Siddhant Adlakha

It’s the rare movie whose every artistic intention can be easily identified, but whose emotional effects are never discovered.

On one hand, there’s perhaps no more honest depiction of a relationship between a parent and their adult child having hit a wall, and a point of no return. On the other hand, pushing against this inevitability is a much more intriguing concept than simply presenting it as-is, over and over again, even when its specifics are disguised by a fable.

The film plays out like a tale where too much has been relegated to the margins and left between the cuts, where the performances shine but their emotional foundations have been laid in reverse.

It’s a gorgeous-looking film, but one that doesn’t go anywhere anytime soon, given the linearity and literal nature of its approach to human anguish. At over two hours in length, its points are made with clarity before being repeated ad nauseam.

The movie often brushes past what might have been its most intriguing moments in favor of an unobtrusive hagiography. It approaches dramatic rigor and visual intrigue in only the briefest of scenes, often far too late into its runtime.

Riz Ahmed makes for a vigorous lead in Aneil Karia’s contemporary British-Indian Hamlet, which loses its emotional clarity beneath an intriguing exterior. Its use of silence and intimacy grants it a fascinating texture, but the film never challenges or re-invigorates Shakespeare’s greatest work, ensuring that it ends up somewhere in the middle of a lengthy pile of adaptations.

A tale of miserable spouses plotting each other’s demise, it doesn’t always work, but its action comedy stylings are enough to keep it entertaining even when it swerves into ugly excess or extraneous subplots.

The sequel to Bollywood’s biggest hit is bigger, longer, and just as vicious in its on-screen butchery, but has far less artistry and visceral allure. The continued spy-revenge saga runs a mind-numbing four hours, during which it sheds all semblance of human drama in favor of naked political propaganda that reveals the emperor has no clothes.

Pretty Lethal is a wonderfully original idea, but its execution falls flat.

The twists of its premise soon end up souring it conceptually, resulting in rapidly-diminishing returns, with derivative formal flourishes that largely recall other, better films. It is, by the time its credits roll, completely exhausting.

Both as drama and as science fiction, In the Blink of an Eye doesn’t probe these questions, but rather, drops definitive answers like anvils, leaving little room to ruminate, wrestle, or consider.

While trying to confront grief with a sense of mischief, the movie’s impish tonal approach takes the sting out of death a little too often, rendering its catharsis null. It’s hard not to respect a big swing, but Wladyka ultimately misses.

Although it eventually leans into traditional genre hallmarks, its introductory musings are novel, taking the form of a one-woman performance showcase that makes ingenious use of visual and auditory negative space.

A headache-inducing screenlife film that straps Chris Pratt to a chair and holds its audience hostage too, Mercy squanders its potential as a sci-fi thriller about the dangers of entwining justice and artificial intelligence. The result plays less like the tongue-in-cheek mystery-thriller director Timur Bekmambetov seems to be aiming for, and more like an advertisement to tech investors, making the movie chilling in unintended ways.

Its strengths also ensure that no matter how rote “We Bury the Dead” becomes, it remains at least watchable for most of its runtime, even as it ignores its most fascinating ideas in favor of safe, familiar ones.

Kate Hudson and Hugh Jackman’s performances are a treat in Song Sung Blue. They sing and perform their hearts out, but none of it ends up in service to a coherent vision, let alone one that says something meaningful or profound.

It’s a gorgeous-looking film, but a drag.

The first and final scenes of any film are vital, and contained within these bookends you can find the entire story of Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere. Unfortunately, nearly everything in between is standard biopic filler and reinforces filmmaker Scott Cooper’s unique position in the Hollywood landscape: he’s a tremendous director of actors and quite unremarkable at most other parts of the job.

Unfortunately, the piece ends up laid low by a climax that peters out by taking itself too seriously, but the film’s totality is still made worthwhile by its central performances.

Justin Tipping’s flimsy football horror movie Him is papered over with colorful lighting but underscored by bland ideas. Despite Marlon Wayans’ bravura performance, it makes very little visceral impact while en route to one of the most confounding third acts of any horror movie this year.

The star-studded After the Hunt has a lot on its mind about human complexities, but largely expresses these notions in didactic form and through dramatic conflict that all but resolves itself halfway through the movie’s languid 2 hours and 18 minutes.

The result is a tale made up of numerous endpoints and thematic conclusions, whose dots don’t feel meaningfully connected, and whose situational oddities rarely yield excitement or intrigue.

A movie that’ll just about keep young viewers’ attention, Smurfs is part Rihanna jukebox musical, and part flimsy attempt to give the little blue critters an identity that’ll stick.

It’s morally upstanding but dramatically dull, without any of the allure or excitement that made Armstrong’s Succession series such a smashing success.

With Eddington, Ari Aster tries his hand at political satire and turns in his first bad movie.

Writer-director Elijah Bynum fills the screen with some impressive imagery, but it’s all in service of an ugliness that Magazine Dreams cops out on depicting.

It’s a strange-looking, odd-feeling film that gestures toward mystery and larger conspiracy, but it seldom pulls on these threads. Instead, it ends up an anodyne political drama that says little of note.

It can’t decide whether it wants to tell the real-life story of respected mob boss Frank Costello and his comrade-turned-scheming-enemy Vito Genovese, or if it wants to skewer the entire genre of films they helped inspire. However, with Robert De Niro in both leading roles, there’s always something interesting to watch, even if it’s buried by mountains of repetitive dialogue.