Marshall Shaffer

The film is a mesmeric but frequently muddled exploration of transgender self-actualization.

If the assignment was to rebuild the series largely from scratch essentially, perhaps the producers should have taken a risk by entrusting “Snake Eyes” with a director who could bring something specific or startling. This is still a derivative, paint-by-numbers effort that can’t decide if it wants to build a franchise or a character.

Given the unhurried pacing and general underplaying of the situation’s gravity, the film feels like visiting a museum exhibit rather than living through a flashpoint of history. Here, the past’s horrors are but pictures nestled safely behind glass.

Wilde toils feverishly to create the illusion of momentum and communicates to the audience that they must be feeling such a sensation. But for all the belabored artistry of this choppily cut enterprise, little in “The Invite” actually moves. It’s potential energy, unconvincingly trying to pass itself off as kinetic.

Its desire to resist easy storytelling paradigms around artists is admirable, but without punching up or down, the film feels like it’s pulling punches altogether.

When they can translate something into a tangible sensation, like the camera effects of focus that take viewers into Piper’s distorted field of vision, the film operates within a comfortable range for the directors. Where they struggle to locate resonance is in the emotional realm.

Origin lacks both a center of gravity and a sense of scale.

Sora Neo struggles to balance the immediacy of adolescent angst with the long-range outlook of using the students’ experience as a canary in the coal mine for society at large.

While it’s great to see an example of a filmmaker refusing to rest on his laurels or stay inside the nearly defined box of his cultural reputation, a film must be a film – not just a concept. Un Couple never quite manages to transcend its origins as a precious pandemic project.

Hardly a false note is sounded throughout The Friend, but it operates within such a limited emotional range that it drifts into monotonic plainsong.

The film’s lack of character development might not appear so evident were it not in such stark contrast with all the other elements of “Harvest.”

Even the most hair-brained of Wain’s films have some quality elements, and Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is certainly no exception to that rule. But it’s nevertheless a slight disappointment to see a luminary operating at the lower end of his power and promise.

The brothers tend not to dally much with their narratives, but even adjusting for their typical brevity, Young Ahmed feels like a cursory examination of the social issues they raise. It lacks the incisiveness of their other glances directly into the heart of Belgian society.

The Return may render its mythological figures lifelike through flesh and blood, but nowhere inside that viscera lies a beating heart.

The Disney animators clearly had a blast creating a world beyond their wildest dreams and finding the connections between all the curios they created. Too bad that they could not let the wider creative team in on the fun – and the audience as well, for that matter. A visual feast leaves the other four senses wanting.

For a film so fixated on provoking fear and dread through the medium of audio, it’s naturally strongest when it does not bother to stimulate the eyes at all.

This bloated documentary will not create any new fans of Led Zeppelin because MacMahon caters exclusively to the group’s superfans.

The film gets too caught up in concern trolling about the sexual timidity of today’s youth.

Shephard’s film is a half-baked thinkpiece on cancel culture in search of a plausible narrative. While hitching her ideas to a scammer story, it loses the thread in a sea of topicality. No matter the potency contained in portions of her message, “Not Okay” is muddled by her delivery through the wrong medium

Once the basic parameters of Franco’s thought experiment in Dreams are grasped, what’s left is an obvious parable about immigration with little to offer beyond spitefulness and a smugly superior sense of self-loathing.

Dead for a Dollar provides a decently intriguing yarn within the framework of the Western that burrows a few inches below the surface. No one can say Hill didn’t hold up his end of the deal, which may be all that matters to him in the end.

It does not take much imagination to imagine a version of “Rob Peace” where, given the room to sit with events, Rob’s journey provides a damning X-ray of American society’s shortsightedness. But far too often, the film settles for simply conveying information through dramatization.

Be it sexuality, gender, class, age, or race, there’s scarcely a hot-button issue of identity that Emerald Fennell won’t invoke to amplify the stakes of an obvious metaphor.

The Whale" stays too intellectual in its exploration of the physical and spiritual dimensions of redemption to and from bodily captivity. This comes at the expense of the director's strengths in the visceral realm. It restricts what could have been a truly great comeback performance from Brendan Fraser into being merely a good one.

Ballerina is passable as a continuation of “John Wick” mythology. However, it’s not strong enough to organically generate comparable enthusiasm for continued storytelling with this character.

The film never manages to reconcile the enormity of the Holocaust with how ordinary a bureaucrat Eichmann was.

[Boden and Fleck] re-emerge carrying some of the hallmarks of comic book cinema as well: an overemphasis on in-jokes, a sprawling web of larger-than-life yet flimsy characters, and a belief that a kick-ass fight scene at the end can overwrite many of the wrongs that came before.

