Matt Zoller Seitz

The film seems to be fighting a losing battle to make sense of itself, to coalesce into a statement, to not fade away. This feels right. Knight of Cups is not a young man's movie. It's an old man's movie. A philosophically engaged, beatific, starchild-as-old-man's movie. The end is coming.

It is not merely a bad film. It is a collection of notes for a film that never quite evolved to the rough draft stage, much less cohered into a finished movie. That makes it more dispiriting than other notorious Woody Allen misfires.

Night Patrol is far from perfect, but it’s got a certain something that pulls you in. The bleakness of its worldview is matched by the integrity of its filmmaking and performances. The life it depicts is not sugarcoated. It’s drenched in blood.

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

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.

The film's tone is just as original. How to describe it? it owes a bit to the biographical films of Ken Russell, which teetered on the edge of camp and used facts as a springboard for wild fancy; but it's much sweeter.

Unfortunately, early hints that the the actor-filmmaker's latest will be a brilliant, bloody, sustained workplace satire don't pan out. This is an intelligently composed, crisply edited, sometimes amusing, but otherwise unremarkable cross/double cross gangster picture.

The problem, though, is that American Underdog doesn't ever really connect the modest virtuousness of Kurt and Brenda to Kurt's ascension as a quarterback.

Just good enough to make you wish that it were better.

For all the psychological realism of Carrie and Margaret's relationship, however, this remake has a comic book feeling.

The process of transformation is the story, and the story truly belongs to the artist.

Based on a 2016 memoir by Tom Mitchell, “The Penguin Lessons” wants to be a thoughtful light entertainment about ideals and courage, but ends up seeming grotesquely misguided.

Guy Ritchie‘s In the Grey offers what fans expect from the director: relentless but nimble editing; breathtaking locations (Spain, Saudi Arabia, the Canary Islands); clothes, shoes, and hair to die for; the self-mocking machismo and playful insults of male bonding; and a character’s verbal summary of a plan intercut with shots of the actions being performed.

If truth in advertising applied to movies, they would have titled this one "Reheated Cultural Leftovers."

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.

There’s no compelling evidence onscreen that the huddled masses that the script is so concerned with are truly moved and edified by watching Ben’s rebellious acts and anti-capitalist slogans on TV, or if he’s just their latest shiny object of distraction.

Slick and sometimes goofy as it is, Blackhat is an odd, fascinating movie: a high-tech action thriller about the human condition. I can think of no better current illustration of the notion that, to quote this site's founder, it's not what a movie is about, it's how it's about it.

The United States vs. Billie Holiday is so misguided that it's hard to know where to start griping about it. It wallows in cruelty, misery, and degradation without providing insight into the historical personages who are so thoughtfully depicted by its cast.

Most of all, Magic Mike's Last Dance is about fit, graceful bodies moving through space.

The best thing about this movie is that you believe in the relationship. Hart and Johnson are a classic comedy duo in the tradition of Abbott & Costello, Bob Hope & Bing Crosby and Gene Wilder & Richard Pryor.

Despicable Me 4 won't win any prizes, but if you like this kind of thing, you'll like this thing. I laughed. The dumber and more random the jokes, the harder I laughed. The kids I saw it with laughed harder.

Heart alone does not a good film make.

The ratio of humor and action and parent-child bonding is so formulaic, and the character design and molded-figurine-like animation so typical of the genre in the age of Pixar (and Pixar imitators), that Epic evaporates from the mind within minutes of leaving the theater.

The Last Thing Mary Saw is so effective as a vehicle for performances, atmosphere, and period detail, and so convincing an examination of suffering under the boot-heel of a cult, that one may wish that it added up to more.

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.

Ford's voice — always deep, lowered an octave by age and one more by William's longing — is even more powerful. This is Ford's best performance since "The Fugitive," maybe since "Witness."

You’re Cordially Invited is reheated comedy leftovers, for the most part, but there’s enough warmth, sentimentality, and belly laughs to make for a raucous timewaster.

Close is aces when it's watching its star move through the world, silently checking everyone and everything out, hiding her mental math until it's time to kill some dudes. The action is frenzied but comprehensible, brutal but not wantonly sadistic.

