Richard Brody

Instead of the roots of Shakespeare’s play, The Northman merely serves up its raw material both half-baked and overcooked.

It’s a miniseries’ worth of action that’s crammed into the procrustean bounds of a near-two-hour feature, without the compensating dimensions of symbol and implication.

In trying to do too much in its mere eighty-seven-minute span, “Kim’s Video” does too little. For all Redmon’s self-described passion for movies and obsession with the Kim’s Video trove, the film has little to say about a wider view of video-store life and its relationship to the movie-viewing experience.

Reed, a comedic wizard, generates some moments of giddy wonder, but the earlier film’s freewheeling, low-key loopiness is replaced by a dull and dutiful plot that, with its forced references to other Marvel installments, squeezes the action to fit the franchise.

The experience of watching Bottoms is weighed down by the movie’s thin drama, hit-or-miss comedy, and merely functional direction—pictures of actors acting.

The Bubble (which Apatow co-wrote with Pam Brady) is a sort of good bad movie, in which the aesthetic falls flat but the personal motive, the emotional core, is authentic, pugnacious, derisive.

Cedar plays Norman’s story for tragedy but never develops his inner identity, his history, or his ideals; the protagonist and his drama remain anecdotal and superficial.

Lavishly detailed yet dramatically vague, opulently produced but blandly depicted.

The failure of topicality in “Don’t Look Up” is, not least, that the movie’s cynically apolitical view of politics contributes to the frivolous and self-regarding media environment that it decries—starting with the very celebrity power that the movie marshalls to score its points.

The formulaic drama is of a piece with the movie’s action sequences, which exhaust their ingenuity from the get-go, with the Matera chase and shoot-out.

The film strains to achieve a breathless panache and a lurid swagger for which David Leitch’s direction is too heavy-footed and literal.

As written and directed by Lorene Scafaria, the movie offers enough moments of sharp emotion and keen perception to keep anticipation high throughout. Yet the movie stays on the surface, to yield, for the most part, a simplistic, unexplored celebration of characters who are molded to fit the story’s amiable tone.

Because the pieces of the movie are calculated to fit together in unambiguous arrangements, the performances are reduced to ciphers.

For all the film’s quietism regarding the particulars of secession and rebellion, “Civil War” is a piece of propaganda, a veritable recruiting video for its own rebels.

It’s bouncy, clever, amiable, and idiosyncratic, but its virtues seem inseparable from its over-all inertness and triviality.

Large in conception, it comes across as small of spirit, cramped in its sympathies and crabby in its attitudes.

Its effortful attempts to craft and sustain an ominous mood comes at the expense of observation, which is too bad, because the film’s premise is powerful and its lead actors are formidable.

The best things in [Spielberg's] version of “West Side Story”—the songs, their acerbity, the view of racial discrimination and class privilege—are already in the old one, while the best things in the old “West Side Story” are missing.

An action drama about the widespread legitimation of abuses by police departments, it arrives onscreen with a jolt but then subsides into a comfort zone of formulaic tropes.

As the cinematic equivalent of an airport read, Anatomy of a Fall is adequate—not brisk but twisty, not stylish but unobtrusively informational. But the artistic failings are obvious and distracting throughout.

For most of Annette, Carax films the actors singing mainly in long travelling shots that hardly reveal much personality on the part of either actor or director.

An intricate time-jumping framework is a large part of what makes the film distinctive, but the compromises made to achieve this are responsible for a pervasive feeling of emptiness.

The movie’s substance remains largely implicit; its pleasures are partial, detached, and superficial. It offers little context, background, personality, or anything that risks distracting from the show.

The film’s overbearing effort to say something serious about society at large seems to force del Toro’s directorial hand. It pushes him to up the razzle-dazzle in order to keep the didactic element entertaining. The result is a movie that is bloated in length, literal in its messaging, and overdecorated, like a cinematic Christmas tree, with dutiful dramatics that leach it of tension, energy, and spontaneity.

The Bikeriders displays the cost of noninterventionist direction, of sticking to source material with a self-inhibiting fidelity. These characters are still in search of their auteur.

The dramatic format seems borrowed from television, with multiple threads jumpily interweaved, to ward off impatience. With so many balls in the air at once, the movie lacks the kind of patient observation that this story demands.

Unfortunately, The Bride! falls victim to this hollowing out of character, and the result feels simultaneously like a reduction and an expansion—or call it an inflation, an accretion of curious traits that crop up conveniently but remain undiscussed and undeveloped.

Unfortunately, the film only hints at its larger ambitions and leaves them undeveloped. The story is told mainly methodically, sometimes deftly, but with little verve, relying on a generalized sensitivity that never approaches imaginative curiosity. It holds attention as a yarn but doesn’t build the incidents of its plot into a world view.