Matt Zoller Seitz

That “Deepfaking Sam Altman” is earnest and curious and full of fun thought prompts ultimately makes it more frustrating than a flat-out bad movie would have been.

The film clearly has a lot on its mind. But by the end, you still might not know what it was, even though the hurtling camerawork, jagged edits, brutal physical confrontations, and bone-rattling sound design will send you home feeling like you’ve had an experience.

Roach is a director who can do stylish, clever compositions when it suits him, as demonstrated in his flamboyantly silly “Austin Powers” movies. But you wouldn’t know it from this film, which prizes information delivery over visual pizzazz to such a degree that it often feels more like a pilot for an HBO comedy series than something that can only be properly appreciated on a big screen.

If you loved the 2003 “Freaky Friday,” you’ll probably enjoy “Freakier Friday,” for the simple reason that it’s more or less the same movie, but with new characters added to the existing cast, and more complicated plot mechanics. Way more complicated. This is “Freaky Friday” to the fourth power.

It’s a disturbing, sometimes beautiful film that, by the end, is disquieting for all the wrong reasons.

The film’s cinematography is the best thing about it. There are solid performances, some believably purplish dime-novel dialogue, and other compensatory pleasures, but “Rust” is a saddlebag full of scenes and moments borrowed from great Westerns and embellished.

Distributed by the Christianity-centered Angel Studios, and written and directed by first-timer Jang Seong-ho (a visual effects master from Korean cinema), it is less of a fully satisfying animated feature that works on its own terms than a teaching tool that is clearly intended as such.

For the most part, “William Tell” is stuck in multiple in-between phases, and filmmaking modes. It’s far too violent and disturbing for little kids, but feels a bit too popcorny to pass muster as a serious epic drama.

The Odyssey is one of my favorite stories of all time, and I was looking forward to "The Return," but it never rises above the level of an honorable but misguided good try.

The Holocaust drama “White Bird” is a sensitive, well-meaning but ultimately rather programmatic film, presenting the tragedy mainly as a school lesson for present-day kids.

There are compensatory pleasures. The supporting performances are above and beyond, and Glen is so likable and so believable as a decent man pushed too far that if this film does well, he might be in line to have a late-in-life career renaissance in another of the senior action flicks that have become ubiquitous.

It's richly imagined, and you can tell everyone had fun immersing themselves in this strange and often disturbing world.

It’s patchy and digressive, and the overreliance on syrupy music becomes off-putting towards the end. But fans of the actor will probably enjoy it, because it’s a chance to appreciate the life and art of a remarkable talent whose period of superstardom was actually much briefer than we might have realized.

God & Country is an illustration of that classic conundrum faced by so many political documentaries with an alarmist tone. Even when its concerns are justified, such a project tends to alienate rather than entice, and those who are inclined to agree with its points will come away feeling that their worldview has been reinforced, while the viewers who are arguably most in need of seeing it will remain unaware of it or dismiss it as propaganda.

It's anchored by committed performances and fascinating details, but it never quite figures out how to lock the audience into whatever odd groove the storytellers have obviously decided to settle into.

This isn't a bad film by any means: it does a creditable job of convincing us that Penn's heart is in the right place (as an activist) even when the execution is sometimes impulsive or clumsy; but it lacks focus.

The problem isn't that this is a faith-based film aimed at a specific market niche (some of the greatest films ever made focus on spirituality). It's the project's bland vision.

Circus Maximus is a curiosity and a career footnote more than a substantial freestanding film achievement, which is too bad. It's more a notion for a work of art than a work of art, and you can't expect people to pay $25 (the cost of a special engagement ticket opening weekend) for a notion.

De Niro, bless his heart, is the engine that keeps this refurbished jalopy puttering along for 90 minutes.

It's better with fists and guns than with people, but it knows what targets it wants to hit, and its aim is sure.

There's a good movie in Romano the feature filmmaker, but this isn't it.

Unfortunately, The Pope’s Exorcist is a watchable but far-from-special rehash of exorcism movie cliches, with detours into a Vatican conspiracy plot that has been compared to Dan Brown's novels but half-assedly connects with church atrocities and scandals.

Watson's memoir and the 2010 documentary about her achievement, "210 Days," are altogether more thorough and nuanced looks at this story, though of course that's nearly always true of documentaries that tell the same story as works of fiction.

Ninety minutes of footage like this, minus any characters or plot at all, probably would've resulted in an artistically better use of a couple hundred million dollars than "Jurassic World: Dominion," which will doubtless be a smash on the order of all the other entries in the franchise, even though it doesn't do much more than the bare minimum you'd expect for one of these films, and not all that well.