A jumbled, fitfully amusing, occasionally fascinating effort, but one that shows promise even when it's stumbling over its ambition and falling prey to some of the same stereotypes about "red" and "blue" (or reactionary and progressive) America that it keeps intimating that Americans need to get beyond.

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.

If nothing else, McConaughey's goofball autodidact's intensity certifies that there is, in fact, a "Matthew McConaughey" type of character, and that McConaughey originated it.

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.

An old-fashioned Biblical spectacular with fresh blood in its veins.

The movie is so relentless in its desire to pull everything together and not leave any threads dangling that it sprints through scenes where you might’ve wanted it to linger, rushes through the final tournament, and rarely gives any character or subplot its full attention.

It’s one of the year’s best and most distinctive movies, though sure to be divisive, even alienating for some viewers, in the manner of nearly all Malick’s films to one degree or another.

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

Everyone in this cast does their best to strike the right balance between seeming in on the joke and acting like all of this bloody absurdity is normal.

It's hard to tell if Kevin Pollak's documentary Misery Loves Comedy is too much of a good thing or not enough.

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."

To its credit, the “Now You See Me” trilogy, about magic experts tricking powerful bad guys, understands this principle and conveys it with humor and a light touch. That understanding, plus a strong cast, is the only thing preventing the films from turning into jumbled, giant bags of arbitrary plot twists, eager to outsmart viewers into nonsense.

It’s a pretty good movie that, thanks mainly to its performances, has a lot more life than you might expect, given the concept and the formulaic way that it hits its major story points.

It's not a great or even particularly distinctive movie, but it's heartfelt and plain-spoken enough that it might connect with viewers whose families have dealt with addiction and recovery, domestic abuse, financial deprivation, and other problems highlighted in the story. Advertisement

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.

So what are you looking at, really? Is the movie a bait-and-switch? Probably. The film has fun with the idea that nobody would have gotten involved were it not for the chance to work with James Franco and perhaps perform in a sex scene with James Franco (there are no sex scenes involving James Franco, if you were wondering).

No matter how feverishly Gilliam directs and no matter how enthusiastically his actors act, the whole thing remains too, er, theoretical.

The film's tight construction and prolific action scenes carry it, and Blunt and Johnson do the irresistible force/immovable object dynamic well enough, swapping energies as the story demands.

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.

I’d applaud the movie for taking the form of its heroine’s pathologies if the result was something more than a good try with a lot of heart.

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

Calling Space Station 76 a spoof of 1970s science fiction doesn't do the trick. It's quiet, slow movie that's often funny, sometimes sad, and occasionally uncomfortable.

Jean-Claude Van Damme, whose work as the villain in Enemies Closer is the only reason to see this film.

The film will play well among standup comics who feel they've been muzzled by humorless slogan-spouting liberals, bluenoses and the generally squeamish.

Millers in Marriage isn’t a science fiction movie. Which is unfortunate, because if it were, we might’ve gotten a decent explanation for why one minute of the characters’ lives makes you feel as if you’ve aged a month.

Bullet Train is at its best when it's a comedy about self-styled badasses who think they're free agents but are really all just passengers on a train rocketing from one station to another, oblivious to the desires of any individual riding on it. The abstractness and "it's all a lark" humor ultimately undo any aspect that might otherwise sink its roots into the viewer's mind.

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.

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.

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.

This American version of Park Chan-Wook's Korean thriller is Lee's most exciting movie since "Inside Man" — not a masterpiece by any stretch, but a lively commercial genre picture with a hypnotic, obsessive quality, and an utter indifference to being liked, much less approved of.

The film is high-strung, nervous and slightly chilly in the New York scenes, but once the action shifts to the beaches of Venice, it slows down considerably, and fittingly.

TRON: Ares is spectacularly designed, swiftly paced, thoughtfully written, and directed within an inch of its neon-hued life.

The picture begins vanishing from the memory the instant that its final credits roll, and its laid back attitude suggest it's fine with that.

Much better and more original than anyone could have expected.

Back on the Strip is qualitatively somewhere between a mid-level "Saturday Night Live" cash-in movie and a '90s indie comedy where the cast greatly outclasses the screenplay.

The film’s clever editing (credited to Klinger and Geraldine Mangenot) jumps back and forth through time in intriguing, sometimes intoxicating ways, and even when the drama flags there’s always a stunning image to stare at.

