Nick Allen

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

Chupa willfully becomes one of those family films that takes plenty from the toy box of cliches left before and hardly gives anything back.

Is American ready for a feel-good movie about a toxic, conservative talk show host who learns to listen? Maybe, but Frank Coraci’s Hot Air is too shallow, sloppy, and unfunny to lead the cause, basing itself off the nation’s divisiveness as if it were a wistful set-up for ideological kumbaya, all while being afraid of starting a tough—and true—conversation.

The romantic fantasies and the time travel plotting of “Meet Cute” are a total mismatch.

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

There are vikings in this movie, and there is destiny. Pure to its junky intentions, if you like your movies served to you without confusion as to the character or their narrative arc, here it is: The destiny of a viking.

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).

Though it starts with promise, Spiderhead is pseudo-heady sci-fi stuff that treats its most intriguing elements like an afterthought, and misses the opportunity to be a memorable oddity aside from its disappointments.

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

From start to finish, Uziel’s packaging of the story seems more inspired than its contents.

This is a frustrating documentary, in that it honors the work of its subject with wide-screen cinematography and leaves-crunching sound design, but as a viewing experience cannot shake the overall feeling of a dirge.

The film proves to be more shallow than its edgy premise and subsequent themes promise.

If you’re going to check out the social media “Bonnie and Clyde” riff Infamous, do it for Bella Thorne’s performance. From the get-go she has the classically great presence of someone like Sandra Bullock, but with her own scraggly edge.

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.

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.

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.

Instead of gradually winning over the viewer, The Mill tests your patience. And instead of achieving a poignant fury, the film's inspiration runs out of energy, long before Howery’s Joe decides that enough is enough.

Their game of cat-and-mouse is not meant to be original in the slightest, but there's no good reason for it to be this dull.

There's an overriding desire throughout Night Teeth for it to be an L.A. story, especially in how its context involves snide comments about how the bloodsuckers run Hollywood. But the movie becomes obnoxiously superficial itself, perhaps most obviously when it includes Megan Fox and Sydney Sweeney, its two biggest stars, for maybe five minutes of screen-time.

There’s nothing wrong with a little cheese in a message about life, it’s just that with The Professor there's nothing more to it.

It can be hard to disagree with the heart and events of this true tale, except for when the movie reveals itself to be mighty self-congratulatory.

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.

This movie, a forgettable indie aside from who directed it, offers sentiment, and its existence. That’s about it. Whether one is revolted or delighted by another C.K. production, Fourth of July is a dud.

Blomkamp continues to baffle even more with Demonic, as he’s made a horror film that is so rote it’s hardly scary, all to showcase a developing technology that is intriguing as a sales pitch but unconvincing as a narrative device.

Jungle Cruise is a monument of zeros and ones, so reliant on CGI that it sacrifices jokes, fight sequences, and general wonder to the distracting notion of admiring how fake everything is, despite the truly incredible effort by hundreds of artists to make it appear as life-like as possible.

There are a few rushes in this movie’s incredibly calculated rendition of Mardenborough’s tale, thanks to Blomkamp. But Sony is transparent with this adaptation, which has no ambitions to make Gran Turismo any more challenging than gamer bait.

There turns out to be no actual book in Spiral: From the Book of Saw, but it does define what makes an intricately bad movie, with flaws that can sometimes be earnest, unintentionally hilarious, or disappointing.

As the overly long movie becomes about 130 minutes of his own propaganda, Washington romanticizes an ideal of man that has never actually existed, instead of a human being who did.