Michael Snydel

In nearly everything other than its visuals, Early Man feels as ancient as its time period, a forgotten relic hibernating in development until its belated release. But coming from a studio and director who’ve repeatedly found new ways to reinvent the wheel, it’s extra disappointing to see them release something so primitive.

A stylish exercise in dread, teasing out its slow-drip horrors with precision, and building a deliriously evil presence that hovers along the fringes.

While the first half meditates on the inconsistency of intimacy and the ways that small things (e.g. close ex-girlfriends) grow to be daggers, the second half adopts a psychological severity that makes My King feel imbalanced.

There’s a potentially good story to be mined here, probably most likely with the mother, but every time it starts to find fertile emotional ground, it can’t help but become distracted and search for another surface.

There’s no doubt Hockney deserves appreciation for his artistic influence, but this documentary is less a reflection of his singular presence than the result of haphazardly mashing together a fascinating life.

In a Valley of Violence feigns to be a revisionist western, but it’s frustratingly stuck in a place of inevitability in the last half. It’s an excellently-made imitation, but coming from a director whose made a career of tilting the familiar, it’s a disappointing detour.

History has validated the view of these people as one of the major causes of modern ills, but Vice is so concerned with wallowing in the past that it has no idea how to say anything new.

As a study of grief, it’s moving, featuring authentic performances and a keen understanding of the receding hibernation that comes with losing a cornerstone person in one’s life. As a romance, it’s slow-going but believable. And as a look at the unfair mythos attributed to the dead, it’s nuanced and incisive. But in attempting to balance these complementary parts, Tumbledown is buried by its own ambitions.

It eventually resorts to well-intentioned but inelegant info dumps to reach its climax, but the tactile environments and direct filmmaking separates it from most films of its ilk.

By the end, there’s a strange sense that the film has been both elongated and rushed in the way that it ends a few arcs, but it’s also an unusually sensitive romance that doubles as a showcase of three of our most talented modern comedic actors.

Despite such misgivings about an ultimately familiar shape, The Black Sea remains a thoroughly entertaining film that doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Simultaneously pretentious, mind-numbingly tedious, and dizzyingly incoherent from scene to scene, Jason Bourne is the definition of diminishing returns.

Even as it pushes into the cozy familiarity of slow-motion party montage, Neighbors 2 can’t help but feel refreshingly new in its vision of the college movie as something unashamed, vibrant, and urgent.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is a galling, casually offensive, and deeply unsatisfying film.

First Monday in May gathers together some of the most influential and radical contemporary figures in fashion, offers a comprehensive view into the creation of a groundbreaking fashion exhibition, and profiles one of the most exclusive figures in the world. And yet, somehow it all feels incredibly familiar.

Jacquot’s Diary of a Chambermaid ultimately feels beholden to art-house dictates, especially with an ending that’s less confounding than poorly articulated.

Race is the rare biopic that needs more of its own main character.

Viktoria occasionally bites off more than it can handle, but even as it threatens to become unwieldy, it always feels essential.

Triple 9 isn’t trying to be something of grand social value. It wants to be pulp, and maybe it’s unfair to criticize it for issues of racism and sexism, but its clockwork, convoluted plot isn’t clever, and it’s certainly not very memorable.

Even at its most transparently manipulative, Risen doesn’t feel punishing. It’s universally good-natured without feeling too conniving.

Morgan struggles to make even a single fight between two people not look like it was edited with a shredder.

Unfortunately, Pilon’s performance is by far the most engaging part of the film, a restless but ultimately familiar crossbreeding of coming-out experience, after school special, and sports achievement story.

Above all of the tiresome, poorly constructed mythology, nonexistent stakes, and presentation of subtext as text, Allegiant’s greatest sin is its total contempt for its viewers.

There’s a very good love story here, but it needed to be about one relationship, not the nature of romance itself.

While the film becomes a constant test to outdo itself, the raw ambition isn’t nearly enough to make up for the content of the actual film: an ungainly, ugly, nearly interminable monstrosity.