Rodrigo Perez

Alluring and captivating, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely can’t ultimately overcome its undeveloped arty tendencies, but its hazy exploration of dread and desire is still unique enough to make an impression.

It's not particularly funny or moving and it's terribly self-indulgent. Flamboyance and cartoonishness rule, there's hardly a moment of genuine emotion, and most overtures in that direction are superficial. As a picture ostensibly about love, revenge and the ugliness of slavery, Django Unchained has almost zero subtext and is a largely soulless bloodbath, in which the history of pain and retribution is coupled carelessly with a cool soundtrack and some verbose dialogue. Though it might just entertain the sh.t out of the less discerning.

If your basic movie needs demand a little bit more -- logical premises; interesting, marginally original characters; dialogue that doesn’t reek of throaty, aspirational monologue after monologue -- Pacific Rim will leave you feeling hollow and wanting.

The Internship might be the best worst comedy of the year thus far.

An uninspired narrative and disengaged performances ultimately keep persuasive deep feeling and captivation at a far distance.

The Plague is a movie-movie, rather than a genuinely searching or affecting film about that most awkward age when fitting in with a group can seem like the most important thing in the world.

There’s nothing lost in the translation of Fences, but its high fidelity means there’s little, if any, inspiration to be found within.

Fleck and Boden certainly have strong filmmaking smarts. They understand restraint, have terrific observational eyes, and know how to coax honest performances out of actors. So it’s perhaps a shame that Mississippi Grind is ultimately too underwhelming to stake with any confidence.

While its ambition does show a director still aspiring for great heights, its patchy execution only partly restores the faith.

Yes, it’s the DCEU’s best film, but as we know, that’s not saying a lot. But, hey, that terrific second act that we should cling to even if it’s a distant memory by the time love defeats aggression. “Wonder Woman” might be molded by the mighty Gods, but as shaped by mere mortals her mettle and beliefs and can be only so wonderfully divine.

Stronger feels genuine and certainly has the right intentions, but never converts to something truly enlivening.

Wild never really earns its hard-fought struggle for redemption and personal reinvention.

Ultimately Beauty And The Beast feels like a cynical rehash seemingly created just to make a fiscal year sound promising to shareholders. This is a product that’s more manufactured than inspired.

Good Grief arguably doesn’t quite get there in the end, but there is a promising sense of possibility for what the future could hold for Levy as a filmmaker next.

Admirable, ambitious and impressive, but ultimately aloof, Midsommar has its delights for sure, but it lacks the emotional depth to match the sharp insights it has into the evils of the ambivalent, wishy-washy relationship (run as fast as you can).

A curious, half-successful mutation in the “Predator” bloodline, ‘Badlands’ wants to transcend the franchise’s primal instincts. Instead, it proves that sometimes survival means knowing what not to evolve. Or at least, pushing the envelope with greater execution and story conviction.

There’s probably just enough elevation by Pearce and Jarvis’ performances to overpower the novice inputs of Williams and Miller. Inside is mostly passable as a film about men and prisons that thinks – wait for it – inside the box.

The Nightmare can be deeply distressing and blood-curdling, and it can be a little silly, too.

A moving movie that tries too hard to please and thus never truly satisfies.

Has its moments, especially any time Streep is on screen, but as it strains on at an overlong two hours, the glitter of fairy tale movie magic diminishes, leaving only a pale shadow.

The Deepest Breath isn’t hiding the fact that there are daring hazards involved with athletes risking their lives for world records, but it isn't exactly forthcoming either, and the failure to effectively thread that needle is its biggest problem.

An uninspired movie, The Drop would be utterly forgettable if it weren't for the fact that you’re left wondering how all this talent created something so unexceptional.

As a “release it during an election year” film and response to the world’s current political crisis, clearly cobbled together at the last minute, it’s perhaps a fitting goodbye to a flawed character who has resurfaced suddenly to say, in the fleeting final minutes of the film, maybe we can change.

Gently involving, but never quite engrossing, there’s a first draft shape to the picture that feels slight and makes for a minor work.

Ultimately, Thank You For Your Service is commendable and, well, serviceable. But it’s more of an honorable discharge rather than something you fete with medals of esteem.

Unfortunately, Zoom movies do not really benefit anyone, Morales or otherwise (but hopefully this means, she gets another opportunity to do it for “real” out in the world). Duplass’ Spanish is good (a nice plus), and the movie’s intentions are in the right place; it’s warm, warm-hearted, and even mildly bittersweet, but in short, no more Zoom movies, please, and thanks.

