Peter Sobczynski

Director Nick Stagliano doesn’t help matters much by presenting the material with a poky pace that does not exactly bring the narrative to vivid life.

Although Vanquish is otherwise as forgettable as can be—that may be the closest thing that it has to a virtue—there's still one thing about it that I cannot immediately shake, and that is the presence of Morgan Freeman in a role that requires so little effort it's a wonder that Bruce Willis didn’t take it.

Even taken simply as a deliberately formless freak-out, the kind that used to turn up regularly back in the heyday of the midnight movie circuit, Tyger Tyger proves to be little more than a tedious bore.

Body Brokers was clearly made with good intentions, but while it might still fill you with anger towards the predatory aspects of the rehabilitation industry, you'll also be upset that the script is not nearly as great as it could have been.

The film has merit as a sprawling and effective work that combines the expected action beats with quieter, character-driven moments, and elements of pure weirdness to surprisingly strong effect. Even when it doesn’t quite work, and it's undeniably uneven at times, it at least has the good taste to offer up flaws borne of ambition instead of laziness.

It's fascinating that while the movie deals with exceptionally grim material, it never becomes too unbearable to watch.

Skyfire is not a very good movie, but it isn’t the kind of bad movie that I feel compelled to come down on too hard. It's dumb and cartoonish as can be and there's never a single moment in which you care at all about anything going on, not even when they drag in an endangered child in order to tug on the heartstrings.

Ultimately, Greenland never comes together into a truly satisfying package, but it deserves a little credit for trying to do something unique within such a familiar framework.

Limbai captures all of this in a direct, unforced, and restrained manner that makes its points about the need for reform to social services without becoming overly strident.

To the credit of the filmmakers, 76 Days has been made in such a skillful and gripping manner that even those suffering from COVID news fatigue will find themselves caught up in it.

I found the film to be an engrossing look at Zappa and his legacy that nevertheless avoids the mere hagiography that films of this sort run the risk of embracing when not handled properly.

While it's unlikely that this film will take up too much time in any future Lifetime Achievement Award clip reels, Dreamland is a testament to the importance of sheer star power to help carry even haphazard material along, at least up to a point.

Even in a filmography with more than its fair share of impressive achievements, it deserves consideration as one of Wiseman’s greatest.

A film so lazy and inane that it feels as contemptuous towards its audience as I am towards it.

Someday, there will be a take on the life and work of John Belushi that is as fascinating, complex, and entertaining as he was. Belushi, however, is not quite that film.

This is Allen’s 48th movie (a 49th, “Rifkin’s Festival,” premiered last month) and while he has certainly made worse films than this one during that time, rarely has he come up with something as utterly inconsequential as this collection of rehashed themes, characters, and punchlines.

In its attempt to cram too many narratives and subjects into too short of a running time, it ends up coming across as both overstuffed and oddly undernourished.

Lost Girls and Love Hotels is too vapid to work as a psychological drama, too silly to work as a passionate romance, and too tepid to work as a sexy guilty pleasure.

Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin, is one of the most deeply personal films of his long and brilliant career, I am not just indulging in a bit of critical hyperbole.

This is a movie so strange, bizarre and so unclassifiable that as soon as I was done watching it, I contacted my editor to see if deploying the phrase “batshit crazy” would be acceptable.

The film is a little too scattershot for its own good, which becomes especially frustrating when some of these detours actually come across as potentially being far more interesting than the central narrative thread.

House of Hummingbird deserves a place alongside the likes of “The Virgin Suicides,” “The Ocean of Helena Lee” and “Eighth Grade” as one of the most knowing and intelligent cinematic takes on the pains and occasional pleasures of female adolescence of recent years.

While the results will obviously not come close to resonating with the public in the manner of “Walk the Line,” My Darling Vivian does an admirable job of recounting the story of a woman who was ultimately far more than just a footnote in someone else’s life.

The Quarry may be a slow burn from a dramatic standpoint but it is only when Shannon is around that it flickers, however briefly, to life.

So yes, Fantasy Island is a terrible movie — this probably won’t come as a shock to most people — but more than that, it seems to have been made with absolutely no one in mind.

In reality, this is the kind of low-key gem that horror fans are always looking for but so rarely find — one that is smartly conceived, visually stylish and genuinely creepy at times.

The addition of Cage to the already heady cinematic brew definitively puts it over the top, making it the kind of cult movie nirvana that was its apparent destiny from the moment the cameras started rolling.

Sitting through it is like watching someone else playing a video game for two solid hours, and not an especially compelling one at that.

As a whole, The Good Liar is not quite good enough to deserve the comparisons to the works of Alfred Hitchcock it's clearly aiming for, though it is just good enough to suggest what Hitchcock himself might have done with it on a second pass.

Unless you are a L.S. Lowry fan of the highest order, the only reason to sit through Mrs. Lowry & Son is to watch actors as strong as Timothy Spall and Vanessa Redgrave going toe-to-toe for 90 minutes.

American Dharma is a frustratingly hollow look at Bannon that is ultimately so benign in its portrayal of the man that it comes closer to an example of fan service than a full takedown.

