Peter Sobczynski

I found it compelling for its depiction of the mechanics of the current athletic scene and the triumphs and tragedies that occur along the way. It may not leave you cheering in the end, but it will give you something to think about the next time the Olympics come around.

On a basic level, the film is entertaining enough, but anyone hoping for a particularly fresh or innovative take on the show or its creator is probably going to come away feeling a bit let down.

Ghost Elephants is a portrait of obsession that, while gentler than some of Herzog’s other works, is mesmerizing from the first moment to the last, yet another title of note in what remains one of the most incredible filmographies of our time.

On paper, this sounds like a potentially fascinating combination but the film emerging from it proves to be anything but that. Instead, it proves to be such an overly ponderous exercise that, by the time it finally comes to an end, you may feel so sapped of energy that find yourself struggling to get up out of your seat.

A by-the-numbers sequel that mostly ignores the stuff that made its predecessor stand out in exchange for formulaic would-be thrills.

It ends up being little more than a rambling, undisciplined clip show that misfires as both history and entertainment.

While the premise has some undeniable potential, it has been executed by writer-director Lotfy Nathan in a manner that is neither particularly frightening nor spiritually enlightening.

The Astronaut isn’t terrible, I suppose—the performance by Mara is solid, and Varley’s work on the directing front shows that she knows how to take familiar genre elements and present them with style and efficiency. However, these efforts are undone by a screenplay that kind of goes off the rails for a while, leading to a conclusion that fails to inspire the overwhelming emotional impact it was clearly intended to evoke in viewers.

This is a bleak nugget of a film that is trying so hard to take the typical sports movie narrative and unleash its darker and more nightmarish side that it runs out of steam long before arriving at its frustratingly oblique conclusion.

The film is blessed with a fairly strong cast and while it isn’t nearly enough to make it succeed as a whole, whatever degree that certain scenes do work are almost entirely due to their efforts.

While there are several problems with the film as a whole, perhaps the central one is that there are long stretches where viewers are expected to take the concept at least somewhat seriously, which proves impossible.

Ultimately, “The Surfer” proves to be not much more than an audience endurance test that offers up plenty of upsetting imagery and moments of emotional torment but never quite manages to make them pay off.

Even those who admired the “Raid” films for their style and heedlessness might find this to be little more than an accumulation of action movie cliches that they have seen enacted to much greater effect in other and certainly better films.

As a Neil Young fan who has cheerfully followed him throughout all the highways and byways of his singular career, I have always found him to be one of the most vital and fascinating voices in contemporary music, even at his weirdest. Sadly, the only thing that “Coastal” manages to accomplish is something that I would have usually thought impossible—it makes him come across as a bore.

While the film does subvert basic audience expectations, it doesn’t really do anything beyond that as it stumbles through a choppy and meandering narrative that not even an admittedly committed lead performance by Danielle Deadwyler can help save.

You always get the sense that you are watching a screenplay’s first draft that never got the fleshing-out that it clearly needed to make it stand out, either from a dramatic or emotional standpoint.

If “Alarum” had been directed by either a complete novice or a total hack, maybe some of its grievous cinematic sins could have been forgiven or at least tolerated.

Although some of the footage seen in “Porcelain War” is grim and hard to watch, the film is ultimately a celebration of the resiliency of the artistic spirit, even in the most horrifying of circumstances.

Whether one looks at it as a summation statement from an artist taking stock of their life and work at the end of their career or as another one of the brief cinematic diversions that he has taken on in between his feature projects, “It’s Not Me” is a reminder that Leos Carax is one of the most fascinating and formally interesting filmmakers working in the world today.

The film isn’t necessarily terrible, but it proves to be deeply unmemorable by offering viewers little more than a rehash of things they have presumably seen before and then taking an unconscionable amount of time to do so.

Here is a work so cloying and ham-fisted in its attempts to move you that there is a point when you find yourself thinking that the only thing that Zemeckis hasn’t thrown into the mix is a needle drop of “Our House” and then he proceeds to do just that.

It offers up a deep and often fascinating dive into his oeuvre, utilizing a central conceit so nervy that most viewers will either marvel or recoil at its sheer audacity.

The only chance of experiencing any actual chills is if you doze off and generate a more interesting nightmare of your own.

While Bautista is still as engaging as ever in the woeful action-comedy “Killer’s Game,” not even he can save this dud from quickly devolving into 100 minutes of blood-drenched tedium.

