Nick Allen

This is an inspirational movie in the broadest sense. You have to squint a lot to see the true story within it, but it's there.

Though it has a tight course of events and is spiked with a few surprises, First Love is far more impressive for how it collides its many characters than what it ever feels for them.

Park coats the big heart he has for these people with warm LA lens flares, and finds energy from sharp cuts and wall-to-wall music. It’s the performances that prove to be spotty, with flat line-readings all around and displays of emotions that struggle to reach from the script to the audience.

Not the type of Iraq soldier film one may expect. It does present intricate experiences of PTSD, but does so with distance.

While Gondry calms his creative instincts to toy with the ordinary, he indirectly errs on making Microbe and Gasoline his first forgettable film.

Son of Monarchs, which is driven by mood as much as it is a metaphor that it can’t get enough of, embodies the equal ambition and shortcomings of a writer/director trying feel their way through science, while having as minimal a narrative as possible.

There’s incredible merit in the action seen in “The Matrix Resurrections,” but those aren’t the elements that free the mind of the medium like bold storytelling, like “The Matrix” preached and then became a game-changing classic, only to become a docket for satisfying shareholders. Blue pill or red pill? It doesn’t matter anymore; they’re both placebos.

While Nona does eventually reward audience members with stark drama grounded in a daily nightmare, it risks cheating itself of its full impact, pretending for most of its running time to be a fairytale it certainly is not.

Long Way North is a different vision, using clear-defined colors, shapes and shadows for hand-drawn beauty, giving the film a bold, intricately-cut-construction-paper look. Especially as the characters are surrounded by ice and cold, the stark white images prove simple yet expressive.

The film is too ordinary to feel like it does her legacy complete artistic justice.

However chronologically jumbled, Victim/Suspect prevails with its many episodes of de Leon’s incisive reporting and dedication, and the insight we get from legal and policing experts about how this cycle continues.

It’s a well-made, purposefully ugly treatise of America as a broken-down theme park. But its charm wanes whenever it’s just not as funny, smart, or edgy as it thinks.

Whoever advances to each respective next round, you want to root for these kids, and cherish the way they advocate for intellect at such a young age.

Rhys Darby is perfectly cast as the wholesome, dopey time traveler in Relax, I’m From the Future, a sci-fi comedy with a modest sense of humor but tangled message to share with humankind.

A frustrating genre picture that’s just too dreary to be scary.

The editorial assembly and talking-head presentation of “Love, Charlie” is a bit too dry for my taste, struggling to build an intriguing pacing with and-then-this-happened storytelling. But the emotional power of the film benefits from its extensive archive, and how it displays it.

Lawrence’s latest is fine for its don’t-over-think-it standards, and while it’s glossier than it is deep, it’s at least charted through with a roller coaster’s engineering. There’s something comforting about a movie that has the true ease of a fantastical dream, and for “Slumberland” that fleeting excitement may be enough.

The story might play out like a missed opportunity in some ways, as it’s staggering that a movie in which Jamie Foxx fights vampires can be so set on killing its fun with backstory. But while the worst parts of Day Shift want to be cute with all of this, Perry’s movie is saved by the inner bad-ass that comes out when it matters most.

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 bad news, I’m sorry to say, is that The Christmas Chronicles 2 doesn’t contribute much that's worthwhile to the first movie's blueprint, and focuses on mildly amusing indulgences — more elf-centric shenanigans, more Santa mythology, more roller coaster sleigh rides.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

No movie with Nicolas Cage, directed by the wonderfully weird Japanese director Sion Sono, should be this taxing, drawn out, and plainly boring.