Steven Scaife

Because we’re tasked with inferring so much about the characters, especially their pasts, so much of the film’s romance is unconvincing.

The film is an aimless, albeit sometimes funny, chronicle of absurd behavior and government ineptitude.

Ultrasound never quite figures out how to keep going once its mysteries have been unraveled.

By the time we’re watching whole conversations be drowned out by noise of pounding rain, the abstract tendencies of Armand begin to feel like an act of unintentional self-sabotage

Subtlety dissipates as Justin Chon’s film grasps for something louder and more obvious.

Michiel Blanchart’s film often feels like a patchwork of half-developed ideas, each more loosely and tenuously woven into the whole than the last.

J.A. Bayona rarely lets his images speak for themselves, which is frustrating given his obvious gift for poetic, almost surreal succinctness.

The problem with Earwig and the Witch has more to do with its confused plotting than its more or less serviceable animation.

The film falters when it attempts to mold its best instincts into a discernible narrative shape.

The hot streak for Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon cools with My Father’s Dragon.

The film ties itself into many knots as it chases the superficial sugar high of a big reveal.

The film doesn’t quite live up to its promising premise and handful of clever camera gimmicks.

One senses that Rod Blackhurst knows that Dolly is undernourished, but his attempts to jazz it up by splitting it into transparently titled chapters only calls further attention to that dearth of imagination.

If Quirke’s film means to mimic the tunnel vision of its protagonist, it does so perhaps too effectively, losing its thematic potency as it travels on a predictable trajectory, involving spooky drawings and sisterly spats, all the while leaving the existential miasma sitting out of frame.

Travis Stevens’s film is psychologically astute, until it gives itself over to turning subtext into extremely legible text.

Hunted intends to make a show of our desensitization to predator-prey relationships, but the greater purpose of its self-awareness never quite comes into clear focus.

It comes across like yet another casualty in the long line of stories about men having their eyes opened by their angelic girlfriends.

A few scenes show glimmers of promise for what Alex Thompson can achieve when he’s more in his wheelhouse. It’s a shame that the horror and tension that make up the bulk of Rounding are so clearly outside of it.

Keating’s film forgets the cardinal rule of good pastiche: that if you’re not building something new from familiar pieces then you’re just regurgitating old ideas.

The film plays a long game with audiences that frustrates far more than it illuminates.

Writer-director Jason Lei Howden’s humor might have been tolerable if his film was at least reasonably imaginative.

There’s a riveting story somewhere here about the crumbling of the Soviet Union and the stranglehold of capitalism on ’80s culture, but Tetris never quite locates it.

Behind the self-awareness and the irony is merely a hollow emotional core, a lack of anything to say because saying something would require ambition rather than complacent winks and nods.

The film gets so lost in its affected idiosyncrasies that it stops probing any discernible human feelings.

Nicolas Cage’s amusing turn as a kooky hermit with an affinity for newspaper hats often feels awkwardly spliced into the film.

Consecration ends up not just gimmicky but derivative of Christopher Smith’s own prior work.

In the end, Leave the World Behind is content to blandly shrug in the direction of an amorphous calamity, reaching for a profundity that it fails to achieve.

Flora and Son is far more invested in making its characters likable and cute rather than risking audience sympathies.