Countdown pretty much fails on every level that a horror film possibly can — the characters are uninteresting dullards, the story is idiotic, and the scares are nonexistent.

For fans of Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Mountaintop is pretty much a must-see—it gives them a chance to see their heroes at work in a raw and unfiltered manner, and the fact that the Colorado album is Young’s strongest collection of new songs since Psychedelic Pill is certainly a sweetener to the deal. Those who cannot stand their sound, on the other hand, are not likely to be won over.

The title is perhaps the cleverest thing about it.

Because it is the first film to be released by Higher Ground, the production company formed by Barack and Michelle Obama that signed a highly publicized deal with Netflix, American Factory will no doubt find an audience far larger than the typical documentary focusing on the contemporary labor movement.

Not even the most devoted of Mandy Moore fans would mistake 47 Meters Down for a good movie by any means.

The problem is not that it tells a story that's been done many times before, but that it never finds a new or interesting way of approaching the familiar material.

And yet, while it does not really work — at least not enough to warrant a full recommendation — it is one of those films where some of the stuff that did work was good enough to inspire me to hold out hope practically right up to the closing moments that it would all somehow all pay off in the end.

Anna was written and directed by Besson himself and it still feels like a misfired rehash of his greatest hits.

While the end result is certainly no masterpiece, it is still better than the average action potboiler and contains a couple of exhilarating set pieces that offer further proof—not that any is needed at this point—that De Palma remains one of the unquestioned masters of creating and executing moments of pure cinema.

The results are uneven — how could they not be? — but the sheer weirdness of the whole enterprise has a charm to it and it certainly is never boring. Bewildering, maybe, but never boring.

There are moments of unexpected humor that blindside you.

Although Pet Sematary is a largely dreadful film, it is slightly better and never as offensively bad as the first version.

The result is a listlessly soapy melodrama, save for a little bit of modern-day nudity and bloodshed, could have been churned out 60-70 years ago and then gone largely forgotten in the ensuing decades.

Both sprawling and intimate, it tells a story dealing with life, love, friendship, mortality and, yes, AIDS, in a manner that is relentlessly and deliberately unsentimental in tone but which nevertheless proves to be quite affecting.

To be honest, the film does not exactly make a convincing case for the idea of Berlin as a hub of passion, or really for its existence as a movie.

A gross, stupid and relentlessly ugly film from start to finish, this may not be the absolute bottom of the barrel in terms of Netflix Originals but nothing else worthy of that title immediately springs to mind.

So excruciatingly awful that you have to wonder what it was, other than their paychecks, that could have possessed the cast and crew to keep coming back each day, when it must have been obvious from the first day of shooting that the project was the most hopeless of cases imaginable.

Those not on the Deadpool bandwagon already will probably not be converted by this version and those who are fans may find it to be a vaguely interesting curio they'll watch once.

It isn’t a bad movie as much as a dead one, never managing to click in the way all involved presumably hoped it would.

The worst thing about The Girl in the Spider’s Web — the element likely to enrage most fans of the franchise — is how it betrays its central character by eradicating almost every aspect that made her so initially fascinating.

A boring and garish mess that even fans of the book will find nearly impossible to follow, this is easily the most embarrassing film with which Amis has ever been even vaguely connected.

This is an interesting concept in theory and for a while, it is undeniably compelling to watch, aided in no small part by a couple of strong performances at its center.

A disjointed and at times off-putting mess that veers wildly and unconvincingly between a road movie, a family drama, a violent crime film and an offbeat sci-fi thriller before arriving at a finale so loopy that even if I spoiled it here and now, many of you would just assume that I was kidding.

The end result may be little more than an exponentially more expensive version of those cheapo Syfy channel movies, but at least it has the good taste to be exponentially better as well.

The only thing preventing me from dubbing this one of the dumbest movies of any type that I have ever seen in my life is the fact that I am not entirely certain that something as shabbily constructed and artistically bankrupt as this actually qualifies as a movie in the first place.

It has a couple of interesting ideas, a certain degree of style and one impressive performance but never manages to pull them together into a cohesive or satisfying whole.

Even the most easily satisfied fans of Washington will be unlikely to find much of anything in this sadistic, stupid and sloppy sequel.

On the one hand, it never quite works in a conventionally satisfying manner—it is wildly uneven, occasionally obtuse and it never quite seems to have a solid grasp on what it is trying to say. On the other hand, it still manages to register in a number of unusual ways thanks to its haunting visual style, offbeat tone, and its intriguing method to put us into the disintegrating mindset of its central character.

While originality may not exactly be in great supply here, these familiar elements have been mixed with enough wit and style to make for some sleazy, insanely violent, and reasonably entertaining B-movie trash.

The major problem with That Summer is the inescapable fact that it only barely qualifies as a movie.

The film has an engrossing and powerful drama that is all the more effective for writer/director Vivian Qu’s refusal to keep the story from spinning off into lurid melodrama — all of the story points on display have the harsh bitterness of truth to them.

While the end result may not quite reach the heights that Miyazaki has regularly hit during his amazing career, it is nevertheless a worthy effort, filled with visuals that frequently dazzle the eye even if the story is more likely to inspiring the scratching of heads instead.

