Tomris Laffly

Sadly, the film doesn’t live up to its charming premise, spending most of its runtime chasing its own tail with pointless jokes and dog-related puns that are only mildly amusing, along with an undercooked love story that doesn’t know how to steal our hearts.

The film’s tonal inconsistencies hurt its impossibly talented co-leads considerably.

There doesn’t seem to be a single original bone in this film’s body that gives you a parade of half-baked comedic scenes braided with a trite thriller and family mystery.

Gordon and Lerman are two committed performers with excellent chemistry and comic timing during these scenes, and much of Gordon’s physical work as the crazy soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend is genuinely impressive and funny. But the seams of Brooks’ writing show often, becoming impossible to ignore.

Following Zhu’s peculiar white rabbit is never less than an intriguing experience, but in the end, it feels like a hollow one.

Spiritually guided by Dabis’ personal and familial memories, the narrative film is sometimes deeply stirring, other times clumsily heavy-handed, often hampered by Christopher Aoun’s bland cinematography.

With a confused tone stuck between satire and horror (that also informs Malkovich’s eccentric, out-of-place performance), and various half-baked ideas about cultural icons and toxic fandom, “Opus” mostly feels like a missed genre opportunity.

While the YA genre can be very capable of unearthing outsized desires and rebellions in all of us, the problem here is the source material itself. Or rather, the timing of its screen adaptation.

With the exception of “The Tragedy of Macbeth” Oscar nominee Kathryn Hunter’s fiercely committed performance, much of this well-designed but boring film yields a shrug.

The Good Half reclaims attention every now and then with its occasional humor and grace notes around its side characters. . . But what we eventually get with The Good Half doesn’t even feel half good.

You come to Blood for its aura of spiritual sustenance, only to leave it feeling curiously alienated and undernourished.

In the end, this is a sufficiently rebellious film about women’s refusal to be forced into sandboxes fashioned by oppressing norms—about fighting for air and resisting the urge to sink into that quicksand, however beautifully decorated.

Sadly, the film plays more like an artless quickie than a fully fleshed-out romance.

Atlas does have Jennifer Lopez in all her starry glory in the driver’s seat. It’s not nearly enough, but it’s something.

Krasinski’s concept borrows generously from Pixar films like “Monsters Inc.,” but is so chaotic and half-considered that you don’t feel as inspired as you should be, making it hard to submit to the film’s alternate reality.

This broadness of info only means the Tickells remain surface-level on most topics. Their Common Ground only teases but doesn’t dig deep enough into the intersection of racism and capitalism that brought us to today.

There is a curious datedness, monotony and lack of excitement throughout “Lisa Frankenstein,” that feels dull despite its preferred power-ballad “Can’t Fight This Feeling” by REO Speedwagon, and colorless in spite of its magenta-heavy production design. In its best moments, Williams’ debut feels very much like its central monster—undead, but with no place to go. It’s a cosmic disappointment.

The story overstays its welcome eventually, with the impending tragedy that would conclude the film fizzling as a result.

Suncoast joins a more forgettable crop of teen movies, lacking plausible character development and sufficient depth to make its themes resonate.

[An] unevenly written but good-looking directorial debut that gradually runs out of steam.

Unfortunately, the script — co-written by Lee and Christopher Chen — leaves a lot to be desired, squandering the old-school appeal of the true-crime drama for a dull and overlong mood piece in which nothing much happens and no real sense of danger ever registers.

“The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes,” unlike the stellar predecessors of the series, feels curiously starved for real insights into the opposing shades of the human soul.

Unfortunately, López can’t sustain the momentum. Every time a new turn emerges within Red, White & Royal Blue it feels like a new film has sprouted out of the story with embellishments that land as superfluous scenes begging to be deleted, instead of grace notes that elevate the movie.

That miscalculated manner that often transposes Dreamin’ Wild into an overtly psychological zone works against the rest of the film’s gentle demeanor.

Despite a worthy message about the importance of embracing one’s past—blocking your trauma is no fruitful way to deal with it—“Insidious: The Red Door” still fizzles in its final stretch, becoming an over-plotted labyrinth of loose ends that drags more than it entertains.