“Superman” may leap tall buildings and succeed on most of Gunn’s terms, divergent from Marvel and old DC, inversely punk rock, and overloaded with bright, colorful hopefulness, but it won’t really soar like a bird or a plane for anyone who demands symbolic gestures of optimism are meaningfully made.

Quantumania is not all dud, per se. Even if it’s not as comical or entertaining as usual, there is a good cast involved here, Kathryn Newton is a welcome edition, and Paul Rudd can’t help but elevate sub-par material. But otherwise, Quantumania is shockingly unremarkable.

Zoolander 2 is no disaster, but it’s almost worse; a tedious jag that barely works as a disposable and mild, if-its-on-cable-TV, diversion.

To say it’s a step backward for the franchise is an understatement.

Desert Road is an admirably ambitious movie, but it just never lands and is too sparse and spare to work.

The Peter Jackson-directed Hobbit sequel might be the more vigorous, action-packed, darker and more (superficially) engaging version of the series thus far, but that doesn’t actually mean it’s a keeper of any sort.

Though not a poor effort per se -- David Chase's Not Fade Away does authentically captures the heart and soul of the music of the era and the intoxicating/naive dream of making it big -- the picture isn't exactly a remarkable one either.

Well shot and well made, Kill Your Darlings is a very competently constructed effort on a whole, but there’s an emptiness and familiarity at its core that it cannot transcend.

Unlike a Ryan Coogler, who always brought an emotional, thoughtful touch to his superhero films, all of the empathetic grace notes Chung was previously known for are nowhere to be found, drowned out in a wet, soggy tempest of noise, screams, yee haws! and catastrophic weather.

Marvel’s ‘First Steps’ may feel somewhat unique in tone, carefree and blithe in a manner audiences haven’t seen before, and yes, these inaugural strides are the best version of these heroes to be experienced on screen. But unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily mean that ‘First Steps is essential, or even fantastic viewing.

Despite the A-list team all returning for the sequel, the frisson is gone, and Enola Holmes 2 feels much more elementary, primary, and uninspired.

Both McConaughey and Ferrera’s characters embody the idea of an everyday hero: perhaps imperfect but unselfishly stepping up to help others in a time of crisis. While the movie’s artifice makes it a thrilling watch, its real-life inspiration is equally just as moving.

Size may not matter in this diminutive story, but the film's slight, disposable quality hardly qualifies it as an essential tale to astonish.

Sentimentality, earnestness, and the ability to tap into naked vulnerability—normally [Gunn's] great qualities—get the best of him, turning ‘Vol 3’ into a largely maudlin, overwrought, overstuffed, and melodramatic mess that only works in fits and starts.

Crown Heights works best when the political and the personal merge with the insidious nature of corruption and systemic cultural, societal and economic oppression.

It would be unfair and an exaggeration to say 'Part III' ends with a whimper, as there are a few moments to savor, but there's hardly a climatic bang and, sadly, absolutely nothing epic and explosive about this rather tepid and forgettable trilogy closer.

Frustratingly uneven, Kelly & Cal is too glib and prosaic to truly be insightful or impacting.

Yes, Naishuller is an inventive action shooter, and if highly-tuned, keyed-up action orchestration is your game, Nobody will light you up, no doubt. However, if you’d love to see the intriguing ideas—that the movie itself proposes upfront—about fatherhood, guardianship, violence, contempt, and neglect, at least semi-threaded throughout the action story, you’ve come to the wrong movie.

Perhaps due to its rote, by-the-numbers story, all of the original film’s less tangible, hard-to-bottle qualities are absent: its delightfulness, its playfulness, and its natural charisma.

It’s an inferior, often frustrating film, it’s hard to root for, and its consideration of its people of color is dubious, even as it features them as protagonists. But nonetheless, there’s some value, especially in is visceral qualities and the chilling nihilism of its violence.

While 'Les Mis' ends terrifically, it cannot make up for the largely uneven experience that comes before it. There is no doubt an abundance of passion and commitment in Les Miserables but when the musical isn't connecting emotionally -- which is at least half the time -- it's a lot of blustering sound and fury that could either use a dialogue break or an edit.

There’s certainly necessarily nothing off with Diane Von Furstenberg: Woman In Charge in terms of its craft, its breezy structure, its slick pace, etc. It’s a handsomely made documentary, but it always borders on fawning puff pieces, letting us into the life of the fashion mogul but still making you feel like it’s a surface portrait meant to resell something vintage, like a classic dress everyone already knows and admires.

Its patchy tone, plot, characters and sympathies make for a film that’s difficult to wholeheartedly endorse.

Both Stearns and Gillan commit to the detached tenor. Still, it’s often more distant and isolating than it is funny, therefore leading to a movie that feels misjudged and far too remote, even for those well-versed and conversant in this weirdly lopsided style.