In the end, “Dead Money” is little more than a modern equivalent of the B movies of old, a meat-and-potatoes programmer designed to appear as the less heralded bottom half of a double feature.

Here is a film that is so awful in so many ways that at one point, it includes a clip from the notoriously dreadful “The Emoji Movie” and you begin to worry that that film’s reputation might be tarnished by association.

This is not a film for everyone by a long shot. Still, those willing to take a chance and embrace it on its own very distinct and occasionally deranged terms are likely to find themselves agreeing with the ultimate assessment of Mirren, who once described it as “an irresistible mix of art and genitals.”

Here is a film that pays lip service to the importance of creativity without ever displaying a demonstrable shred of it during its seemingly interminable run time.

Although the duo's reputation hardly needs bolstering these days, it gets just that in this extraordinary exploration of their legacy by one of the many filmmakers who have found themselves enthralled and inspired by it.

The first two-thirds of "A Sacrifice" are a largely leaden affair that offers viewers little that they haven’t seen before. It isn’t even awful so much as it is intensely forgettable—the kind of film whose title eludes you even as you watch it.

While “Jim Henson: Idea Man” may not break any new ground regarding Hensonian research or documentary filmmaking in general, it should prove valuable to younger viewers curious to know more about the man behind so many beloved childhood icons.

Instead of piling on contrivances and cheap psychology to move the story along, Kavtaradze keeps "Slow" situated in a refreshingly human level, respecting the intelligence of her characters and the audience.

This is funny to a point, but the problem with “Stress Positions” is that said point arrives about halfway through. The runtime that remains gets overloaded with too many plot threads, characters, and repeated punchlines, Hammel essentially turning the proceedings into a failed exercise in Blake Edwards-style farce.

This is a soft-spoken but ultimately powerful work that makes the case for the importance of empathy in treating those with mental illnesses, and makes you hope that programs like the one depicted here will one day become the norm.

While the film is clearly telling a story that wants to come across as profoundly emotional, I always felt as if I was being kept at too far of a distance from it while watching it.

Outlaw Posse doesn’t quite work in the end but there are enough moments of note scattered throughout it to let you forget that from time to time.

In “Stopmotion,” the debut feature from Robert Morgan, the medium—the painstaking and time-consuming process of stop-motion animation—may be unusual but the resulting film, an undeniably grisly but ultimately tedious tiptoe through the genre tropes, certainly is. This is all the more frustrating because in the middle of it all is a performance by Aisling Fransciosi that is so strong and committed that viewers will wish that the rest of the film had made the same kind of effort that she clearly did.

The Tiger’s Apprentice is not an awful movie per se—some of the animation is striking and there are a couple of funny moments—but it is one of those frustrating exercises that seems to have assembled all the elements for a genuinely innovative film and then fails to make much of them.

It feels like a film that has already gone through the remake process, casting all the stuff that made it interesting in the first place aside and leaving only the glossy surfaces.

The young ones that this film is being aimed at are of the age when the movies can genuinely be magical, and the best ones can form memories that will last a lifetime. “Migration” may pass the time, but my guess is that those kids will retain more lasting memories of whatever their parents got for them at the concession stand than anything up there on the screen.

Viewers will find themselves entertained and curious to get home and see just how many of the records in their collections bear the creative imprint of these guys.

To Kill a Tiger tells an important story in a compelling manner that makes it worth watching, but its journey is so intense at times it might prove to be too much for some.

There are many points where Expend4bles feels less like a legitimate continuation to a franchise that has been quite profitable to many involved and more like a cheapo television pilot that was mercifully scuttled before it could air.

Here is a film so devoid of thrills, excitement, or purpose that it seems to have been custom-made to play in empty multiplexes during the traditionally dead last weeks of summer.

An often striking take on the tale that makes up for what it lacks in surprise with a lot of style and some undeniably effective scare moments.

Rise, from French filmmaker Cédric Klapisch, is not blazingly original by any stretch, and any moviegoer paying even the slightest amount can predict most of the plot's moves. And yet, something is to be said about presenting a familiar narrative in a straightforward and undeniably entertaining manner.

This unabashedly trashy project from director Peter Thorwarth has its moments of invention and excitement in the early going, but the constant spray of bullets and body parts proves numbing.

The only thing holding me back from officially naming it the worst film ever is that it's so slapdash in its construction and inept in its execution that I am not entirely sure it should count as a film.

A quiet, heartfelt, and beautifully nuanced drama that feels unique and universal, featuring what will surely go down as one of the best performances of 2023.

This film is so smug and self-satisfied that you can practically feel the contempt everyone involved with its production has for its audience.