Happy Clothes gives us an intriguing snapshot of a creative force who can mix patterns and colors more fearlessly than anyone in the business. But it ultimately leaves us craving move.

Perhaps it was enough for “Book Club” to merely exist as an act of rebellion against the stubbornly young-skewing studio fare. But this follow-up needed to give us more, something along the lines of a sharper film deserving of the earned legacies of Fonda, Keaton, Bergen and Steenburgen.

Sure, Ghosted feels mostly awkward, but everyone seems to be in on the joke for some shameless fun. And that’s all you might get from this movie, a little pick-me-up before you ghost it forever.

Hallström mostly strikes a nice balance between approachability and mystique, between the definitive and the abstract, getting a huge amount of help from his daughter Tora’s open and warm performance in her first leading role.

While Hardwicke’s direction is slick across picturesque Italian locations and various high-octane set pieces that are shockingly bloody, there isn’t a lot she can do to rescue Collette’s fish-out-of-water protagonist from a lackluster mafia comedy with romantic undertones.

Finley loses his exacting handle on the material, allowing the story’s more commonplace ideas to dictate its direction in ways both unsurprising and a little rough around the edges.

Bless the old school stars Roberts and Clooney for elevating this lackluster mélange and in certain instances, even making you forget about the non-sensical film that surrounds them. But that’s hardly enough, especially if you are hoping for a homecoming for the rom-coms of yore.

Raymond & Ray is curiously alienating despite the two A-listers in the driver seat, some decent chuckles to spare and a handsome, cinematic finish courtesy of DP Igor Jadue-Lillo.

Perhaps the chief deficit of Don’t Worry Darling isn’t even predictability, but a discernible lack of new ideas of its own.

Empire of Light feels more like a sweet experiment on nostalgia and memory than an articulate film with something to say.

Breaking is a noble and deeply sensitive effort that aims to commemorate an honorable veteran who was failed by the dysfunctional and racist country that he bravely served. But despite a committed cast, and a well-staged and devastatingly truthful finale, Corbin fails to break this story out of its predictable mold.

A throwback buddy action-comedy that offsets its run-of-the-mill sense of humor with a pair of appealing leads.

What ultimately waters down Lightyear, an otherwise polished, gorgeous-looking entry into the Pixar oeuvre, is an absence of the excitement and disciplined storytelling spirit that made Toy Story such a pioneering hit.

What’s jarring in Crush is the absence of some requisite dose of youthful mischief, a sense of stakes and perhaps even a lightly scandalous touch, integral to the spirit of many of the genre staples Cohen and co-writers Kirsten King and Casey Rackham attempt to revive on their own terms.

Despite an eager-to-please ending that tries too hard to redeem the elderly Frays, Bialik’s movie still offers up hope, humor and above all, keen observations on grief in the wake of those who’ve damaged us in ways both tangible and veiled.

The most bewildering thing about The Secrets Of Dumbledore is how superfluous each of its ideas feel in relationship to one another. There are countless globe-trotting international characters, worlds-within-worlds, and constantly competing historical, political, and mythological references, but they all fizzle because their ill-considered stakes never seem fully realized.

Though thinly conceived overall with not much philosophy to back its daunting visuals, Offseason still offers some genuinely spine-tingling images and sounds that will keep midnight audiences on their toes until the end.

On the whole, Abu-Assad is less successful in braiding the respective tales of Reem and Huda through Eyas Salman’s editing. But eventually the seams show and clumsy jumps between the two locations feel strangely episodic, losing Huda’s Salon some of the urgency it has claimed in its earlier moments.

This ambiguously humorous film with a shaky pace and viewpoint sets forth a tough proposition: will you be patient for its 80+ minutes of running time, accept that nothing much will actually happen throughout that duration and settle for occasional jolts of rewards only?

For a tender movie that follows an old man on a long and demanding multi-bus excursion to honor his late wife’s wishes, the placid affair has curiously little emotional range, and an even narrower sense of stakes

[A] generations-spanning yet emotionally and visually flat familial movie.

Despite a strong ensemble of actors and some impressive photography, Mayday drowns inside its own overambitions.