Godzilla asks you to care about its characters, achieves that aspiration, earns your trust, and then not only pivots towards a far less interesting character, but abandons most of its absorbing emotional legwork for a fairly rote and straightforward rock ‘em, sock ‘em monster movie.

While it’s hard to indict the movie for wanting to admire and honor this extraordinary girl, the movie loses its own inherent potency with a haphazard structure that jumps around far too much in time and a monotonous narrative about Malala overcoming oppressors to bravely speak out and inspire the world.

The Wolverine wants to have it both ways: a dark character story and an action-packed superhero film. But it never reconciles the two notes, and thus becomes more and more atonal as it wobbles towards its symphonically jarring ending.

Decker is good at articulating sinister moods and unstable psyches, but anything resembling a cogent narrative is challenged.

As a comic book movie writ large, as an adaptation of an imaginative, gonzo, frenzied, devilish graphic novel not meant for kids, Birds Of Prey is arguably perfect as a blast of that kind of feverish dynamism. However, as a movie, Birds Of Prey can’t really break free from the cage of quirky insanity it is so content to nest in.

A lovely, but uneven moral tale of love, forgiveness and heartrending misdeeds, Derek Cianfrance’s The Light Between Oceans is conceptually sound, and at times, beautifully gut-wrenching. But the plaintive picture often becomes engrossed in conveying at all times just how precious life and love is.

Not even the funniest actors on the planet could save what is an occasionally humorous, but largely unremarkable rehash.

Kill The Messenger hopes to solemnly lionize and exonerate Webb, but rarely does it reflect anything back to its audience other than reminding us how corrupt and unprincipled our system is.

Steeped in a nostalgia that often feels borrowed and canned—the space-age era impulses of progress and possibility from the 1950s and ‘60s—Tomorrowland asks that you never give up or lose hope, literally and figuratively, over and over again, to the point that the movie has little else to say.

Respectfully presented, Unbroken is competently made and even has a sequence or two that’s impressive, but it’s ultimately very familiar and eventually draining.

There’s a terrific ensemble at the heart of Magic Magic, including its talented director, but this psychological horror is only creepily superficial and has very little of anything insightful to say about people, its characters or its lead.

It’s essential to have characters and a good story around a ‘GvK’ movie because, without it, all your left with is an empty trailer of fight scenes. The irony is this overly involved story detracts from one’s engagement in the movie. Legends may finally collide in this installment, and it’s mildly entertaining in spots, but the whole endeavor is ultimately almost as hollow as the earth’s empty core.

As a taut thriller, it works, but the “why” of it all, the substance that generally makes even Sheridan’s worst efforts still fascinating, is strangely and glaringly absent.

Theron can survive almost anything onscreen. Apex proves, once again, that she can carry weak material farther than most actors. It also proves that even she cannot quite drag a dull survival programmer up the mountain.

A very routine twelve rounds of tragedy, resilience and redemption, the boxing film Southpaw is a conventionally told dramaturgy high on intensity, but low on human insight or novel ways to tell a familiar story.

Not particularly sophisticated, the searing intensity of revenge in The Equalizer is still occasionally arresting (and even entertaining) in its stylish hard-R violence.

Despite the oh gee golly wiz Midwestern yokel-isms and the aforementioned cartoonish makeup she wears—historically accurate, yes, but still bordering on the ludicrous in reality— Chastain manages to bring such dignity to the character, really plumbing the depths of her soul for the moments of pathos, heartbreak, and despair. Much of this comes to an incredible crescendo in the third act, when Tammy Faye is tragic, washed-up, but never willing to give up or radiate compassion, even when she’s being mocked.

Intimate, but never actually involving, The Glass Castle at least has admirable performances to watch.

Sonic The Hedgehog 3 feels like a darker, the-end-times-are-near blockbuster in the vein of a big “Avengers” Marvel movie, and it’s unclear how being like everyone else serves a franchise that has been perfectly content to be its weird, wacky, lovable little self.

The Fence presents a theatrical style that paralyzes the film into a tense but frustrating checkmate for much of its running time.

Largely harmless and tame, but also shallow and uninvolving.

Admittedly heartbreaking and moving in its final moments, Hellion just can’t quite convince or coalesce its ideas of struggle, pain and fury in a meaningful or new way.

This visually clumsy and gauche, but spectacular, movie knows what it wants to be when it grows up for better or worse.

Meant to appear as some kind of tribute to the victims and families of the Kursk, Vinterberg’s poorly strategized film barely justifies its existence.

