Marshall Shaffer

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Frank & Louis slips into being a film that’s observed and admired from a distance, not experienced emotionally.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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