Pat Brown

In the film, Manaus is a place of irreconcilable tension between the lush natural world and the cold, metallic world of industrial modernity.

The documentary brings to the foreground a fascinating and, moreover, beautiful culture lurking in the background of other stories.

The film slides seamlessly between empathizing with its clueless bros and making them objects of unsparing derision.

As a tribute to farmers’ way of life, its effective and at times moving, but as an exposé of the potential losses that a business-centric green revolution is in the process of incurring, it wants for a stiffer punch.

The film’s orderliness of plot somewhat undermines the sense that the family at its center is steeped in a truly messy situation.

Michael Winterbottom’s film succeeds in translating the problematics of intercultural conflict into thriller fodder.

Claudio Giovannesi’s film is more an interesting tweak of Goodfellas than an eye-opening social statement.

The film justly draws attention to the perpetual work that must go into preserving democratic institutions.

The film might have better performed if it consisted of more than a smattering of good but relatively isolated ideas.

The second half’s series of hollow visual spectacles foreground the film as a corporate product.

An airport novel of a movie, Bill Condon’s The Good Liar is efficient and consumable, if a bit hollow.

In more than one sense, Justin Kurzel’s aggressively strange film queers the myth of the oft-lionized Ned Kelly.

The fabric of the fantasy world depicted in the film lacks the cohesion of its central theme about appreciating one’s place in a family tree.

The film's command of action defuses concerns about whether it offers a thorough social critique.

It has almost enough genuine charm and heart to compensate for the moments that feel forced.

Cyril Schäublin’s precisely framed snapshot of a microcosm of timekeepers ends up being a bit too, well, mechanical.

Despite glimpses of a larger critique of the American project in Afghanistan, it lets us escape from the horrors of war before it finishes demolishing the illusion of a clean one.

With Ahed’s Knee, Nadav Lapid plays a game with alter egos that’s at once canny and frustrating.

Peter Strickland’s playful mockery of performance art and excessively serious-minded “collectives” feels both insular and, at times, a shade too flavorless.

Writer-director Samuel Theis’s film is a noteworthy repurposing of the coming-of-age social drama.

The film never feels as satisfying or as haunting as its bow-tying epilogue strives for.

Long stretches of the film are simply mesmerizing, but both Sylvain Tesson’s written compositions and the conversation between him and Vincent Munier often lapse into clichés about the distractions and decadence of modern society.

In the end, it’s a memorably girthy, if not evenly muscled, ode to the treacherousness but ultimate value of romantic love.

The Adults affectingly captures the uniquely American ennui provoked by the banalities of a hometown and the lost utopia of childhood.

Ciro Guerra never quite finds an imagistic equivalent to the novel’s apocalyptic mood and subtly hallucinogenic atmosphere.

Margarethe von Trotta's documentary reminds us of the reasons for Bergman's continued influence on cinema today.

After a first hour that may well hit Zoomers and their millennial parents in the feels, Turning Red gradually runs out of steam.

The film's slotting of two African women into a familiar romantic structure represents a radical and important upending of contemporary Kenyan sexual mores.

Freaky doesn’t reach for any arch commentary beyond the suggestion that, hey, Freaky Friday the 13th is a pretty funny idea.

With its naked celebration of self-sacrificial combat and idealization of the soldier as an avenging angel, it strikes a tone redolent of old-school war propaganda.

Its major contribution, as one museum curator suggests, may be to bring the works of Moshe Rynecki back into prominence.

The film is an imperfect but affecting portrait of social isolation that captures both the pain and the warmth that comes with finally letting others in.

When the devastating quake finally strikes, it creates a truly suspenseful scenario of vertiginous falls and last-minute saves.

As it proceeds toward its telegraphed rom-com ending, the film becomes just more empty rhetoric, an ineffectual reiteration.

Sienna Miller lends credibility to a character that in other hands might seem like a caricature of the white underclass.

As a musical, Dexter Fletcher’s film is just fun enough to (mostly) distract us from its superficiality.

Even though it’s about a person who speaks with courage about the urgency of the global crisis, I Am Greta itself doesn’t possess enough of that urgency.

After a while, the film’s not-strictly-linear structure and handheld camerawork come to feel like self-conscious signs of “gritty” realism, attempts at masking a certain conventionality.

The dichotomy represented by Jonathan and John is too clean for the film's exploration of a divided psyche to ever feel particularly complex.

In the end, there's little payoff for all the repetitive series of evocative visions and mute stares.

Vincent Le Port’s grim morality tale depicts a society caught between differing norms of discipline, punishment, and sex.

At the very least, Ryan Reynolds’s casting perfectly splits the difference between the adorable and the absurd.

The film never finds the spark that would imbue the love affair at its center with a sense of passion or urgency.

As it proceeds through a series of teary reconciliations in the last half-hour of its 110-minute run time, the film's didactic drama begins to grate, its treacly emotions feeling increasingly unearned.

It’s difficult to shake that the film finishes saying what it has to say long before it staggers to the end.

Woke Disney, trying to navigate a tricky representational path, steps all over itself throughout.

Gene Stupnitsky’s Good Boys is Big Mouth for those who prefer ribald humor about tweenage sexuality in live action, though it lacks the Netflix show’s frankness and authenticity.

The film doesn’t bring to light otherwise unexplored aspects of the experience or memory of persecution and genocide.

Despite convincing performances, the film is hampered by its stylistic and moral conventionality.