Is it a must-see? No—the middle hour is fun, in that patented easygoing "Ant-Man" way.

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.

Co-directors Éric Summer and Éric Warin and their collaborators seem determined to crush the life out of an original premise and many promising characters by stealing every available page out of a substandard American studio animated feature’s playbook.

Its imperfections are compensated by magnificence.

The movie never entirely rises to the height of its ambitions, though: there are moments when you can practically hear it straining to impart significance to what is, in the end, a fairly standard sensitive-young-criminal-in-over-his-head story.

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.

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.

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

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.

But still! Even if Irresistible were released a year ago, when its face-down-on-the-bar, abandon-all-hope vibe would've made more sense, it would still be entering a pop culture landscape in which "Sorry to Bother You" and "The Death of Stalin" existed, and it would seem imaginatively as well as politically bereft in comparison.

If smart dumb comedies hold a place in your heart, you'll like Masterminds. The main characters are masterminds only in their own heads, and the thoughts that tumble out of their mouths are as nonsensical as they are sincere.

If you love the “what the hell, let’s try it” sensibility that the Legendary Pictures monster franchise has embraced thus far, you’ll still find plenty here to enjoy. But it shouldn’t have been necessary to go looking for it.

Did I like The Seven Faces of Jane? I love the idea of it, I love that it exists, and I'm not sure how much I can ultimately say for or against it, considering that everything good and bad is baked into the methods that the performers and filmmakers committed to.

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

Sweet Girl is too long and disorganized, and often just too much, for its own good. It seems to want to be five, possibly six landmark 1990s and early aughts blockbusters at once.

A tougher, smarter film than American sci-fi cinema buffs are used to seeing.

It's as engrossing, thoughtful, heartfelt, angry, hopeful, and altogether valuable as his best work. If it is indeed Loach's farewell, it's one hell of a fine note to go out on.

We're watching two strong-willed people overcome their differences and learn to be a team: it's "Die Hard" reimagined as couples' counseling.

Although it has a solid cast, some amusing bits, and lots of imaginative violence, “Play Dirty,” a comedy-thriller-action movie about the theft of already-stolen treasures in a plot to topple a dictator, is easily the most forgettable of Shane Black‘s films, as both writer and writer-director.

The star's Capone Voice is really something else, though — right up there with Hardy's Bane in "The Dark Knight Rises" and the title character of "Bronson" and the murderous trapper in "The Revenant" in goofy daring, as well as raw material for celebrity impressions that one might attempt while buzzed at a party. No matter how many times you hear it, it never seems to issue organically from the man on the screen.

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.

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.

The problem — and wow, it's a big one — is that none of these actors have material firm enough to shape into a bona fide performance.

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).

It's often painful, and not in a good way; it's painful because of the roads it doesn't explore, the shortcuts it takes, and the special pleading it can't stop itself from indulging in.

An action film, a spy thriller, a meditation on revenge, and a story about mentors and pupils, but mostly it's a movie that loves to maim and kill people and is very good at 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.

If the film is a potluck stew of half-cooked notions, it's at least a tasty one.

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

The cast's heroic exertions fail to save Flower from its own worst tendencies.

The crime comedy Pixie dissolves in the mind as you're watching it. You've seen it before. And the "it" you've seen before is the most derivative version of "it."

It's the kind of film where you start trying to guess which of the characters will turn out to be a figment of the narrator's imagination. The answer, of course, is all of them.

Loud, trashy, sweet and weird, the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers reboot Power Rangers is not merely an ideal film for rambunctious and undemanding 12-year olds, it actually sees the world through their eyes.

The thing that makes the film stand out is the way it shows artists relating to each other and to their work. It's rare to see a movie about creative people that accurately captures the way they'll size each other up on first meeting and then, once they've determined that the other person is serious, proceed immediately to the sharing of influences and the granular discussion of theory and technique. [2021 Director's Cut]

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.

Next Goal Wins exists as proof of the invulnerability of a certain movie template and as a Frankenstein patchwork of previous films.

