Siddhant Adlakha

The Color Purple strands a passionate cast in a passionless movie musical that’s eager to skip to the end.

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.

A film with sights and sounds you’ve never seen or heard, it’s an intriguing watch with catchy, energetic numbers, even if it doesn’t always land emotionally.

A film of remarkable performance and subject matter, laid low by unremarkable filmmaking.

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.

A low-energy comedy remade from a French farce, The Valet tries (and fails) to inject an absurd story of stardom and fake romance with added commentary and sentiment. Eugenio Derbez and Samara Weaving lead a more than capable cast, but they can’t overcome the film’s sluggish length and disconnected story.

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.

Clocking in at nearly two hours, Peter Strickland’s sound-and-food odyssey Flux Gourmet is only ever alluring when its made-up artform (“sonic catering”) is front and center during surreal vignettes. Otherwise, it falls back on rote observations and explanations about what compels its characters to create — a far less engaging experience than actually witnessing that creation.

While it’s hard not to be moved by footage of Robert Downey’s final days, the film is more informative than emotional. It contains hints of an intimate story, but mostly flattens a strange and exotic career into a series of light observations.

he fatal flaw of “It’s Not Me” is that it looks backward rather than forward, embodying films that have already been made, rather than those yet to be dreamed.

Malcolm & Marie is a well-acted but frustrating exploration of art and bad romance.

Its martial arts spectacle is scattered across a sprawling refugees-and-triads saga that, while adequately laying foundation for the aforementioned fisticuffs, is seldom coherent or engaging on its own.

The film is full of potent human drama (largely coming from Gourav’s performance), but as an examination of the world’s intersection with modern India, it usually lands on the wrong side of inauthentic.

From its anachronistic homages to its tensionless filmmaking, Pearl — Ti West’s prequel to X — doesn’t have nearly as much to say as its predecessor. Mia Goth gives it her all as a villainess who dreams of stardom, but the film can’t decide what to do with her.

The story soon gets away from Kandhari, leading to a film that enraptures and delights in its first hour but gets so locked in to a singular approach by its second that it’s practically consumed by its own style, rendering it unable to keep pace with the bold ideas at play.

An artless retelling of major events, She Said chronicles the investigation into Harvey Weinstein in mechanical fashion, flattening its tale of victimhood, paranoia, and perseverance into a journalism movie checklist.

What’s especially strange about The Killer is that Fincher achieves almost everything he sets out to, but he sets that bar dispiritingly low.

The Radleys is a vampire horror comedy that can’t quite figure out its tone, so more often than not, it ends up in a lukewarm middle ground.

A scattered but intimate drama about a queer immigrant left adrift, Marco Calvani’s High Tide boasts an impeccable leading performance that buoys the movie even at its weakest.

Whether strictly factual or broadly truthful in a poetic sense, its approach to queer history as coded, long-buried document is its most exacting facet. But as a story of science, hidden desire, and sparks re-igniting the soul, it’s a languid affair.

Anyone watching the film is likely to learn something, though whether its lessons will stick, or claw their way beneath one’s skin, is less likely.

The film’s focus remains largely on the crowd — not the forces that pull and push at it, contort its shape, and determine its movement through space and history, but rather, the crowd as mere spectacle, divorced from all the things that paved its path to the Capitol.

Its all-star cast performs admirably, in a film that takes its time to get going, reveals and confronts little once it does, and uses none of its story swerves to build on its dramatic themes, or its one-note humor.

It’s a rare misfire from director Sebastián Lelio, whose approach to his tale of a 19th century English nurse (Florence Pugh) investigating an Irish miracle is far too plain to be mysterious or stirring.

Blitz's piercing sound design can't make up for its bloodless depiction of World War II, its scattered sense of place, and its saccharine approach to overcoming racial hostility. Saoirse Ronan is captivating in the role of a single white mother to a defiant Black son trying to make his way back home, but the movie can't seem to balance her talents with its own timeline.

Dev Patel’s diehard sincerity clashes with unwieldy religious imagery in an India-set revenge saga whose tepid action scenes fail to make up for its muddled politics.

Men, from Ex Machina and Annihilation director Alex Garland, is a folk-horror movie about gendered trauma that quickly falls apart. It skillfully builds tension in its first half — with the help of brilliant lead performances — only to have that tension dissipate when its inventive metaphors become consumed by traditional staging and literal explanations.

Try as it might, its story of a good man caught in a bad situation is bogged down by empty reveals, and by a plot that tries to fool you without first earning your investment.