It's Middle America vs. big bad corporate America, and while the (not so) "bad guy" predictably finds salvation in salt-of-the-earth people, Promised Land often leaves a sour taste in your mouth.

Ninjago is mildly entertaining, and kids should find it pleasurable enough, but it’s missing that special spark, the kind of joyful flicker that compels children to ask for the movie on DVD at Christmas

Without a marriage of inspired storytelling, straight up regurgitation doesn’t elevate new tech. Also, thinking about could and should, one needs to consider good taste, but that’s clearly not driving any of the decisions here.

Those impatient with Malick’s cyclical fixations will easily find themselves worn out by Song To Song especially in the enervating third act that essentially repeats the entire movie and its theme exhaustingly.

With the sound off, Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby surely looks as radiant and extraordinary as some of the most dazzling movies ever committed to celluloid, but with the sound up and the experience on full volume, the movie is mostly a cacophony of style, excess and noise that makes you want to turn it all down a notch...or three...

Part escapist action-adventure, part would-be exhilarating quest of self-discovery, The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty isn’t so much a mess because it wants to be everything at once, but because it employs hackneyed and mawkish methods to achieve a false sense of joyfulness.

ZSJL is a fan cut as much as it is a director’s cut, with all the indulgence that the notion applies. As for any continuation of the story, as the fans hope, that seems gravely unlikely considering the direction Warner Bros is headed. But for a director who had to abandon his grand superhero project because of a family tragedy and because a big movie studio tried to wrestle control of the film, which was too much to bear at the time, one supposes, this postmortem collectible for die-hard, is about as good as an outcome as one could get.

Semi-flat with only a few jokes and emotional beats that land, the picture is often dull when it should be poignant.

Ricki And the Flash is about mistakes, regrets, and of course, redemption, but all of it feels a little too neat, familiar and convenient even if no one’s quite belting out “Kumbaya” by the end.

Moore’s goal — save the country from the worst Presidential election of all time— is sound, but his ungainly presentation and shaky arguments make for an uneven polemic that never takes fire, even when doused in gasoline.

Hypnotic features a well-crafted suspense sequence or two, a couple of clever twists – but also some wildly stupid ones, and a bone-headed over-explainer ending that treats the entire audience like dopes. [Work in Progress SXSW 2023]

Billy Lynn has its moments, but its critical and unexpected folly is that the cutting-edge technology diminishes the picture emotionally, its ungainly look trivializes the drama and indulges it with an undesirable air of superficiality.

While it’s Lawrence’s most mature and relatively subtle effort to date, it’s also, unfortunately, a slog. The director’s well-intentioned patience ultimately means nothing when its interminable pacing makes the movie feel twice as protracted as its longwinded, two-hour-plus running time.

[A] benign, only marginally-amusing-at-best nostalgia cash grab.

In some senses, Zhao bucks the Marvel formula, but goes so far off-piste, everything that’s enjoyable about Marvel—the breezy snap, crackle, and pop of escapist watchable entertainment—go out the window in favor of something far more muddled. In another sense, it’s not all that different, just not orchestrated very well with an ill-advised structure that mars the entire affair.

Visually dazzling, but dispassionate and hollow, the film often looks impressive, with some incredible action sequences to boot, but otherwise keeps the viewer at a considerable distance.

Despicable Me 4 is just messy and wearying, even at a scant 95 minutes.

Even if the movie is based on an existing property, a beloved French graphic novel, as a producer and designer, Besson should be lauded; ‘Valerian’ is out of this world. But next time, he might want to reread the comic for its characters, checking the little word bubbles to see if there’s actually something there.

Project Power, especially from these “Catfish” and “Paranormal Activity” filmmakers ultimately feels like a big let down— a captivating idea about the way the system preys on the disadvantaged and the constant exploitation and appropriation of black and brown voices, that fizzles out fast once the high of its concept wears off.

It’s, unfortunately, just one-dimensional, a little first-draft-y, perhaps rushed and hurried, and never as powerful or emotional as the film obviously hopes to be.

Song One is well intentioned, well-shot and has its musical heart in the right place, but it often feels incredibly familiar, and the more contrived, credulity-straining moments don’t help.

Fuqua’s movie, unqualified to create anything other than superficial poignancy, is empty, tiresome and uninteresting, satisfied with repeatedly communicating that if you exploit the innocent, harm the oppressed or abandon your code of conscience, Robert McCall will be there to set things right and severely punish you several times over.

White interjecting its social commentary, “Snow White” otherwise tackles much of the same ideas—the notions of true love, the power of friendship, and the triumph of good over evil—but it’s all put together in a very familiar and garish package. The fairest in the land? Far from it.