Keith Uhlich

There are plenty of real-life anecdotes that Scott Cooper draws from Warren Zane’s 2023 book Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, but they’re filtered through the hoariest of biopic clichés.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s dark comedy One Battle After Another turns overreaching into an art form.

In the end, Luca Guadagnino effectively turns a very complicated literary figure into the kind of blubbering, nostalgic old man you’d expect to see in a student film or a Sundance prizewinner.

The film knows the words and tunes but, with rare exception, lacks the passion and the perspective to make them truly resonate.

Both Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet are sadly at a disadvantage given how many of the older actors gnaw at the scenery like it’s a still-warm cadaver.

This Bond’s overall arc from modishly merciless killing machine to aging assassin with the familial feels comes off as a treacly sop to psychological complexity.

When it comes to individual people and their hopes, fears and desires, Akl has a talent for both the surreal flourish and the grounded insight. In this case, the bigger picture and the larger point are what prove elusive, leaving the whole enterprise feeling sadly schematic.

Director Nick Rowland couldn't ask for a more magnetically tormented character to anchor his low-key-to-a-fault feature debut.

The closing scenes of Straight Up are more contrived and constrained — an acquiescence to living inside the box, with one dramatic wrinkle that feels tacked on and ill-considered. The fiery talent that Sweeney displays throughout, both in front of and behind the camera, regrettably ends up ashen.

In the end, it can’t help but sentimentalize the better angels that supposedly reside in the land of liberty’s flawed human fabric.

There's a tight, tense thriller in all this. Unfortunately, director Deon Taylor and screenwriter Peter A. Dowling stretch things out to a logy 104 minutes. Too often, the suspense dissipates between action scenes when it should be consistent and relentless, even in the quietest moments.

Renée Zellweger can reach all the notes and hit all the marks, but Garland’s intense emoting eludes her.

The images, and the actions within them, lack the acerbic edge that would really drive the knife in.

The blurring of the lines between fiction and fact still mostly feels like a crutch or an affectation. It's as if Cordero and Croda are trying to goose the drama rather than unearth it, never entirely trusting that Felipe's life is interesting enough as is.

All of these beasties are "scary." Though they'd be much more so if they felt less like franchisable IP and more like fervent expressions of the ills of the eras on which the film aims to comment.

At its best, which is often enough, the film does provide that sort of intimate and evocative insight into a culture too often vilified due to Western ignorance. At others, the gentle exquisiteness with which Longley approaches even the most unappealing sights and sounds feels like an evasion of something more troubling, and potentially more profound.

Stem to stern, this 88-minute slasher runs like the clockwork bit of machinery it is, and that baseline competence effectively leeches it of personality.

Since the lead character is effectively a mystery man, some lack of grounding is appropriate. Unfortunately, the impressionism — the improvisation, you might say, of this particular life (mirroring, one supposes, Bolden's approach to music) — is so dominant that it finally proves a crutch.

Like Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy or Granik's Leave No Trace, this low-key drama focuses on a regional American woman trying to sustain herself through rough economic and emotional times. It's derivative of both films, but, for a little while at least, not disagreeably so.

There's a shakiness in how Hormann utilizes the fact that Aynur's murder is a foregone conclusion. It's as if the director is delaying gut-wrenching emotion as opposed to letting it emerge organically from the stylistic severity.

None of it adds up to much beyond painting the band, despite their often repellently bad behavior, in a flattering light.

Even in this fictional context, the line between portraying and exploiting abused innocence gets uncomfortably, offensively blurred.

Polar is pure trash, but the generousness — and, in the final stretch, the poignancy — with which Mikkelsen approaches even the most lurid of the film's conceits at least pushes it toward the top of the garbage heap.

M. Night Ghyamalan’s film is aimed at an audience from whom he cringingly craves fealty.

Scene by scene you wish 55 Steps made you angrier than it does. Yet August's docile filmmaking acts as an emotional soporific, removing even the potential camp pleasures of Bonham Carter's histrionics.

David Lowery has a carefree, bordering on insubstantial touch, which gives rise to several rank absurdities.

The mystery surrounding the Slones and their missing child is much less interesting than Core's burgeoning friendship with the local sheriff, Donald Marium (James Badge Dale), who assists with the investigation.

It's a competent, by-the-numbers action melodrama.