In pushing so many seemingly crucial moments off screen, the film transforms its main characters into blank slates.

Leonora Addio is a wrestling with memory and history through a deeply personal, if at times indulgent, lens.

Bumblebee exudes some of the tediousness of a reformed sinner who decries hedonism, trying hard to convince us that it now believes in something.

Around his main character, writer-director César Díaz builds a complex but unpretentious interrogation of national belonging.

The film feels rather like listening to the arsonist calmly explain why he set the fire as we continue to watch it rage.

Given its hero’s imperviousness, the film’s chaotically edited action sequences tend to be devoid of suspense.

Convenient plot twists undermine its early pretense that it’s aiming for something other than to exploit our deepest, most regressive fears.

While the film features a strong performance from Judy Greer, it’s essentially a patchwork of broad strokes that rarely feel like they’re bringing its world to credible life.

Avoiding excessively heightened melodrama, Thirteen Lives doesn’t substitute it with much that one couldn’t already find in the copious amount of available coverage of the real-life incident.

Ralph Fiennes’s film too conspicuously avoids an overt political perspective.

One may wish that the absurdity of the conceit had been matched by a bit more irreverence in the script and audacity in the imagery.

The film’s relatively static approach to narrative works in scenes where the material is funny or elevated by a certain performance.

Kogonada’s film doesn’t trust us to recognize the legitimacy of the other’s being without filtering it solely through the lenses of the ruling class.

Director and co-writer Hannah Fidell's film never finds the right mix of meaningful parable and sophomoric romp.

Paul W.S. Anderson has simply combined the established iconography of the popular Capcom game franchise with prefab movie moments.

The film could aim with a bit more precision at the price of its characters’ evident comfort.

Like a traumatized psyche, it remains uncomfortably stuck in the past, replaying familiar events in an effort to empty them of terror.

The film’s overtly non-specific title is surely meant to suggest some kind of pared-down elementality, but, in the end, it mostly just reflects the story’s lack of definable character.

It’s at a certain point toward the finale that this Scream becomes almost as drearily repetitious as the reboot culture that it skewers.

For all of the film’s somberness, its depiction of an era of rigid class divisions and incalculable loss still comes through the hazy, soft-focus goggles of nostalgia.

At its best, the film doesn’t just privilege altered states of consciousness, it is an altered state of consciousness.

Throughout, the filmmakers occlude the most fascinating and potentially powerful elements of Jean Seberg’s history.

This tongue-in-cheek gorefest gives the impression of an only semi-coherent joke on the audience.

Chris Hemsworth’s hyperbolically skilled soldier is borne of childish fantasies about the order of the world.

While it can be expected that high-concept horror movies will often be sewn together from the premises of recent genre successes, it’s much too easy to see the stitches in writer-director Jacob Chase’s Come Play.

The Woman in the Window never manages to transcend the impression that it’s merely being clever.

Supernova is so obviously structured that it often seems to be imposing meaning on its characters.

The fatal flaw of the film is that it genuinely believes in the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie.

The film is inspirational only in the sense that it may inspire an uptick in Amazon searches for running gear.

The film’s approach is completely subsumed by the importance of the Mayor Pete persona as the means and ends of the candidacy.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film prioritizes the sentimental over the true, the tidy moral over the messy reality.

The film’s evocative imagery doesn’t compensate for the story being told with such a heavy hand that it dulls, rather than sharpens, Justin Chon’s urgent political message.

It seems so invested in a rehabilitation of Brittany Kaiser’s image that the filmmakers’ own motives end up being its most interesting subject.

Expending so much energy anticipating our avenues of interpretation, Malcolm & Marie leaves us with little to interpret.

Perhaps the fairest description of Stallone’s performance is that it’s only as one-note as the material, his stern tough-guy muttering and grimacing just about right for a screenplay that feels like it’s been plucked out of a dustbin left untouched since 1995.

Often divertingly colorful and busy to a fault, the film seems to dare us to mock the world of comics' most risible superhero.

Artemis Fowl concocts an adventure that requires its privileged hero to go virtually nowhere, physically or emotionally. As if he ordered it on Instacart, conflict is simply dropped off on his front stoop, and all he has to do is throw on some shoes and sunglasses to pick it up.

Whatever new technology facilitated its genesis, the film is just another assembly-line reproduction.

The film’s repetitive and lifeless dialogue robs otherwise charismatic performers of distinguishing characteristics.

The film’s outward liveliness can’t mask the inner inertia it has as just another lifeless product assembled in a factory.

Its performatively extreme imagery thinly masks a rather banal view of male subjectivity and inner conflict.

After a brilliantly constructed opening, Dario Argento’s film gives the impression only of a giallo doodle.

The film wastes its charismatic leads in a parade of wacky CG creations whose occasional novelty is drowned out by its incessance.

Director Ty Roberts’s film is unable to realize that its subject matter is that of a horror story.

There’s a self-reflexivity to the game’s artifact-y textures that’s lost in this film adaptation, where the finely detailed look of just about everything says nothing in itself about the endless possibilities of a digital world’s malleability.

The film falls back on the myth of modernity being born in the laps of practical, native-born American ingenuity.

The film is at least as likely to elicit laughs as shrieks, and certainly unlikely to leave a lasting impression.

Transforming Ophelia’s abuser into a helpful co-conspirator hardly seems like the most daring feminist reading of Hamlet.