Coming across as little more than a filmed adaptation of the first two-thirds of Neil Bogart’s Wikipedia page, Spinning Gold is a mess that even those with a keen interest in the subject will find both ponderous and uninformative.

The film has its moments, and Dafoe certainly gives it his all, but there's a hollowness that ends up rendering the whole thing fairly forgettable—the cinematic equivalent of a piece of art you buy only because it goes well with the couch.

While Juniper as a whole is not great, it has enough wit and intelligence to be better than it sounds. Most of all, it has Rampling, as captivating as ever; she proves once again that she can single-handedly take somewhat dubious material and make it eminently watchable.

Full Time looks and sounds like a nail-biting thriller and tells a story that many viewers will be able to relate to on an intensely personal level.

Blood delivers plenty of the titular substance but not much else of note other than a couple of decent scenes here and there; a central performance from Michelle Monaghan is ultimately more interesting than the film surrounding it.

The Devil Conspiracy is nuttier than the proverbial fruitcake and twice as difficult to swallow, regardless of where you reside on the theological spectrum.

The Western may not be entirely dead yet, but The Old Way is not exactly doing it any favors.

A largely tedious cinematic lump of coal that unsuccessfully tries to stretch its one-joke premise out to 101 minutes in a tonally uneven attempt to position itself as a new alternative holiday classic.

In the end, the biggest problem with Slumberland is its utter innocuousness. Because it is bright, noisy, and things are constantly happening, little kids might like it as a momentary distraction—but it certainly won’t inspire them to check out McCay’s original work for themselves.

It isn’t necessarily bad, per se, and it contains just enough in the way of intriguing elements to more or less hold one’s interest for its running time. However, Next Exit never shifts into a higher dramatic gear at any point, and it concludes on a note that is more than a bit unsatisfying.

As an enormous fan of Argento, I would love to be able to report that “Dark Glasses” is a worthy entry in his filmography, even if I had to go out on a limb to make my case. However, there's no branch long enough that would allow anyone to defend this particular effort, perhaps the only way in which the word “effort” could be used in conjunction with this film.

This "Goodnight Mommy" replicates the basic story beats of the original but leaves out all of the tension, ambiguity, and nasty invention that made that earlier effort so effective in the first place.

With his latest film, “House of Darkness,” LaBute tries something similar to "The Wicker Man." And while the results may not be nearly as outlandish this time around, they do make for an intriguing and occasionally quite witty battle of the sexes, in which not all of the bloodshed is strictly metaphorical.

Whether or not Blanco is able to save his factory, Bardem is able to navigate the narrative missteps surrounding him and ultimately make "The Good Boss" worth a look.

Listening to these people grapple with Proust’s work and relate it to their own individual lifetimes of experience is often fascinating.

Endangered is unlikely to change the minds of anti-press zealots (not that they'd even be watching it in the first place) but others will hopefully come out of it both shocked and startled to see what is happening to journalists around the world these days.

Despite my ostensible disinterest in the subject at hand, I found myself mesmerized by this spare, affecting, and powerfully humane work that may seem quiet and reserved, but which ends up packing a surprisingly powerful emotional punch by the end.

Instead of leaving viewers with a better or more informed idea of what makes her tick as a person and as an artist, "Halftime" feels more like a ruthlessly efficient election ad for a political campaign that was decided a long time ago.

To give Deception, the latest attempt to bring Roth to the screen, a little bit of credit, it does come closer than most to rendering his prose stylings into cinematic terms. But it does so in a film so lifeless and inert from a dramatic standpoint that few viewers are likely to notice or even care.

Memory is a little better than the majority of Neeson’s recent action excursions and there's a chance it may prove to be better than most of his future projects. However, that doesn't prove to be enough to make it worth watching, and those lucky enough to have seen “The Memory of a Killer” are likely to be disappointed as well.

Take Me to the River: New Orleans is essentially a feature-length version of a commercial put out by the city’s tourism board hoping to lure visitors by offering them little bits of a lot of different things in the hopes of attracting a wider audience. It has been made with plenty of sincerity but that alone does not guarantee quality filmmaking.

This Italian import's title may make it sound like either a kids movie or a cooking documentary, but it proves to be a wild and compelling work that simultaneously evokes the influence of such disparate filmmakers as Terrence Malick, Werner Herzog, and Sergio Leone (not to mention a dash of “Broadway Danny Rose”-era Woody Allen) while still coming across as a fresh and unique cinematic vision.

