Liam Lacey

Returning director Patrick Hughes and screenwriters Tom O’Connor, Phillip Murphy, and Brandon Murphy count too much on star charisma and action set-ups to carry the narrative. The result is that the smirks are mild and scattered while the bloodshed, gun fights, and explosions are relentless.

A dark movie, but also a funny one.

All this is big, busy fun and while one might wish for some a bit more grit in the charm offensive, the catchwords here are feel-good and broad appeal.

Equal Standard means well, doesn’t stereotype black or white characters unduly, and offers hope instead of rage. The trouble is the movie is just poorly executed.

One can see clear linkages between Undine to the nightmare weirdness of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, though it’s as if this similar story were drained of its passionate momentum and rendered abstract.

Though it comes with good credentials, four hours feels like a lot of screen real estate for a what is essentially an elevated soap opera. For the home-streaming viewer though, The Real Thing meets the essential requirements for binge-watching: it’s undemanding to follow but sustains enough of a mystery to keep us hooked.

Both a heist film and a revenge story, Ritchie’s Wrath of Man is the cinema equivalent of a hollow-point bullet. It’s not weighty, but it causes a lot of destruction.

Drunk Bus has some pros and cons. At its best, it evokes the freewheeling style and emotional pangs of Greg Mottola’s 2009 film, Adventureland.

There’s more than an echo here of The Client, the 1993 John Grisham adaptation which saw Susan Sarandon playing a maternal role to Brad Refro’s 11-year-old Mafia witness. But the surrogate mother-child bond barely develops here, as Hannah and Connor leap from one near-death experience to the next in this relatively brisk 100-minute film.

At 74 minutes, the film has little time for deep character mining and ends up feeling more like a collection of uneven scenes and engaging dialogue riffs rather than a fully realized drama.

Bolivia’s 2019 Oscar submission for best international picture, adapted by writer-director Rodrigo Bellott, the film floats freely through different chronologies, creating a level of intellectual play that prevents the drama from sliding into earnest messaging.

Possibly, Eat Wheaties! will age well, but at this point, there’s more cringe than comedy here. The character of Sid isn’t just endearingly awkward or amusingly fatuous, like Steve Carell’s Michael Scott in The Office. He’s just thickly insensitive.

3 ½ Minutes, 10 Bullets, as well as being a compelling real-life courtroom drama, offers some clarity about race and injustice in the pre-Trump era.

Beyond the premise though, Held is pretty much stale ginger ale, not fresh, no fizz, thinly acted and tepidly paced. While it’s passably interesting, watching co-directors Travis Cluff and Chris Lofing (The Gallows) explore the antiseptic house as if watching a a real estate video, the accompanying thin drama drifts into episodic genre violence and doubtful logic.

Bosnian director Jasmila Žbanić succeeds where many filmmakers fail in conveying the dimensions of a mass atrocity in a film that matches clear-eyed personal experience to history in a lightly fictionalized story.

Sugar Daddy impresses as an idiosyncratic film with a forceful visual style and sound design, attached to a familiar story about the ways of bad men and a young woman getting lost in the fast life.

Fill the cupboards and refrigerator with junk food, lock the doors, roll yourself a couple of fat ones and settle in for a couple of hours of stupor/reverie. Warning: Resist any temptation to roll the movie back to figure out what just happened; it won’t help.

In summoning the artist and his eighties’ art-scene milieu, the film also serves as memorial to the generation of creative voices silenced by the AIDS virus.

As effective as Enforcement is on a visceral level, it comes up short in any deeper reflection on the social crisis of its premise.

Like a rash of contemporary films — The Trial of the Chicago 7, Judas and the Black Messiah and Da Five Bloods — F.T.A. reminds us how much the anti-war and civil rights battles of the past are currently resonant, even when we have our history slightly wrong.

You couldn’t call Coming 2 America a good movie or even a so-bad-its-good, but just puffed-up mediocre concoction with a few pockets of delight.

The best way to appreciate The Affair is to sidestep its pot-boiler pretentious and think of as an exceptionally elegant episode of House Hunters International.

The problems with The United States vs Billie Holiday aren’t about Day’s creditable performance, but pretty much everything that happens around it. That includes Pulitzer-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’ time-hopping, confusing script and Daniels’ direction, which is both feverishly pulpy and stilted and laden.

While the gangster genre over the past 50 years has been the specialty of Italian-American auteurs (Coppola, Scorsese, DePalma and The Sopranos’ David Chase), Mafia Inc., directed by Quebec director Daniel Grou (a.k.a. Podz), stands up surprisingly well.

I Blame Society barely scrapes by as midnight movie camp; it’s much better as a form of wryly witty performance art/film criticism.

A farce that fizzles, a satire that sags, and a dead-end for its gifted cast, Breaking News In Yuba County at least starts well.

Featuring terrific performances from Get Out alumnus, Daniel Kaluuya as the young revolutionary Hampton, and LaKeith Stanfield as FBI informant, William O’Neal, the film is a revelation from King, a director, who until now, was known for his television work and the 2013 comedy, Newlyweeds.

The film suffers from the over-interpreting mental “glitch,” eagerly connecting coincidence, mental illness, drug experiences, religious awe, computer gaming, and science fiction movies in an over-arching pattern.