Richard Whittaker

The story Surgal tells is ultimately fascinating but dry, deep but limited, and a lesson more than an experience.

If you grew up in the 1990s post-hippie Massachusetts performance arts scene (as Baker did), Janet Planet may tug on your nostalgia, but you may not feel otherwise drawn to its ethereal qualities.

Misericordia feels like a big metaphysical shrug, sluggish to the point of lethargy.

Unfortunately, what should have naturalistic depth seems oddly superficial, and an attempt to dispose of traditional structure becomes episodic. As with many failed experiments, there are still, at least, some interesting takeaways.

The animated feature directorial debut of both Kim Burdon and Robert Chandler (writer/producer of The Amazing Maurice) is a light jaunt that's mostly delivered in mid-tier CG and mildly overblown celebrity voice-acting. However, there are still some delightful flourishes, like opening credits that evoke the distinctive vintage British Rail tourism posters, and a flashback involving articulated paper puppets.

I Am Everything is most fascinating when it goes deep into his formative years and the influences of truly obscure figures like Esquerita and Billy Wright (both Black queer musicians). Yet the further into his life the documentary goes, the less insightful it becomes.

For a movie about our relationship with our bodies, there's surprisingly little intellectual meat on its pretentious bones.

It’s not frustrating, but then, it’s not quite that engaging. It may spark a little light self-recognition among filmmakers, and that’s all Hansen-Løve seems to aim for.

It’s rare to say about a contemporary film, but maybe it could gain from a little didacticism, a little lecturing, a little clarity to ensure that its muddied purpose becomes clearer. Instead, its idiosyncrasies obscure its insights.

In one of those odd happenstances of cinema, The Beast shares those themes of processing romantic trauma through temporal displacement with Alice Lowe’s Monty Python-esque Timestalker: but La bête lacks its pithiness and humanity.

It’s hard not to feel that Look Into My Eyes would pierce the veil with greater insight if Wilson wasn’t so credulous about everyone’s good intentions.

The People’s Joker feels like it would work better as a one-woman show, a monologue that seems weighed down by the burden of its own metaphor.

Mortimer, coming off his critically-acclaimed and award-winning debut Daniel Isn't Real, never quite strikes a tone or a pace that suits his tale of a (potentially) fractured mind.

Underlit, shot in the same murky beiges that plague so many low budget horrors, and not as profound as it thinks it is, it isn't quite exploitation schlock or a cerebral shocker, instead relying on both conventions for a hybrid that ends up with the satisfaction of neither.

Memory is better than some Neeson action flicks, worse than others, but, predictable as it is to say, you'll have trouble remembering it much longer than its run time.

It feels like Glander was hoping to create something that all the former kids that grew up on Cartoon Network’s wild, weird era will gravitate towards. But the reality is that it’s not as bizarre, creative, transgressive, or even just plain entertaining as the average episode of The Amazing World of Gumball, and that was about a 12-year-old cat boy and his fish friend.

There’s an important message in here, especially when it comes to the financial inequality between men and women in sports. But rather than using the 17-year-old Shields’ pugnacious attitude to really explore how she landed body blows on the sexist establishment, The Fire Inside just ends up shadow boxing.

The narrative is too flat, too drily filmed by César-nominated cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie (8 Women) to induce much emotion or debate about Anne’s hypocrisy and abuse of power.

Raimi plays with the audience’s loyalties, making the insufferable Brad increasingly sympathetic and Linda more unhinged and despicable by the minute. Yet ultimately Send Help devolves into two awful people being awful to each other for two hours.

The Outwaters stumbles because it fails to clear the second hurdle of any found footage movie: not simply answering why would the camera stay on (that's the easy part), but why would anyone edit what's been recovered in this way?

In his three-acts-and-an-epilogue structure, Guadagnino inserts more story than Burroughs intended, and Queer becomes aimless.

True, the odd quill may scratch the surface, but there’s nothing really penetrating.

The result is something that feels like an adult’s idea of a sophisticated kids’ movie, its sense of adventure and imagination overruled and undercut by its tone of mature melancholy.

It’s an inevitable problem with the screenlife format, to find a way to keep this deluge of pop-ups and cutaways all interesting without the audience’s POV ever leaving a desktop screen.

Prows lets all those subplots divert him from saying something meaningful about how even the best-intentioned of cops end up part of a nightmare machine. Luckily, the plentiful and creative gore splatters enough blood and ichor to provide camouflage disguising those shortcomings. Or rather, enough to make Night Patrol entertaining – just not enough to completely obfuscate what it could have been.