It draws together a first-rank cast of character actresses and actors, most of them over 50, then mostly fails to invest the material with the invention and snappiness needed to invigorate it and make it memorable, as opposed to merely agreeable.

It has solid performances by an eccentric ensemble cast, charming moments of banter, and sex scenes that seem shockingly frank by American standards (they still take their clothes off in France). But it's too slow, disorganized, and muddled to make coherent points, and it often has to remind itself that it's based on a fairy tale.

The performances are better than the material deserves—particularly those of De la Reguera and Huerta, whose reactive closeups have a silent-movie expressiveness; and Lucas, who once again proves that he's willing to play deeply unlikable characters without signaling to the audience that he's a nice guy offscreen, actually.

There's no denying that Cruella is stylish and kinetic, with a nasty edge that's unusual for a recent Disney live-action feature. But it's also exhausting, disorganized, and frustratingly inert, considering how hard it works to assure you that it's thrilling and cheeky.

A promising but self-thwarting movie like this is more depressing than an outright bad or dumb film.

Netflix's The Prom is billed as a musical comedy because people sing in it while making funny faces, but beyond that, the relative levels of comedy and musicality ought to be subjects of debate.

It inadvertently puts Hawke in the position of having to carry a film that's more of a series of half-formed notions, some intriguing, others ill-advised, and a few verging perilously close to cute.

The voice-over explains things that we could have understood from looking at the images. It rarely passes up the opportunity to drop in a cliche.

It has a goofy grin on its face from frame one. But it never quite figures out how to pass its good vibrations to the audience.

Human Capital is so exquisitely cast, down to the smallest role, that it puts viewers in the unusual position of wishing a film were a TV series or a much longer movie, the better to take advantage of its best assets.

Lean, sincere, impassioned filmmaking, yet it fails to leave as much of an impression as it clearly wants to.

The result is a disappointment that's more crushing than an outright bad movie would be. The original, despite its flaws, had moments of primal power and deep understanding of what drives people, qualities that are mostly lacking here.

This is a Sad Rich People movie, no more so than a lot of American films dating back to the dawn of cinema, but it's no "The Leopard" or "The Royal Tenenbaums" or "The Great Gatsby" or you-name-it.

Full antihero equality will only be achieved when women are permitted to carry a crime drama by being so charismatic that viewers would consider following them into hell rather than give up the buzz they get from watching them be bad.

Unfortunately, Three Peaks is so thinly conceived and executed that, for the most part, it fails to justify its existence as a stand-alone feature.

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story is one of the most frustrating Martin Scorsese films as well as one of the most out-of-character.

It’s a dancing elephant of a movie. It has a few decent moves, but you’d never call it light on its feet.

So much of the needlessly complicated and rules-driven action inside the park plays like wasted motion, visually as well as narratively speaking.

The whole movie feels oddly stranded and dramatically inert, despite the obvious passion that went into making it.

You could build a suspension bridge over the gap between what Robin Hood could have been and what it is. Its hero is credible as a man who wants to rob from the rich and give to the poor, but the storytelling is so impoverished that the message can't stick.

The devil figure is Federico (Riccardo Scamarcio, last seen in "John Wick: Chapter Two"). He's eloquent, charming, faintly sinister man who, as Bryan points out, seems to magically appear in their lives at moments of crisis.

Unfortunately, the film never finds a way into Berg's personality that explores his many facets without reducing him to a blank-slate character at the center of a traditionally-made period thriller.

So preoccupied with giving its star's wish fulfillment fantasies that it forgets to make sure all the other major characters seem like characters, rather than underdeveloped notions.

This all sounds like it could make for a fascinating movie. But The Devil and Father Amorth feels at once bloated and slight, like a DVD supplement puffed up to feature length (an hour and eight minutes, just long enough to be exhibited in theaters as a stand-alone title).

This is not a particularly fascinating movie, unfortunately, despite being well-done in most of the superficial ways.

The cast is filled with actors doing everything they can to make their characters as memorable as possible even when the script (credited to four people) isn't lending them the support they deserve.

To call Clint Eastwood's The 15:17 to Paris a mixed bag would be generous. It packs all the wild action you came to see into a 20-minute stretch near the end, and elsewhere gives us something like a platonic buddy version of Richard Linklater's "Before" trilogy.

Frustratingly not-quite-there from start to finish.

This is all fascinating stuff. But you pretty quickly get the sense that Buirski either doesn't find it interesting enough to let it stand on its own or else is afraid audiences will rebel against too many bare-bones elements.

