama, or melodrama, or just bad drama, Freed rarely delivers the goods while trying hard to give fans what they came for.

If anything, the movie offers up the guilty pleasure of seeing Bridges and Moore duel it out in front of countless green screens and a few stunning Canadian backdrops – two great actors clawing at each other with magic staffs and fake fire, trying to survive in the netherworld of heroic kitsch.

This ludicrous outing from helmer Christian Alvart ("Pandorum") and scribe Ray Wright ("The Crazies") takes its psycho-satanic babble much too seriously, and should elicit more laughs than frights.

To the director’s credit, the animated sequences are richly rendered, making the most of the rather stiff and plain-looking originals (though, if you want to get nitpicky, an early gag poking fun at the fact that Playmobil legs are unbendable is soon forgotten) and offering up a plethora of settings that help compensate for the lack of good writing.

Well-shot (by Luc Besson regular Thierry Arbogast) but otherwise entirely forgettable.

Travolta is a lively presence in some scenes, talking in a rowdy New Yawka accent and tossing off a few good lines early on. (The highlight being: "If I robbed a church and had the steeple sticking out of my ass, I would deny it.") But he can do little to bring this tedious and episodic chronicle to life.

To their credit, the directors aren’t afraid to take things way too far — which could be considered a quality in and of itself, but not one that’s sustainable for nearly 90 minutes of action.

A run-of-the-mill crime drama that toes the risibility line on several occasions, even if it’s better made than your typical straight-to-video movie.

Generic and too self-indulgent, if energetic and occasionally funny, the film’s greatest attribute is by far co-star Crispin Glover, who steals the show as a deranged French-speaking assassin named Luc Chaltier.

Not only does the film offer a superficial reading of all the famous movies that inspired it, but there’s also an incredibly bro-ish sentiment to the whole thing, as if Franco and Boone binge-watched half the Criterion Collection while slamming down brewskies on the couch.

Filled with strong performances and numerous twists that keep the tension high, even if the plot gets tied up a tad too neatly.

Like many science-fiction films, Star slowly but surely reveals itself as a parable of our self-destructive times – an artsy Interstellar with a threadbare narrative rather than one that’s forever running on hyperdrive.

French splatterfest Martyrs offers a few genuine scares early on, but they're quickly washed away by all the blood tossed around by writer-director Pascal Laugier.

Cedric Anger’s stylish thriller Next Time I’ll Aim for the Heart (La prochaine fois je viserai le coeur) offers up a strong central turn from Guillaume Canet while dishing out a number of crafty and suspenseful set-pieces. But it can also be too self-serious at times and winds up dragging a bit in its latter stages.

Best when it reveals the painstaking details of investigative work, worst when it plunges into improbable emotional depths, SK1 is an above-average policier.

Unfortunately, [Miike] never quite tops the hijinks of this film’s opening reel, and at nearly two hours, As the Gods Will grows gradually tiresome until it seriously drags during a lengthy and entirely kitschy closing battle.

The filmmaking is often splendid to behold, though not necessarily for two full hours, and Tran’s Gallic tone poem winds up suffering under the weight of its own aestheticism. It’s a beautiful flower arrangement in need of an adequate vase.

It’s hard not to be both moved and slightly blown away by the plight of these birds.

Animation work is never exactly jaw-dropping but fits the bill, with plenty of colorful set pieces in both the great outdoors and the high-tech headquarters of HairCo. Snarky dialogue is minimal compared to most tongue-in-cheek cartoons, while a few pop culture nods (to Star Wars and Better Call Saul) will give older viewers something to look out for.

Good luck trying to make heads or tails of it, but as an eye-popping exercise in cinematic strangeness, 9 Fingers is a rare breed.

Vogler creates an intoxicating mood at times, especially through slick visuals and a trippy score by French electro maven Laurent Garnier, but her movie is like something you distractedly watch out of the corner of your eye in a café or train station or on someone else’s iPhone on the subway. In other words, it belongs on the small screen.

Game Girls doesn’t really go beyond its fly-on-the-wall approach to its heroines, offering us lots of intimacy but nothing that really sets its story within a greater social or political context.

Intelligently observed and backed by a strong cast, this well-performed ensemble piece oscillates between documentary-style study of the French social care system and Lifetime-style tearjerker that tends to overdose on the saccharine.

The pacing is a bit flat in parts, with a little too much dead air, but the drama builds its way to an emotional finale where Sidi’s long and difficult life in exile comes full circle.

The result is a film that sometimes feels as frenzied as the world it’s depicting, but one that benefits from being such a full-blown nosedive into a unique moment of collective creation.

There’s no denying the power inherent in Shimu’s grueling pursuit: one which, in many other countries, would simply be a matter of filling out some forms, but here takes on nearly Melvillian proportions of impossibility.

Ameur-Zaïmeche remains vague, perhaps frustratingly so, about his movie's identity — per the closing credits it was mostly shot in the South of France — but what he says about fear and isolation in a totalitarian society has a universal tinge.

They’re two out of millions of New Yorkers, but the more we get to know them, the more we see how these opposites — who exist on opposite sides of the law — are bound together by their mutual struggle to make it in the big city.

The movie itself doesn’t always live up to its ambitions, playing like a loose assembly of sketches that are by turns hilarious and tedious, with a third act that fizzles out and an ending that doesn’t land smoothly.

Like the previous Kirikou movies, the combination of classic animation and straightforward storytelling provides a welcome antidote to the kind of overcaffeinated cartoons gracing today’s screens.

The Last Out is a moving reminder of how hard it is to make it to the big leagues.

It feels closer to Taxi Driver or the films of Gaspar Noé than to Kiarostami’s work, and yet Ahmadzadeh’s portrait of his country’s disaffected youth, especially during the current period of revolt, is just as socially vital.

It’s a solid ending that helps compensate for the film’s somewhat opaque plotting and languid drama, despite sturdy performances from Feng and the rest of the cast.

This is still earnest, compassionate filmmaking that tries to cut past clichés and show how even the worst criminals have a heart — and, because this is Italy, how they can also cook up a solid batch of meatballs and marinara sauce.

By giving the patients considerable time and space to bare themselves before the camera, Philibert grants us access to the the darker sides of the human psyche, portraying mental illness with an innate sense of compassion and understanding.

Working without much in terms of visuals but talking heads and screens, Klose manages to make his film feel both suspenseful and informative.

If anything, Diaz succeeds in conveying how fatal the conflict in his homeland truly was, making its way into foreign lands and tearing loving families apart.