In George’s odyssey, McQueen attempts to emulate and skewer the classic British boys’ own adventures by juxtaposing it with social realism, but it ends up divided between the two instincts. Blitz is also burdened by a surprisingly leaden script filled with paper-thin Cockney stereotypes.

Even compared to his last film, the bifurcated dual character studies of In Our Day, A Traveler’s Needs feels less like a completed movie and more like an acting exercise.

With neither the grandiosity of pagan vision that illuminated The Green Knight, or the subversive forest horror of Ben Wheatley's In the Earth, Garland's Men is never quite a joke, but maybe that would have made it a more pointed parable.

A tedious mix of Reno 9-1-1 awkward humor and the queasy provocation in Tim and Eric's Awesome Show, Great Job!, it felt like Dupieux was trying too hard, and Deerskin feels like the injection of the leather obsession just never quite meshes with the rest of the story.

Poser, the debut feature from local filmmakers Ori Segev and Noah Dixon, is so in love with the scene from which it draws, with the bands given momentary cameos, with the cool hipness and store brand subversion of it all, that they never seem quite capable of giving it the critique for which they seem to aim.

The real engine that keeps the movie moving isn’t the cliched script or the spectacular race footage. It’s Pitt.

Luckily, Ne Zha II still retains the charm of the best parts of the original, with the young rapscallion Nezha still a hyperactive bundle of mischief, hand stuffed down his pants like Dennis the Menace, waddling through jade palaces as he defies his destiny. May he stay as chaotically endearing for the inevitable part III.

If The Five Devils more bravely embraced a single perspective, that might have better bound together its depiction of a family splitting apart.

For all the effort that Van Sant and his team put into making Dead Man’s Wire look like 1970s Indianapolis, its ability to really summon the spirit of the era only goes skin deep.

Just because you can shove a bunch of IPs together, should you? Especially when the motivation is a 90-minute joke about beloved TV series, with a lot of cheese-as-cocaine gags. Who is it for? People who still laugh at uncanny valley jokes. For those that don't, no reason to worry, because most of the references will be explained to you.

The pat defense is that Skinamarink is not for conventional horror audiences, and that's obvious, but at the same time it feels overextended as a conceptual piece.

This is still Dragon Ball, with all its quirks so well established that they're just part of the process now.

Heavy-handed and stuffed with cardboard characters, everything about Twisters save for Powell feels like a pale imitation of what made the original such an unexpected smash of a disaster movie. Lightning definitely does not strike twice.

Oppenheimer never quite embraces the absurdity and madness of his own proposition, and instead engages in a surprisingly flat tragicomedy of manners.

Raging Grace is too gleefully ridiculous to live up to its didactic ambitions, and too on-the-nose to let its wings of crushed velvet madness truly spread.

It's all peak Anderson, which sadly also means his inability to put a story together.

Originality is what made Alvarez famous. If only he showed more of it here when it comes to storytelling, not just innovative jump scares.

The best moments are when Keery and Campbell get to be blue collar schlubs facing down these messy menaces. Maybe if there was more of their back-and-forth and less of Neeson and Torchia’s distant double act, or vice versa, then Cold Storage might balance between its gruesome and goofy aspects.

There’s none of the visceral artfulness that Scott managed in the original. Quite simply, if you can’t make man-on-baboon hand-to-hand combat interesting, why do you think you can make a sword fight fun?

There’s an insufferable longwindedness to Kinds of Kindness, each installment dragging on beyond the point of patience. Watching becomes a chore, made heavier by Robbie Ryan’s often flat cinematography and the pacing created by Lanthimos’ longtime editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis.

Taken on its own fluff piece terms, Piece by Piece is an interesting sprint through three decades of cultural relevance and relatively scandal-free living. If Pharrell’s happy, then it seems we have to be too.

Singer has great inspirations, and the multilayered approach to edits and sound design within the hypnosis is ingenious and excellently executed. But it doesn't add up to much.

The episodic nature of Beau's misadventures serves as both distraction and bloat, a metaphorical cavalcade that lacks the acerbic agility of many of its predecessor.

It's easy to see this coming out in 1998 with Ashley Judd as Rebecca, and Carey Elwes under Victor's tattooed skin. However, this midbudget drama doesn't have quite that star power, and it definitely lacks the visual flair of that era's overdriven and weird procedurals.