There are a few brilliantly realized moments, the acting is mostly strong despite the weak script (Affleck and Cavill are both superb—Affleck unexpectedly so), and there's enough mythic raw material sunk deep in every scene that you can piece together a classic in your mind if you're feeling charitable; but if you aren't, “Batman v. Superman” will seem like a missed opportunity.

It mostly feels like a very long pilot for a Netflix show that would go to series, build a modest but loyal following, then get canceled after two seasons so the streamer doesn’t have to give everyone a raise for going to three. But there's loads of talent in it.

Wish Upon is another one of those movies that would be memorable if it were a lot better or a lot worse.

Equals goes for the Vulcan solution, and while the movie feels a bit thin and padded as a feature, it believes in itself completely, and there are moments when the sincerity of the lead actors and the director's addiction to the narcotics of Kristen Stewart's eyes, lips, neck and hands puts the whole concept over the top.

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.

Nothing about it makes a lot of sense, but then, nothing about classic old comedies starring people like W.C. Fields or Laurel and Hardy made much sense, because they about oddballs getting into trouble and then trying to get out of it.

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

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey illustrates a principle endorsed by many legendary directors: Casting the right leads will get you ninety percent of the way to success.

Has a lot of good ideas and a few engrossing sequences, but it never quite finds a groove, or even a mode, and it ends in an abrupt, unsatisfying way.

The result is a narratively relaxed yet intensely tactile experience.

Old Dads has a great cast, but it's barely a movie. That's a shame, because it's the directorial debut of Bill Burr.

A handsomely produced, nearly empty experience, "Unfrosted: The Pop-Tarts Story" is hard to describe because it's tough to tell what the filmmakers were going for, much less argue about whether they achieved it.

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.

The most galling thing about Transcendence, though, isn't its inability to get a handle on what, if anything, it wants to say about the enormous changes happening to the human race, it's the movie's ending, which seems calculated to reassure us that everything's going to be fine as long as the right people are in charge, especially if they're good looking.

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

Momoa is the best reason to see the movie. He's as alpha-cool, even jerk-ish, as a "maverick" action star can be while also making you believe his character is fundamentally decent and knows when he's gone too far and sincerely feels bad about it. And he's got range.

There are too many major characters and too many points of emphasis. As elegantly directed as it sometimes is, it feels disjointed, scattered.

Jem and the Holograms is one of the weirdest big screen adaptations of a cheap TV cartoon that I've seen. That's praise.

The result is an oxymoron: a frenetic slog. That’s unfortunately what happens to King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.

Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, and featuring a remarkable lead performance by Dwayne Johnson, the spiky and majestic Black Adam is one of the best DC superhero films to date.

When future generations of media scholars need an example of a work that gathered up and displayed with peerless skill all of the techniques yet devised for a new medium—in this case, second-screen entertainment, which superficially resembles cinema or television, but is meant not to make any demands on anybody—”Fountain of Youth” might be the work that they they name-check.

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

Like many classic Japanese monster films of the era, it is blithely unconcerned with convincing you that anything in its running time could actually happen. As a result, you believe in every frame. You enter the dream.

Bell's performance is the best reason to see Raze.

The dark comedy Bad Therapy, about a married couple that becomes prey for a disturbed and manipulative therapist, contains so many promising elements that it's a shame that it never figures out how to mold them into a satisfying shape.

Table 19 also feels the need to be a romantic comedy in which all's well that ends well, and it's here that the movie fails most conspicuously.

Throughout its last hour it keeps jumping into your lap and demanding love without doing anything to earn it.

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

This is the kind of earnest but inept and obliviously indulgent indie flick that a film festival's artistic director would program in full awareness of its deficiencies, because they thought the name of someone associated with the project (in this case, the director) will put butts in seats.

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

A decent idea for a low-budget movie that never gets past the idea stage, and after a brief while, you may start to question whether it should have been a movie at all, much less a 90-minute one.

It takes its sweet time getting to the point, and generally speaking, the less interested it is in moving the plot along, the weirder and funnier it becomes.

The Exorcist: Believer is a pretty good movie that's so stuffed with characters and not-quite-developed ideas that you may come away from it thinking about what it could have been instead.

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.

If the action and espionage elements were executed at the same level as the dramatic and comedic exchanges and the observations about the types of people drawn to this life, Ava might've been a cult classic.

