Nick Allen

It has taken so long for a feature-length The Flash to finally hit theaters, and he’s too late. Barry is barely the lead character of his own movie.

Fourteen simply runs too bland to have that vital sense of curiosity that comes from watching a movie where people talk about seemingly superfluous memories and interactions.

Hermia & Helena’s touch-and-go approach weakens the movie’s key expression of being a relatable story about being lost during your late 20s/early 30s.

The frantic adults and kids in Trish Sie’s The Sleepover are often screaming, but that doesn't mean they’re getting anywhere. You’d think that a story about a mom's cool secret and kids breaking curfew would be a lot more fun, especially with a charismatic cast like this, and yet The Sleepover is mostly about killing time, specifically that of your own.

This movie’s dry, facts-first approach does not have the capacity to pull it off.

This movie has Jeunet doing “The Jetsons” while ruminating on what a robot uprising might inevitably look like, but that proves to be less exciting than one could ever imagine.

There is a lacking critical quality to the story as it goes along, touching upon the film’s many idiosyncrasies but leaving them alone.

In spite of the available chemistry and charisma from Hathaway and Ejiofor, Locked Down proves to be a bewildering mess, in part because of choices made in how to tell a story that mixes two-hander drama with a heist.

With its coming-of-age and its historical context, Beans concerns ideas of pain and conflict, but it’s too timid to really engage those ideas, to honor their discomfort aside from how horrific discrimination is (a few scenes of the family being ambushed by racist Canadian citizens are upsetting, but played too directly for tears).

The film has a grounded, jovial quality especially whenever we see images of Wilkes and Maisel from previous years; it's sometimes like a low-key comedy about one man's quirky mentor and buddy.

Lacking personality or insight, King Jack is a ho-hum tale of young aggression—been there, bruised that.

In spite of his low-key ambitions, debut filmmaker Simon Baker doesn’t yet have the eloquence as a director to get you on board.

There’s so much going on in Three Months, so many emotional pieces in motion, but very little of it is particularly moving.

With little wit to its name, Sherlock Gnomes becomes far more tedious than playful.

The documentary is pushed mostly by a maudlin reverence from director Gianfranco Rosi, whose collaging approach does not produce the meditative experience it desires.

But even with its all-around noble dramatic intent, particularly from Butler, the film struggles to leave a mark.

By trying to make a grand statement to a post-lockdown theatergoing audience about what they are willing to believe—but also about how far they are willing to go for others—Shyamalan trips over himself and neglects to give them much of a movie.

Half-nifty, half-cheesy.

This is a story that errs toward the familiar instead of embracing strangeness, its freaky kid becoming the distraction when you just want more time with the hole in the ground.

Plane rushes through its emotional and explosive beats so that it can get to the next crisis without having to fill out the previous one, and it wildly skims on the good stuff in the process.

Leigh Janiak's Fear Street Part Two: 1978 has more slasher thrills, but the fun of this series that makes it Halloween in July returns with an overly serious face, resembling something of a killjoy.

Never as fun as it should be, despite a gripping central crime.

It’s all overly precious and just not funny enough, even if it is a blood-soaked tribute to those who would look at the story as just another day of underpaid work.

The premise isn’t thoroughly uncomfortable so much as it is simply tedious; Barbara Hershey’s focal character Tabitha is made to appear more and more helpless in the film’s scant psychological thrills, and yet we’re stuck with a flat anxiety for a feature's length.

While Suntan is more than just a tale about an older man becoming involved with a younger woman, it's unfortunately not as profound when it later claims to be a statement on the movie you think you're watching.

Moonshot is the kind of movie that’s frustrating because of what makes it endearing—there’s so much that makes you wish it were more original. No rom-com set in space should feel this ordinary.

The anger within this movie becomes muted along with its thrills. Anvari has proven to be a roller coaster horror filmmaker who should flourish with such freedom, but he loses the momentum here by his own design.

They’ve shared home movies previously, but this documentary—meaningful in concept, but fleeting in its expression—puts them in close-up, with Gainsbourg behind the camera in her debut.