K. Austin Collins

It’s funny to be watching a movie about nationalism—something of a hot topic right now—that gives off so little heat. Not because it’s unexpected—but because the missed opportunity seems both so obvious and so beside the point.

It becomes a lot of movies at once. Some fly, some don’t, but the sum effect is that it winds up spinning its wheels, its hyperkinetic delights (all I’ll say is: magnets) awash in too many strands of background drama.

Not a great movie, but courtesy of director Robert Lorenz, a lean, plausibly entertaining one with all the fixin’s and none of the extra flab of deep, incisive meaning. It’s a buddy movie, a cartel chase, a sentimental redemption story. It’s a comfort watch.

What the movie’s effortful attempts at symbolism and meaning do most effectively are undercut what’s smart about the questions it raises — and DaCosta’s fine hand at creeping us out. The movie wants to be more than it is. The result is that it winds up amounting to less than it could have been.

The film is moving. It’s also a bit reductive. The flaw is in the way that one enables the other.

Somehow, a James novella whose subtext has been debated for over a century has been rendered almost free of subtext—and it sort of works.

It’s not a knockout, but the actors frequently are. The rest is an exercise in not overdoing it. It’s here, it’s queer, it’s not much else — and that’s OK.

What starts as one of those rare, unplaceable, maybe-satire, maybe-camp, high-wire pop confections morphs into a fairly straightforward biopic about a beloved superstar that seems overly wary of pissing off a living idol.

The Devil All the Time has the pretensions of a mythopoetic story that’s chipping away at a community’s dark underbelly. But here the misery is as belly-up and eager to be noticed as a house cat or a dead fish.

Bolstered by the strength of its admirable and talented cast — which includes Kiersey Clemons, Gabourey Sidibe, Jena Malone, Tongayi Chirisa, and Jack Huston — the movie is good at getting a good number of ideas going at once.

Mulan emerges as a curious act of market negotiation. It is a perfectly fine movie; it will no doubt be meaningful for children, especially those who could afford to see more of themselves onscreen in heroines like Mulan. But its cast, its attitude, its overall eagerness to please — all benefits, one would think — don’t add up to a good movie. They add up to a blueprint of the movie this ought to be.

Its preference is for plucking the lowest hanging fruit and, more urgently, letting its own audience off the hook. Though Irresistible occasionally lands a point—a soul surfaces briefly, thanks to Cooper—the movie ultimately doesn’t have the guts to be the movie it needs to be.

Baumbach overreaches in White Noise. The movie is unsuccessful because its various energies eventually begin to feel mismeasured.

It fails as a character study because the murky inner workings of the character are all manifest, outwardly, in turns and attitudes that you can see from a mile away and are no wiser for being able to predict.

The movie has the makings of a devious erotic game, of a dirty pas-de-deux that spills out of the Van Allens’ marital bed and into a friend’s pool, a nearby quarry, and the woods. But the movie doesn’t quite have the backbone it’d need, or even the sense of fun, to clarify the extent to which this is a game that both players know they’re playing.

The disappointment is that the movie wields so much and achieves so relatively little.

The Pale Blue Eye is heavy, and not always to its advantage. Its glumness, meant to come off as a good-looking take on American gothic, gets in the way of its juicier, freakier bits. The offense is that it does so in service of a mystery that barely matters.

Credit is due to Pugh and Johansson, most of all, for proving, in the movie’s opening chunk, that their foes-then-friends dynamic could satisfyingly hold an entire movie.

There isn’t truly standout work from anyone in the cast, even if the cast is what makes the movie work when it does work. Thank God for Hader’s unassuming sense of humor, Ransone’s jitteriness, Chastain’s steely, intuitive resolve.

An exercise anchored to a likable LeBron charmfest, melding multiple forms of animation, recycled cartoon jokes, and the basic plot of the original Space Jam, but with a twist that updates the original for our new, streaming content century.

Tame is what Magic Mike’s Last Dance is — what it apparently wants to be, what it becomes in exchange for its new, cardboard-simple, ostensible pro-woman worldview. The movie’s pleasures mute themselves beneath its good intentions. It wants to be about what women want. But it feels like it never asked.

The cast puts its effort into a slightly less underwhelming movie, one a little more willing to engage this gallery of personalities, which, insofar as they’re based on the characters in the novel, are just engaging enough to watch this once and never think about again. Austen works hard. But mediocrity, this movie reminds us, works harder.

The film falls prey to its own smoke and mirrors. It is less subversive than it aspires to be, and more emotionally real than than the filmmakers seem to realize.