Reminiscence aims for something existential within a well-recognized film-noir template. Sadly, the result is an unpersuasive, vaguely pessimistic dystopia at best, one that liberally pulls 101-level references from recognizable Hitchcock flicks and neo-noirs alike, only to drown their time-honored spirit in murky waters.

The strongest point Gutnik makes with his film is that we all have a concealed story when we share common spaces in silence. But that sadly isn’t enough of a hook to carry out this scattershot effort.

Writer-director Sabrina Doyle’s fable-like tale of working-class Americans on the fringe navigates its elusive waters with compassion and care, even when it veers into some predictable shallows from time to time.

Despite an obviously resourceful filmmaker at the helm and a more-than-game Beckinsale with proven genre chops, the film’s ultimately empty action bores more than it intrigues.

The result is a well-meaning but somewhat granola, partly engaging yet disorganized documentary, one that searches for an imprecise story and struggles to keep its chief ambitions afloat.

One almost wishes Chaves and Johnson-McGoldrick had not tried to reinvent the wheel, and instead just stuck with the franchise’s sophisticated simplicity and tried-and-true paranormal formula. Without a focal haunted house, this one just doesn’t feel like a film that belongs in “The Conjuring” universe.

The Woman in the Window thoroughly struggles to keep the viewer interested in Anna’s fight to prove the veracity of her version of the story

The whole experience feels like a generic inventory of recognizable tropes—the possessed child, the creepy old woman, the deeply-concerned priests, and the Ouija board are all here. Except, the cumulative fear bizarrely fizzles before it reaches something significant or emotionally meaningful.

It’s a rewarding experience to watch Izzo thread a tricky line with ease here, emitting both a child-like innocence and gradual steeliness that slowly yet convincingly sharpens and matures. If only the film could deserve her level of commitment.

In a lot of ways, Crisis is a classic example of a movie that wants to be a little bit of everything, only to add up to a much lesser version of something you keep waiting to see.

You long for something evocative and warm throughout The World to Come, only to leave it with a minor shiver.

It’s curiously difficult to stay engaged with Mock’s film that merely puts forth a paint-by-numbers assembly of the wealth of material it has at its disposal.

Even the most eagle-eyed and engaged viewers might run out of patience with R#J. Thankfully, Williams’ magnificent cast counters the disorder with their confident screen presence and theatrical muscles that stand out within the film’s unique atmosphere.

Horror is most effective when the graphic scares are matched with an emotional dimension, something at which Ellis aims but doesn’t quite arrive — a shortcoming that also undersells the marvels of his first-rate ensemble cast.

Sweet and personal, How It Ends is hardly an entertaining movie, or one that will go down as one of the defining films of these unpredictably strange times. But you can’t really blame the artists for trying to make some therapeutic sense of it all, with a little help from one another.

Bakhshi’s sure-handed assessment of Iran’s class struggle, a thoughtfully-parsed topic with universal implications, is the film’s most fascinating dimension.

The Sounding impresses more with its majestic and ageless feel than its vague ideas around the human mind.

Shrewdly, Watts goes for something subtle and soft here — instead of clichéd garishness, her performance hinges on her doleful gaze and melancholic tinge, ultimately helping Penguin Bloom honor its real-life character’s journey with some respect.

A tedious and only occasionally amusing comedic riff on “The Purge” franchise.

Abramenko maintains the film’s finite appeal throughout, mostly thanks to a familiar aura and a charismatic lead performance by Oksana Akinshina, a fine surrogate for the tough-as-nails heroine Ellen Ripley.

A cringingly syrupy tale of overdue bonding between an estranged father and his only offspring.

Suffused with plenty of gross-out, phantasmagoric body horror but short on actual spine-tingling scares, the handsomely-produced Amulet asserts Garai more as a gifted genre stylist than a savvy storyteller.

A detailed yet paint-by-numbers study of the living legend who believes in the necessity of making good trouble as an instigator of societal change.

There is enough substance here to propel The Short History of the Long Road forward through its minor bends and speed-bumps. Most of all, it is Carpenter’s restrained performance and air of wisdom, permeating the screen with an astutely soulful quality that’s tough to turn away from.

A grueling coming-of-age thriller on the cliché-heavy side, with little hook to offer other than Wolff’s aching screen presence.