Whenever the movie reaches for poetry it lands somewhere in a chain drugstore's greeting card aisle, trying to choose between one that shows an adorable child laughing in a Photoshopped field of sunlit daisies, one that tries for gallows humor but isn't really that funny, and a third with a quote about mortality and wisdom only seems thoughtful because it's written in cursive.

Unfortunately, Lucy Walker's Buena Vista Social Club: Adios plays more like a well-intentioned but unsatisfying addendum to Wenders' movie and Cooder's recording.

Free Fire is neither the best nor the worst of the Tarantino wannabes; at its worst, it's tediously unoriginal, and at its best, it's funny and reasonably involving.

I keep forgetting the title of A Cure for Wellness and calling it “The Color of Despair.” It’s an accurate mistake.

The character is so one-note, always tying everything back to his need to redeem himself and his dad and articulating so many of his concerns verbally rather than through his eyes or body, that after a while I wanted to put in earplugs to get a break from him.

Sleepless is one of those movies that needed to be a lot better or a lot worse to make much of an impression.

Despite being played by two charismatic and more-than-capable actors, the title characters never click in the way they need to. They're too cool and vague for the volcanic story they enact.

It’s a pity that Jack Reacher: Never Go Back fails to support Cruise and his co-stars, all of whom are acting as if their lives depended on it. There’s a great movie buried somewhere in here—a strange but beguiling family comedy and a meditation on nature vs. nurture, with a bit of shooting and punching thrown in—but the filmmakers never figure out how to excavate it.

Like many Mel Gibson films, as well as such revenge-driven revisionist Westerns as "Posse" and "Django Unchained," The Birth of a Nation is an intriguing object, passionate and furious and shameless and slick, distorting history in both defensible and problematic ways.

A frustrating missed opportunity, The Lovers and the Despot takes a fascinating story about filmmaking, politics, kidnapping and propaganda and gives us almost no insight into the work of its two main characters, a director and his actress wife.

They all ultimately seem as if they are participating in a dubious enterprise, devised by gifted individuals who somehow can't take a big picture view of a story that would seem to demand one. London Road is brilliant in all the wrong ways.

War Dogs is a film about horrible people that refuses to own the horribleness.

There's not much awe showcased here. The film is mainly horseplay, wasted motion, and talk, talk, talk, with a few good action scenes.

Only fitfully entertaining or illuminating.

The alternately cornball and self-aware dialogue and the clearly not state-of-the-art CGI would seeming charmingly retro (like something from a TV miniseries two decades ago) if the movie didn't trot out one epic action film cliche after another.

An impressive display of film craft and a profoundly ugly movie—so gleeful in its violence and so nihilistic in its world view that it feels as though the director is daring his detractors to see it as a confirmation of their worst fears about his art.

And this is ultimately what damages In the Heart of the Sea more than anything else: it is so very many different things, but they all feel detached from each other, almost like a bunch of self-contained mini-movies stitched end-to-end, with the framing device serving as needle and thread.

The film's fuzzy mystical undertones are irksome as well. They seem less aligned with 19th century representations of Christian or Muslim spirituality than with fond childhood memories of "Star Wars."

If you love rape jokes, Get Hard is your movie.

It's blandly, often listlessly bad, check-the-blockbuster-boxes bad, just-out-of-film-school-and-shopping-a-tentpole-screenplay bad.

This ensemble drama about troubled upper-middle class strivers is slick, confident, and rather empty, and structurally more self-defeating than clever.

If only Dying of the Light had broken Schrader's recent close-but-no-cigar streak.

The film that Memphis most reminds me of is Bruce Weber's "Let's Get Lost," a meandering, ostentatiously gorgeous black-and-white documentary about Chet Baker.

The November Man wants to be taken seriously, except when it doesn't. This creates viewer whiplash. The movie is confused and often untrustworthy.

Too bad it isn't a wickeder, subtler, more imaginative movie.

This latest, a thriller about a photographer who might be a killer, is wild pop fly that disappears in the stands.

Divorce Corp is directed and edited at roughly the same level of imagination as a network newsmagazine story: talking head, talking head, talking head, cut to a chart, exterior shot of a courthouse, cut to another chart, talking head.

Lacks the original's momentum. It only sometimes builds to the peaks of lunacy that you want and need from this sort of picture. It goes here, it goes there, it does this, it does that.

Unfortunately this film has none of their urgency or sense of control; for long stretches it just doesn't seem to have any idea what, exactly, it wants to say, or be.

The picture is assembled with energy and a smidgen of style, but it's tiresome and slight.

Just bloody eye and ear candy.

Gandolfini's quietly magnificent performance is the only reason to see Violet & Daisy.