Army of the Dead is neither the best of Snyder nor the worst. In whipping a bit of both extremes into a dependably watchable piece of pop froth that hits the appropriate marks, the movie strives for the expected relevance, offers the right amount of nonsurprise surprises, and distinguishes itself from the given rules of the genre just so that it, more or less, breaks even.

The Lion King, ultimately, is simply a copy—not a true remake. It’s exactly the movie Disney wanted to make, which is good news for them—but a shame for us.

It’s not hard to be sympathetic to Let Him Go’s desire to broaden, drift, be all-encompassing; that’s what yarns are good for. It’s what makes the movie an okay hang as is. And it’s also what may make you crave a better movie.

It’s funny to think of this new chapter, with all its mean twists and its tense character convolution, as a prelude to the story we already know. Orphan is the longer movie, but compared to First Kill, it’s a psychologically slim, unmessy affair in comparison.

Layton’s portentous style does the story no favors. It’s all mood, mood, mood: sharp angles, dark interiors, long pauses, and quietly thrumming background music.

Smith is the lifeboat leading us to a more pleasurable film, one where it doesn’t so much matter that the sets look cheap, to say nothing of the CGI keeping Smith’s head plastered on a floating blue body.

There are personal fragments of interest here; it’s useful to see how a man like Bannon narrates the story of himself, mythologizes himself, if only for the glimpses of worldview that sneak through in his presentation of the details. But the failure of Morris’s film is that it snuffs so much of that out.

The results are, understandably, thrilling at times, because violence is thrilling—vengeance even more so. But what it adds up to is a chaotic, misbegotten mess.

Spiderhead was adapted from a short story by George Saunders, but halfheartedly and with decidedly less wit.

Eternals is good at telling us where to look, at impressing us with its manufactured sense of grandeur. What it lacks is any credible sense of what’s actually worth seeing.

The movie certainly has heart; its purpose is unmistakable. But the spark — for which it has all the necessary ingredients — is somehow missing.

There’s no other way to put this: Deadpool 2 is a regular, shmegular superhero movie, distinguished only by an obnoxiously unearned dose of “see what I did there?!” It’s a drag.

Blonde is no truer or more intelligent than a more openly sleazy rendition of this story. It leaves too little room (despite its two hour and 40 minute runtime) to reconcile the fuller reality of this woman.

The black-and-white glossiness of it, the close-ups, the knock-down drag-out verbal tussles: This is the kind of movie that practically begs comparison to John Cassavetes, while also giving us a lead character who’d berate us for making the comparison. It gets a little boring. Turn the movie off at the 20-minute mark and you can ultimately still say you’ve seen the entire thing.

Jojo Rabbit has little to say about any of the things it dredges up, beyond the obvious.

The movie is so overbearingly high on its own fizzy, clever stylishness that it strands the heart of its own story.

Washington...absolutely has a keen sense of his character. It’s there in every skeptical cock of his head, every sly, knowing grimace. But The Equalizer 2 is too much of a dull slog for any of that to pop with Washington’s usual ace charisma. The movie is a bog; Washington’s merely wading through it.

Climax feels like what happens when a provocateur grows up. Noé, a nominally outré festival regular three decades into his career, is unmistakably washed. The jig is up, as of Climax, if not even earlier.

It wants to be a slasher, but it isn’t reckless enough. It wants to be funny, but it only has two jokes, and it repeats them ad nauseum. It wants to be tense, but it takes advantage of almost none of the tension that this scenario and its McMansion setting have to offer.

It’s the product of a satirical ambition that lacks the wit to land any heady blows; the horror mastery to be even glancingly scary; the intellect to make those thrills invigoratingly existential; and the sense of humor to make it entertaining. What it is, is limp, dull, half-cocked — with a few good performances from good enough actors that hints at how a smarter movie might have worked.

Bohemian Rhapsody’s problems aren’t specific to this movie. They are the bane of biopics broadly speaking, especially those tackling artists. I want to leave this kind of movie with a sense of the artist’s art, not just of the headlined subsections of a Wikipedia summary.

An all pain, no gain, minimal-reprieve character study completely unaware of the ways its selling the singer short.

S. Craig Zahler's controversial movie about a pair of racist cops gone rogue has more bark than bite—and that’s telling.

The Midnight Sky is a good example of a movie that sells itself short by trying to be one thing — serious, heavy, emotional — when, by all available indicators, it should be more of a thriller, or more ridiculous, or at the very least more fun.

The plot of Godzilla vs. Kong matters far less than the basic fact that it’d be a much better movie if it stuck, firmly, to its title.