Pat Brown

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.