Robert Daniels

Burdened by its bluster, Extraction 2 is merely a loud, blithering mess masquerading as fulfilling escapism.

Education ends “Small Axe” on unsuspectingly grand terms. Yet the compact 63-minute coming-of-age film never loses its soft devoted touch. And McQueen, already an incredible filmmaker, shows another facet to his immense range.

The Fall Guy is at its best when it captures the frenzied energy, the multiplicity of artisans, and the devoted precision necessary to bring a scene together.

Because what Havoc lacks in characters and story, it delivers in two audacious waves of indiscriminate killing that are so bruising and relentless they make the “John Wick” movies look like “Sesame Street.”

Despite the tantalising set up, Immaculate is a dull, predictable affair, composed of far too many inconsequential jump scares in lieu of sturdy storytelling.

Barry Jenkins’ Mufasa is a strong, uncomplicated effort that should charm kids. The Moonlight directors involvement in a CGI-heavey Disney prequel caused serious film lovers to wring their hands, but the results speak for themselves: This is simply a lovely movie.

Though Willmott has the best intentions with The 24th, and the story of this infantry is ripe for the Black Lives Matter era, the narrative drama is a missed opportunity to honor these fallen heroes.

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

Despite its over orchestration, director Vanessa Roth’s slight, hagiographic documentary Mary J. Blige’s My Life, manages to provide profound truths concerning its self-admitted insecure subject.

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

If Radioactive spent more significant time with Curie’s eccentricities . . . we might have arrived at a real character study. Instead, the biopic’s strained narrative bonds dissolve, awash in a series of disconnected events.

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.

There are plenty of flaws in Spaceman. Mulligan’s character is underwritten . . . The overall tone might also be too sleepy, too introspective and despondent to some’s liking. But I just love Sandler in this register.

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.

Old isn't M. Night Shyamalan’s best work, but it is one that shows maturity – a movie that tackles universal and intense themes over twists and puzzles.

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.

In Everything Everywhere All At Once, a dizzying and aching bit of popcorn entertainment, in fact, Yeoh has never been better.

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.

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

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

While you will get sturdy popcorn pleasures from Spiderhead, you’ll also leave wondering what more possibilities Hemsworth holds as an actor once he lays his hammer down.

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 violent franchise has rarely felt so assured, so relaxed and knowingly funny.

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.

Hancock, in what might be his best film, grazes with greatness by constructing an enthralling thriller that relies on the talent of its three leading men to mine regret for mystery. But the mawkish little habits, the slow start, and the timid finale just barely get Hancock caught. It’s the little things that tear The Little Things apart.

It’s a fascinating premise by screenwriter Gregory Poirier, one that is methodically and quietly built, but ultimately loses any grit, atmosphere, suspense, or emotion it could possibly carry because of a few narrative headscratchers. Even Keaton, usually a sure bet, doesn’t land what the movie is selling.

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.

This is a film that leans into its cliches — long, loving nights transform into windswept mornings, ardent dialogue teases obsession — and smartly uses them to enact triggering lessons about generational trauma.

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.

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.

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.

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?"

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.

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.

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.

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.

In direct conversation with cinema’s many spaghetti westerns, Van Peebles’s shaggy script relies on winking nods and plentiful shootouts in lieu of production value. Outlaw Posse may not be innovative, but its regard for family affairs is worth treasuring.

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.

Sometimes Wolf is slight, relying on mystery and metaphor to build suspense, but Biancheri’s sense of narrative adventure imbues this survivalist picture with more than uneasiness. She gives it tenderness.

It’s A Wonderful Knife has plenty of attributes—charm, blood, and angst—that should fit right in at any family holiday gathering.

Murphy’s charm, his close chemistry with Hall, Snipes’ wily performance, and the resplendent costumes uplift this nostalgia trip.

G20 is an entertaining and gripping action vehicle with a deft sense of tension that is sometimes undone by its on-the-nose dialogue.

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.

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.

Even when there’s a comically large moon that feels ripped from a Méliès movie undercutting whatever emotional drama Ayer wants to pull in the film’s climactic raid on a brothel, it doesn’t matter. Because if “The Meg,” “Wrath of Man” or “The Beekeeper” proved anything, it’s that it doesn’t matter how outlandish or overcooked the movie is. Nothing can slow down Statham.

Lathan’s film is only a pale imitation of what came before it. But while “On the Come Up” is a major miss, here’s hoping that Lathan returns with a bigger and better directorial effort next time out.

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.

The indelible, unmatched voice of Houston may live on, but I Wanna Dance with Somebody lacks the ingredients of what made Houston a force that permanently altered every person who truly heard her.

