Robert Daniels

While the nimble Jang holds together the robust action sequences — bloody freakouts often captured in slow motion — no one else grounds any of the scenes with any emotion. Consequently, The Killer fails to land a real knockout blow.

While this slick film wants to use their stories to put faces to the fentanyl epidemic, Swab’s genre instincts get the better of him.

If The Covenant were only an interrogation of the hollowness of American exceptionalism, as its first hour suggests, it’d be among the most honest portrayals of the country’s role in the region. But Ritchie eventually awakens from his stupor, pushing this combat-action flick to gonzo territory.

The ticking clock makes The Midnight Sky a post-apocalyptic survivalist space film whose narrative is so overloaded that the emotional weight offers zero gravity.

Even for fans of this animated universe, New Gods: Yang Jian can’t turn its viewers into believers.

The subplots dangle, the suspense unravels, and the primary relationship never takes off. What you’re left with isn’t an arresting piece of filmmaking, but an idea that is stretched beyond the ability to naturally hold one’s attention without relying on loud filmmaking and even louder themes.

There’s nothing inherently bad in the Pastors’ film. It’s competently made with the general sheen you expect from a bigger budget. You are, however, left scratching your head about what another sequel could bring that this one clearly couldn’t. No one in this cast is as dynamic as Bullock, nor is anything as tightly conceived as in the prior film. If seeing is believing, Bird Box Barcelona doesn’t have much to show.

Barker takes his initially enthralling documentary and dilutes the story with this new feature, creating melodramatic lightness without an affectingly heavy touch due to the tepid tone and wheezing tempo. In short, it snoozes.

While “The Gates” itself isn’t a total smash, it’s a more than sturdy final effort from a beloved actor.

Linden offers a fascinating premise, but her visual language doesn’t catch the eye, and the potential excitement to be mined from translating Blaxploitation motifs for modern-day audiences is missing. “Alice” could’ve been so much more, but instead, it comes off like a lost opportunity.

The Inspection isn’t a bad movie. Rather it’s a disappointing slog because the arduous journey it sets up should have offered greater returns.

While there’s plenty of large entertaining set pieces, Sheridan’s intriguing premise withers under its overabundant components.

The well-placed message and the imaginative animation will win over the film’s intended audience: young children. But the moves Where is Anne Frank uses to deliver that message may do as much harm as they bring help.

Truth & Treason is a staid drama whose observations about Helmuth could easily be summed up in a quick encyclopedic blurb.

There is a good movie lurking within writer/director Cinqué Lee’s survivalist coming-of-age thriller “Last Ride.” It’s just suspended between two half-told stories.

A kind of mash-up of “Interstellar” and “Stranger Things,” the extraterrestrial coming-of-age sci-fi flick “Watch the Skies” is a passably enjoyable story about loss.

Inspired but overwrought, “Scarlet,” an anime adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, begins with stunning style before falling off a major cliff.

Stockholm Bloodbath is a half-promise. There's plenty of blood to be had, but not much of it boils.

It becomes empty, artificial scenes of actors playing dress-up.

There are shootouts, a car chase, some heroics and some hard life lessons—but this film isn’t breaking new ground on either the action or socio-political front.

The sunny, diverse musical delivers sugary messages of self-affirmation with the shine of a lollipop and the stickiness of a half-eaten sucker. It’s a bold attempt, putting a neo-realist spotlight on a bevvy of first-time and nascent actors, but presented under an obnoxious treacle banner.

Williams’ playful, genre-bending music that mixes post-soul cool with skater sensibilities is probably more than a live-action narrative could contain. In the hands of director Morgan Neville, however, the story of Williams’ life lacks specificity and substance.

If the action in Kraven the Hunter was as well conceived as its villains, it’d be a riot. Unfortunately, the brawls are physically detached from the environment. The choreography lacks punch and design; the compositions are spatially unaware.

The father-son drama in Embattled might win some rounds, but the abundance of clichés leads to a loss overall.

At every turn director James Mangold desperately wants to recapture the glory of old-school Hollywood filmmaking, but turns, painstakingly to the worn-out tools of present-day tentpole moviemaking.

While Powell’s film is highly bloody and invested with psychological realism, it lacks a pulse and curiosity that doesn’t befit the excitement promised in the title.