Then again, even they may find that this collection of half-baked scenes, inscrutable imagery and, yes, a couple of splendid musical performances wears out its welcome long before its conclusion.

One of the dumbest variations of the weather-based action thriller subgenre that I have ever seen, you can be rest assured that I know what I am talking about.

The result is a slow burn of a drama with a restrained tone that may put off some viewers, but which will captivate those who responded to its low-key wavelength.

The problem with Samson is that while it cannot be faulted for its sincerity, it can be faulted for its sluggish pacing, inconsistent performances and lack of cinematic style that gives the proceedings a tacky feel throughout.

The end result is pretty much what you might expect—a work so desultory that you wonder how all involved managed to work up the energy and enthusiasm to make it to the set each day.

The film may be completely worthless from an artistic standpoint but it certainly can’t be beat from a convenience standpoint.

Alas, it also contains many of the same inherent flaws as most movies of this type, and not even the genuinely good and powerful aspects on display are quite able to overcome the more troublesome elements.

One only has to go into his latest effort, Happy End, for a couple of minutes to realize that the old Haneke is back with a vengeance.

A saccharine stab at a new holiday perennial that tries to fuse the classic Yuletide yarn with a “Shakespeare In Love”-style literary origin story and manages to let both of them down, not to mention a performance by Christopher Plummer as Ebenezer Scrooge that deserves a much better showcase than the one provided here.

An ambitious but occasionally uneven animated film.

Geostorm fails to work either as awe-inspiring spectacle or as campy silliness.

Despite its early unevenness, Only the Brave tells its story in a sincere and relatively non-exploitative manner that isn’t overly dominated by visual effects, and the cast does some very good work as well.

This is a strong film that tackles a charged subject in a fair and even-handed manner. The Force will give viewers of all social and political persuasions much to think about afterwards.

The end result is a film that may not rise to the level of “Don’t Look Back” or “Truth or Dare” but still manages to create a sense of intimacy and revelation, even as we sense that there is really no such thing as an unguarded moment for Lady Gaga.

A terribly uneven narrative that doesn’t especially work as drama or noir and which manages to waste a pretty good cast in the bargain.

Gun Shy is an action-comedy starring Antonio Banderas that is lacking only action, comedy and a performance by Antonio Banderas that is anything other than a complete embarrassment.

Aan odd fusion of an earnest socially conscious drama and a B-movie mystery programmer that never quite comes together despite a strong performance from Adele Haenel at its center.

The end result is a movie so resolutely bland and forgettable that the cast and crew probably expended more sheer effort dragging themselves to the set every day than they did in staging all of the various chases and shootouts and whatnot.

The result is a dark and stirring variation on the standard coming-of-age narrative that, much like its central characters, does not follow the path one might expect.

The result is a bit of a mess and an oftentimes dull one at that, the kind of bland cinematic Euro-pudding that Miramax used to release in bulk back in the day.

A work so completely devoid of wit, style, intelligence or basic entertainment value that it makes that movie based on the Angry Birds app seem like a pure artistic statement by comparison.

It's a film filled with humor, charm, excitement and so many memorable images that many viewers will find themselves struggling to keep from blinking so as not to miss any of the eye-popping delights crammed into each overstuffed frame.

Huppert is still there plugging away in every scene. To the extent that False Confessions does intermittently succeed, it is due almost entirely to her efforts.

A depressingly rote piece of corporate product that has so little on its mind other than presumably making hundreds of millions of dollars that you half expect the ticket sellers to hand out copies of Comcast’s latest earnings report along with the 3-D glasses.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai is your typical sci-fi/action/comedy/rock&roll/kung-fu/political satire/neo-western/guys-on-a-mission extravaganza.

47 Meters Down, despite a few things going for it, is an easily skippable work that will, ironically, probably wind up playing better on television and home video, where viewers might be more willing to overlook its failings

Lazenby himself takes center stage to tell his story and explain his actions at last but the end result is a sometimes frustrating work that takes a potentially fascinating tale and renders it mostly inert thanks in large part to its questionable approach to the material.

An utterly lifeless and profoundly unoriginal animated effort that is desperately lacking the very thing in its title.

This is a modestly scaled B-movie by one of the best genre filmmakers of our time, Walter Hill, that has enough skill and personality going for it to make it worth checking out, even if it doesn’t quite live up (or down, depending on your perspective) to its borderline sleazy premise.

While Smurfs: The Lost Village may not be better or more entertaining, the acknowledgment that it is aiming solely for the kiddie audience this time around at least makes it slightly more palatable than its predecessors.

This is an uncommonly smart, well-made and ultimately touching meditation on grief, revenge and the ordinary perils of adolescence that should resonate strongly with adults and thoughtful teenagers alike.

While it is far from Ozon’s worst movie, it is perhaps the first one he's made that feels like it could be the work of any other director.

They (Assayas/Stewart) have managed to out-do themselves with a work as mysterious, moving and haunting as anything that has materialized in a movie theater in a while.

The Shack wants to be a sincere exploration of faith and forgiveness but somehow manages to be both too innocuous and too off-putting for its own good.

More wearying than frightening, Rings is a total non-starter.