Rodrigo Perez

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

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

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.

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).

Ultimately, Glass is a killer concept that suffers from a wobbly execution. Shyamalan nails the intimate stuff, but that third act is just bound to shatter and confound audience expectation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

A weird, uneven mixed bag, there’s much about Mojave that’s paradoxically maddening and doesn’t really add up. As the movie plot becomes less interesting and more straight-forward — like a slasher movie with the evil antagonist character slowly closing in on the hero — it becomes funnier and more purely enjoyable.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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...

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

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.

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.

The fifth installment of the Terminator series cannot overcome the weight of its convoluted time travel leaps, its strained attempts at injecting twists everywhere, a clunky opening, and a painfully clumsy finish.

Low on ideas and high on atmosphere, Dixieland is a promising debut, but it likely won’t find you overwhelmingly writing back home about it.

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.

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.

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.