Avis loses the novel’s sincerity by watering down Sewell’s animal welfare plea. In this update, the humans are not as villainous. Beauty is not as prominent. And the novel’s mustang spirit diminishes into a ho-hum horse movie.

Martin and Lindsay’s Tina all too often struggles to show Turner as a three-dimensional person — her wants, her beliefs, her passions — in lieu of her being a product of the abuse she withstood from Ike. As a tribute, it’s a disappointing slog for an always-vibrant legend.

Judging by this documentary’s easygoing approach, Altrogge wants to use his film as a full-spread story on Clemente. The decision pushes Clemente the man into being a mere memory.

Unfortunately, much like the light at the end of the tunnel, the thinness of this situational comedy, which continues to hit the same jokes with diminishing returns, becomes glaringly obvious.

Halverson is too far on the deep end to provide us with digestible storytelling, and Cowperthwaite, who spends the movie jumping in nonlinear fashion from one year to the next, is in no rush to make the larger picture easier to see.

As much as Costner tries to play an even hand, attempting to give the Indigenous and settler perspective equal attention, it doesn’t wholly work.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come delivers short-term thrills in an emotionally hollow gore fest.

The kinetic, captivating tone disintegrates once the narrative remembers that it needs to tell us about these people.

Sidney functions as a loving memorial to the pioneering Black movie star who passed earlier this year, but it never suffices as more than a tepid first draft of his life. And it is never as groundbreaking as Poitier’s best work.

There’s a great film waiting to be made about the opioid crisis. But much like “Hillbilly Elegy,” “Cherry” can’t conjure up the cause and the toll of the devastation without relying on pastiche. Even the ending, meant to be a moment of healing, reduces Cherry’s concluding journey to a mere saccharine montage.

The entire ensemble rolls with the fast punches. And Crosby and Knapp show real comedic potential. But First Date takes too many big bites without the ability to digest any of its gummy sweets. Crosby and Knapp’s First Date, an at-times hilarious California pleasure trip, dissolves under the weight of its self-evident ambition.

By playing with formalism, using faux documentary, and cranking out hedonistic scenes of excessive drug taking and partying, Yates aims to blend “Erin Brockovich” and “The Wolf of Wall Street.” But the director’s filmic language never offers quite enough sex, quite enough excess, quite enough of capitalism’s depravity. Pain Hustlers just doesn’t know how to commit.

As a gangster film, “The Alto Knights” does little more than putter along, taking in very few new or interesting sights along the way.

A high-strung, faith-based hood drama, Moses the Black has admirable intentions but lacks precision.

What follows is a movie that wants to be a teen movie and an allegory for the immigrant experience but never wholly coheres.

As a film, The Humans provides serrated frights and big challenges for its actors, but ultimately, it is too cold and never believable enough to immerse one in its purported dread.

Those affected by America’s terrible immigration system need a film explaining their difficult plight. Knowton’s “Split at the Root” just isn’t it.

If Pearce weren’t so heavy-handed, if were just self-aware enough to know how to connect character with metaphor, then Encounter, a flawed sci-fi flick with a simple premise, could be a great adventure fit for the stars.

Despite a deep ensemble led by a transformative Bullock, Unforgivable moves at a turgid pace, lacking the urgency and pathos required in a redemption narrative with any hopes that the audience will pull for its damaged protagonist.

It ultimately crashes into a heap due to a host of rambling non-connective ideas and tonally grating dialogue.

A brisk film that could do with twenty more minutes, Green’s “Good Joe Bell” has its heart in the right place, but the limited gaze the writers and director offer withholds this redemptive tale from being the uplifting critique of homophobia and bullying that it needs to be.

This Italian post-apocalyptic film from director Alessandro Celli angles for child soldier depravity without any of the heart.

Both Dickey and Studi shoulder the lesser material through a charming naturalism that papers over the script’s artificiality.

Singer’s Reptile, distributed by Netflix, wants to be a David Fincher procedural with Steven Soderbergh’s paranoia, but it’s a fangless homage without suspense, logic, or shame.

Sam Levinson’s Malcolm & Marie is a purposely self-absorbed meta-narrative about a navel-gazing director at odds with his muse—an enticing premise on paper—that too often obscures its heart in lieu of tedious diatribes.