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

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

Once you're immersed, it's a powerful experience that lingers in the mind long after the film's many disappointments have started to fade.

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.

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.

For all its miscalculations, this is a personal picture, violent and sweet, clever and goofy. It's as obsessive and overbearing as Steven Spielberg's "1941" — and, I'll bet, as likely to be re-evaluated twenty years from now, and described as "misunderstood."

There’s no denying Hill’s instinct for identifying the heart of a dramatic scene and turning the volume of the storytelling down low enough for us to hear it beating.

The Cloverfield Paradox is a bit of a scam job, promising to reconcile entries in a series that have little in common save for a shared genre. It fizzles so badly at the end that you might legitimately wonder if it ever had anything to do with the other two films in the first place, or if it was produced independently of the series and retroactively added.

Nearly every aspect of this feature from Tyler Spindel, formerly a second unit director for Adam Sandler's Happy Madison Productions, is derivative and desperate and, at the same time, bizarrely pleased with itself.

There's something off-kilter about it, in a good way. It has a confidence that might not be earned but is still enjoyable to see. It's tapping into something true and knows it.

This second sequel is escapist in a next-level way: it escapes from drama as well as life.

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.

Once in a while, you see a film where it's clear that everyone involved is operating at the peak of of their skills, yet the whole is so misguided that the result is still awful. Such is The Desperate Hour.

Wahlberg should not be cast in any role predicated on the idea that he’s good with words and ideas. Hauser is one of the best actors in the English language and will escape this disaster and do more great work, so there’s that.

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

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

I removed my eyeballs from my head as soon as I got back from Alice Through the Looking Glass and cleaned them in a sink. I could have left them in and only cleaned the fronts, but I didn't want to take any chances.

Annie is light on its feet, frothy, and always insistently, at times provocatively kind, determined to melt grumpy hearts like marshmallows.

After Earth is ultimately too thin of a story to support all of its grandiose embellishments, but so what? It's better to try to pack every moment with beauty and feeling than to shrug and smirk. The film takes the characters and their feelings seriously, and lets its actors give strong, simple performances.

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.

This isn't an unwatchable movie, just an underachieving and forgettable one, and somehow that's more irritating than a disastrous swing for the fences would've been.

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

The new Death Wish is a vigilante film that's also about vigilante film cliches, when it remembers to think about such things, which is only occasionally. Most of its attempts to subvert or freshen up familiar elements aren't well developed, and they're certainly never strong enough to counter the bloodlust and gun worship that's invariably going to power this kind of project.

It's the kind of movie where, if you saw it when you were 14, you'd see it ten or twenty more times, and be inspired to check out books from the library, maybe memorize some poetry.

The movie has a clearly defined aesthetic and a consistent tone and a good heart, and there are moments where it wanders into the sublime.

Orwell did not intend “Animal Farm” as light entertainment.

There are a few nice moments of performance and filmmaking (including the elaborately choreographed final shot), but not enough to redeem a film that seems to flinch from the harsh truths it was presumably created to address.

The whole thing is too much of a tease, and once you figure that out, there's no actual suspense to speak of, just momentary manipulations.

Unfortunately, the craftsmanship is lacking.

There are no people to watch in Fantastic Four, only collections of character traits and attitudes brought fitfully to life by actors who might've mistakenly thought they were hitching a ride on the superhero movie gravy train by signing up for this misfire.

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.

There's nothing fun about panning a feature by a first-time director, especially when it seems to come from a place of good intentions, but Music, a musical fantasy drama about an autistic teen, is bad. Mystifyingly bad. Verging on "What were they thinking?" bad.

The car chase thriller Getaway has a wild premise and few good moments, and if there were an Oscar for wrecking police cars, it would absolutely win.

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.

Maybe the heart of the problem is that Kate and Meg's behavior doesn't track with the practical realities of lifelong, functioning friendship between (most) women as experienced by...well, any functioning adult who lives in the world.

The worst American film I've seen this year.

The comedy thriller The Con is On is a Who's Who of 1990s indie film character actors, but the movie ends up delivering a lot of cliches from that brief but extremely specific era of filmmaking, and not necessarily the ones you might want.

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.

This movie will be of particular interest to students who want a lively, thoughtful presentation of basic historical subjects but aren't going to get it in classrooms where the curriculum is approved by people who are mainly concerned with avoiding discomfort and preserving the status quo.