Alice Winocour’s captivating fashion drama Couture is a quiet, observational picture about creative women finding solace in one another.

Peninsula combines components from I Am Legend, Mad Max, and the Fast & Furious series for a nonsensical joy ride that, while entertaining, lacks the sharpness of its predecessor.

The film bewitches you with its seemingly spontaneous humor, a cadre of original soulful folk tunes, and its adoration of the breathtaking surroundings.

Hillbilly Elegy is a prime example of a systemic failure, from script to craft to acting.

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.

From an outsider's perspective, however, as poetic and otherworldly as War Pony can be, the reality of its people never feels real.

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

It lacks form, edge, politics, coherency, and the grand vision necessary for vast world building. It’s a film that begins on volatile ground only to tumble down a tonally rocky hill before settling on a conclusion so emotionally dissonant that its clang rings louder than the minor laughs the film engenders during its bloated run time.

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

It’s not the promised spectacle that cements Venom: Let There Be Carnage as touching, wild entertainment. It’s the themes of home, love, and companionship that make Serkis’ sequel another reason to want more “Venom” movies, and quickly.

It’s a shaggy hangout film where McCartney and Wonder are dimwitted adversaries who spend their days getting high, insulting one another, and eating veggie dinners. In short, it’s incredibly fun.

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.

Ric Roman Waugh’s movie is a notable step up from the first film. The Garritys’ traversal across the treacherous North Atlantic Ocean and dashes past marauding bandits in Europe make for real human stakes.

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.

This Apple TV heist flick is underwritten, dreary, tedious, inert, and without any stakes. I almost hesitate to write too much about it because this soulless dreck feels so unworthy of adding blemishes to the white page.

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

The compositions lack clarity, the score of undulating voices is comically clichéd and the visual effects are a dingy, nauseating mess. There are no stakes in a film that not only takes seven royal lives — it snatches several brain cells with them.

Director Neill Blomkamp’s Gran Turismo, a crowd-pleasing, genre-bending sports drama, approaches wonder with an odd tepidness; it maneuvers around any modicum of character development by taking all-too simple routes and swerves away from formal experimentation, opting instead for simple enjoyment.

While The Call of the Wild is silly, and never completely pulls the wool over the eyes with respect to the CGI, there’s enough meat on the bone to gnaw on before burying it in the backyard.

A game Ridley, along with a brief cameo by a soulful Gil Birmingham, provides the necessary stakes for Burger’s film not to idle in narrative mud.

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.

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.

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

Play Dirty is a misanthropic work. Which isn’t inherently a deal breaker, but a stiff Wahlberg lacks the moxie to make the brutal barrage of death amusing or worthwhile.

Brendan Walsh’s cold survivalist thriller, Centigrade, is a creatively crafted claustrophobic study of a fractured marriage. Strongly acted, the drama wallows in melancholy while presenting peaks of hope amid its simple icy setting.

For a movie so intuitively captivating, so visually extravagant, it very nearly papers over all its emotional weaknesses.

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.

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.

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.

While what Cline did and the fight his victims took to find justice is a truth worth knowing and learning, Jourdan’s crass documentary isn’t the best vehicle for such weighty material.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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 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.

A flattened biopic devoid of a perspective or originality. It follows a long list of musical origin stories that feel designed to sell new pressings of former hits more than tell an engaging story.

Though the filmmakers hoped to balance the historical atrocities of slavery with contemporary racial oppression, Antebellum — yet another unnecessary slave movie — rarely feels like a horror flick. Instead, its needless brutality, ropy character work, and misguided twist make it easily 2020’s worst movie so far.

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.

Sy and Lafitte still carry the day. They give the story a kinetic energy and a loose rhythm, which makes the narrative’s meandering more palatable, even as it fails to break out of the familiar action-flick mold.

This movie is anything but brave. It is the most feckless, spineless blockbuster of the last decade.

This lackluster script struggles to build a captivating story to match the allure of its expansive desert setting.

While Sollima tries to rekindle Clancy’s 1990s magic, Without Remorse is rendered as unmemorable schlock due to his inability to map the author’s familiar espionage themes onto a new protagonist with very different story requirements.

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.

Hart possesses neither the charisma of Cruise nor the charm of Redford necessary to shoulder these action movie mechanics, a failure that demonstrates what happens when character actors are told they’re movie stars.

Though The 355 tries to maneuver with the kinetic verve of a globetrotting adventure, the marks of shooting on generic sets are all over this film.

The film is as unimaginative as it is corny, as dull as it is cheap, and as unfulfilling as any cash grab for a well-known property could be.

If Spiral hoped to reinvent the franchise, the dull installment merely amounts to bad fan fiction.