Kristen Yoonsoo Kim

Moscow Never Sleeps is ambitious to a fault. While O’Reilly flexes an ability to tie together several narratives, he introduces so many characters that some of their stories must fall by the wayside. It’s a shame, because that muddles the more interesting vignettes.

Tito is a better achievement in sound and visuals than plot or character. The sheer strangeness of the film may be mesmerizing at first, but even the slim 70-minute run time eventually feels tedious when so little happens.

It's difficult to label Arnow's cinematic voice, and this particular film, or why anyone would even want to watch something so personal, but i hate myself :) is never not fascinating.

The jump-skip format renders the chemistry between Senna and Adam so incoherent that by the time you watch them have their big first kiss, then break up, then get back together again, it plays less like a real movie and instead one of those memory slideshows your iPhone photo album generates for you.

Lewin’s film is directionless, so muddied by Berg’s bloated résumé that the payoff never comes. Berg was an enigmatic and underappreciated Renaissance Man, and we leave the film not especially enlightened.

Elizabeth inspires empathy, but it often feels like we’re being told to feel a certain way by being shown so much rather than being allowed to naturally warm up to her.

With his first feature, the director and co-writer Nico Raineau flips gender stereotypes, giving Darla more sexually aggressive traits and Bailey more timid ones. But even that feels trite.

Elijah Bynum’s messy debut film is only bearable thanks to Chalamet’s charisma.

There are some nicely shot moments throughout, but they feel empty — slow montages that mostly just fill out the film’s thin plot and already slim runtime.

Though the Psammead grants the children’s wishes . . . they come with a catch: a set up for an unimaginative moral lesson and nearly two hours of lukewarm familial bonding.

An unfortunate, unfunny mess.

Herzog has previously thrived on madness, so the failure here proves even more curious.

Aardvark, the first feature from writer-director Brian Shoaf, is so inane that several times it put this critic into a fugue state. Meandering in message or plot, the film proves to be not just incoherent but excruciatingly boring, quite a feat with a cast that includes Jenny Slate, Jon Hamm, Sheila Vand, and, sure, Zachary Quinto.

Rupture is a sci-fi abduction thriller that leaves little to be thrilled about.

This movie so badly wants to be a sexy thriller, but it is neither sexy nor thrilling.

With only a few fleeting moments of nail-biting thrills, Every Breath You Take remains mostly tepid and frustrating.

Daniel Adams’s An L.A. Minute makes you suffer through it all and never redeems itself, despite the potentially interesting duo of Gabriel Byrne and Kiersey Clemons as leads. The stars seem out of place with each other and in this movie, with creators who have no idea what they want to say.

The problem — aside from the movie being simple and gimmicky — is in the execution — Schulze's, not the villain's.

It’s a well-meaning portrait, with heartfelt moments — especially as Kim recounts childhood hardships — but it’s often muddled, especially in its selection of talking heads.

The film fails to sustain the exhilaration of its initial buildup.

Despite the classic David-versus-Goliath narrative, the story is never as mesmerizing as the grotesquely glam stage numbers and Imperioli’s illuminated face watching them, glowing with pride.

Even with the personal elements, the lean feature also feels like an educational program, to a fault.

Fox is riveting as a stubborn go-getter who often employs morally questionable methods for the sake of truth and art. But her screen presence isn’t enough to fill out this lean thriller, which hits so many cliché beats along the way.

Leopold and Persi are both compelling performers, but the writer-director Yuval Hadadi renders their characters with little subtlety.

For a film granted so much up-close access with its subject, Picture of His Life hears surprisingly little from Nachoum himself. Between vérité clips of the journey, the film is inundated with archival footage.

The documentarian Joseph Hillel tells their stories in somewhat formulaic fashion, creating a perfectly pleasant, educational movie that is not as riveting as it should be.

Imagine mumblecore with actual mumbling and no wit, even though those lo-fi auteurs, the Duplass brothers, are executive producers.

Long Live Rock feels, at best, like a passionate but elementary essay. More often than not, it feels like a table of contents. The hot-topic buttons are touched upon, but McHugh doesn’t forge far enough into the mosh pit.