Richard Lawson

Shyamalan can’t settle on a tone; he turns the comedy and tension and drama knobs seemingly at random. Trap is jumble of moods and textures that never cohere into the taught little thriller that the trailers advertise. The film is instead paunchy and meandering, a slog of pat psychology and limp cultural analysis.

Your Place or Mine occasionally gives off a glimmer of something interesting, but all too quickly snaps back to the featureless drudgery that has, sadly, come to define its genre.

Polley admirably allows her fine performers ample space to bring Women Talking to life. But there are also the bigger needs of the film to be considered—sometimes Polley’s actorly generosity comes at a cost, when the film turns stage-y for a minute and we’re snapped out of its enveloping spell.

The Meg is bad, but only rarely in the fun way.

Cruella is yet another act of co-opting by the biggest entertainment company in the world, an attempt to graft a cheap rebel spirit onto a naked exercise in I.P. synergy.

The film may have just been a failed stab at inter-gender empathy, were it not for its wretched final act. This is where Men takes an abrupt turn into surreal horror, and when something bad starts glinting just beneath the surface of Garland’s apparent motivations.

The movie feels too late and too little, a minor work that’s perhaps too streamlined to be really messy, but nonetheless has an air of shambling inexactness.

Technically speaking, Dolittle is a film made for children. So we should probably mostly view it through that lens. In that regard, the movie is perfectly okay.

Iñárritu has a lot on his mind here, weighing the sins and graces of personal and public history, and attempting to atone for some of it. But as Bardo stretches on and on and on, the film narrows into something solipsistic and meta.

An action-drama sourced from history (while riffing considerably on that history), The Woman King is a sturdy testament to how renewed a staid form can feel when it’s stretched to include different narratives.

DuVernay can’t seem to settle on a consistent visual or narrative cadence. Her camera is all over the place, hurtling in for woozy close-ups and then rearing back to reveal what is meant to be vast splendor but is often just bland C.G.I. prettiness.

Judas and the Black Messiah is missing that deeper personal aspect, some sense of the emotional force yoking O’Neal and Hampton together, dragging them toward ruin. The film is resonant regardless. Still, there’s such an opportunity presented here—to see these two sterling actors really working in harmony—that goes frustratingly unseized. As is, Judas and the Black Messiah is richer and more engaging than a standard biopic, but is not quite the Shakespearean tragedy of double allegiances and backstabbing that it could have been.

Rising to challenge viewers’ qualms about the movie’s existence is Deadwyler, whose stirring performance may be reason enough to see the film.

It’s an ugly stray who smells bad and should not be invited into your home, certainly. And yet it is its own kind of living creature, worthy of at least some basic compassion.

With Dune, Villeneuve has the chance to right the wrongs of David Lynch’s 1984 misfire (a misfire according to some, anyway) and truly honor Herbert’s text. But Villenueve can’t help but lacquer it all up into something hyper polished and hard to the touch.

Babylon is unfocussed and overeager, continuously distracted by the burst of a new idea. That could be read as an apt rendering of the manic thought of a cocaine binge, but there is something awfully studied in how Chazelle conjures up that nose-scratching, high-speed verve.

Let There Be Carnage tries to recreate the first film’s giddy shock while also upping the ante, taking what audiences liked and slopping more of that onto their plates.

What they’ve visually pulled off in Lightyear is stunning stuff. The story, sadly, does not rise up to meet that work.

In some ways, the film is hallmark Denis, flinty and strange and sometimes inscrutable. But it is also a disappointment, a leaden film whose points Denis has made more convincingly elsewhere.

Jungle Cruise is a two-hour movie that has far less consequence than a ride that’s a small fraction of that length. The experience the film more accurately simulates is the standing in line: all that tedious waiting in the heat for the fun to start.

Book Club’s four stars—and others like them—deserve material that’s specific, clever, surprising in some way. These plug-and-play movies have lost much of their charm at this point, feeling more like a slightly degrading duty than any kind of demographic triumph. Which may be overthinking it. But shouldn’t a movie about a book club feel at least a little bit literate?

Mortal Kombat is a disjointed, halfhearted trip to the past, where things probably should have been left finished for good.

It is the film’s bitterest irony that a story about a man controlled by a domineering force seems itself unwilling to give its subject true autonomy, lest that distract from its director’s aesthetic interests.

Perhaps the film’s thematic intentions are noble. But its execution is glib, never finding the right balance between compassion and leering.

There is, alas, nothing enriching about Capone. It offers none of the robust competence these dwindling-culture times are running low on. Perhaps more dismayingly, it’s not even entertaining. The film’s arresting oddity is fleeting, and then we’re just made to sit with it for another humid 90 minutes.

The film looks pallid and cheap, with pretty much zero nod to the style and panache of Wes Craven’s original. The jokes are heavily telegraphed as Clever Jokes, the references to cinema culture and film structure landing as obligation rather than organic bursts of analytical wit.

There’s Bullock, doing something good and interesting. Though it does ultimately prove frustrating and sad, watching her so desperately grasp for a finer film—one that lies just beyond what Bird Box allows us to see.

The House That Jack Built is a tediously navel-gazing exercise in von Trier trying to explain, and make half-hearted atonement for, his “totally twisted, man,” worldview, an explication of his personal psychology that is almost heartbreaking in its conflicted self-regard.