Burton and his writing team waste the opportunity of a sequel to fix the errors of the past, and instead double down on the most problematic elements of the original.

Maybe some grasp of the dynamics of the modern publishing industry would have added some grit, making it more than it is: a formulaic and forgettable pulpy beach read.

If you weren't afraid of heights before, then Fall will give you the fear. Welcome to vertigo hell, mainly due to the work of cinematographer MacGregor.

What I Want You Back really has going for it is Slate and Day. The set-up may be a Ryan deep cut, but their awkward energy, and shared ability to scattershot subtle one-liners without them getting buried by the sillier antics, harks back to another of her classics: When Harry Met Sally.

Somehow, there’s more than a little bit of fun to be had in this oddball little throwback, filled with mischievous glee and a sullied heart of gold.

There are so many underdeveloped themes that it’s not hard to see what Singer was trying to achieve, and how short he falls.

We Bury the Dead is already too slow and mournful to pass as popcorn entertainment, and it’s rarely quite thoughtful enough to bring its art house horror aspirations to life.

Sisto's direction is a victory of glacial tone over actual content, and John and the Hole's frustrations outweigh its insight into the forces that can spawn a monster.

Watching two irksome characters fall into a new co-dependence (all at the expense of other characters) is scarcely the emotional victory that Eisenberg presents it as.

Jenkins had an opportunity to build on the flawed but rousing headlining debut of DC's greatest woman warrior. Instead, she delivered the modern DC Extended Universe's Superman III. It's a lumpen mass of half-ideas and glaring fan service, topped by a horrendous montage ending that is clearly designed to inspire hope, courage, and kindness, but will more likely make everyone wonder if that was why they waited two and a half hours.

House of Gucci isn't aggressively bad, but it is undeniably tedious, threadbare, and unengaging.

Even by Byington’s lo-fi standards, Lousy Carter feels ramshackle. It’s got traces of the familiar warm bathos of his sardonic best work. However, like Lousy’s cardigan, it’s all a little threadbare.

Written by Mark Duplass and first-time feature director and veteran producer Mel Eslyn (Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off, The One I Love), there's no doubt that Biosphere is filled with ideas, and they're given easy life by Brown and Duplass.

The underlying narrative theme of sons who become greater – and better – men than their fathers is underdeveloped. Meanwhile, the animation feels oddly dated, as the decision to give visual continuity to three and a half decades of storytelling re-enforces this as fan service.

Between the half-formed romance, the uneven comedy, and the observations that stop just short of real insight, it's a wedding invite that's easy to skip.

If what you want is a fancier episode of The Great British Baking Show, then you'll "ooh" and "ah" at all the right moments as Ottolenghi assembles his kitchen of world-class patisserie chefs and jelly experts.

If only Fight or Flight knew that what it does best is hectic mayhem then maybe it wouldn’t be such a bumpy ride.

At the end of the day, people won't be lining up at a Disney park to ride a clamshell into a ride based on this live-action version. And that tells you everything you need to know. Next time, maybe just give this kind of money to the ink and paint department.

Peeking its head out from this pile of trash is the ghost of one of the year’s most wildly entertaining movies.

It’s hard to blame the actors for not grasping the tone when it seems to elude the filmmakers.

Horror is built on moms wanting to protect their kids, and Come Play falls down because Sarah just never really seems to connect with Oliver.

There's none of Spielberg's verbal wit or the astonishing shot composition that helped the rest of the films flourish so far above their gutsy, 1930s action serial roots. Dial of Destiny feels like a less skilled hand tracing over the work of his favorite artists: The lines may be their own, but you'll always see the superior work underneath, overshadowing it and making you wish you could see the original instead.

Even if you like Snyder's non-superhero work, this feels like a serious step down.

Insert Coin doesn’t tell gamers anything they didn’t already know, and non-gamers won’t care – so unless you're a hardcore fan, maybe just save your quarters.

There are flashes of greatness, especially when Gyllenhaal and cinematographer Lawrence Sher capture some of the film’s wilder set-pieces. But then the narrative messiness undercuts the beauty of those images.

Ultimately, the slow boil bleakness of the script, with its subtle ruminations of what it is to go on in a time of hopelessness, is what marks Settlers apart, even as it looks and feels like so many of the post-apocalyptic drought-plagued SF dramas of the last few years.

It’s as if Hot Fuzz was under the cultural and chemical influence of Sixties and Seventies psycho-pharmaceutical mind expansion conspiracy fantasies rather than Eighties action flicks and real ale.