The scattershot Mother Mary can never effectively find the connective tissue between different modes of storytelling. To put it in musical terms, this is less a mixtape and more of a playlist on a chaotic shuffle.

Christy lulls us into complacency by deviating little from the standard inspirational sports-movie playbook.

When given the space to explore the knottiness of being a gay man in a world taking but tentative steps toward recognizing the community’s full humanity, Luke Evans provides the complex representation that audiences are craving.

Not unlike the on-screen pair, Mickey (Sebastian Stan) and Chloe (Denise Gough), Papadimitropoulos excels in exploring the couple’s carnal journey but can never quite hit a groove when it comes to finding stability in their cohabitation.

There’s a floor for entertainment with a cast this strong, especially two leads who can contort themselves bodily and emotionally with such dexterity. But “The Bride!” spends too long operating at that level because it cannot escape the mire of confusion about its own identity.

Hocus Pocus fans wanted a new movie, but Disney just gave them a mascot appearance masquerading as a sequel instead.

The film ultimately feels like little more than hired hand work from Wright. What he lacks in compositional vision, he tries to make up for in clever casting (Colman Domingo, William H. Macy, and Lee Pace all deliver their best), as well as some simple gags. But like the people in Ben Richards’ fictional dystopia discover, amusing ourselves to death can only go so far. “The Running Man” settles for being good when, if the topline talent had leaned into their fortes, it could have been truly great.

Law’s take on the Russian leader feels both real and mysterious — two features that the film otherwise struggles to corral across its unwieldy runtime.

If the people on screen only feel like characters, then no amount of creepy creature design or surprising twist can make a venture such as Perkins’ here register as anything other than an antiseptic experience.

Green’s humanistic stamp is evident when Wahlberg expresses a soulful sentiment or denunciation of narrow-minded thinking, yet there’s little for any director to do when faced with such an untidy script.

Assayas becomes so subservient to the sheer volume of events and information he must bring to life that the film completely subsumes any sense of personal style or voice.

The film tastes like the cinematic equivalent of Clooney's tequila brand Casamigos. That is to say, The Boys in the Boat goes down smoothly, if somewhat unremarkably.

Orphan: First Kill only merits viewing if it is a viewer’s first exposure to the series. For anyone else, a rewatch of the original ought to do – it holds up remarkably well on repeat viewing.

As it goes on, Cocaine Bear becomes far too sober an affair for its subject matter, where no amount of carnage can fully compensate for its lack of comedy.

Watts certainly makes that internal struggle compelling without resorting to overwrought physical transformation.

The best that can be said about everything surrounding Powell and Sweeney in Anyone But You is that they mostly have the good sense to move the plot quickly and then let the stars sparkle.

There’s a good movie about therapy and PTSD inside Jay Duplass’ See You When I See You. The trouble is, it’s buried in a so-so family ensemble film about shared grief and recovery.

The material’s dualities trap Ford between continents, not to mention genres and tones.

The drama in Downtown Owl often feels stilted and too locked in to Klosterman’s observations instead of the character’s actions.

A need for speed works for Sonic the character, not “Sonic The Hedgehog” the franchise itself. The film never feels like it’s thinking beyond the next laugh line. It’s so caught up in the adrenaline rush of the present moment that Sonic The Hedgehog 2 completely loses sight of the endgame.

The film is in fact so busy introducing characters and churning through plot points that there’s not really even time to let animation powerhouse Illumination give it a spin of inspired silliness that made the “Despicable Me” franchise such an unexpected hit.

They/Them lacks an overarching perspective on the very nature of conversion therapy practitioners, perhaps because it is so straight-jacketed by the Blumhouse house style. In search of topicality for its audience, it sacrifices authenticity to itself.

Fleischer channels the tenor of the influences his film wears on its sleeve: the manipulative music demanding awe, the lighthearted spirit of the action, the smirking star-power needed to sell quippy banter. But his tonal fidelity cannot entirely cover the seams of this sloppily assembled script.

The film has no answers because Lin plays it more like a heist film—where the bounty is the purity of the unexposed North Sentinelese—than a sincere human drama about faith and identity. Lin entertains as a result but struggles to enlighten.

Rise of the Beasts proves that Bayhem is still strong within the series. Worse, the parts that linger are not the visual signature of sweaty, sun-streaked bedlam. It’s the noisy, nonsensical insistence that submission to sensory overload should outrank any other storytelling consideration.

Like a Spider-Man pointing meme doomed to continue eternally, ‘Dominion’ points to the terrifying possibility that nostalgia might serve as a renewable resource for Hollywood. (Ironic, given the fossil-fueled power of ‘Jurassic.’) Trevorrow gives audiences what they want – or, at the very least, what the studio bosses at Universal think they want. But at what cost?