Port Authority isn’t a transgender-led love story. But another short-sighted film using Black folks as a lesson for ignorant white outsiders.

The star-studded cast does good, dependable work. There are visual flairs that linger in the mind: For all its faults, this movie has a striking look to it. And Corbin’s best intentions are genuine. The ending comes with a startling bang. But what remains when the dust settles? By the end of the over-tightened 892, unfortunately, a memorialization to Brown-Easley’s plight, we know little about the actual man.

Cruella is a dull overwrought origin story without an audience.

It’s all pastiche; all surfaces with nothing below. And it leaves one cold.

As I watched this turgid muddle, a messy ball of nonsensical threads and worse performances, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Roger Ebert’s old maxim: No good film is too long, and no bad film is too short.

A good movie exists in On the Count of Three. But a film with such challenging subject matter needed a more experienced director capable of shading the dark comedy and the heartfelt spirit with an assured visual hand.

While The Forgiven isn’t concerned with making David a better person — rather to get him to fully grasp his guilt — McDonagh’s methods can’t distinguish the film from the long list of stories about white folks learning lessons at the expense of brown people. There may have been higher ideals in mind, but “The Forgiven” fails to gracefully reach them.

While this installment isn’t nearly as woeful as Beverly Hills Cop III, it doesn’t have the charm or energy of the first two films either. It’s a limp, desperate action comedy with few memorable moments.

Blink Twice is haunted by lost opportunities. As a woman and survivor, Frida feels ignored. But Kravitz leaves the erasure that Black women feel untapped.

The Tomorrow War tries its hand at throwback ‘90s action glory, back when cinematic adventures could be everything for everybody. Instead, this post-apocalyptic combat flick lacks the intensity to reach the 1.21 gigawatts worth of power needed to emblazon our screens in escapist flair.

This is a nostalgia play composed of admittedly funny and gnarly moments that do not string together into a satisfying whole.

A convoluted conclusion, begot by an unconvincing change of heart, obliterates any chance of “Hunt” offering the clarity it needs to be entertaining. Instead, Lee’s directorial effort wanders toward something unmemorable.

Even for a man who could be called the greatest actor of his generation, the obtuse script and abstract visual language are too much to overcome in what is ultimately a dull, meandering film.

Laboriously paced, the indulgent jolts and bloodless scares, neither deeply rooted nor artfully raised, float as lifelessly as a lily pad on a bog.

One Gets Out Alive is a desperate attempt to explore the immigration crisis through a horror lens, à la Remi Weekes’ stunning film His House. But Menghini’s film is an underwritten hodgepodge of hollow scares.

The tale is one of greed and grift. But BS High, a documentary about the saga, is too taken by the audacity of Roy Johnson, the founder of Bishop Sycamore, to critique his actions.

The creators’ quest for deeper meaning feels strained and overreaching, and it overwhelms the adventurous spirit of the film’s first half. If anything, this is at least a great jumping-off point for Evans, who never wavers, even when everything around her does.

In its quest for entertainment value, this documentary loses sight of the actual grief and hurt a devastated son would feel.

The film is missing out on a cohesive vision, to the point where the audience will spend the entire film waiting for the flashbacks and summaries to end, and for DaCosta’s movie to finally begin. But by the end, she’s only offered a visually stunning homage to the original film. For a director of her talent, that isn’t enough.

Co-written with Krysty Wilson-Cairns (“1917”), Wright’s Last Night in Soho is funny and chaotic, slick and stylish, and falls apart in its confounding second half.

Between the eye-catching period details and the warmth of the performances, you want to wrap your arms around “The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat.” But this is a film that seems intent on pushing you away through its ludicrous plotting.

Leaning toward unrelenting shock, “Newborn” as a whole becomes something worse in the process: dishonest.

It’s a shame. Argylle had the potential to be a whissmart parody. It unfortunately just seems to get tired of being the butt of the joke before it can deliver the punchline. But in attempting to avoid becoming a gag—laboring to connect this film with the Kingsman franchise—Vaughn imbues his film with anonymity, making it merely forgettable.