For all of Elordi’s mutton-chopped brooding and Robbie’s vamping, there’s something shallow and glib about “Wuthering Heights.” Yet again, the psychosexual classic tragedy has been turned into a well-crafted mass-market potboiler.

The narrative trick that worked within the narrower confines of Krista seems almost absurd here, a leaden feel-good ending that sits at complete odds with the formless opening. Beast Beast is far better when it's abstract and observational, drifting somewhere between the wistful compassion of Jonah Hill's Mid90s and the sociological immediacy of Larry Clark's Kids.

Alienoid is so big in its ambition that it rarely coheres, and sequences in each time period go on for so long that the other era, and all its characters, fall away. But the characters are overwhelmingly entertaining, most especially Jo and Yum as the hapless monster hunters who are promised much bigger things if Part 2 ever happens.

Sure, the kids will giggle, and the animation is well-executed (even if there does seem to be something a little off around the eyes in this version of Po) but it just doesn't land with that same ebullient skadoosh.

Some of this – the simplest parts, the interpersonal drama played out in the rehearsal room, the power dynamics between actors and directors – are genuinely fascinating and darkly fun, as director Karl quietly abuses his position for his own ends. If Warmerdam had kept to that refined perspective, with quibbling about blocking and line delivery, then Nr. 10 might have become more of a complete film.

With M3GAN out of her recognizable body for most of the film, it becomes clear how much of the success of both films comes down to Davis’ delivery.

Huang's understatement often seems flat. There's nothing visually distinctive about his depiction of diverse working class NYC, and major events bubble up with surprisingly little impact. With so much on the line, Boogie just sort of dribbles to nothingness.

Ultimately, Prisoners of the Ghostland is an OK film by a great filmmaker who has made truly great films, most memorable for its cast and the fact Sono finally made an English-language movie. Yet, when what's noteworthy about a film is just that it exists, it's more a vapor than an actual phantom.

The Mauritanian wants to be a fusion of Papillon and A Few Good Men, but it cannot work out whether it wants to make a purely emotive argument, or engage in a brutal cross-examination of the legal system.

It's still not quite Pratchett-y, still a little static – most especially in the oddly flat animation – and still not quite snappy enough. But that doesn't stop Maurice being an entertaining way to convince kids to pick up the book.

Making a movie about how annoyed you were that your label tried to force you to make a concert movie is just 103 minutes of Charli xcx relitigating an argument she already won, just with added product placement.

For a film with such weighty aspirations, I.S.S. lacks gravity.

Clunky horror in-jokes, like a heavy-handed Scream nod in the name of Winnie's aunt (Isabelle), feel labored, and it's all plagued by the same unevenness that afflicted director Tyler MacIntyre's Tragedy Girls: The gore and the comedy are well-executed, but the timing is off.

The script by Mike White (who may have been locked in the writer’s room by Illumination Studios after working on the superior Migration) and series co-creator Ken Daurio feels like a stack of B-plots stapled together rather than a full story.

If Slingshot leaned into that character study, rather than roughly gaffer-taping it to a deep space thriller, maybe it wouldn’t stall out on the launch pad so badly.

What could have been a worthy tribute becomes a by-the-numbers melodrama.

This is definitely one My Hero Academia adventure that should go back to the classroom.

Operation Fortune is just one long series of heist sequences that run at the same speed, at the same tone, and all flatly shot by Ritchie's new regular cinematographer, Alan Stewart.

Smith is still a long way from being a great filmmaker, but he's an earnest one. And Clerks III, flawed as it is, is his heartfelt farewell to the Quick Stop.

PAW Patrol: The Movie is bigger and prettier than the TV show, but it's still PAW Patrol. What makes it worth the time investment for kids is that it's really about introducing the street-smart long-haired Dachshund Liberty (Martin) into the team, while giving a little drama to Chase's life as he processes some old trauma about being a stray in the big city.

Worse, the Marvels themselves have any potential chemistry drowned like an Atlantean with blocked gills. All the giddy charm of the Ms. Marvel version of Kamala Khan is lost in a torrent of fannish shrieks, while the demand that the audience feel empathy for grown adult Monica Rambeau who's still pouting that Auntie Carol never came back (Auntie Carol, who was literally off saving the cosmos) is wearisome.

Howard, mercifully, dumps most of Vance's political cant in favor of a maudlin, slow, rehab drama, carried on the backs of a cavalcade of wafer-thin characters.