It’s mostly a vanilla documentary with no real destination, but one with plenty of cuteness to go around.

The film offers some simple-minded insights into the myth of the happily-ever-after, and a dash of nonchalant French charisma. But the whole thing is only as original as a dull midlife crisis, retrofitted into a whimsical screwball mold that feels miscalculated.

And the source of inspiration here is an affable role model, brought to life by “Stranger Things” actor Noah Schnapp with plenty of zest and believable innocence.

You wonder how high “Sea Fever” could have risen, if only Hardiman had truly embraced the bare bones of the genre, indulging in some well-wrought group dynamics and even a pair of sneaky jump-scares to boot.

Rushing through an emotional journey with an uneven pace and clumsy dialogue, The Lost Husband aims for familiar sentiments around loyalty, family and sacrifice, but bypasses sincerity, the most crucial ingredient.

Fanning delivers a performance of such astonishing depth and emotional range that her presence here is both a relief and strangely frustrating, since the film that surrounds the young actor is sadly no match for the qualities she brings to Potter’s profoundly personal narrative.

Ben Affleck steps back in front of the camera in a weighty but weary comeback drama that feels like catharsis.

While listening to the kids, Rainwater makes sure we see the humanity and future potential in each and every one, treating his subjects with the respect they deserve.

Balloon is decent entertainment to a degree, and that is mostly thanks to its handsome production values.

The human dimension that gives the film brief jolts of energy never takes root. Instead, audiences are left grappling with a stuffy maze, albeit one presented with handsome production values and a filmmaker’s striking visual touch.

Richard Jewell’s greatest feat is the generous emphasis it places on its Forrest Gumpian do-gooder’s complex sense of humanity; if only there were more of that to spread around to the other characters.

On the whole, his (Griffin) indecisive The Wolf Hour tick-tocks its way to an underwhelming finale. And when it gets there, the most shocking realization you’ll have is how forgettable an affair it all has been.

It’s bewitching stuff when it doesn’t feel like a waste of invitations.

Black and Blue feels imbalanced and overlong, favoring fast and repetitive chase scenes over well-calibrated tension.

In the end, only a fraction of McLeod’s ambitions sticks a landing. But Astronaut stays afloat with sweetness, thanks to a measured performance from Dreyfuss.

It is then unfortunate that this tempting package by Khan, a creative and producing force behind ABC’s “Fresh off the Boat,” is so bland, feeling less like a movie and more like the output of an assembly line.

As visually uninspired and ideologically conservative as it may be, there seems to be something beguiling about the series that keeps one (including myself, admittedly) on a short leash.

While it’s hardly Hawkins’ error that his documentary feels unfinished — the self-defined activist’s dramatic saga is still unfolding as we speak — you can’t help but feel his unprecedented access to Manning should have emanated a portrait a lot more enlightening.

Appealing on a scene-by-scene basis but generic like its title — it might as well have been called “About a Girl” as a thematic nod to Chris and Paul Weitz’s superb 2002 film — Steiner’s dull comedy lacks the crucial feelings that could have made the suburban aunt-niece tale at its center more memorable.

Little wears the theme of black sisterhood on its sleeve, growing into something winsome by prioritizing contemporary concerns over nostalgia.

This vintage tale of camaraderie flaunts an old-fashioned innocence and some endearing defiance, exemplified by its sweet original song “Do-Dilly-Do (A Friend Like You).”

More troubling is Neeson’s baffling disappearance for long stretches of time, when screenwriter Frank Baldwin gets too enamored with the supporting clan while failing to expand upon them.

The most radical observation Late Night makes concerns the extreme maleness of showbiz that turns women into rivals. But the film brushes over this insight and ultimately falls short of even its more modest intentions.

An incomplete exercise that lacks crucial emotional brushstrokes despite a rich palette and a piano-heavy score, At Eternity’s Gate still offers the thrill of being inside an artistic process, adoringly interpreted.

A thoughtfully feminist spin on “Pretty Woman,” this film is not.

With its script (co-written by German and Yulia Tupikina) that lacks the traditional structure of a three-part act, Dovlatov managed to evoke in me an overall feeling of internment. Along with it crept in a gloomy mood, gradually formed through the collective frustrations of the time’s hampered dwellers.