Robert Daniels

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.