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.

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.