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.

First Love is an earnest but unremarkable romance wrapped around an intelligent and sometimes powerful story of the destruction that capitalism inflicts on middle-class American families.

By the time the film eases into its final stretch, it becomes a sub-genre of drama that I call "accidental radio," meaning that even though there are pictures, you might not see them all because you're covering your eyes a lot of the time.

It's torment in cinematic form, made comprehensible and engrossing by its focus on a singular experience, and the performance that anchors it.

Waking Karma is the kind of small movie you root for even when it fails to live up to its potential. There's a lot that doesn't quite work, but you can tell by the strong performances and the production's overall sincerity that everyone involved was hoping to create something memorable; the missteps are mainly about what the film decides to emphasize.

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

The jump scares work (jump scares almost always do; they're the easiest way to convince the audience that they've gotten their money's worth), but Malum is much more impressive when it turns its talented ensemble cast loose on material that was obviously a lot of fun to play with.

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.

Even for a picaresque plot comprised of incidents and moments, it's a flat and disjointed effort that lurches forward and stops and lurches forward again throughout its brief running time—a labor of love that doesn't deliver.

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.

A strange and memorable but not entirely successful film, "Sweet Dreams" turns colonialism into a source of pitch-black slapstick comedy.

As it turns out, this movie has a lot of the virtues of a Sorkin joint, in particular a gift for snappy patter and keen insight into the dynamics of relationships between smart, accomplished, ambitious people. However, it also has some of the flaws, chiefly an overconfidence in its ability to articulate the big ideas and timeless themes that are believed to be hallmarks of Important Drama.

This movie should probably be considered more promotional material than journalism, but that's not necessarily a bad thing because it's the most intellectually stimulating kind of promotion, concentrating on the illumination of the artistic process rather than cliches and hype.

The Last Republican also mostly elides Kinzinger's positions on various issues, seemingly to make him more palatable here as a Capra-esque hero who is exclusively defined by standing up to corruption, and against a politician that the filmmaker also opposes.

It’s substantial and thoughtful because of how Walt incarnates a very specific type of existential American dread — the depths of his self-loathing and feelings of inadequacy aren’t unlocked and explored until pretty deep into the story — and also because Cascella and Cordery have filled the script with supporting characters who are richly drawn enough to be the stars of their own film.

This is as much a movie about memory, psychology, and trust as it is an account of an event that seems pretty strange at first glance, but becomes stranger, deeper and sadder once you get to the bottom of it all.

I haven’t seen anything quite like it before. That alone makes it worth seeing, as long as you accept the proposition that a movie like this is unique, in some ways beyond genre labels, and feeling its way towards the right flow and shape as it goes.

It’s certainly a portrait of matrimony and pregnancy, though one that should never, ever be screened in a Lamaze class.

Without Arrows is an ironic title for a film that pierces the heart. It’s a loving portrait of a damaged but unbowed way of life, that of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, and that makes it important for archival reasons. But what makes it art is the way it uses the language of cinema to capture the experiences of life as it is lived, decade after decade, and also as it is recalled in present tense.

It has a lot of the flaws that are common to super-low-budget movies produced outside of the system, such as it is, including hit-and-miss performances and a look that falls somewhere between a “Saturday Night Live” short and a student film.

All in all, it’s heartening to hear a major figure in American political history talking about the future as if it might actually happen.

The mission statement is right there in the title. Whether it succeeds will be up to the viewer. As is so often the case with these types of non-fiction films, the people who stand to benefit the most from watching it are likely to avoid it after hearing what it’s trying to do.

Admittedly, the logistics of filming a Tyler Perry film with Perry performing multiple roles is not what most viewers will be thinking about. But there’s little else to recommend it except for the performances.

As a personality portrait, it’s superb. The inherent instability of the filmmakers’ approach fuses with the manipulative charm and psychic damage of their subject.

It’s a smart, mostly light movie that will teach viewers a lot about processes they might not otherwise think about. You come away from the movie seeing the world in finer shades than when you went in.

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.

This is a more-than-solid observational comedy with a melancholy undertone, reminiscent of early Albert Brooks movies like “Modern Romance.”