This film is simply a simulation of the genre beats you expect in a story about a man kidnapping a woman in the woods. The cloying setup also leaves much to be desired, as does the anti-climatic ending

My Policeman is surface-level queer representation lacking in visual imagination and begging for better performances. It’s the kind of glacially paced movie that sticks around for two hours and tells its viewer nothing new; a series of moving images without any sense of emotion or wonder. “My Policeman” commits the gravest of crimes—it’s soulless.

Berry’s Bruised is a familiar comeback tale relying on the inner-city motifs of 1990s hood films to deliver a melodramatic, barely coherent prestige vehicle with very little to say about MMA itself.

There are, to be sure, moments of shock. But they offer very little awe.

If you squint you can nearly see the kind of movie Gutto might be aiming for.

Neither the tacky ending nor the very existence of this second installment is earned. Instead, it languishes as the squeezing of the final drops of a once bright idea.

Absolute Dominion is a high-concept sci-fi flick whose many pieces move but rarely settle in satisfying positions.

Butcher’s Crossing is unfocused, distant, and flat.

Few threats are more pertinent to the earth's future than deep-sea mining. I can think of no documentary as ill-equipped to inform viewers of this peril than director Matthieu Rytz’s scattered and vague documentary Deep Rising.

The Book of Clarence, the religious epic by multi-hyphenate talent Jeymes Samuel, is a handsomely crafted picture that simply loses the plot.

Emancipation becomes an exhaustive, vicious, and stylistically overcooked recounting of a man whose very visage led the abolitionist charge. Emancipation is a hollow piece of genre filmmaking that rarely answers, "Why this story and why now?"

Elvis certainly works as a jukebox, and it does deliver exactly what you’d expect from a Luhrmann movie. But it never gets close to Presley; it never deals with the knotty man inside the jumpsuit; it never grapples with the complications in his legacy. It’s overstuffed, bloated, and succumbs to trite biopic decisions.

Trigger Warning is a self-serious, brooding film without the wherewithal to know how righteously dumb it could be if it committed to the bit. Or, at least, the expertise to elevate it to the suspenseful level it so desperately aims to reach.

When “Revelations” isn’t investigating signs, it’s a dry, psychologically driven ghost story.

Ultimately, this film attempts to set up the future through Shuri. Wright is a talented actress with the ability to emotionally shoulder a movie when given good material. But she is constantly working against the script here.

After the forced bursts of energy, nightmarish dream sequences, and a strained bit of self-absolution recede, you soon realize that writer/director Niclas Larsson’s “Mother, Couch,” a morose, nonsensical family drama is about as interesting as the lint between the cushions.

[Borgli's] mealy-mouthed timidity in addressing genuinely controversial and provocative subjects, especially those that require a radical kind of empathy, not only renders his supposedly edgy provocations dull. It also makes one wonder if he’s at all interested in women as people.

These characters possessed far more soul in the prior film: they walked through every scene with centuries of baggage and loss; they spoke of times gone by with wonder and awe; they cared for one another. None of that is present here.

Rather than make the more interesting movie, Chaves and Johnson-McGoldrick kick the can down the road toward the next money-making sequel. Which would be totally welcomed if the The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It weren’t so artistically inert, and oh so boring.

This film, unfortunately, fails to live up to the quality of its influences. Filomarino’s Beckett lacks urgency, wit, and a lead actor capable of pulling together its underwritten themes.

Such blunt messaging reduces the onscreen carnage, which relentlessly occurs via this mute machine’s searing lasers, barrage of bombs and kaiju breath, to little more than the human toll required for this particular military man to feel again. Worse yet, the film concludes with hawkish intensity, fashioning itself into a tasteless recruitment video.

The preceding two-plus hours of this 145-minute slog — Tommy’s threadbare hodgepodge of bad impressions, gratuitous filmmaking, and even worse depictions of mental health — isn’t even a shadow of the real natural woman.

Grainy establishing shots of the skirmish offer little visual information other than its location on an expressway. Without viewers knowing where, and at whom, the soldiers are firing, the onscreen action is rendered indecipherable. Mackie’s quirky performance — Leo ends every order to Harp with an uncomfortable smile — is likewise baffling.

Schweighöfer’s prequel fails to offer the same level of excitement or gore as Snyder’s film. The heists are all snoozing affairs, and ultimately, the film succumbs to the script’s franchise ambitions.