It's an intriguing idea for a film, I suppose, but it proves to be pretty much all setup with precious little follow-through. Not even the good performances from the two leads can make the whole thing work.

The lo-fi horror film "Night's End" tries to combine old-fashioned haunted house chills with more contemporary technological terrors, but never quite figures out how to do that.

The film bizarrely takes what could have been a touching and powerful drama about the traumatic family ties that bind (and occasionally choke) and attempts to refit it as a straightforward, if mostly low-key horror exercise chock-full of scenes involving various things popping up out of the darkness with numbing regularity.

Whatever "Breaking Bread" lacks in artistic ambition, it makes up for with its good heart, sincere intentions, and, most importantly, all of those luscious images of food.

The Pact starts off on an intriguing note and has some moments when it does work (especially the ones involving Grete), but while it's theoretically filled with dark psychological underpinnings, it seems oddly reticent to deal with them in any significant way.

The Long Night wants to create a sense of encroaching fear and unease in viewers but cannot inspire much of anything other than boredom and apathy.

The trouble is that while many of these bits and pieces are often fascinating, they never quite pull together into a truly compelling or satisfying narrative.

Although their work is ultimately not enough to make “See for Me” anything more than a gimmick movie that never quite pays off, Davenport almost makes it worth watching and will leave you wondering about what they could accomplish with stronger material.

The best family films capture the imaginations of younger viewers and teach them the power of storytelling in ways that can affect them for their entire lives, possibly inspiring them to create their own stories as well. By comparison, “Sing 2” serves no other purpose than to waste a couple of hours.

Although it's undeniably well-made, it lacks the kind of energy that might have helped make it truly come alive, and seem like more than a historical reenactment.

Most viewers will find themselves wishing that writer/director Patrick Ridremont had come up with a few variations on this standard theme in order to liven up this competently executed but painfully familiar genre exercise.

For the most part, So Late So Soon is a moving and thoughtful meditation on the inevitability of aging and mortality and the unstoppable lure of the creative process.

A film that is a somewhat uneven journey, though one that proves to be ultimately rewarding in the end.

By and large, though, Only the Animals is an effectively convincing slow-burn thriller that marks the welcome return of Moll, who first made a splash with the wickedly entertaining thriller With a Friend Like Harry.

Those willing to give No Future a chance will find it to be a fairly smart and realistic depiction of two people consumed by grief, guilt, and loss and the misguided ways by which they attempt to come to terms with those feelings.

As it turns out, this literary curiosity proves to be far more interesting than the finished film, which takes an undeniably interesting premise and then fails to make good use of it.

Even though the film is ultimately not much more than an exercise in nostalgia, that's hardly a bad thing when you're delving into a past as rich as the one on display here.

Such a spectacular misfire on every imaginable level—and even some you haven’t begun to imagine—that there are times when one might mistake it for an especially clever and relentlessly deadpan satire of the type of film it's desperately trying to evoke.

Small Engine Repair is little more than 103 minutes of a would-be provocation whose only real advantage is that it's ultimately too dopey to be as offensive as it clearly could have been. It has nothing of note to say about the issues it pretends to raise, though it does try to say them as loudly and as pseudo-colorfully as possible.

If watching a low-key portrait of a person struggling through a personal crisis with a refreshing lack of cheap melodrama sounds intriguing, well, that's exactly what director Kazik Radwanski has delivered with undeniably compelling results.

Its biggest crime is that the whole thing, in the end, is just kind of pointless, and doesn’t offer viewers anything that they haven’t already seen before and it's never as amusing or thought-provoking as it would like to be.

While I like the laid-back attitude the filmmakers apply to the theoretically devastating situation, it quickly becomes apparent that attitude is the only thing the film really has to offer to viewers. Although there are a few amusing moments here and there, the comedic situations are too droll for their own good and too often seem to waste potentially interesting ideas.

Cuartas' film provides a generally interesting spin on both the vampire mythos and more typical dysfunctional family dynamics. And while I can't promise it will provide you with a good time at the movies, at least in the conventional sense, I can tell you it's one that's likely to stick with you for a while.

It isn’t bad, per se, but I just never felt the emotional impact it's clearly hoping to achieve.

What could have been a powerful, timely, and potentially funny meditation on the grieving process is instead a work that's about as thin and flavorless as a gum wrapper.

Those who are willing to give it a chance—and that would include thoughtful teenagers who would respond to a film that approaches their lives in a serious and reasonably non-judgmental manner—are likely to find it as fascinating as I did.